Is quantum computing having its moment?

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Hello, I'm Tom Whipple and welcome to Inside Science

from the BBC World Service.

And this week, I'm not in the studio.

I'm in West London.

I am actually beside Paddington Station.

To my right is the station concourse.

A monument to the finest technology of the 19th century.

To my left in the basement is what could be the finest technology of the 21st.

It is a quantum computer.

It's a type of computer that promises to do all sorts of things

from drug discovery to breaking encryption on the internet.

Quantum computers can't quite do those things yet.

But when or if they can, the government thinks they could revolutionize the economy.

This week, the UK pledged £2 billion of funding to develop the tech.

Will it be a good investment?

A confession.

Before we visit it, in covering science, I've been visiting quantum computers

that are on the cusp of doing interesting things for 20 years.

They still can't really do much of use, yet the cuspiness of their

interestingness does indeed seem to be different.

Not least, because one to my left isn't in a laboratory in a university.

It isn't a startup in central London.

Is quantum about to have, as some in the business put it,

it's chat GPT moment.

This is all a computing, and we're going down to see one of their machines.

One of our systems is just being flown overseas to Japan.

So one of these, we can't say where exactly yet for the next few weeks,

but one of them is on its way to a big industrial Japanese company, which is really exciting.

How many of you got out there in the real world?

11 now, including this one, which will be installed in Berlin.

And then across US, Europe, UK, in Magiapan.

It's good stuff.

So I'm Richard Murray, I'm chief executive and co-founder of All Cook and Beauty,

and we build photonic quantum computers.

Okay, so we're going to the photonic bit, but I have a timer here,

and we're going to have to explain what a quantum computer is,

and why we should be excited about it, and you have one minute, no more.

So quantum computers are harnessing quantum information,

so complete departure from our normal digital information use.

It does this weird thing about being able to hold two states at one time,

which makes it a fundamentally different way of performing the computing.

What is exciting is really the first time anyone has tried to reinvent a computer.

Since they're originally invented in the 1930s.

Very much more powerful at certain types of calculations.

We think very much more powerful when it comes to certain parts of machine learning,

and drop discovery and other things like this.

Okay, so well that was a lot, we still got 26 seconds,

so different types of information.

So digital information is ones and zeros.

Yes, and you are what?

Yeah, so weirdly a quantum computer can coexist as a one and a zero at the same time,

and it's not halfway in between.

It's fundamentally two different places at the same time.

I always describe it as as weird as you're in a room.

There are two different exits,

and you leave the room through both exits at the same time.

It's that conceptually weird.

There we go.

I hope that works.

But we could spend all day talking about this.

People have spent 100 years developing the theories behind quantum,

and what's great nowadays is we just make them.

We make all this stuff real into computing devices.

Okay, and so what is yours?

You said yours doesn't look like those chandeliers that hang from the ceilings,

which are the abduim super-cooled versions.

Yours is here, it just looks like a really big black computer.

What's it's doing?

What's special about it?

So we use photons, which are fundamental particles of light

to make up our quantum computer.

So our systems are based out of light,

and the great thing about light is it doesn't need to be cooled to low temperatures.

It can be built from a lot of telecoms equipment,

and it could be made to look like the normal server app that you see in quantum view.

This is your company.

This is your computing box.

What was it that happened in 2014 in Oxford that meant that this now exists?

Yeah, that's right, so you can see this is our PT2 system.

It's a photonic quantum computer.

It's originally started as research from the University of Oxford.

And what was happening there is some quite early stage research.

It was actually a big government program to set up what's named as a quantum part.

So the researchers who started over working in the hub,

they were working on lots of quantum networking technology,

which means lots of single photons in lots of optical fiber

that the purpose is sort of moving quantum information around.

And what the researchers came up with is actually a way that several key components

that allow that network to be used as a computer.

And so just on the original technology,

you are catching light beams, you are controlling photons,

and these are your qubits, the bits that holds the information

of particles and light itself.

Absolutely.

Yeah, so actually if you're able to see in front of you,

you see our system, it's a modular construction.

So there are different modules that do different things.

The first thing that we do in the top module here is we make perfect single photons.

So perfectly identical single photons.

You're right, then those are the feedstock of our system.

The next module down then takes those single photons

and turns them into qubits, which are our ones and zeros,

or they can be in between in any quantum states.

So that next module, we call it the processor module.

It creates a lot of these qubits.

It carries out interactions on the mic.

It can use critical beam splitter operations

to sort of move them around and perform operations on them.

And all of this stuff sounds simple,

but actually is in the world of quantum mechanics,

performing very complex operations,

which we find very hard to properly classically.

And then our photons are measured.

And the weird thing about quantum is that as soon as you measure anything

all the quantum state disappears,

you read out your quantum state,

you convert it back into a classical signal.

All the quantum stuff is lost,

and then that signal then gets passed to another type of a classical computer.

Okay, and so you've got 11 of these out in the real world,

doing things, one of them on the way to Japan.

What are they actually doing?

How is quantum helping us?

It's a great question.

And specifically for Orca,

we spend almost all of our time applying them

to existing generative AI machine learning.

So we have a very particular view that

what we want to do is put these systems inside

of existing machine learning algorithms.

That's like really our focus.

But and that's what our customers use them for.

They put them alongside their existing computers,

and they use a bit like an accelerator

to make the computers faster.

In general, what the systems are useful for are

all sorts of incredible things like

finding a new molecule that no one has ever understood before,

solving the problem of how a plant's so good at photosynthesis.

There are many, many ways that nature is incredible

at doing things that we have no clue about.

And part of the reason we have no clues

is that those systems are quantum.

So quantum computers are just really,

really good at helping us understand these

really, really complex computation complex things,

which in the moment we have no clue about.

So I've been covering science for 20 years,

and I've been getting answers like that

about quantum computers for 20 years.

Oh, we actually do, because it is different

that now that I can come to a startup in London,

see a real quantum computer that's being bought by real people.

But are they buying them because of what they can do now,

or are they still preparing for the future?

How have they actually done something

that a big normal computer can't do?

It's a bit of a technical answer.

So they have done things that an normal computer cannot do.

It's a term for quantum advantage.

The problem at the moment is that that thing that they do

differently is actually not useful.

It's a completely abstract mathematical problem,

but we're right on the cusp.

So, I mean, strictly speaking, companies,

they're not using them to do anything

to commercial use for right now.

But we're right on the cusp of them being transferred

and applied to real commercial problems,

the likes of which our customers really care about.

So, in all of you, it's not far away,

and maybe the difference between

when you were talking about this 20 years ago

is it isn't our really current.

We do have these systems that are

performant enough to outperform existing computers.

We're just not quite sure how to actually use them

to apply them, if the fact makes sense.

Well, after our day trip to the big smoke inside science

got on one of those Paddington trains

and returned to our base in Cardiff,

in a studio with me is Gareth Mitchell.

Gareth, you've been a technology journalist

for quite some time.

How many times have you heard big promises

for quantum computers?

And is this different?

Well, yeah, it's like nuclear fusion in a way,

isn't it? You know, this kind of idea

that it's the technology and the science of the future

and always will be.

But now, I think things are going on.

You know, I saw Tom a few years ago

I went to see a company in Oxford

that had one of those chandelier hanging

from the ceiling type of quantum computers

that you mentioned.

So, speaking to them, seeing the plans

that they had, the science that they were doing

and indeed that they were claiming

they were making a bit of money out of it

with clients who are paying for quantum computing

as a service, then, yeah, I think

this is a good thing from the government.

And of course, in their own press release

they're calling it a quantum leaf.

And of course, as we all know, a quantum leap

is the smallest leap that you can scientifically ever have.

So, at least they're not over-promising.

But no, seriously, I welcome it.

Yeah, and I could imagine the press officers

sort of thinking, must not, must not say,

but then you just can't resist quantum leap, can you?

We're going to return to you later on,

Gareth, for some of the more science of the week.

But we're going to move to something

which is completely unconnected

or, well, actually, turns out,

isn't completely unconnected at all.

Late on Wednesday, an Iranian missile hit Rast Lafan

and flames once again appeared on the Katari skyline

as the world's largest liquefied natural gas plant burnt.

What's this got to do with quantum computers?

Well, the Gulf doesn't just supply natural gas.

The same plants provide rather lighter gas.

A third of the world's helium comes from these two

and helium is not just balloons and squeaky voices.

If you want to make advanced microchips for AI,

medical equipment for hospitals

or many of those super-cooled

chandelier quantum computers,

then there is no substitute for helium.

So we thought this was an opportunity to talk about

it's often overlooked importance

and why we should be worried.

Dr. Rebecca Engel is associate professor

in physical chemistry at UCL and a helium user.

She's here to tell us about this other sort of gas shortage.

Rebecca, welcome, why is helium used for all of these things?

Well, the reason we're sort of so dependent on helium,

particularly in the scientific communities

is really that helium has this whole array

of completely unique properties.

So it's the second lightest element,

but I think it's probably the undisputed king of cryogenic.

So if you want to get your quantum computer

or your particle accelerator

down to sort of temperatures below, say 4.2 Kelvin,

and helium's really the only choice of element you have to do that.

And that's minus, for those of us not in Kelvin,

that's minus 269 or so.

You're not here in done 69 yet, degrees.

So it's pretty cool.

Why do we need it to do that?

What is special about it that means you can get it so cold?

So liquid helium has a boiling point of about 4.2 Kelvin.

And what that means is that because it's also got

a very high heat conductivity,

you have something that behaves as a liquid.

So it's nice and easy to sort of design

your refrigeration and compression systems,

but it's very, very effective at taking heat away

from the thing that you want to cool down.

Why are we getting it from natural gas plants?

I think most people will be surprised by this.

Why are the Straits of Hormuz

pertinent in helium?

So the problem with helium is,

the Sun is a great producer of helium, right?

If you could do nuclear fusion,

we could have lots of helium on Earth.

But actually, in terms of planetary sources,

most of our helium comes from radioactive decay

of heavier elements.

And because helium is so light,

what it can do is it can actually escape from the atmosphere.

So it's sometimes called the only unrecoverable element.

So once it's out, it's out.

The reason we sort of end up extracting it with natural gas

is that we need to basically have these reserves

in the Earth's crust where plenty of radioactive decay

is taken place over many sort of thousands of years.

And then when you do your natural gas extraction,

you also extract this sort of pool of helium,

quite a significant amount escapes during the extraction process.

But yeah, this is the only source,

natural source we have of it here.

Just to give us an idea of the range of stuff.

So we use it in MRI scanners,

and I write to make them really cold.

Yeah, so MRI probably can't for about sort of 15 to 20%

of the world's usage.

The biggest chunk is really sort of scientific applications,

and that really covers a huge range of things

from analytical chemistry.

So the chemistry equivalent of MRI,

nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy,

which is how we check that we've made the right sort of chemicals

and things like that.

All of those kinds of devices rely on it.

So anything where we need these very strong magnetic fields,

so we need to cryogenically call the magnets,

we need lots of helium.

So how worried should we be?

Do you have any sense of how long we can survive

with depleted helium?

Could we just use fewer party balloons and we'd be all right,

or is there a worry in the community?

I mean, that would be lovely, right?

But I think one of the challenges you have with helium

is opposed to sort of other what we call critical elements,

is that helium storage is not very straightforward.

You can store it as a pressurized gas,

and that comes with lots of issues,

or you can try and store it as a liquid,

but then you need the kind of cryogenic facilities

that places like the Large Hadron Collider,

where they do have quite a bit of helium storage,

you need that kind of investment.

So generally, that means that again,

because helium is this escape artist of an element,

because it's so difficult to engineer the storage,

we tend to run,

it's not that we've got huge reservoirs anywhere,

and a lot of places like the US have made decisions

to actually cut back on how much storage capability they've had.

So it remains to be seen, I guess,

because it also depends on how quickly both output

in terms of mining and output,

also in terms of shipping returns.

And when you say it's an escape artist,

are we literally losing it to space?

I mean, it just disappears off.

Okay, well, this is yet another unexpected reason

to be worried about what's going on in Iran.

Thank you very much, indeed,

for speaking to us that's Dr Rebecca Engel.

You're listening to Inside Science from the BBC World Service.

Tell us what science you think we should be investigating.

Our email address is inside science at bbc.co.uk.

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Now from one horseman of the apocalypse to another, water plague.

Roland Peas is here to talk to us about the increasingly desperate battle

to contain antimicrobial resistance

and find new ways to defeat bacteria.

85 years after we thought we had got infection on the run.

Penicillin introduced as an antibiotic in the depths of World War II

was a wonder drug, cuts, coughs, gut gripes

that could go from harmless irritants to deadly infection in hours.

Could now suddenly be cleared up with a simple course of antibiotics.

Dozens of other antibiotics soon followed

and infectious disease medicine was transformed.

But there was a problem from the start.

Antibiotic resistance.

Any other drug that was invented in 1945 still works as good today as it ever did.

If you took an aspirin from more than 100 years ago or any drug,

they worked forever except for anything in which evolution causes the foe to change.

So anything that's antimicrobial.

Penicillins are an amazing drug, but time erodes its effectiveness

because the bacteria evolve and responds to it.

So these drugs, we need to reinvent them for every generation.

We need to run faster just to avoid falling behind.

That was given out to some director of Carbex,

an international non-profit funding the science to find replacement antibiotics.

But what they're up against is bacteria's power of quickly evolving new ways to evade them

and to share that power.

Bacteria take up DNA from the environment or from other bacteria

and that DNA will contain genes that encode enzymes that can break down antibiotics.

And this is the main reason why antibiotic resistance is spreading quickly

is via this process called horizontal gene transfer.

A bit like bacterial sex really.

Mobile cassettes of genes called plasma are promiscuously shared this way

as I heard from microbiologist William Van Schijk at Birmingham University.

So some bacteria have been called drug resistance traffickers

because they move on all these genes that cause antibiotic resistance

and this is the major pathway towards resistance

keeping microbiologists at wake at night

because it's such an effective process

and because these little piece of DNA that are moved around

have often multiple antibiotic resistance genes on them

it becomes increasingly difficult to treat infections.

Oxford University where Kirsty Science runs an international

resistance surveillance network

the power of this mechanism of pre-arming bacteria against antibiotics

became abundantly clear.

Some of our research we've found that within the first day of life

babies in their developing gut bacteria are carrying bacteria

that have particular resistance markers

this was in what babies in one day old.

So you've never had antibiotics at the point?

Exactly, absolutely.

Yet within the first day or two of life

bacteria with often resistance markers to those

reserved antibiotics as well.

So not even the commonly used antibiotics

and how big an issue is this in terms of the health of newborns?

It's an absolutely huge issue because if babies are born

carrying these types of bacteria or exposed to it

within that first day of life they go on to get an infection

treating that with antibiotics that will be effective

in a timely manner is really really tough.

Underlining why, as Kevin Allison said,

we have to run faster to avoid falling behind.

In a corridor in Warwick University's chemistry department

Mona Alcalaf called me over to a wall chart

illustrating bacterial enzymes.

Yes, so like, as I'm trying to say, there's always loads of it.

There's also, you know, reductase, which will always turn

and double one.

These are nature's chemistry tools.

While most of our antibiotics like penicillin,

vancomycin, streptomycin are compounds borrowed from microbes

the products of endless microbe on microchemical warfare.

Mona hopes bacterial chemistry will help her cook up new,

better ones.

She showed me some of her chemists.

So streptomycin is our soil bacteria

that often make a lot of natural products.

So when you scoop things up from the soil,

bacteria and they're always engaging in this like chemical warfare

to try and kill each other.

But what we're particularly interested in is how the bacteria

make those compounds.

It's just to be clear that's because they do it step by step.

A bit like you would in the lab,

but they're doing it all inside their cells.

Yeah, so they have different enzymes that do a step at a time

to go from a starch material or a number of starch materials

to make these specialised molecules

the approaches to hack the genes of the bacteria

to alter or just disable some of the chemistry producing enzymes

and see what new compounds come out.

And once in a while he's strike lucky.

In this case, what we noticed is we've got a cumulator

and of this one molecule that we're calling pre-methylides

and see lactone because it's called...

Say that slowly.

Pre-methylides and see lactone.

Blimey, you practice that.

The interesting part is that although we don't routinely test

these intermediates, the PhD student at this time thought,

no, I'll test it, see if it has any antibiotic activity

and it turned out to be 100 times more active

than the thing that we were initially looking at

as an antibiotic in the first place.

I mean, that sounds crazy.

Yeah, it was quite crazy

because I suppose the question is why does the bacteria do that?

Why is it not making the most active antibiotic?

Maybe it's hurt as it's helped.

Maybe it hurts itself.

Maybe it can't get rid of it fast enough

if it's too active or wherever it is.

And it's powerful against what sort of bacteria?

So the most interesting activity is powerful against enterococcus,

which is a particular problem with vancomycin resistance

but is becoming more of a problem

and our compound was both active against these types of strains

and also we did an experiment where we tried to induce resistance

so you can grow it in the presence of the antibiotic

and when we do a controlled vancomycin

we can introduce resistance quite quickly

and we do that same experiment with our compound

it was much harder to introduce resistance.

So that's really quite promising.

So that is a good sign, yes.

And it's not one of these compounds where you'll introduce it

and then in a year everything's a distance to it

and it's used because really we want drugs

that are going to be quite stable to its systems.

Which sounds promising though, history tells us

you need tens of promising leads to get one

effective antibiotic you can introduce to the pharmacy

and that takes over a decade at best

and hundreds of millions of dollars of investment.

And Kevin Allison warns that recent history shows

companies in the past decade passing all those hurdles

have nevertheless gone bankrupt

or otherwise lost billions of their investors cash

because the antibiotic market is broken.

It's either bankruptcy or liquidation

or a distressed sale or some other recapitalization event

which results in the original research and development

investors losing everything.

But these are every company that made it successfully

to approval.

So these are the successful companies

and it's not just one or two of the successful companies

it's every one of them.

So behind each one of these companies

that made it to approval are 30 or 50

that failed along the way because the science is hard.

So where's the positive example for an investor?

Show me the antibiotic company that I can invest in

and I would have made money?

The answer right now is you can't.

Over the next three weeks on Discovery

here on the BBC World Service,

I'll be digging much deeper into the antibiotics challenged.

I hope you can join me.

Thanks, Roland.

We've got time now to briefly go through

some of the other stories from the science journals.

I'm here with technology journalist, Gareth Mitchell.

Gareth, what's caught your eye?

Yes, so potatoes can be grown on the moon, say.

Excellent.

So this is a preprint, like a pre-publication article

from Oregon State University that has caught my eye.

And it's where they haven't tried anything on the moon

but they have tried creating artificial regoliths.

So regolith is this stuff on the moon's surface

and don't ever call it soil.

The moon is not exactly jersey for growing potatoes

and that's the point of this research.

But having constructed like a mock up as it were

of the material on the moon's surface,

the scientists thought can we grow potatoes in this

that could maybe nourish and sustain future moon colonies

or what have you.

And the answer was, no, we can't.

But if we add a little bit of fertilizer,

a little bit of organic matter, like worm compost basically,

then yet we've got a fighting chance of growing potatoes

but they won't be very nice

and they certainly won't be very good for you.

Excellent, so a pretty grim future in our moon bases

once we've destroyed the earth.

Indeed, but they do say the better news here is they say,

but this is something that could be tweaked.

This is proof of principle that stuff will grow in regolith.

It's just about then how we nourish it,

what we need to bring up to the moon with us

that could make this a viable crop on the moon.

So you never know.

Great, well, I look forward to chips on the moon.

I have a food related story as well.

It is about patience.

They will eat a lot in one sitting,

perhaps even their own body weight

and then while there's a slowly digesting goat

whatever they want, they can last a year

without eating anything else.

Now, the interesting thing about this is for humans

that would be extremely bad for our metabolism

and some scientists have looked at what's gone on.

They found a metabolite that the pythons produced loads of

which seems to regulate their metabolism

and they've put it into mice

and found that it stops mice from eating.

And the thing I find fascinating about this

is the healer monster, which was a North American lizard,

was a progenitor of all of these ozempic type drugs

because they realized it did something quite similar.

It's also got quite unhealthy eating habits.

So the early researchers, basically,

they took the bought some healer monsters from a zoo.

Those healer monsters did not have a nice end,

but they found within them this molecule

that was like GLP1, so I find it fascinating

that we can look at these animals with extreme diets

and think, is there a way to harness this

for our own lifestyle and our own obesity crisis?

That's amazing.

That was Python-related news.

I wasn't expecting to hear today,

but that's very encouraging.

No, it is and who knows if the next set of drugs

will be Python-derived.

Alas, that is all the news that we have.

It is time to go.

Thank you very much for joining us and listening

to BBC Inside Science.

It's goodbye from Eton Whipple

and it is goodbye from Gareth Mitchell.

Bye, everyone.

It's 2009 and we're in the German mountains.

A man straps himself into a car

on the world's most dangerous racetrack.

He whispers to himself.

It's time to put my balls on the dashboard.

As he starts the engine.

In 15 minutes, he's in an ambulance on conscious.

In 15 years, he's a billionaire.

This is Total Wolf, Formula One's most powerful team boss

and the breakout star of Drive to Survive.

This week on Good Bad Billionaire,

how Total Wolf made his billions.

Listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts.