Hi listeners, Benjamin here.
Welcome to the Nature Briefing podcast, the Friday show where we talk about a couple of stories we've read about in the Nature Briefing, which is, of course, Nature's daily roundup of the latest science news.
A couple of stories to talk about today, and joining me is Maren Hunsberger.
Maren, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you again for having me.
Not at all.
Well, listen, why don't you go first this week?
What have you got?
I've got a really fun one this week, Ben.
Okay.
So, as any parents out there listening will have experienced, you get all kinds of germy nastiness from your kids when they bring it home from nursery and school.
But you might have also experienced that as they get older, maybe you get less and less sick because you're acquiring immunity.
Now, who might have more immunity than parents, Ben?
It might be someone who spends all of their time with sick children as their job.
Right.
OK, so I'm guessing then this must be someone maybe in the medical sphere.
Exactly.
Hit the nail right on the head.
This study looked at pediatricians whose entire job is to spend time with sick children.
And they looked at these pediatricians because they're getting basically year round exposure to respiratory viruses acquired from small children.
And they thought to themselves hey, I bet these guys have built up pretty strong immune protection to some of these viruses.
And the two that we're talking about in this paper, which I read in Science, Translational Medicine, are RSV and HMPV.
That's respiratory syncytial virus and human metanemovirus.
And these are both what we call ubiquitous viruses, which means that basically every child in the population, like nearly 100, has gotten RSV by age 2 and HMPV by age 5.
So they're everywhere.
And these diseases are both often relatively mild, but they can be severe, with RSV alone being responsible for 36 million hospitalizations and 100000 deaths per year in children under 5, according to the WHO.
Hmm.
So really serious.
And the problem is we don't have vaccines that work for or are approved for RSV in young children.
Now you can get vaccinated as a mother who is pregnant, and then you can pass those antibodies on to your child in utero.
But we're looking for things that will help for the children who are affected by these diseases, who are under two and under five.
So what do you do in that case?
If a vaccine isn't going to work, you skip a couple of steps and you just give them the antibodies.
And I get a sense this is where the pediatricians are going to come in.
Precisely.
Now, we do have some antibody treatments that already exist for RSV.
We don't have any that exist for HMPV, but they could be better.
And this study aimed to do just that.
So they took blood from pediatricians and screened their blood for B cells.
And then they were able to take those B cells and extract antibodies to RSV and HMPV.
And then they were able to test these in a lab in mice and rats that they exposed to these diseases.
And these antibodies work really well about 25 times better at blocking RSV than our existing antibody treatments that we have available.
And they were able to neutralize a wider range of strains of RSV.
Which sounds like great news.
And so this would be described as what, a cocktail of antibodies? exactly this is what i'm going to call it at my next dinner party when i have doctors over i'm going to make something that looks kind of yellow and call it an antibody cocktail and one of my favorite parts about this is the even just the title of the paper which calls this occupationally acquired immunity and it's like ah how perfect so as we often say on the podcast these results are based on testing in animals and there is a big leap between a mouse and a human what are the next steps Absolutely.
I think the next steps here for this team and others who are looking at very similar methods are to try this out in human populations.
And the great thing is that not only is this applicable for our very young populations, who are quite vulnerable to these kinds of respiratory viruses, but it's also a great solution for other vulnerable populations, like the immunocompromised.
So these antibody treatments will be a fantastic solution for folks who can't receive, or won't react properly to, a vaccine for these illnesses.
And do we get a sense of what doctors, what pediatricians might think about all of this?
Well, I think it aligns a lot of anecdotal evidence.
So, for example, one doctor who was interviewed by The New Scientist when they wrote an article about this paper said that they've been working with pediatric patients for 10 years.
And in their first few years, they would get two to three respiratory illnesses a year.
But now they can go a year without getting any.
So this is great hard lab evidence for why that is and the fact that we can use that to our advantage in other people.
Well, that is a good news story.
And fingers crossed those results do carry across into people and then can make a difference in the real world.
Let's move on to my story this week.
And it's a story I read about in Science.
And it's based on a paper under review for the Journal for the History of Astronomy.
And it concerns marginalia, which is a word you don't hear very often on this podcast.
Yeah, what does it mean to you?
Stuff you write in the margins?
Bingo.
It's the stuff that we all do, right?
Like, I often take notes in books for the Nature Hits the Books podcast, and on papers as well.
And it's, yeah, stuff written or scribbled or doodled in the margin of books.
And it's of immense interest to historians.
The most famous that I'm sure our audience are thinking of right now is the mathematician Fermat who, back in the 1600s, said he'd figured out a proof about a to the n plus b to the n equals c to the n, But there wasn't enough room to write it out.
And it had mathematicians vexed for like 300 years.
Simply because the margins weren't wide enough.
Simply because the margins weren't wide enough.
And there's many other examples, too.
And we've got a beautiful one today.
Now, our story begins in this instance, in the present day, with the historian Ivan Malara.
Now, he was looking at several 16th century printings of an ancient text.
And in one of them someone had transcribed some words, some religious words, specifically Psalm 145.
And this handwriting looked pretty familiar to this historian.
And there were other notes written, too.
Now, according to this article, he dashed off some 3 am emails to some other experts saying essentially he thought he'd found some new writings by the great Galileo.
Whoa.
Can you imagine being so familiar with historic text written by a particular person that you can recognize their handwriting?
That's so cool.
It is awesome.
And of course, this is Galileo Galilei, a colossus of science physics maths, of course, astronomy as well, using telescopes to add evidence that planets go around the sun.
They don't orbit the Earth.
And of course, that didn't end too well for him.
The Inquisition, when you least expect it.
Well, quite.
And the discoverer then, Malara, he was confident that this was Galileo doing the writing.
And there's some evidence to suggest that it was.
So some other handwriting specialists suggested this was a good match to what was known.
Obviously, he's a very well studied individual.
But there's also some evidence from what the book itself was.
That was going to be my next question.
What book was the marginalia found in?
Well, it was the Algomast, or perhaps the Algomast, which is an ancient text on maths and astronomy, written by Ptolemy.
It was obviously a very important figure in early astronomy.
So this was written maybe in the second century.
So really, really old.
And it describes an Earth-centered cosmos.
So this geocentric view, something that was central certainly, to Western astronomy for hundreds, maybe a thousand odd years,
And the notes that are written in here showed that Galileo was a big fan of dissecting the ideas in this text.
And some of his notes resemble things that he wrote in later books of his.
So there's some more evidence there. but also the psalm that was written.
There's some evidence that says that Galileo would pray before sitting down with this book.
So it seems that that might be what he's doing in this instance.
OK, that's so interesting.
So it gives us a little insight into what his mind might have been like when he was making these world changing discoveries.
Right.
And that's kind of what this article puts forward.
It says that this discovery gives more of an insight into Galileo.
When we think about him, we often think of him as this kind of late stage guy, this kind of maverick defying the church and all the rest of it.
But it's not clear how this mindset came to be.
Now, these notes were written maybe 20 years before Galileo did his work on the moon and Jupiter, and then Venus, and led him to this kind of heliocentric view, this sun-centric view of the planets orbiting the sun, of course,
And the article quotes another historian saying that Galileo is sometimes portrayed as this kind of big thinker kind of guy.
But what this work maybe does is suggest that really he's hitting the books, right?
He's looking at the data.
He's working through these ideas in his head.
He's scribbling his ideas.
And maybe this opens up new lines of inquiry in his head as to what's going on and you know ultimately, how his ideas came to be.
I love that.
I think it's so important because, as science students and students of history, we always learn about the eureka moment the end result of somebody's work.
But what's maybe more interesting and more important is the process.
It takes years.
It takes study.
It takes failure.
And so when we're getting to shine a light on that kind of detail in someone's lead up or their journey into who they become and what knowledge they deliver, I think that's so, so interesting.
And I think any student listening to this right now who's got a paper in front of them and is scribbling on it.
I used to do it in a pen.
I'm old school saying is this right?
Maybe that's something I can think about.
I think there's echoes there all the way back to Galileo himself and his ideas.
So keep that in mind when you're double underlining a passage or writing must look more into this.
But I think let's leave it there for today.
We'll put links to both of these stories in the show notes and a link where you can sign up to The Nature Briefing to have even more stories like this delivered directly to your inbox.
But until next time, I've been Benjamin Thompson.
Maren Hunsberger, thanks so much for joining me.
Absolutely.
Thanks for having me and thanks for listening.
