Our place in an amazing universe

by John Maryon

Looking out into space it is possible to see back in time some 13 billion years and study the pattern of cosmic microwave radiation that resulted from the creation of the universe. Light travels at 186,282 miles per second which makes it almost impossible to grasp the vast size of the universe. We can observe the remnants of cataclysmic explosions, see giant red stars near the end of their life and the birth of new stars forming within vast nursery clouds of dust and gas as they collapse under gravity. Large black holes lurk ominously at the centres of billions of galaxies each containing billions of star systems.
    We must also examine events at other extreme of size. The Greek philosopher Democritus believed that what he called atoms were the smallest parts of matter but he was not in a position to vary his idea. With a typical radius of 0.1 nano metres over 5 million could be placed on a pinhead. Democritus would have been reassured by the work of the Russian chemist Demitri Mendeleev who created the Periodic table in1869. The modern table lists118 naturally occurring elements in order of atomic number related to their make up in terms of electrons, protons and neutrons. Hydrogen being the lightest and uranium the heaviest.
    It is now known that the electron is an elementary particle but protons and neutrons are themselves made up of elementary particles known as quarks. The Large Hadron Collider in Geneva has recently identified a particle called Higgs bosen which had been predicted mathematically and was linked to a field that created matter. It is now believed that all forces, waves and matter, including atoms, are the result of the interaction of various forms of wave energy and fields at a sub atomic level. For example magnetic and electrostatic fields combine to produce light.
    Within the apparent chaos of the universe life has evolved on earth and almost certainly in other places as well. The earliest forms on earth were microscopic organisms whose presence were identified by specific carbon molecules found in rocks 3.8 million years old. Life arose from chemical reactions in non living matter consisting of carbon, water and amino acids that formed in the earth's early atmosphere. Sunshine, hot water and carbohydrates provided the energy to drive the process. In a star system there exists a zone of tolerance where the temperature is just right for life to develop. Also some small cold moons in close proximity to much larger bodies could be heated by gravity stresses in their rocky cores.
    But the big question is why did the process start and continue? Isaac Newton believed that all the conditions for life were created by God. In the early 1970s John Conway, a young mathematician at Cambridge, examined the probability of pattern replication using an infinite grid of squares. By imposing a simple set of rules of contact between identified random squares, Conway and his students, were able to demonstrate that eventually complex patters could be automatically repeated. This revolutionary principle of order from apparent chaos applied to the primeval soup could make life inevitable.
    Today life on Earth has evolved to fill every possible niche for its existence. It is estimated that the total number of species exceeds 8.7 million. The one which I wish to examine in more detail is our own.
    First simple life forms consisted of single cells formed from organic molocules. They processed no consciousness and just survived in a fixed environment. As conditions changed those that had mutated were able to flourish. Variety developed and the natural laws of evolution took over. Cells that combined with others were more successful and more complex organisms emerged that were able to sense their environment and react accordingly. This marked the beginning of a conscious existence for life that would now develop intelligence.
    The ability to observe and respond rewarded those creatures that were to exploit their situation and predators also evolved. Life became more advanced and eventually Homo Sapiens became the dominant species.
    Humans are social creatures that even in their early development existed in small family groups with a life style based upon hunter gathering. Those that formed into larger tribal groupings were more successful in meeting danger and facing competition. For a brief period a form of primitive communism existed for their mutual benefit. Ultimately the 'division of labour' with the emergence of specialist skills and crafts led to the creation of wealth and privilege.
    Human development still continues and I believe can be divided into two phases of progress. Barbarian and Socialist. Today both exist simultaneously and human civilization has reached a major turning point. Capitalism and its extreme nationalistic forms represent the final stages of barbarism. Socialism is the beginning of a new progressive social advance that will change society and human relations for ever. The changes take time to mature, develop and must embrace the experiences of individual nations and peoples.
    Marx and Engels examined the social and production relations of capitalist society and outlined the scientific principles for building a new form of society that would be able to create a beautiful new world. One in which true freedom would exist without explotation and class repression. We live in a physical world within which we may shape our own destiny. On this basis of fraternity and respect we can explore and study the universe and reach a deeper understanding of everything.

Science in the Pub -- November 2015

Antibiotic Apocalypse? Antibiotic Resistance: Occurrence and Challenges

By Kate Viscardi

November’s PubSci was timely, coming as it did in World Antibiotic Awareness Week. Dr Michael Byford, who is a Biochemist lecturing at London South Bank University, outlined the dangers that arise from the development of resistance to antibiotics and discussed a different approach taken in the Soviet Union.

Bacteria are all around us and generally do us no harm; indeed we have symbiotic relationships with some, inside and outside our bodies. However, when the wrong bacteria get in the wrong place they can, and do, kill. Until the discovery of penicillin, infections in wounds were very bad news indeed and made surgery a risky business, while tuberculosis patients were isolated in remote sanatoria for long periods.

Today we take antibiotics for granted – too much for granted. Bacteria reproduce simply by splitting in half, so one bacterium can become a million in just a few hours. The more “copies” there are, the more chance there is of one of them having a mutation: and that mutation could be something that enables that bacterium to survive the attack by the antibiotic that is killing its neighbours. The mutated bacterium then divides and passes on its newly-acquired resistance to its offspring. The chances of resistant bacteria developing are increased when a course of antibiotics is not completed – antibiotics take time to kill all the bacteria, if the course of treatment stops too soon there will be bacteria still around that have been weakened but not killed, and they will develop their defences. And if antibiotics are used when there is no infection it results in bacteria in balance in the body being exposed needlessly to the pressure to evolve resistance.

It takes time and costs money to identify the exact strain of bacteria that is causing an infection, so most antibiotics used are broad-spectrum – effective against a variety of bacterial strains. In fact, most antibiotics are only profitable for pharmaceutical companies if they are broad-spectrum because they can then be used for more conditions, so for more patients, so more sales volume. It is not, however, in the pharmaceutical companies’ interests for bacteria to develop resistance to their products. Developing new antibiotics is an expensive business and the speed at which resistance is now spreading makes it a risky undertaking.

Most antibiotics have at the base of their development some kind of fungus, natural or synthetic. Another approach, however, is the use of bacteriophages (phages). These are a specific kind of virus that attack bacterial cells. Their disadvantage is that they are very specific to individual strains of bacteria so banks of phages are needed in preparedness for different infections. It is said there are still buildings full of phages near Moscow and these could yet prove valuable.

Many of the audience were clearly very knowledgeable, able to follow the technical details, and the questions at the end revealed deep concern about the problem of antibiotic resistance when it affects gravely ill patients.

Will this prove to be the end of the Antibiotic Age, with the subsequent return of fear of disease and lengthy treatment regimens?  The speaker was hugely pleased when “measures to address antibiotic resistance” was chosen by public vote as the winner of the Latitude Prize 2014, but it would help now if people would trust expert knowledge. A cold is caused by a virus, not a bacterium, so there is no point in taking antibiotics, yet people express dissatisfaction with doctors who don’t prescribe them.

Pubsci is held on the third Wednesday of every month, upstairs at: The Old King’s Head, King's Head Yard, 45-49 Borough High Street, London SE1 1NA

Ada Lovelace Day at Science in the Pub

By Kate Viscardi

Ada Lovelace Day is celebrated on the second Tuesday of October every year, while Science in the Pub (PubSci) meets on the third Wednesday of every month. Starting in 2009, Ada Lovelace Day was originally a day of blogging about female role models in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), but quickly grew into events run around the country. PubSci sticks to its usual date but has an annual Ada Lovelace event each October. This year the speaker was Dr Charlie Lea who, a few years ago, used a PubSci audience as guinea pigs in her PhD research. Charlie is now a Psychology lecturer at the University of Brighton and returned to PubSci to take a different approach to commemorate Lady Ada King, Countess of Lovelace.

Despite her programmes for Babbage’s unrealised programmable computer, and Babbage’s own acknowledgement of his “Maths fairy”, Ada Lovelace was dismissed by many contemporaries in the early 19th Century and her efforts attributed to Babbage. Charlie took this as her starting point and discussed the way that women have been whitewashed out of the history of Psychology.

Educated women were regarded with horror in 19th Century society. G Stanley Hall said: “Educated women are functionally castrated”, but there were pioneers determined to succeed, and succeed they did. Nevertheless, they have still been largely written out. Charlie attributed this to the bias of misogynist historians and that women tended to work in under-valued areas, such as educational, social and occupational psychology. Much less famous than the “founding fathers” of the discipline, Charlie gave brief biographies of some amazing women.

Mary Whiton Calking founded the Psychology lab at Wellesley College and was already working on memory and synaesthesia at the start of the last century. William James taught her in his own home and described her as his best PhD student ever, but Harvard never awarded her PhD. No US university would let Christine Ladd Franklin into their Physics labs, so she switched to Logic and Mathematics and fulfilled the requirements for her PhD at Johns Hopkins University in 1882, but it was not awarded until 1926. She was introduced to Psychology in Germany and developed her own theory of colour vision.

Margaret Floy Washburn did ground-breaking work on the animal mind, including maze-learning rats. Lillian Moller Gilbreth, whose interests were in engineering and management theory (“time and motion”), left academia and together with her husband ran a consultancy company. Amongst other things she invented the pedal bin – and they also had 12 children.

Charlie summed up by saying that women invented important paradigms yet had difficulties even in being awarded their PhDs, getting lectureships or funding. They were influential teachers but the areas in which they worked were often devalued. They have also suffered from mis-attribution of their work, for instance by being described as “X’s student” instead of being given the dignity of their own names. And they continue to be whitewashed out. Finding little mention of women in histories of psychology, Charlie searched her university library for a book specifically about female psychologists and found just one, published in 1982 in the USA.

Science in the Pub meets at 7pm on the third Wednesday of every month, upstairs at the Old King’s Head, 47–49 Borough High Street, London SE1 1NA. Arrive early to take advantage of the pub's Happy Hour from 6–7pm. Our next speaker, on November 18th, will be Dr Michael Byford on Antibiotic Resistance.