Research isn't always conducted in a laboratory. Dr. Brian T. Murphy runs a research program that takes him all around the world collecting aquatic microorganisms, en route to the discovery and development of new antibiotics. On this podcast, Dr. Murphy explains how antibiotics work and the importance of discovering new ones, as well as detailing some of the exotic underwater adventures involved in his line of work. Ongoing projects in Dr. Murphy's lab merge the identification of small molecules with marine microbiology, molecular biology, genomics, and bioinformatics. To date, his lab has built a collection of over 1,500 aquatic bacteria and are using them to generate small molecule libraries that they screen against bacterial pathogens and cancers. The lab is also innovating the way drug discovery libraries are managed to make them more intuitive and efficient. Antibiotics research crowdsourcing programs: Great Lakes Freshwater Sponge Ecology And Drug-Discovery (Murphy Lab project) University of Oklahoma's Citizen Science Soil Collection Program Drugs from Dirt (US) Swab and Send (UK) Small World Initiative Additional scientific resources discussed: Murphy Lab UIC website Current Murphy Lab projects Feature on Murphy Lab in Toronto Star Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation TB Alliance Murphy Lab on Twitter Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter withCody Gough andAshley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Research isn't always conducted in a laboratory. Dr. Brian T. Murphy runs a research program that takes him all around the world collecting aquatic microorganisms, en route to the discovery and development of new antibiotics. On this podcast, Dr. Murphy explains how antibiotics work and the importance of discovering new ones, as well as detailing some of the exotic underwater adventures involved in his line of work.
Ongoing projects in Dr. Murphy's lab merge the identification of small molecules with marine microbiology, molecular biology, genomics, and bioinformatics. To date, his lab has built a collection of over 1,500 aquatic bacteria and are using them to generate small molecule libraries that they screen against bacterial pathogens and cancers. The lab is also innovating the way drug discovery libraries are managed to make them more intuitive and efficient.
Antibiotics research crowdsourcing programs:
Additional scientific resources discussed:
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/the-microscopic-chemical-warfare-of-antibiotics
CODY GOUGH: I'm curious, why is it so important to discover new antibiotics?
BRIAN MURPHY: People get bacterial infections and then they take antibiotics to treat these infections. But bacteria evolve way faster than humans do. And so just putting it simply, they can see these drugs and learn how to fight them and learn how to beat them. And then they survive. And so then after one year, five years, 10 years, the treatments that we use are no longer work. And so we need to find new treatments.
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CODY GOUGH: Hi I'm Cody Gough from curiosity.com. Today we're going to learn about antibiotics research. Every week, we explore what we don't know because curiosity makes you smarter. This is the Curiosity podcast.
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The word research kind of has a stigma around it. You might think of a white, sterile, boring laboratory with a bunch of microscopes and Petri dishes. So that's why I wanted to talk to a scientist who goes out on adventures Indiana Jones style for his research. And that's exactly what I did.
Dr. Brian Murphy will talk about how his research in the field of antibiotics has taken him all across the US and around the world and why his research is so important. We'll get into some surprising science, plus learn how you can get involved as a citizen researcher. Dr. Brian Murphy is an associate professor at University of Illinois at Chicago in the Department of medical chemistry and pharmacognosy, not pharmacology.
BRIAN MURPHY: Correct.
CODY GOUGH: What is pharmacognosy?
BRIAN MURPHY: Yeah, it's a complicated word that basically means knowledge of drugs. If you break it down, as you know pharma, cognosy. So cognosy like knowledge in pharma drug.
CODY GOUGH: Got it. OK.
BRIAN MURPHY: So knowledge of drugs.
CODY GOUGH: Well, welcome to the Curiosity podcast. I'm talking to you today because you run a drug discovery research program. You're working on lots of projects, but there are some that seem very pressing and even more important perhaps than others. So what problem right now is the main problem that you're trying to solve and why is it important?
BRIAN MURPHY: Yeah, great question. We're trying to tackle the problem of antibiotic resistance. So people get bacterial infections and then they take antibiotics to treat these infections. But bacteria evolve way faster than humans do.
Just putting it simply, they can see these drugs and learn how to fight them and learn how to beat them. And then they survive. And so then after one year, five years, 10 years, the treatments that we use are no longer work. And so we need to find new treatments and this is where my lab comes in.
The whole point of my lab is to discover new antibiotics from the environment, but specifically from bacteria that we collect in the environment. Now bacteria are everywhere. You can look on your skin, on the table right here. You can go under the water and to little sediment samples or sand. There's bacteria everywhere.
And back in the 1929 or '28 or so, Alexander Fleming discovered that there was this fungus that fought off a bacterium by producing a little small molecule, a compound called penicillin. And this is a huge discovery because it really ushered in what was called the Golden Antibiotic Discovery era. And it ushered in the concept that microorganisms fight each other with little chemical weapons. All right.
And so what researchers did at that time they invested billions of each year to try and collect these chemical weapons that microorganisms use against each other and develop them into drugs. So when I get a bacterial infection, you basically-- like nature has been fighting each other for-- bacteria and nature have fought each other for millions of years. And so we're just harnessing that power when we developed drugs from microorganisms.
And so I go around to different parts of the environment, particularly under the water. We'll scuba dive for different samples and some weird environments to try to collect strange bacteria. And we'll collect the bacteria that live there and then we make a whole library of these bacteria.
And then we try to collect the chemical weapons that they produce and test their ability to inhibit different diseases. And that's what we do. And hopefully, we find chemical weapons that can target these drug resistant bacteria.
CODY GOUGH: That is a great overview.
BRIAN MURPHY: Thank you.
CODY GOUGH: Kind of go into each of the parts of what you were talking about, let's start with in the early 20th century, penicillin is discovered. Why is it's so important that you're doing that now? Don't people come out with new antibiotics all the time?
BRIAN MURPHY: No. They don't. They used to. There's a certain defined reservoir in nature for antibiotics. And throughout the '40s to '60s, 1950s and 1960s, companies were pulling out antibiotics left and right. That's why they called it the golden era of antibiotic discovery.
And most people thought that bacterial infections weren't going to be so much of a problem. But of course, because bacteria become resistant to these drugs, it became ever increasingly difficult to discover new drugs to treat these drug resistant bacteria.
And so over the years, the rate of resistance to drugs outpaced the discovery of new drugs. And so there's not an infinite reservoir of drugs from the environment. So a major problem in my field right now is rediscovering the same old antibiotics that have existed in nature for a long time.
ASHLEY HAMER: Hey, Ashley here. Calling the first half of the 20th century the golden age of antibiotics is no overstatement. Before Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, hospitals were full of people with blood poisoning they had contracted from minor cuts and scrapes.
You couldn't effectively treat infections like pneumonia or gonorrhea. You just had to wait it out. From 1942 when the first patient was treated with penicillin through the 1970s, 270 infection fighting drugs were developed. That's an average of 10 a year of new antibiotics alone, which is a really impressive statistic when you consider that today the FDA approves about 30 drugs a year total.
CODY GOUGH: How quickly are these bacteria adapting and how quickly are these antibiotics becoming obsolete?
BRIAN MURPHY: It really differs for every strain of bacteria or pathogenic bacteria. There are some that can become resistant very quickly. I think with some of the first antibiotics on the market, they observed resistant strains within a year. And then there are some that it was more like 10 years.
But it all depends on-- you always hear people talk about the overuse of antibiotics, and this is one of the things that propagates resistance. When you don't properly use an antibiotic to kill an entire population, you kind of expose it to the antibiotic. But sublethal concentrations, it can become resistant. It can learn about that antibiotic and then-- learn is probably the wrong word to use, but--
CODY GOUGH: Adapt.
BRIAN MURPHY: It can adapt to it.
CODY GOUGH: And so are antibiotics being overprescribed or just taken in too much in general?
BRIAN MURPHY: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, they're being overprescribed and doctors are prescribing them when they don't need to prescribe them and this is a problem. And a major problem is their use in agriculture, where just swaths are being used on whole animal populations.
CODY GOUGH: Animal populations?
BRIAN MURPHY: Yeah. Like pigs or cows or so to prevent their crops from getting diseases.
ASHLEY HAMER: Pop quiz. What percentage of the antibiotics administered in the US go to animals? Care to take a guess? It's 70%. When you add that to the numbers in other countries, it's pretty clear that animals worldwide are getting way more antibiotics than people are.
Sometimes this is necessary. Animals get infections just like people do. And to withhold medication would be bad for a farmer's bottom line, not to mention their conscience. But many farmers dish up regular servings of antibiotics to help animals grow faster and that can lead to antibiotic resistant infections. Considering that 2/3 of human infectious diseases start in animals, that's a very bad thing. Some countries are working to combat this problem, but change has been pretty slow.
CODY GOUGH: So who isn't using antibiotics?
BRIAN MURPHY: I don't know.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, man.
BRIAN MURPHY: It's a major problem, their use in agriculture. Are over used in agriculture.
CODY GOUGH: Is that why you're going underwater to find them?
BRIAN MURPHY: Yeah. Well, that's why people went into the water in the first place. Yeah. I mean, the first place is they looked for the land. These were the easiest places to collect. You get a soil sample from your backyard or down the street, or you go on vacation you bring a tube and collect some soil and isolate bacteria.
And then after a decade or two, you start to see the same structures. And so you have to innovate. OK. Well, let's try some new methods, new methods of growing or new places to collect. And well, I guess this leads us right to one of the major problems that my lab is trying to solve right now.
And in nearly like 7 to 8 decades of biomedical research in trying to discover new antibiotics, there have been relatively few changes to the philosophy that we use to collect bacteria, and thus their corresponding chemical weapons from the environment.
And we're kind of still using the same old techniques that we used in the '40s and '50s. You go to a different place, you collect some soil. You put the soil onto Petri dishes, which is basically food for bacteria, and then bacteria grow. And then you look at the plate and you have all these different colors on your nutrient plate.
And you say, oh, well, here's a purple bacterium, and here's a black bacterium and here is an orange bacterium. Geez. I guess I'll pick one of each and then I'll ignore the other seven orange bacteria. But really using color and shape is what people still do nowadays, and that tells you nothing about the chemical weapons that they produce, which is obviously the important part.
CODY GOUGH: So if there's 40 bacteria on a Petri dish, researchers will literally randomly pick a handful of them?
BRIAN MURPHY: This is correct.
CODY GOUGH: Are you serious?
BRIAN MURPHY: Yeah, that's the best we got. Because now not to say that we don't have ways to identify the bacteria, but the ways that we have to identify them are time consuming and costly. When you take a sediment sample and put it onto maybe six different nutrient media, OK, that's a manageable number of bacteria. You can have anywhere from 20 to 100 different types of bacteria growing on these plates.
But when you start to say, OK, now you have six plates per sample. But then you go on a collection trip and you collect 60 samples and I have 60 times 6 and then that number times 100. And now all of a sudden, you're starting to be around like 50, 60,000 colonies that you need to pick.
And I'm running an academic research lab. I don't have a ton of money. It's really difficult to get money here. And so I had to pay people to do all this. And so you just have to hedge your bets and just pick some of them and hope that what you picked produces a new drug. And it's been serendipity, really. It's this collection based on serendipity.
CODY GOUGH: During the golden era of antibiotics research and discovery, did they do things differently? Were they able to collect 60,000 and test all of them or has it been pretty much the same?
BRIAN MURPHY: It's been pretty much the same. I mean, pharma companies had a bit more money so they could build bigger teams and slightly bigger libraries, but there was still not a whole lot of documentation about exactly what was tested.
Luckily, we have developed a method in our lab now in collaboration with another assistant professor at UIC, Dr. Laura Sanchez, who's an expert in mass spectrometry. It's basically this tool that we can use to analyze both the type of bacteria and what it produces on a plate.
And we're able to analyze high numbers of these bacterial colonies very quickly and get a very brief fingerprint of not only what type of bacteria it is, but what it produces. And we can then make informed decisions about what bacteria we should add to our library. So instead of basing these decisions on color and shape, we can base it on what type of bacteria it is and what it produces. Like the weapons it produces.
CODY GOUGH: That makes sense.
BRIAN MURPHY: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Let's leave the lab just for a minute. We'll come back there. But let's talk about the scuba diving. You are going on adventures. You're like the Indiana Jones of microbiology, right? Is it microbiology?
BRIAN MURPHY: Microbiology, chemistry, yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Chemistry, a little bit of both?
BRIAN MURPHY: MM hmm.
CODY GOUGH: Your background is more chemistry?
BRIAN MURPHY: I'm a trained chemist. Most of my degrees are in chemistry. In my postdoctoral training, I did two years of heavy chemistry/microbiology research. And so the microbiology part was really half self-taught and half trained with really talented microbiologists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
CODY GOUGH: OK. There's going to be some overlap, I suppose depending on the research. So back to the scuba diving. So you're going underwater, having these adventures. When I think science-- a lot of times people think science or research, it's always you're in a lab with a bunch of beakers somewhere, everything's white countertops and everything. But you're out and about in the world and you're traveling and things like that. Where is this project brought you?
BRIAN MURPHY: Yeah, this project-- in the continental US, it has brought me all throughout the Great Lakes to Massachusetts to the coast of Maine to Florida. And internationally, it's brought me to some amazing places.
We've done collection expeditions in Iceland, where you have literally below freezing waters. And we've just gotten a five year grant to work and develop an antibody discovery program that focuses on tuberculosis in Vietnam. So I'll be going there for the next five years. We've been able to see some amazing things in these kind of-- And we're again, partnering with scientists who work in these countries because like I said before, this is an international problem that knows no borders.
CODY GOUGH: Is this an international effort?
BRIAN MURPHY: Yes, it is. Absolutely.
CODY GOUGH: So you're getting help from all over the place?
BRIAN MURPHY: Oh, yeah. In our collaboration with Iceland, we have a partnership with Dr. Cecilia Omar Sasha's lab at the University of Iceland. And in Vietnam, we're working with Quang van Pham in Hanoi at the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology, and another professor in the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology in Hanoi.
CODY GOUGH: And it's important to gather samples from all around the world because of the variety of bacteria you'll find?
BRIAN MURPHY: Correct. Yeah, absolutely. We both have the same goal. For example in Vietnam, they have expertise in TB biology. I have expertise in sample collection and the identification of drugs from bacteria.
And so we can combine these different expertise and build a nice training program to train young scientists in this process. And pass some of this knowledge on to, then they can further innervate the discovery process. So that's the grant we have going with Vietnam right now.
CODY GOUGH: Well, when you're on these expeditions, are you doing the old school kind of collection? I mean, is it just you drive somewhere or scrape up some soil and put it in a dish?
BRIAN MURPHY: I have this amazing picture of-- we got on one of the largest vessels in the Icelandic Coast Guard fleet. It's called the IEA. And there's this great picture that this photo photojournalist Jenny Yang of the Toronto Star took.
And this vessel is immense. You look at it and you say, I do not belong here. And you have this great picture of me and Cecilia, my collaborator. And the captain rolls this large map of the North Atlantic out in front of us and says, hey, you guys have the ship for six days. All right. Where do you want to go?
The picture is perfect because this is a dumbfounded look on my face saying, uh. Because the truth is, you don't know where to go. Nobody knows where to go except, let's just go somewhere different. And that touches on one of the other projects in my lab about, how do you intuitively choose where to collect? Because nobody understands how these chemical weapons are distributed in nature.
And if you don't understand that, then you don't really know where to collect. The best philosophy that we have is that different organisms produce slightly different chemical weapons, and so just collect different organisms.
CODY GOUGH: Now if organisms have been fighting each other here on Earth for thousands and thousands of years, I have to ask. My Curiosity audience love outer space, our editorial staff loves outer space. Are you working with space agencies to collect from outer space?
BRIAN MURPHY: Can I tell you, every time I go under the water I feel like I'm in outer space. Especially in Iceland, it looks like outer space. So I would tell you that I'm already collecting them but that's not true.
When you find a microorganism from outer piece, that is going to be a big deal because you've just proven life exists elsewhere. So, no. There's not a huge-- our field is called natural products. There's not a huge natural product contingency focused on space. But I will tell you that not-- three years ago I told my nephew that when he grows of age, he can be the first guy to go into space to start collecting samples to look for new microorganisms to use to fight bacteria.
CODY GOUGH: Wow. Very ambitious. I like it.
BRIAN MURPHY: He really likes the stars. He likes looking at a telescope, so I had to give him a project.
CODY GOUGH: Good. I mean, if you got to give somebody a project, I suppose that's a good place to start. If there's no scientific method for locating where to even start digging, can people get involved where they're citizen scientists, they can collect this kind of stuff?
BRIAN MURPHY: Yeah. There's quite a few scientists in my field who have pretty large citizen science efforts that have them mail in samples. It's a bit more complicated because there's some permitting issues. You can't just do it. And for good reason, you can't just have these things come in all around the world. Somebody can't like live on a farm in India and send a soil sample in because-- the USDA is going to have a major problem with that.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, customs doesn't like that.
BRIAN MURPHY: Customs does not like when you bring in soil from other farms. You should not do that. I'm not advocating for that. But, yeah. But it's a lot easier to do local citizen science efforts. And there's even a website. I forgot what the name of it was. But there is a website that can direct citizens toward citizen science projects, and it's just a whole database of different researchers who are looking for help.
ASHLEY HAMER: For our listeners in the US one of those citizen scientist sites is called Drugs from Dirt. We'll have a link to that and lots of other great resources in the show notes.
BRIAN MURPHY: We actually have a citizen science project in our lab. First of all, did you know that there are sponges in the Great Lakes? Little sponges, these little animals?
CODY GOUGH: No.
BRIAN MURPHY: Of course. Not many people do. I didn't either when I took the job. I thought that sponges only occurred in the ocean. They occur in lakes. And so I thought, and it was even better that the most-- a lot of these sponges grow off of wood, which means off of old shipwrecks.
And so we had a pretty great citizen science effort of we put the word out to a bunch of paddy scuba diving centers around the Great Lakes and we sent them sample collection kits. We got all of the appropriate permits to collect from these places. And they went out. The citizens, they took videos, they documented the sponges and where they were.
They got us the depth, the water temperature, the exact coordinates. They took a little tiny centimeter cubed piece of a sponge. They put it in a tube under the water. They got up and dropped in an envelope and mailed it to us.
And as a result, we have a project where right now we're working with greater than 50 sponge samples collected from the Great Lakes. Not only studying what types of sponges exist in the Great Lakes, but we're studying the types of microbial communities that live in these sponges, how consistent the communities are throughout different sponges and the different chemistry that occurs within these sponges.
And I know people probably thinking, well, who cares? But you have to care because if you understand how microbial communities change over the course of geographic location, then you can understand how to more intuitively design a collection trip so that you're not going to have that picture of me staring dumbfounded at a map on a ship.
I might actually have a better answer when the captain asks me, where would you like to collect? So if we can understand how microbial communities and the chemical weapons they produce or distributed in the environment, we can intuitively design collection trips.
CODY GOUGH: That seems like a pretty important thing to do.
BRIAN MURPHY: It is. And I'll tell you, it's not a question that just my lab can answer. It's going to take a concerted effort of many scientists. But there are other labs out there who are working on the same issue. There aren't many, but there are.
CODY GOUGH: So let's say a bunch of citizen scientists send you some samples and you've collected a bunch of samples, but you already said you don't have the capacity to analyze all of them.
BRIAN MURPHY: Good question. Nice lead in too. Nice transition. We do now. In the past year and a half, we have two very talented graduate students and one very talented collaborator, Dr. Sanchez. We have designed a method that we can go through these colonies, these microbial colonies in high throughput. So in large numbers, and make a quick evaluation of whether or not we are interested in them as sources for drug discovery.
So whereas before, there's no way we would have been able to process 10,000 colonies. But now using a lot less money, fewer personnel and in a more automated system, we can actually process that many colonies and go through that many while reducing the redundancy that usually exists in our libraries. Repeats of types of microbes.
If you just say the orange color, you might collect 200 orange colors and you have no idea which of those bacteria are similar or which produce the same chemical weapons. But now we will have an idea of where the overlap exists and we can throw out all the redundancy and only keep the unique microorganisms.
CODY GOUGH: So you've solved the part of the problem, really.
BRIAN MURPHY: Yeah, I hate the word solve because it suggests that there is an end to it. There's always a way to improve what you're doing. I think we've introduced a nice innovation to the front end of this drug discovery process, which has been severely lacking in innovations.
CODY GOUGH: What kinds of conditions are you testing to be able to combat?
BRIAN MURPHY: You mean to combat drug resistance?
CODY GOUGH: What diseases are you fighting or what-- yeah, what are you trying to develop these antibiotics for?
BRIAN MURPHY: So we collaborate heavily with the Institute for Tuberculosis Research at UIC. So tuberculosis is a pretty awful disease that affects 1 in 3 of the world's population. It's a bacterium called mycobacterium tuberculosis, or TB.
ASHLEY HAMER: If you're in a developed country you may be saying, wait. Tuberculosis? Isn't that an old fashioned disease like scarlet fever or smallpox? In your part of the world, yes, mostly. Each year in the US for example, there are only about three cases per 100,000 people. But worldwide, it infects around 10 million people per year and kills 2 million.
The greatest number of TB deaths occur in Africa, mostly because Africa is experiencing a terrible HIV epidemic and TB is one of the main killers of people with HIV. Suffice it to say, finding drugs that can wipe out tuberculosis is super important.
BRIAN MURPHY: And so this is one of our major targets, but we will not discriminate. We will fight any pathogenic bacteria that exists out there. So whenever we do isolate an antibiotic, we will test it against as many different human pathogens as we possibly can.
And we have other projects too where we focus on trying to combat different cancers. We have a lot of different of what's called biological assays that our collaborators do, but I think our major focus is antibiotic discovery.
CODY GOUGH: And that's the most urgent, again, because you said that not a lot of new antibiotics have come out in the last several decades.
ASHLEY HAMER: Not a lot is putting it mildly. We haven't seen a new class of antibiotics since 1984. Only five of the top 50 pharma companies are even creating antibiotics. A 2002 analysis found that out of more than 500 drugs in development that year, only five were antibiotics. 89 drugs hit the market that year without an antibiotic among them.
CODY GOUGH: And part of that's funding, I guess.
BRIAN MURPHY: Yeah. Oh, boy. There's a lot of reasons for it. Part of it is funding. There has been a huge divestment of pharmaceutical companies from antibiotic discovery because it's just simply not that profitable. I mean, I hate saying that, but it's absolutely true.
It can take billions of dollars to develop a drug. And then you can develop the drug, go through discovery and then you can put it through phase 1, phase 2, phase 3 human clinical trials. You can put it on the market. And then within a very short period, the bacterium can be resistant to it.
So what company would invest in that? So I think we need a severe change in the way that we invest in discovery. And this is just my personal opinion that there has to-- at least for antibiotic discovery, there has to be a huge percentage of for profit motive to be removed but we need a major restructuring of our system to do that. And there are not-for-profit discovery institutes, especially that focus on more third world diseases like tuberculosis. So these places do exist, but not for every disease.
CODY GOUGH: Is there a way people can locate those and donate to those or support those in some way?
BRIAN MURPHY: Some of the major ones that do more not for profit discovery are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the TB Alliance, and then there's several others.
CODY GOUGH: And we'll post some links in the show notes if people want to get involved. Well, the research you're doing sounds like it's really useful and a cool thing to do. And you to get outside the lab, you're not just sitting hunched over numbers all day and crunching in little microscopes and doing lots of different things. For our younger listeners or students that are trying to choose a career path or are interested in this kind of research, what do you want them to know that you think they might not know?
BRIAN MURPHY: Well, it depends. Know about our field or know about how to apply to a program like this?
CODY GOUGH: Either way.
BRIAN MURPHY: OK. Well, to apply to a program like this, you want to have a strong background in things like biology and chemistry. So a lot of people are afraid of organic chemistry. The name just-- the name is just terrifying to some people. But I promise you, if you sit and read the book and really take your time to study it, it is a very intuitive subject.
I was bad at a lot of subjects. I wasn't bad at that because I thought it was intuitive. The first three chapters of the book set out rules. And once you learn those rules, everything builds off of those rules.
But if you do like what I did in a lot of other classes and accidentally like drink through the whole course, you're going to miss the rules and then of course, you're not going to understand chapter 4 because you didn't study hard on chapters 1 to 3.
So it's one of those subjects that if you get lost at the beginning, it's tough to recover. So please study your organic chemistry and study your biology because I was never an A student. I was never the smartest kid in the class, but I really studied hard when it came to organic chemistry. And it paid off.
And so be good in those biological sciences. Develop a relationship with your professors. Get good recommendation letters and then when you apply to graduate schools, type in things like drug discovery natural products into Google or drug discovery synthetic chemistry into Google and you'll have a whole slew of grad programs all across the country.
CODY GOUGH: What's the coolest thing that you do that, people might not know that you do?
BRIAN MURPHY: I mean, you already touched on it. By far, the coolest thing that I get to do is go explore the underwater environments of places like Iceland and Vietnam. And you go to Iceland and there's places where I can literally swim between the fissure or the crack between continents. And there are points where I can put my left hand out and put my right hand out and I can be touching both continental shelves at the same time.
You know that place where the Eurasian Plate meets the North American plate. I can be underwater in this subfreezing environment where it's negative 0.5 Celsius or 31 Fahrenheit and you're in this dry suit.
And it's totally freezing water but then you see this hydrothermal chimney that's built up of minerals that's tens of thousands of years old that's just spewing boiling water out of it from glacial melt that enters into the Earth is heated by the volcanic rock and then shoots out of these chimneys. And they're just such strange places that I have the absolute privilege to see. And for that, it's-- everything that I do is worth it, just to see those.
CODY GOUGH: I'm sold on it. I'll go check out one of those textbooks and make sure that I pay attention during the first three chapters. Where can people learn more about your research online?
BRIAN MURPHY: Oh, www.murphylabuic.com. You can follow us on Twitter also @MurphyLabUIC. And we're always promoting things that we do and talking about other people's science as well because it's not just us here. We are a splinter in the wrong of an ever-growing ladder of drug discovery.
And so I really want to highlight our place as significant contributions from very insignificant-- not people, but we're a very small group. That's how drug discovery works, is you build off-- you stand on the shoulders of giants. Forgive the comment. Forgive the comment idiom, but you stand on the shoulders of giants and then you also stand on the shoulders of people who are the exact same stature as you.
CODY GOUGH: Sure.
BRIAN MURPHY: And so it's just a big group international effort, and all of our contributions together aim toward this greater cause of discovering cures to diseases that are going to plague us.
CODY GOUGH: And what happens if you and a lab in Thailand and a lab in Iceland cross-reference all your research and compare your notes and end up coming up with some antibiotic and you realize, oh, my gosh, this can fight cancer or something like that. What happens then? Do you bring it to market? Does it become released just to everybody? How does that work?
BRIAN MURPHY: Then it gets really complicated after that if you find something. We have these agreements in place where usually when we work internationally, we have these 50-50 type agreements saying, all right, we will go into this 50/50 benefit sharing.
It's really unfortunate the degree to which profit comes into drug discovery. Unfortunately, the way that our discovery system set up, it's totally-- it has to happen because it costs an incredible amount of money and takes an incredible labor force to put a drug on the market. You can't just discover something and throw it into the human body and ignore all of the possible consequences that come after that.
Because there's a lot of toxicity issues with the drugs that you discover. And when you put something into a living system, these living systems are incredibly complex and you can't even predict the ways that this thing is going to act in different subpopulations of humans.
And so it takes just a lot of research and a lot of money to develop a drug. So somebody has to do it. As much as I have had a lot of criticisms of pharma companies over the years, they do amazing work and they operate a lot of times at a loss.
So I never thought it'd be one day he's behind a microphone defending pharma companies because they have their share of offenses, I promise you. But it's not as simple as people usually put it. Like oh, there's a cure out there but companies are just hiding it because they want to make more money.
That is so BS. It is so intellectually hollow and there's literally no thought put behind that and no evidence to support that. The fact that some company has this cure to cancer that-- we can't even keep. We can't even keep the simplest of secrets among human beings. So the fact that one company has this cure to cancer that they're not releasing, it's crazy.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yale neurology Professor Steven Novella has a good argument against this idea. He says, ''Often those who claim that they are hiding a cure for cancer have only a vague notion of who they are. They generally have an image of the medical establishment as monolithic, but nothing could be further from the truth.
The medical establishment is composed of universities, professional organizations, journals, regulatory agencies, researchers, funding agencies, and countless individuals all with differing incentives and perspectives. The idea that they would all be in on a massive conspiracy to hide perhaps the greatest cure known to mankind is beyond absurd.''
CODY GOUGH: And you're not paid by a pharma company to say all this?
BRIAN MURPHY: I am not. I have no conflicts of interest here. I am just a silly little citizen just like everybody else. There's no conflicts of interest. I don't make any money from this stuff. So no.
CODY GOUGH: I think you deserve a little more credit than that. I'm just a silly little citizen, you're doing some pretty important stuff.
BRIAN MURPHY: We're on a ride here. Like the late great comedian Bill Hicks said, this is all just a ride.
CODY GOUGH: Sure, it is. It's a pretty fast and furious one too. You taught me so many things and I appreciate that and I would like to maybe teach you something. Now in our little bit-- I always say little bit. It's just a bit.
BRIAN MURPHY: Rick and Morty fans out there.
CODY GOUGH: So many. We're going to do one of our little beer called the curiosity challenge and I'm going to ask you a question and maybe you'll know it, maybe you won't. But I thought this was appropriate given you spend a lot of time underwater. So you spend a lot of time with fish. Here's your question why doesn't lightning always kill fish?
BRIAN MURPHY: I have no idea. It's a great-- and if I may preface-- I don't know. If I may add something to that. I am a chemist and a microbiologist and people ask me questions about fish all the time and I have the same answer. I say, how the hell should I know? I'm not a marine biologist.
And we'll be under the water and my student will come by and say, hey Brian, did you see that thing? What was that? And I'm like, I don't-- I'll tell you about molecules. So please, enlighten me. This is great.
CODY GOUGH: Well, there's really two major reasons. The first one is basically that lightning doesn't strike the ocean that much. It just strikes land a lot more. You were going to say something?
BRIAN MURPHY: Well, I have a guess but I just--
CODY GOUGH: Well, go for it.
BRIAN MURPHY: I just assume that when lightning hits the water, it's just the water's a poor conductor of electricity. It's not going to-- your lightning isn't going to spread down and electrify every single being in the ocean. Otherwise, everybody would be dead.
CODY GOUGH: So you're half right. Water is actually a good condition.
BRIAN MURPHY: Yeah, good conductor.
CODY GOUGH: Well, then you were right. Well, metal is a good-- water--
BRIAN MURPHY: And so it's right.
CODY GOUGH: Yes. Like metal, water is a good conductor. So it encourages the electrical current to travel over its surface rather than delve underneath the same way a Faraday cage protects its contents from harmful shocks.
BRIAN MURPHY: Kids, stay in school.
CODY GOUGH: Pay attention to chapters 1 through 3.
BRIAN MURPHY: Except I drank through most of my biology courses.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, there you go. So if a fish surfaces at the wrong moment like maybe a dolphin or whale or something, then it can definitely get hit and shocked but luckily most fish spend the majority of their time underwater. People don't, however. That's why you're supposed to get out of the swimming pool when it's about to thunderstorm.
You can read more about that on curiosity.com or on the Curiosity app. We'll also have links in the show notes as always. And now it's your turn to ask me about something-- yet something else that I may not know.
BRIAN MURPHY: I do a lot of political writing and social justice writing. And so ever since I left Chicago, my home, about seven years ago, I've been absolutely fascinated with its long storied and tragic history. And here's my question. So what is the major factor that drove this high degree of racial segregation we see in neighborhoods in Chicago following the Great Migration of African-Americans escaping Jim Crow in the South?
CODY GOUGH: Oh, where did this aggregation come from, was one of the major factors.
BRIAN MURPHY: There is a myth out there that people just simply like to live with people that look like them, and this is a major myth that must be destroyed because this is not the case. So why are our neighborhoods so segregated? What is one of the major factors?
CODY GOUGH: I will say one of the primary factors, and this is-- whenever I talk about politics with my dad, he always just circles around and says it's the economy, stupid. So I'm going to say that it has something to do with the money involved, maybe real estate rates were higher or lower in certain areas.
BRIAN MURPHY: I will give you the same 50%, I'll say. You hit it when you said real estate. And so it was mostly a dual housing market, obviously and spoiler alert, driven by racist policies. There was systemic oppression from both government and private sector to prevent African-Americans from being homeowners over the course of several decades in Chicago.
And there's these policies called like redlining and preventing Blacks to moving into White neighborhoods to which-- and you can look at all of these huge race riots, a lot of them were centered around housing. And so you had strict government policies that prevented African-Americans from moving into specific neighborhoods and ended up corralling people into these ghettos.
And there's a lot of different awesome resources like Arnold Hirsch's Making the Second Ghetto, Family Properties by Beryl Satter and a lot of different research by Ta-Nehisi Coates like the Case for Reparations and a few other different resources that really document these policies in detail. But it's tragic and it's fascinating. It's been a hobby of mine to learn or to educate myself about these issues. And I still have a ton to learn. But we are silence is complicity, as they say.
CODY GOUGH: And I have seen your Twitter feed. And if people are interested in following you, you often talk about issues like this and more of a contemporary context. So they can follow you on Twitter at--
BRIAN MURPHY: WratesofMurph, with W-R. WratesofMurph.
CODY GOUGH: W-R-A-T-E-S, then?
BRIAN MURPHY: Yeah. Yeah, it's a clever little punt off of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, there you go.
BRIAN MURPHY: Yeah, and I should give you more credit for your insight because you said real estate and economics, which of course I think your dad's probably right. Economics is everything.
And yeah, as a combination of factors that really did lead to poverty in some of these neighborhoods and it was just a combination of both housing policies or educational discrepancies, correctional like policing and judicial discrepancies that all led to basically breaking down and the terrorism of the family unit for a lot of racial and ethnic minorities that prevented the accumulation of wealth over the years in Chicago.
And if I look back to my grandfather, I'm Italian and Irish. So everybody hated the Irish when they came here. And you ask any Irishman, and they'll say, well, my ancestors came here and they had a really tough. Well, yeah. They absolutely did and that is true. And they were spit on and nobody wanted to work with them and they had to fight for their own.
But when they had kids, their kids were able to escape their ethnicity, because they looked like other people. And African-Americans weren't necessarily able to escape their color, that is one thing that has always been there. And so they have always been discriminated against. Anyways. Yeah, I didn't mean to get dark at the end there. Sorry.
CODY GOUGH: History is not always pretty.
BRIAN MURPHY: No.
CODY GOUGH: It's really often not pretty at all. There's some really terrible things about history. But fortunately, we can look at it and learn from it. And I learned something. So great curiosity challenge. And again, people want to find you online, they can go to--
BRIAN MURPHY: murphylabuic.com.
CODY GOUGH: murphylabuic.com. Thank you again so much for joining me, Dr. Murphy. I really appreciate it.
BRIAN MURPHY: My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
CODY GOUGH: Of course. I've got an extra credit question for you courtesy of the Curiosity app. Dr. Murphy talked about traveling around the world, so this week I've got a travel related question for you. Why are most airplanes white? And I mean, what's the main scientific reason, putting economics aside? The answer after this.
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I hope you love this podcast as much as I do. I've got one quick request. Please give us a five star review on iTunes. Well, actually I have two requests. If you're listening to this in your car, then please pull over and park before leaving us a five star review. It's the fastest, safest way to support the work that we do and the best way to leave this feedback.
If you have a specific idea for a show, then you can also send an email to podcast@curiosity.com. I promise I read every message, so keep the ideas coming. I will now reward your podcast listening patience with today's extra credit answer.
So what's the main scientific reason for snow white plains. Thermal science. The color white best reflects sunlight, which keeps the cabin of the craft cool kind of like how long white clothing is your best bet in the desert. And shielding the plane's plastic parts and composite materials from the sun is especially important.
White paint also lets potentially dangerous solar radiation bounce right off. So you can think of white paint as a kind of airplane sunblock. There are a few other reasons why airplanes are white. But to learn more about that, you can take a look on the Curiosity app or on curiosity.com.
Before I sign off, I want to thank Ashley Hamer for her always helpful expertise and fast facts. And I want to thank you for listening. Extra special thanks and 10 Schrute bucks if you've told your friends about our show. I wonder how many people will get that reference? For the Curiosity podcast, I'm Cody Gough.
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