Welcome to the first ever Elements podcast brought to you by Louise Ogden, Beki Hill and Richard Masters. Every fortnight, we’ll be bringing you the hot topics from the website as well as interviews with some of the contributors and experts from the field.
This fortnight, we delve into the slimy world of hermaphrodite slug sex, discover how a morsel of poo could save someone’s life and determine whether determinism is affected by neuroscience.
Plus, we find out what will be coming up on the site in the next week.
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TRANSCRIPT
Louise Ogden – Hello and welcome to the first ever Elements podcast, with me Louise Ogden…
Richard Masters– And me, Richard Masters.
LO – Every fortnight we’ll be bringing you the very latest news and views from the science website Elements.
RM– The podcast will be split into three separate sections, where we’ll be bringing you the hot topics on Elements;
LO – Speak with some of the contributors and let you know what will be coming up over the next couple of weeks.
This week we’ll be focussing on the somewhat frightening combination of free will…
Thomas Nadelhoffer – I think that you will see an erosion of the belief in agency and responsibility. It just turns out we’re not the kinds of creatures that we assumed ourselves to be.
LO - slug sex…
Steve Jones – If you go to the north of England, Preston as I say, you find that all the slugs are the same – they’re doing it to themselves.
LO - and faecal transplants…
Jack Serle – is a procedure where a morsel of poo is taken from a healthy person, liquidised in a blender with some salt water, and squirted into the recipient’s gut.
LO - but first let’s have a look at what’s hot on Elements. Richard?
RM – Thanks Louise. Stories of the office party photos popping up on the boss’s Facebook wall are worrying enough, but as Anka Lindemann found out, typing your name into Google can throw up a web paper trail as well as a history you may not want the world to see.
However, embarrassing web histories may become just that. With software like X-pire and Vanish offering privacy in the form of a digital expiration date. Images can only be viewed on social networking sites up until a date set by the user. This could put an end to the paranoia about that picture falling into the hands of prospective employers.
LO – Thanks Richard. Now, how happy is your dog? Jennifer Appleton found out that research from Bristol University has shown that dogs can either be of an optimistic or pessimistic disposition. They even found that the optimistic dogs were much less likely to become anxious when left alone by their owners.
Now Richard, you’ve got a story all about straightening out the facts of climate change…
RM – I certainly do, Louise. Following the torrential rain and landslides in Brazil, floods in Brisbane, and heavy snowfall in Sydney, many of us were left asking the question: What the hell is going on with our climate?
This is not an easy question to answer. But, Mike Jones gave Elements some of the current thinking surrounding the tricky subject of climate science. He reported that La Nina, a weather pattern caused by cooling of equatorial waters, could have played a significant role in these extreme weather events.
LO – Now, if you’d like to read any of these articles online then you can find them on our website at www.elements-science.co.uk
RM - And you can follow us on Twitter @elementsscience.
Now we have Beki Hill who has been exploring the decidedly slimy world of hermaphrodite slug sex…
Beki Hill – Sex, eh? Hermaphrodite slug sex, in fact. Well, this was an interesting topic to discuss, but discuss it I did. I went to speak to Professor Steve Jones, who works in the genetics department at UCL, about his slightly squidgy and certainly slimy subject area. His work explores genetic diversity – this describes the fundamental parts of every living being – their DNA. A huge contribution to genetic diversity is the ability to reproduce – even small differences can have huge effects on a population over time. Now some plants and animals give up sex entirely, and one of the ways to study why this might happen is by looking at hermaphrodites. We’re used to thinking that self-fertilization will lead to the accentuation of genetic flaws, but can it actually be advantageous in some animal communities? Let’s get Professor Jones to explain why hermaphrodite slug sex stops at Preston.
Steve Jones - In many parts of the world, down here in the Deep South, in London, they have sex. Boy-girl meets girl-boy and if you look at the DNA and proteins of slugs down here they’re variable, the same as we are. But if you go to the North of England, Preston as I say, you find that all the slugs are the same; you look at DNA and they’re all the same. You do some experiments and it turns out that up there actually boy-girl meets girl-boy, they’ve given up on – they’re doing it to themselves. So if they all self fertilise, very soon, you end up with a strain in which they’re all the same.
So why is that? Well, the general explanation is that it depends on what kind of enemy you face. Under those circumstances, they are always the same – every year it’s going to be cold, there’s going to be a shortage of food, certain genes, certain combinations of genes are going to be particularly good at dealing with that. And if you’ve got that combination of genes, it pays to keep it, by not having sex and jumbling it all up and having to start again.
But if you go to the tropics: who are enemies? It’s not generally shortage of food and cold – it’s disease and parasites and predators. Now if your diseased organisms are having sex, like the malaria parasite which has super-sex, you yourself are stuck, you cannot afford to give it up. You have to recombine and generate new combinations and mix up genes or sooner or later your enemies are going to draw a hand of cards and kill you off.
LO - That was Professor Steve Jones from UCL who spoke to Beki Hill about the exciting world of hermaphrodite slug sex.
Next up, with neuroscience progressing at the rate it is, we’re finding out more and more about how our brains work. But does science threaten a fundamental feature of our existence? - our free will. Over to Richard, who found out more.
RM - Thanks Louise. It’s true that the leaps and bounds being made by neuroscience are shedding light on the relatively uncharted territory of the brain. The introduction of fMRI scanning has allowed us to look inside the mind as it goes about it incredibly complex business, to the point where certain studies are able to predict subjects choices seconds before they make up their mind. But with these developments comes a troubling question. If I can map out the process in the brain, the neurons firing and sodium channels opening, that caused me to pick up a gun and kill a man, can I be said to have freely performed the action, and more pressingly can I be held criminally accountable for it? I spoke to Dr. Thomas Nadelhoffer, professor of philosophy at Dickenson College, Pennsylvania and fellow of the MacArthur Law and Neuroscience project.
Thomas Nadelhoffer – There are two different questions when we talk about the relationship between neuroscience and free will. One question is: do individuals, just as a matter of fact, view neuroscience as threatening the traditional pictures of agency and responsibility? And if so, why? There’s also a normative question, which is, what effect should these developments have on our traditional pictures of agency and that’s a straight forward philosophical question. And I think that is a more difficult question, and at least for the purposes of law, I think it might actually be less important, because regardless of what I happen to think people should be dealing with all this information about neuroscience. What really matters is legal decision makers are actually going to interpret this stuff.
RM – Could you explain what determinism is, and more specifically, determinism within the mind.
TN – The way philosophers understand determinism is in the following way, when we make decisions at any moment we have the feeling that there is openness in the Universe around us. If determinism were true, and I’ll say what we think determinism is, if determinism were true, in any given moment, there’s really only one path that I can take, so I might have the illusion of openness and choice, but in some important sense, what I’m actually going to do was something that, had I known everything about the Universe since the big bang, I would have known in advance was going to occur. So determinism, at least the way philosophers use it, is a theory about the nature of the Universe, it’s not about a particular circumstance. So determinism is just a view about the openness in the Universe. We’ve run some studies that explore whether or not people find determinism threatening and the answer is, by and large, the evidence is mixed, but the answer is, by and large, no. If I give people deterministic scenarios, and I give them examples of people who do immoral things, I ask, was the person free, was the person responsible? Seventy to 80 per cent of the people will usually say yes to free and yes to responsible, even if I build the determinism in, in precisely the way I defined it earlier. However, if I use the exact same deterministic scenario, but instead of describing the people’s actions in terms of their beliefs and desires at the level of folk psychology, like I was talking about before, in terms of their conscious beliefs, if I instead describe their behaviour deterministically, at the level of neurons and mechanisms, instead of eighty per cent thinking they are responsible, it will go to twenty per cent. There really is something unique about neuroscience, there seems to be doing the work, so it’s not just the same old determinism in new garb. I think that you will see an erosion of the belief in agency and responsibility. It just turns out we’re not the kinds of creatures that we assumed ourselves to be.
What difference will this make at the policy level? That remains to be seen. The law is designed not to change, or to change very slowly, so even if society’s views changed, even if the science showed that these things are happening, it will take the law a lot longer to come around.
LO - That was Dr Thomas Nadelhoffer who discussed the complexities of free will with Richard Masters and whose article is now up on the website.
Finally, we’re joined in the studio by Jack Serle, who recently spoke to Professor Ian Poxton about a nasty bacterial infection called C. difficile and a rather unpalatable treatment for it. Jack?
Jack Serle – Thanks Louise. Faecal transplants is a procedure where a morsel of poo is taken from a healthy person, liquidised in a blender with some salt water, and squirted into the recipient’s gut. The donated material is taken from a close relative or housemate so that their gut-microbiota, all the little bacteria that live in your intestines, is similar to yours.
The reason this really quite unpalatable therapy is used is all to do with the basic biology of the bacteria, Clostridium difficile. The cause of a great many hospital infections, it is not being killed by alcohol and resistant to antibiotics.
Alcohol hand gels are used throughout hospitals. When someone has C. diff on their hands and scrub up with the alcohol hand gel, they kill all the other bacteria and leave their hands free to be covered by C. diff.
So when it gets into a patient being treated with antibiotics, which kill off all the other bacteria in their gut, the C. diff survives. Once entrenched it then produces toxins which mean the patient has to endure explosive, green, foul-smelling diarrhoea.
So the purpose of faecal transplant is to populate your intestine with lots of harmless bacteria who occupy all the nooks and niches left open by the antibiotics, this means that the C. diff can’t get a toe hold to exploit and start causing havoc.
Ian Poxton, Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of Edinburgh was kind enough talk to me on the subject of C. diff, faecal transplants and the future of treatments for this pernicious bacterial disease.
Ian Poxton – So, I think the basic approach of using donor faeces to re-establish the gut microflora is never going to be hugely attractive but I’m sure there are ways of making it attractive by identifying the components in normal faeces that are really protective in this individual and in other words getting the gut micro flora back to normal. And if these components, whether it’s one species, which is highly likely, or many species, whether they could be grown in pure culture and then delivered to the patient in an acceptable way, either through a colonoscope or a capsule that would open up in the colon would be very very useful.
JS – How close are we to isolating the active agents, the active constituents of the gut microflora?
IP – I’m not sure. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened before now, because it’s such an obvious route. It is difficult doing this sort of faecal microbiology is a specialist area and there’s not many people who can do it. Getting funding for it has probably been pretty difficult in the past because it is a very expensive sort of research to find out all the components in the gut and then finding a model to test it in. You need some sort of evidence before you can feed patients faecally derived organisms, but it would be something that is so obvious that it is always a surprise to me that it hasn’t been done.
LO – That was Professor Ian Poxton who spoke to Jack Serle about the benfits of the rather strange treatment faecal transplants. If you’d like to find out more about this topic, or anything else we’ve spoken about today, you can find all the articles on our website at www.elements-science.co.uk
Now we come to the part of the show where we take a look at what’s coming up over the next couple of weeks on the site. You can keep updated by following us on Twitter, @elementsscience, all one word, or on our Facebook page, Richard?
RM - First up, millions of people worldwide have been diagnosed with a personality disorder, but many experts disagree about the system currently used to classify such conditions.
Personality can be difficult to define; especially the definition of a “normal” person. Medicine, with its propensity for clear cur answers can run into great difficulty even coming up with these basic terms.
Lorna Powell will look at the changes being made to the criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders - the bible for psychiatry, and how this could change the face of mental health care.
LO - We’ll also be looking at the fact that people in the US pay between $3000 and $4000 to test for two of the most commonly faulty genes in breast cancer. When you consider that this high price is partly because the companies producing the tests have patents on these naturally occurring genes you may be rather shocked.
Beki Hill asks, does someone have the right to own your DNA? She discusses genetic patents and how they could affect treatment of breast cancer.
RM- Well, that’s it for this fortnight’s edition of the Elements podcast. Thanks to Jack Serle, Beki Hill, Professor Steve Jones, Professor Ian Poxton and Dr Thomas Nadelhoffer.
LO - This episode, Free Will, Slug Sex and Poo Transplants was produced by Beki Hill and presented by me, Louise Ogden…
RM -…and me, Richard Masters
LO - Until next time, thanks for listening.
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