Staph Retreat

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This week I want to bring back an episode

about scientists who look in the most unexpected place

to find a brand new drug to treat a very tricky bug.

The bug is MRSA, that really nasty infection.

People sometimes get in hospitals

and I don't want to give away the drug

because that's sort of all the fun.

So I'm going to just pass you off to Chad, Robert,

and little baby Latif from about a decade ago.

Here we go.

Yeah, wait, wait, you're listening.

OK.

All right.

OK.

All right.

Listening to Radio Lab.

Radio from W and Y.

Six.

Three, why?

So the way the story goes, it starts in 1928.

1928, Alexander Fleming, the story goes

who knows if it's apocryphal or not,

is growing staff, Staffalakakis, in his lab.

That's Mary McKenna.

She's a science writer.

And staff is a bacterium.

It lives on our skin, and it especially

likes parts of the body that are warm and damp.

So it likes to be just up our noses or...

On our genitals, in our armpits, places like that.

And generally, it's no big deal.

Doesn't really do us any harm.

But if it gets into a scratch or a cut

and makes its way inside our bodies,

Staff goes from being this benign companion

to being potentially deadly.

Anyway, London, 1928.

Fleming is growing staff in his lab.

In these little petri dishes.

And he was a slob, basically.

And he goes on a vacation, leaves his petri dishes,

covered in bacteria just around, leaves his window open,

and something blows across his lab plates.

Some tiny little speck of a thing just floats in through the window

and comes to arrest on one of those petri dishes.

And so a few weeks later.

Fleming, finally, back from vacation.

He needs to use those lab plates again,

and he and his assistant go to clean them off.

I mean, you'd imagine that he would

seed some real lush, nice, furry lawn of staff just overflowing

right out of the plate, because it's been sitting there for so long.

It's been a staff party.

But on one of the plates that they pick up,

they realize that it's almost polka dot.

It's got little dead zones all over it.

Little patches where the staff is dead.

Dead patches.

So something blue through the window landed in the dish

and starts killing the bacteria.

Yeah, and so when Fleming looks down at his plate,

he sees that at the center of these staff dead zones,

there's a tiny speck of natural mold.

Oh, mold.

And they realize that that mold is expressing a compound

that is killing the staff around it.

It's like emanating rays of death.

What was the compound?

That compound was called...

Penicillin.

Penicillin.

The first true antibiotic.

Infectious diseases that had been killing people

for as long as we had been people suddenly could be stopped.

And it just blew in through the window?

That is the story that's always been told.

However it got there, it was amazing.

It was a miracle.

It was called a miracle drug, right?

I mean, it really was a moment when the world changed.

When Fleming was put on the cover of Time magazine.

This was 1944, Hyde of World War II.

It was a picture of his face and the banner on the cover said,

his penicillin will save more lives than war can spend.

But...

And this is...

I had no idea about this.

Virtually at the exact same time when Fleming's face

is on the cover of Time magazine, like two months later,

this Stanford researcher publishes

that he has found five different strains of staff

that do not respond to penicillin.

Really?

Yeah, this is happening while he's on the cover.

Virtually the exact same moment.

And it's the first sign that staff has responded

to the penicillin in the world by developing resistance.

It's almost like a separatist or so in Wheeler.

The era of penicillin was over before it began.

Almost before it began.

Before it's even released to the general public.

Wow.

And that penicillin resistant staff moves across the globe.

And in 1957 in Cleveland, some scientists gather together

and they are in a panic.

They have no idea why they've lost the antibiotic miracle

so quickly.

So scientists across the globe put their brains together

and try to come up with a new drug.

The next amazing thing.

And in 1960, they get methicillin.

And it works.

For about 11 months.

11 months.

And so we started this arms race.

There was a bug.

And then there was a drug that took care of it

and then there was a better bug.

Drug bug, drug bug.

Right, exactly.

I actually found this list.

Do you want to hear it?

Yeah.

OK, so Streptomycin, 1943, Resistance 1948.

Methicillin, 1960, Resistance 1961.

Clinton, myself, 1969, Resistance 1970.

You can think of it as sweet frog

or you can think of it as a game of whack-a-mole.

Ampestillin, 1961, then 1973.

So that's a little carbenicillin, released 1964,

Resistance 1970.

They're getting better.

They're getting better.

There were always more drugs.

You know, the drug development was doing really well

for a really long time.

Hypericellin, introduced 1980, Resistance 1981.

But after the year 2000, drug companies begin to realize

it's not really in their best interest

to make antibiotics anymore.

And the end I have on this list is Linnizolid,

which is introduced 2000, Resistance 2002.

Wow.

And there are a few more, but you get the idea.

Antibiotic proofs, the entry of new drugs to the market,

just kind of fell off a cliff.

Why?

Well, it takes 10 years and a billion dollars

to get to the point where the drug is marketable.

But as soon as you get the drug on the market,

the resistance clock is running.

So you probably won't make your money back.

And as you've probably heard, we now have these situations.

Well, frighteningly warning from the Centers for Disease Control

about the spread of a string of germs

where literally nothing works.

So-called super bugs are now turning up in hospitals

and the patient dies.

There are now bugs that can resist all of our drugs.

I have seen physicians break down weeping over this.

It's not the way that medicine is supposed to fail anymore,

but it does.

I mean, I know that possibly the origin story

of penicillin is powerful.

So this is all a little suspect, but just to enjoy

imaginings for a moment, like it just seems like

if that happened, let's just open up a bunch more windows.

It's something not a blow-in.

So we could wait a long time, right?

I mean, we had staff had been around for millennia before 1928.

But you know, the whole reason that I wanted to do this story

is because kind of there is a new window.

It's a different kind of window, though.

Not to not a window next to some petri dishes.

Not a window next to some petri dishes.

Kind of a window next to some petri dishes,

but a totally different kind of window.

What kind of window is it?

Well, I'm about to tell you that.

Is something blow-in to the window?

Yeah, but it's not mold.

It's way more fun than mold.

It carries an axe.

How about that?

So it's a person, maybe.

I don't know what I'm referring to anymore.

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On the broad side, we take you into the heart of the South

with stories that'll surprise you.

Bigfoot apparently loved glow sticks.

I like to put things in my eyes.

Exactly, he's a raver.

And topics that dig into the muddy margins of history.

Right, the good, the bad, the ugly.

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Uh, part two?

Yeah.

Okay, hey, I'm Chad Abumrod.

I'm Robert Kroich.

This is Radio Lab.

We're ready now for part two.

Now, remember when part one ended?

There was a window open and something was going to come through.

We don't know what.

We know it's not mold.

So whatever it is, whatever it was, whatever it will be,

we will hear about it now from our reporter,

a lot of NASA.

Well, actually, there is this story about these two women

who did open a window

to an alien and distant land.

Um, and actually, in a way, it's a story about reimagining the past.

But to me, it's a story about a friendship.

Hey, everybody.

Hello again.

Hello again.

It's a buddy film.

It's a buddy.

It's a buddy movie.

Okay.

Yeah.

Maybe just walk us through it.

Right.

Okay.

So you have, um,

Hello.

I'm Dr. Kristina Leigh.

Kristina.

And I'm an associate professor in Viking studies at the School of English

at the University of Nottingham.

She's a historian.

And then you also have,

Hi.

I'm Freya Harrison.

Freya.

I'm a research fellow in the Center for Biomelectcular Sciences

at the University of Nottingham.

And Freya's a microbiologist.

She studies bacteria.

We'll start with her.

Okay.

So most of my work is about sort of looking at how bacteria evolve

during very, very long-lived infections.

But my big hobby is Anglo-Saxon and Viking reenactment.

So I have purely amateur interest in the history and mainly in

dressing up as a warrior and going to Fight Club every Wednesday night

and learning to use the weapons.

Yeah.

So this is actually not Freya's group.

This is a group in New Jersey, but basically they do the same thing.

Hundreds of people go out into, you know, some field with some dulled weapons.

Everything from swords, spears, axes, and we give each other a jolly good

fashion and have a good time.

I only mentioned this because it actually plays into the story.

Well, it was really a nice sort of coincidence, really.

2012.

A few years after finishing her doctorate, Freya goes off to work at

the University of Nottingham.

Nottingham is one of the places in the UK, not only for the microbiology,

but for Anglo-Saxon and Viking history.

And she goes there to study microbes, but she figures, hey, why not?

While I'm here, brush up on my old English.

With her, it's Wilfield.

I studied some old English to a level where I could sort of read

and speak a little bit.

But she figured, hey, she could be better.

And if she did, she would get deeper into the whole reenactment thing.

So I rather cheekily emailed the School of English's old English reading group.

That's where she met Christina.

Yes.

The historian.

One point, Christina the historian asks, Freya, like, what do you do?

And Freya said, you know, my day job is that I'm a microbiologist,

but on evenings and weekends, I'm a history nerd.

And Christina said the moment she heard that.

I just kind of thought, I found my kindred spirit here.

And she was like, wow, I'm like your mirror image.

Because I'm a historian by day, but by night, I'm a microbiology nerd.

I've been interested in infectious disease for quite a long time,

which I don't find any kind of friends in my department.

She told me she's the kind of person who would, you know, watch Ebola coverage on the news

and not be able to stop watching.

So eventually, they start talking about historical diseases.

So like, how would people back then have treated something like, you know, Ebola?

Freya is especially interested in this because she, for her historical reenactment,

is developing this none character who goes off and heals people.

But anyway, so they're talking back and forth and then to cut a long story short.

They find themselves both interested in this one particular book.

It's known as Bald's Leech Book.

So this is about 1100 years old.

What's it called?

Bald's What?

Bald's Leech Book.

It's nothing to do with no hair.

Oh.

Even though it's a speth.

Bald, is it B-A-L-D?

It is indeed.

And leech, like, leech like a leech like a little worm that grabs onto your blood?

No.

No, it comes from the Old English word letter, which is actually a healer or a doctor.

So the little squiggly animals are called leeches because they're medicinal, not the other way around.

Oh.

So the doctor wasn't named for the leech, the leech was named for the doctor.

It's actually, yeah.

And Bald is a man, the guy wrote the book.

We think it's a guy.

We think it's a guy's name.

And what is this book?

So it's kind of like this old healer's handbook.

It's filled with these potions and cures.

The original manuscript is in the British Library.

Locked away.

But 21st century, very kind people have digitized the original Old English text and put it online.

So Christina and Freya bring it up and they start going through all the remedies.

And, you know, it describes to you remedies for stuff that is...

A little bit different, you know, things like...

Which according to this leech book, the remedy for someone who is possessed by the devil is you...

Make this kind of like foul brew.

You make them drink it and it'll make them vomit out the devil.

And then there's another remedy for warts.

And all I'm going to say about that one is that it involves hounds urine and mouse blood.

And then things like...

How should we say make your husband more physically attentive?

Or less physically attentive?

Which have a direction you need to moderate it?

Pigs blood, I hope.

Or toad blood.

Drink on neoched.

Nestia.

Actually, it's just you boil a plant in some water and give it to the guy.

Oh, yeah.

Anyway.

So Freya and Christina are going through this leech book.

Looking for some kind of wound.

Something that was clearly in infection.

Some pussy...

Something?

We could clearly say that's bacterial.

And eventually, they find an entry...

Where at the end of the recipe, it says in Old English...

Say, Beth's the Lachodon.

So Beth's the Lachodon.

The best medicine.

The best medicine?

Hmm.

Yeah, move over laughter.

Yeah.

And we thought, how can we not try this one?

What was the best medicine for?

So it said it was for a lump in the eye.

It's actually called when in Old English.

Yeah.

These days, if you get it, of course, that could be something like a wart, right?

But there is a suggestion by archaeologists that eye infection was rife amongst the Anglo-Saxons.

Really?

Because you lived in buildings where you had smoke going on.

You lived cramped together.

So it could also be a stye.

What is a stye?

It's an infection of an eyelash follicle.

You rub it and it itches and then it gets swollen.

Of course, it's quite a nasty red lump.

A stye in your eye.

Stye in your eye.

Now, it just so happens that the bacteria that causes the stye in your eye is...

Staphylococcus aureus.

Stap.

Oh, the same stuff is the Mr. Windowman, penicillin man.

Exactly.

And we just thought, wouldn't it be nice to have a bit of spare time and a couple hundred quid to buy the ingredients and just give this a go?

Yes!

Let's give it a try, you know, why the hell not?

And matter of fact, look at this place!

We thought that too.

Not bad.

Recently, producer Matt Kielty and I went to my tiny apartment in the city and we tried to cook it up too.

Are you ready to cook?

Oh, I'm ready to cook.

I've got this recipe here.

Oh, awesome.

Yeah, yeah, please, read it.

Go for it.

Okay, it goes like this.

Weird.

I see all of us with one name, Crop Lea.

That's the first line of the recipe and right off the bat for Christina and Freya, there's a problem.

That first ingredient.

The word Crop Leaach.

Crop Leaach.

Crop Leaach.

Christina said it was quite difficult to translate.

Nobody quite knows who nor what it is.

But luckily...

Just a couple words over was a clue.

And garlic.

It made a second ingredient.

Garlic.

Which is an allium species and Crop Leaach.

We know this was another allium.

That's what the dictionary of Old English tells us.

So they figured probably what they were dealing with was an onion or a leak.

But we didn't know which one.

So we thought, okay, we'll try one that has onion and one that has a leak.

Now, the recipe doesn't cover this, but we did it anyway.

Peel the onions.

Chop it up.

Ooh.

The same for the garlic.

And the recipe doesn't tell you how much.

It doesn't tell you equal amounts of.

So you take out the measuring cups, you measure out equal amounts.

Yeah, equal amounts.

And there's a pestle.

And then after that, okay, it says.

It can be counted well together.

Okay.

To be really pounded.

And pounded.

Frayed it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So lots of time with the mortar and pestle.

Muscles built up from wielding a sword if they're pounding the ingredients.

Look, starting to be more of a musk.

Third ingredient.

The next one was definitely something you wouldn't have knocking around in your kitchen.

End of Feyr.

Yes.

Oxgol.

Bovine bile from a cow's gall bladder.

What do you give to kill the cow and then go reach it?

No, it's actually a very standard ingredient in microbiology labs.

Oxbile.

Today in 2015, you can but should not just buy it on the internet.

Here we go.

And so you take the oxbile, add it to the onion and garlic.

And then the fourth ingredient.

Yenima wien.

Wine.

And wine time.

Red wine, white wine.

Like what kind of wine are we talking about here?

This is the thing.

So we had quite a discussion about what type of wine should we use.

And we don't know, really, did they have red wine?

Did they have white wine?

What was the alcohol content?

But I did a bit of detective work.

And she figured out that the monastery where this leech book was written.

Well, they, she figured out where their vineyard was.

And just down the road, there's this modern organic vineyard.

So they used that wine.

Gave it to you.

Gave it to you.

Gave it to you.

Gave it to you.

Gave it to you.

I just want to point out how difficult it is to find English wine.

We had to use Italian.

But...

Once you get all that stuff together, you're under the final ingredient.

The fifth ingredient was actually that you're specifically told that you have to mix these ingredients together

in a brass or a bronze pot.

I don't have one.

So we had to sort of add pieces of, you know, a copper that would have been available to people at the time.

So they had to do some research.

But they figured out that the copper of today, that is most like the copper of a millennium ago,

was actually cartridge brass, which is what's used as standard in plumbing fittings.

Got a few pennies in there.

We actually use pennies.

Do I stir it?

I think I stir it.

It's like a world's worth cooking challenge.

It looks and smells like quite an ice, quite an ice summer soup.

Oh, yeah, that's awful.

Oh, that's so gross.

Clearly we botched this whole thing.

Not to stand the neonict on them, out of fire.

And finally...

Okay, so we're going to cover it.

Okay, we're covering it.

The directions say we have to let the whole thing sit for a while.

There has to be stored for nine days and nights.

Okay.

Okay, that's it.

One day goes my two days three, four or five.

Six, seven, eight, nine.

All right.

Nine days later.

All right, here we go.

You ready?

All right, here we go.

And...

Then you have to strain it through a cloth.

The liquid that comes off you apply to the person's eye.

Or the liquid.

Yeah, with the feather.

Now, clearly we didn't have any staff to try this out on,

but Freya in her lab, she made these mark wounds.

With these little plugs of collagen.

So it's a bit like jelly.

Basically, it's like a goopy substance made to be kind of like a flesh wound.

And we infect these wounds with bacteria with the staff.

Then they put this thousand-year-old recipe that had been standing there for nine days.

They put it on the bacteria that was in the fake wound.

Which, obviously, we didn't think this was going to work.

No.

We thought, you know, all given the ingredients,

we might see some small killing effect on the bacteria,

but it won't be anything to write home about.

They thought maybe it'd kill 10%, 20% of the bacteria.

But then when they came back the next day.

And it was a staff massacre.

It went on a rampage.

It went on a staff rampage.

It was killing, you know, 99.9999% of these bacterial cells.

Yeah, first we thought we made some sort of mistake.

And this was some kind of fluke.

You know, we accidentally mixed up our plates or mislabeled something.

So they run the entire experiment again.

They grab the ingredients, mash them up, put them on some bacteria.

And it happens again.

Just absolutely wiped out the bacteria.

Kill them dead wounds.

Then they tried a third time and a fourth and a fifth.

And it works every time.

And this is just something you really don't see in your career,

some microbiologist.

And eventually they escalated from just regular staff to the MRSA,

to the methicillin-resistant staff.

And this is one of the bad ones.

A super bug. New government data estimate that about 2,000 people

are dying of community-based MRSA every year.

This one is very dangerous.

And Christina and Freya, they sent some of Bald's brew

to one of their collaborators in the States.

A collaborator Kendra Rumbau in Lubbock in Texas.

Kendra took this stuff, put it on some MRSA bacteria,

and then a week later sent Freya and Christina an email.

And I think it was actually a three-word response.

I think she just simply said,

What the fuck?

What the fuck?

Bald's best medicine had just wreaked havoc on the MRSA.

It killed 90% of them.

This is beyond our wildest dreams.

Now, Freya and Christina made very clear

that this is not yet a miracle drug.

I mean, it's not even being tested in humans.

So absolutely do not do this at home.

They don't even know if this is safe.

It might be that if you don't do it in exactly the way we did,

nasty fungus could grow in it,

give you a worse infection.

So we should not have done this.

Matt and I, we...

dumbtars down the drain.

But the thing about this whole story that is so intriguing

and so cool to me is this time travel thing,

which is so strange.

The idea that something a thousand years ago,

like a bullet forged a thousand years ago,

we could use it now and that it could work.

The time travel dimension of that is so weird to me.

It kind of makes you think differently about...

I don't know, progress.

So, without which further ado,

Dr. Christina Lee and Dr. Frey Harrison,

and they're going to talk to us about some ancient biotics.

For example, just a few weeks ago,

Freya and Christina got up in front of the royal society of chemist.

Thank you very much and it is an absolute pleasure to be here.

Large hotel conference room, hundreds of so people.

Freya actually got up on stage just as a nun.

Okay, so this is one interpretation of what an Anglo-Saxon scientist may have looked like.

And they presented the results.

Next ingredient is particularly...

The cooking demo.

And then at some point, Christina said something really interesting.

She was like, okay, sure, we want to write this off,

because it has demons and dragons and elves in it.

But are we sure that we know what they meant by those words?

Like, for example.

There are remedies, which ask you sing for avomerias.

And we would say, oh, that's so superstitious, this is all in their heads.

But there again, we should also remember,

this is a period when people do not have watches.

They don't have your nose, you know, so that's got to watch.

Everybody knows the avomeria.

Everybody knows the length of an avomeria.

So maybe it's...

Maybe it's take this medicine and wait 20 minutes.

And I know how to standardize 20 minutes, which is...

Three avomerias, four avomerias.

So it may appear one way and it's...

In fact, could be a totally different way.

It suggests that in order to time travel,

you have to somehow...

God, it's like we don't even have the language to be able to understand what they were doing.

How effective.

There's a phrase, the past is a foreign country.

Likewise, we need to learn the language of the doctors of that time.

We need to kind of be a little bit less dismissive

and learn a little bit more, you know, from them.

I learned a bit of humility this way.

But here is the reason why this is so confusing to me.

So 1100 years is a crazy long time for humans.

And for bacteria, that's like a exponentially crazy long time.

Yeah.

So how is it that something that this man bald was doing to these bacteria then...

Like, it's not even the same bacteria.

Yeah, how could that even work?

That's an awesome question.

So one thing we've got to think about is...

Well, why did these medicines drop out of use?

And maybe it's because when they were used,

the bacteria evolved resistance.

But now, a thousand years later,

when these medicines have not been used,

you would expect that resistance to be lost.

This is something that Marin McKenna mentioned to Soren and I,

that sometimes when you take a drug out of circulation...

Sometimes resistance will decline.

That doesn't always work,

but sometimes resistance does decline.

So if we had been using this compound through the ensuing thousand years,

then maybe it wouldn't work.

So there's an interesting discovery there,

like that what worked once and then was resisted,

you'd give it a rest and it can work again.

And it will be resisted and you put it to rest.

And if you had enough different...

You could go to different places and the different paths

to go to China where they now got all these people studying Chinese cures,

and Arab cures.

You could come up with a rich historical cocktail of armamentariums

that will work if you bring them in, take them out,

bring them in, take them out.

And the whole world, the whole world of the past,

then becomes the fruit of your future sort of.

So it's also, like now I have a suddenly an image that is possible

that this is so in Wheeler, by the way,

in conversation with Mary and McKenna Latif.

That a thousand years ago, these folks went through what we went through with penicillin

and that this guy wrote something in the book

and it's actually called the best medicine.

He probably got on the cover of whatever their version of time was.

He got their Nobel Prize.

Everybody celebrated.

And then years later,

the styles were coming back and the garlic wine didn't work anymore

and they stopped using it and it got put away.

And then here we are and we discover it

and it's been put away long enough that, like now I'm thinking about future,

some future civilization digs up an old medical textbook

that was in some dusty, whatever, and discovers penicillin.

And it works.

Did I lose you on that, Mary?

No, no, I'm still with you.

I don't know.

It just seems like such a great hypothetical construction.

I just didn't really know what I can add to it.

Sorry, I have to go.

Hey, Lulu again with a quick update.

It has been almost a decade since we first aired this episode

and since then, Christina and Freya have published several papers

to show how this concoction works and why.

Now, Ball's I-self is not quite ready to hit the drugstore shelves yet

but in 2022, it made it over a big hurdle for new drugs,

phase one safety trials.

It was tested on healthy humans, so not already sick folks

and not in open wounds, and the results were overall successful.

And Freya and her colleagues have a pretty good idea now

of which chemicals in the medicine are the important ones

so they can distill it down to its bacteria, fighting essence,

potentially great news for all of us staying a little healthier,

using very old things.

But all this did leave me with one very important question

for Christina, the Viking expert.

If we get further in clinical trials,

and this actually becomes a drug who owns the patent,

is it Mr. Bald or whoever from like a thousand years ago?

So we asked Christina, the Viking expert.

I don't know.

I don't really know, but technically Mr. Bold

is having this manuscript written for him,

it's in his possession.

But that doesn't mean it's his work.

So it becomes a really interesting question, you know,

of who owns the IP on this.

Anyway, Radio Lab, here for you,

the hard-hitting medical questions, the hard-hitting patent questions.

Thanks so much for listening.

We'll be back next week.

Special thanks to Sarah to Steve Diggle.

And to Alexandra Ryder and Justin Park,

who came down from Yale to be our old English readers.

To Gene Murrow from the Gotham Early Music scene.

And to Marsha Young on the Medieval Harp.

Colin Monroe of Tadcaster.

And the rest of the Baronie of Iron Bok.

Not totally sure what that is, but I know they helped us out.

And I guess we should help ourselves out.

Yes.

Very quickly.

Through the window.

I'm Jedi Murrow.

I'm Robert Cullwich.

Thanks for listening.

Hi, I'm Gabby.

I'm from the Bay Area, California.

And here are the staff credits.

Radio Lab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Lentip Nasser.

So Ron Wheeler is our executive editor.

Sarah Sandbach is our executive director.

Our managing editor is Pat Walters.

Dylan Keef is our director of sound design.

Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom,

W. Harry Fortuna, David Gabel,

Maria Paz Gutierrez,

Sindu Nain Assambandan,

Matt Kielty,

Mona Madgauker,

Annie McEwan,

Alex Neeson,

Sara Kari,

Natalia Ramirez,

Rebecca Rand,

Anise Vica,

Arian Wack,

Molly Webster,

and Jessica Young,

with help from Gabby Santas.

Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly,

Emily Krieger,

Natalie Lentip Nasser,

Angelie Mercado,

and Sophie Semmey.

Leadership Support for Radio Lab's Science Programming

is provided by the Simon's Foundation

and the John Templeton Foundation.

Fundational Support for Radio Lab

was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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