Curie×Feynman

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on TITANS: Marie Curie and Richard Feynman, on Long a dream, it's now real: a fast and accurate TB test that doesn't need phlegm.
2. 00:11
   Marie Curieshare moment

   We have just received news from the studio. A new test for tuberculosis, accurate, requiring less than thirty minutes. No sputum.
3. 00:19
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   No phlegm! That's fantastic! Do you know how hard it is to get a good sputum sample? You're asking someone who's already sick and exhausted to cough up stuff from deep in their lungs. Half the time they can't do it, or they do it wrong.
4. 00:33
   Marie Curieshare moment

   The sensitivity of testing has always been the difficulty. When I was young in Warsaw, tuberculosis was everywhere. My mother died of it when I was ten. The diagnosis took months of watching her fade.
5. 00:46
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   I'm sorry. I didn't know that.
6. 00:48
   Marie Curieshare moment

   It was 1878. We had no X-rays yet, of course. No reliable test at all. Just the observation of symptoms and the waiting.
7. 00:56
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   So by the time you and Pierre were working with radium, you must have thought about tuberculosis treatment. Didn't they try radiation therapy for TB?
8. 01:04
   Marie Curieshare moment

   They tried everything. Radium, sunlight, fresh air in the mountains. Most of it was desperation dressed as medicine. The problem was always the same: by the time you knew someone had tuberculosis badly enough to treat, the disease had already done terrible damage.
9. 01:21
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   Right! That's why this is so exciting! A fast test means you catch it early. But wait, what are they testing? Blood? Breath? The article says no phlegm, but they've got to be detecting something.
10. 01:33
    Marie Curieshare moment

    The report does not specify the mechanism. This is frustrating.
11. 01:37
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Oh come on, you can appreciate the result even without knowing every detail of how it works! Someone figured out a better way. Maybe it's a protein marker, maybe it's genetic material from the bacteria, maybe it's an immune response they're measuring.
12. 01:50
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I do not trust results I cannot verify. When we isolated radium, every step was documented. Every measurement repeated.
13. 01:58
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Sure, sure, but this has obviously been through trials or NPR wouldn't be reporting it as real. They said it's more accurate than the old test. That means somebody did the statistics, compared the false positives and false negatives.
14. 02:13
    Marie Curieshare moment

    The sputum test was never good enough. Too many cases missed. Too many healthy people told they were sick. You are right about this.
15. 02:20
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    And think about what this means for places without fancy labs! Tuberculosis is still killing over a million people a year, mostly in poor countries. If this test is fast and accurate and doesn't need someone to handle infectious sputum, you can do it anywhere.
16. 02:35
    Marie Curieshare moment

    In Poland, in the villages where I was born, they still had nothing when I left for Paris. This would have changed everything. My mother might have been treated early enough.
17. 02:44
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    It's one of those things where you solve one problem and suddenly ten other problems become solvable. You can screen more people. You can screen them faster. You find cases you would have missed. You start treatment before they infect other people.
18. 02:59
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Tuberculosis is a disease of poverty and crowding. I saw this in Paris, in the laboratories where young researchers worked in cold, damp rooms. Better testing is necessary, but it is not sufficient.
19. 03:12
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    No, no, you're absolutely right. But necessary is nothing to sneeze at! Penicillin didn't solve poverty either, but I'm glad we've got it.
20. 03:21
    Marie Curieshare moment

    The antibiotics came too late for my work. I died in 1934, before they were widely used. But yes, I understand your point.
21. 03:29
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Do you know what I love about this? It's the same thing I love about physics. Someone looked at a problem everyone accepted, the whole sputum collection mess, and said, "There's got to be a better way." And they found one!
22. 03:40
    Marie Curieshare moment

    This is the work. You do not accept the current method simply because it is current. In our laboratory, we processed tons of pitchblende residue by hand because everyone said the amount of radium was too small to matter. They were wrong.
23. 03:55
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Exactly! You questioned the assumption. And these researchers questioned the assumption that you need sputum. Maybe they realized the bacteria leaves traces elsewhere, or maybe they found a way to detect the body's response to infection. Whatever they did, they bypassed the hard part.
24. 04:12
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Half an hour. This is remarkable if it is true. The microscopy for sputum samples took hours, and then you had to culture the bacteria for weeks to be certain.
25. 04:23
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Weeks! And people are contagious that whole time, spreading it around. With a thirty-minute test, you know the same day. You start treatment the same day. The math on how many infections you prevent gets really good, really fast.
26. 04:36
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I would like to see the data on accuracy. The sensitivity, the specificity. These are the numbers that matter.
27. 04:43
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    They said more accurate than the old test, which frankly isn't a high bar. But yeah, I'm with you. Show me the error bars. Show me the sample size. Still, I'm optimistic.
28. 04:54
    Marie Curieshare moment

    You are always optimistic. This is sometimes exhausting.
29. 04:57
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    And you're always skeptical! But that's why this works. You keep me honest, I keep you from dismissing something great just because you don't have the full paper in front of you yet.
30. 05:06
    Marie Curieshare moment

    It is good news. I admit this. My mother would have benefited. Millions would have benefited.
31. 05:12
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    And millions will benefit. That's the beautiful thing. Someone did the hard work of science, the real grinding problem-solving, and now people who never meet that researcher won't die of tuberculosis. That's what it's all for.
32. 05:25
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Yes. This is what it is for.