NATURE PODCAST
12 December 2018

Podcast: The art of performing science, and chiral chemistry

Join Benjamin Thompson and Shamini Bundell for this week's science updates.

This week, ‘performing’ experiments, and making mirrored molecules.

In this episode:

00:45 There’s magic in the air

A surgeon and a magician meet to discuss the intersections between their crafts. Books and Arts: Science in hand: how art and craft can boost reproducibility; Lecture: Dissecting the Consultation

08:34 Research Highlights

Mass-testing malaria drugs, and geckos going fast. Research Highlight: Almost half a million mosquitoes are drafted to fight malaria; Research Highlight: Geckos slap their feet and swish their tails to race over water

10:46 Shining a light on chiral chemistry

Researchers have discovered a new method for mirroring molecules. Research Article: Hobmeier et al.; News and Views: An exciting tool for asymmetric synthesis

17:40 News Chat

Strengthening AI research capacity, and melting ice in East Antarctica. News: Europe’s AI researchers launch professional body over fears of falling behind; News: East Antarctica is losing ice faster than anyone thought

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-07755-6

Transcript

This week, ‘performing’ experiments, and making mirrored molecules.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

Welcome back to the Nature Podcast. This week, we’ll be hearing how performance arts could help researchers perform science.

Host: Shamini Bundell

And we’ll be shining a light on chiral chemistry. I’m Shamini Bundell.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

And I’m Benjamin Thompson.

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Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson

These days, it’s hard to escape the word ‘interdisciplinary’. While most modern researchers don’t have quite the variety of interests as certain famous Victorian polymaths, there’s certainly more collaboration happening between different scientific subject areas. But it’s not just collaborations between scientific disciplines that are being explored. This week in Nature, we’ve got an essay in our Books and Arts section looking at what researchers can learn from artists and performers, and vice versa. One of the essay’s co-authors is Roger Kneebone, a surgeon and general practitioner by training, now professor of Surgical Education and Engagement Science at Imperial College London. Roger dropped by the studio along with Will Houstoun, a magician who has a PhD in Victorian Magic Literature. The two of them chatted about what the worlds of medicine and science can learn from performance, magic and even cooking. Roger began by talking about the performance of a medical consultation.

Interviewee: Roger Kneebone

I’ve been in the world of medicine ever since I qualified in 1977 but as I became more experienced, I came to see the consultation itself as a kind of performance, and that’s where, when I met some magicians a while ago, a penny dropped with me that there was an awful lot of stuff that I could learn from other expert performers who deal, in this case, with a very small audience if I thought of myself as a performer as a doctor, and Will I know that you do a lot of work with very small audiences.

Interviewee: Will Houstoun

Yeah, absolutely. One of the most common places for someone to perform magic I suppose is in a close-up setting, working with two or three people at a time, showing them card tricks, coin tricks and that sort of thing. And in those settings, people don’t necessarily know what you’re doing – are you going to do something that’s fun for them, are you some sort of con man, are you somebody who’s going to make fun of them? They don’t really know, so those same sort of interpersonal dynamics I guess come into play a little.

Interviewee: Roger Kneebone

Because you get those in the consulting room as well. I mean people come and see you and they’ve never met and they’re often very anxious. The skill is, I think, making a connection with somebody and then moving the conversation forward. One of the things that struck me when I first saw you work is the way that you are very skilful in establishing a connection while making it seem completely natural and effortless, but I know from my own experience that making things seem natural and effortless takes a lot of effort.

Interviewee: Will Houstoun

Yeah, absolutely. So, you don’t want somebody to feel, I think, that they’re in an incredibly contrived and peculiar situation or that you are there sort of just blindly going through something you’ve practiced loads of times, and so you have to make sure you’re working with the person and aware of what they’re doing and how they’re acting. And you certainly have an idea of where you’re trying to go with something, what the end of the trick is, what point you’re hoping to reach, but you never know quite what’s going to happen along the way.

Interviewee: Roger Kneebone

So, the work that we’ve done about looking at the consultation as performance really made me think that there are all kind of insights that people in my profession – in my case, medicine – can gain from people in completely different areas of practice. A year or so ago I know you took part in a symposium I organised at Imperial College London where we brought together about 65 people from very, very different backgrounds to explore with one another what they actually do. And there we had scientists and clinicians and artists and performers, and an awful lot of people found that they had unexpected areas of similarity, whether they were restoring statues in the V&A Museum, or whether they were manipulating tiny insects under the microscope or doing things in a chemistry laboratory. And I know that you do things that require great skill and delicacy and manipulation, but I know that you’ve also got a science background as well yourself, haven’t you, an engineering background.

Interviewee: Will Houstoun

Yes.

Interviewee: Roger Kneebone

And I wonder if that made sense to you as another point of sort of bridging.

Interviewee: Roger Kneebone

I did a Mechanical Engineering degree to start with, and very much liked the world of magic and did magic tricks, but never really thought the two could crossover. And then it was only really afterwards when I started getting more interested in the magic world, did a PhD based on Victorian Magic Literature, and then started to find actually there’s lots of interesting stuff where the two cross. I rather wish there had been somebody saying, ‘You know what, these things can inform each other.’

Interviewee: Roger Kneebone

Although we talk about performing operations, we talk about performing experiments, I think, you know, people don’t always follow that thought through. But when I started exploring whether these ideas I’d noticed in my world of medicine might also play out in laboratory science, I discovered that there were all sorts of similarities there that I hadn’t thought of, so people in chemistry laboratories having to work with very precise measurement and exact temperatures and mixtures of things and close observation, all those skills seem to me to be mirrored very closely by what happens in high-end chefs, kitchens. And interestingly, the symposium I mentioned has now led onto a collaboration and we’re going to be getting undergraduate chemistry students to spend time learning culinary techniques in a kitchen, and getting culinary students to spend time in a chemistry laboratory to see whether each can learn from the other.

Interviewee: Will HoustounAnd of course, the wonderful thing about that I suppose is that if I’m doing something which is about magic, I have a feeling of obligation to be good and sort of know something about it and be able to do it to a certain extent, but if I’m spending time with somebody else – I’ve been working with a puppeteer, for example, recently – I have no expectation of being good at puppetry, and perhaps I can learn more because I’m not worried about proving myself in the same way.

Interviewee: Roger Kneebone

And that’s exactly the case with the Chemical Kitchen, as we’re calling this project, which is being funded by Imperial College London as a way of helping chemistry students particularly to learn these techniques that, these days, they may not have learnt much or indeed at all at school. And this is a way of making sure that they gain those skills, exactly as you say, without them feeling embarrassed in front of a chemistry professor if they can’t do a chemical experiment because no one expects them to be able to make a good soufflé or vice versa. And I think that particularly as the school curriculum is becoming scooped out and opportunities to perform and to do things with your hands are being systematically eliminated, I think it’s getting more and more important that we give people the opportunities to make these connections with people they might not otherwise think of meeting. And so, the collaboration that we’ve developed between magic and medicine seems to me to be an example of something that has a much wider set of implications.

Interviewee: Will Houstoun

And a particularly exciting one for me because my PhD was looking at a man who wrote a book about how to do magic in the Victorian period, not because everyone should be magicians but rather because he thought that magic would teach people useful skills for the rest of their lives, and that’s something that sort of took off a little bit, then faded away in the intervening 100-120 years, and it’s rather exciting to think that maybe the idea of using magic to help look at other things and examine other areas is there, and also of course that magic can become much richer by interacting with other areas, by finding out more about other things, and by using some of that in the way it develops.

Interviewer: Benjamin ThompsonThat was Will Houstoun chatting with Roger Kneebone. You can read Roger’s essay over at nature.com/news. If you’d like to see a longer discussion between the two on the lessons that medical consultations could learn from performance magic, you can find one over on Gresham College’s website where Roger has been giving a series of talks, and I’ll put a link to that on our show page over at nature.com/nature/podcast.

Host: Shamini BundellLater in the show, Holly Else will be joining us with an update from an AI conference – that’s coming up in the News Chat. Now though, Anna Nagle is here with this week’s Research Highlights.

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Interviewer: Anna NagleI’d imagine that dissecting a mosquito takes some pretty fine motor skills, but how about dissecting half a million mosquitoes? That’s what a team from the University of California did in a bid to uncover new compounds to treat malaria. When an infected mosquito bites someone, Plasmodium parasites enter into the person’s bloodstream, and first move to the liver where they mature. The California team wanted to target the parasite at this early stage in its life cycle, which meant painstakingly removing Plasmodium parasites from nearly half a million mosquitoes. That then mixed the parasites with human liver cells and pitted them against various chemical compounds to see how they fared. Out of more than 500,000 compounds, almost 6,000 quashed the pathogen without damaging the liver cells, and could form the basis for new malaria prevention drugs. Read more on that research in Science.

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Interviewer: Anna NagleDid you know that geckos can race across the surface of water at impressive speeds? Well, now scientists have used high-speed cameras to work out exactly how they manage it. Many species can travel along water’s surface. Lightweight creatures like insects make use of surface tension, while some larger animals like basilisk lizards use vigorous water slapping techniques. Geckos, it turns out, use a mix of approaches. Scientists at Rockefeller University in New York found that geckos use all four limbs to slap and stroke the water’s surface, creating underwater air pockets that propel them forwards. They also wiggle their semi-submerged bodies from side to side to generate thrust and get a boost from the water’s surface tension. This combination of techniques means that geckos can speed across a body of water at around 61 centimetres per second. That’s faster than a young alligator can swim. You can find that research in Current Biology.

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