Science Friday - Kids Next For Pfizer Vaccine, Side-Channel Surveillance, Medical Maggots. Oct 29, 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: October 29, 2021

Younger Kids Next In Line For COVID-19 Vaccines This week, an FDA advisory panel voted unanimously to recommend that the COVID-19 vaccine made by Pfizer vaccine be approved for children as young as 5. If the FDA concurs and the CDC agrees, lower-dose Pfizer vaccinations could soon be available for children ages 5 to 11, via local pediatricians. Just who will be immediately eligible for the doses, and how vaccinating young children might affect school mask policies and other restrictions, remains to be seen. Umair Irfan, staff writer at Vox, joins Sophie Bushwick to talk about the news and other stories from the week in science, including potential COVID-related criminal charges against Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, an experimental bionic vision implant, and the possible discovery of an exoplanet in the galaxy Messier 51.   Could Ordinary Household Objects Be Used To Spy On You? In the movies, if a room is bugged, the microphone might be hidden in a potted plant. But in recent years, researchers have come up with ways to use the trembling leaves of a potted plant, light glancing off a potato chip bag, and even tiny jiggles in the head of a spinning hard drive caused by a nearby conversation to be able to listen to what’s happening in a room, or to gain information about what’s going on nearby. On a larger scale, other researchers have been able to use the vibrations of an entire building to paint a picture of movements within it—and even the health status of the people inside. The approach is known as a side-channel attack: Rather than observing something directly, you’re extracting information from something else that has a relationship with the target. Many of the approaches are not straightforward—they require an understanding of the physics involved, and sometimes heavy data-processing or machine learning to interpret the hazy information yielded by these techniques. Jon Callas of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Hae Young Noh of Stanford, and Kevin Fu of the University of Michigan join host Sophie Bushwick to talk about the risks and opportunities afforded by these sneaky methods of surveillance, and how concerned you should be.   A Maggot Revolution In Modern Medicine In a bloody battle during World War I, two wounded soldiers were stranded on the battlefield in France, hidden and overlooked under some brush. Suffering femur fractures and flesh wounds around their scrotum and abdomen, they lay abandoned without water, food, or shelter for a whole week. At the time, outcomes for these kinds of wounds were poor: Patients with compound femur fractures had a 75 to 80% mortality rate. By the time the soldiers were rescued and brought to a hospital base, orthopedic surgeon William Baer expected their wounds to be festering, and their conditions fatal. But much to his surprise, neither showed any signs of fever, septicaemia, or blood poisoning. When his team removed the soldiers’ clothing, they discovered that their flesh wounds were filled with thousands of maggots, or baby flies—little larvae with a massive appetite for decaying matter. Baer was repulsed by the sight, and the team quickly washed off the wriggling maggots. Underneath, instead of the expected pus and bacteria-infected flesh, Baer marveled over “the most remarkable picture.” “These wounds were filled with the most beautiful pink granulation tissue that one could imagine,” Baer later wrote in a 1931 report in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery. Maggots have long been associated with death, but in this case, they were helping the soldiers stay alive. As these insects were simply tucking in for their typical meal of dead, decaying flesh, they were inadvertently aiding the soldiers by cleaning their wounds, keeping infection at bay. The soldiers recovered—saved by their tiny, wriggling “friends which had been doing such noble work,” Baer wrote. Baer’s paper is one of the first reports of maggots used in medicine, but these insects have been found healing wounds for thousands of years, with references in the Old Testament and in ancient cultures of New South Wales and Northern Myanmar. Read the rest on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Sophie Bushwick, technology editor at Scientific American, and this week I'm sitting in for Iroflato. Later in the hour, what biomedical researchers are learning about the medical miracle of maggot therapy. Yes. And ways to listen or watch that you may not expect. Is your potato chip bag giving you away? But first, progress towards COVID vaccines continues for younger and younger people with an FDA advisory panel, voting unanimously to recommend that the Pfizer vaccine be approved for children as young as five. Vox staff writer Umer Erfahn is here with more on that and other stories from this week in science. Welcome back, Umer.

Thanks for having me, Sophie. So this week, COVID vaccines for kids got a step closer. Umair, what's the latest? This advisory committee to the Food and Drug Administration that looks independently at this data basically concluded that the benefits for this vaccine outweigh the risks in ages 5 to 11. This is the Pfizer-Bio-N-Tech vaccine that already has full FDA approval for adults. And now this moves us to a lower age bracket, which could potentially include upward of 28 million children. And these shots could potentially start rolling out as soon as early next week.

Will kids be getting the same dose adults did and the same way that adults did? No, they will not. One of the critical things they did in this clinical trial is that they used a lower dose. They wanted to measure and ensure that children were still generating the same immune response as adults, but they wanted to use a lower level of the inoculum because they wanted to minimize the amount of side effects that were potentially could occur. And, you know, a lot of doctors and scientists will tell you, children are not little adults. And so they wanted to make sure that they started from scratch and made sure they had a dosing that was actually optimal. And so with this one third level dose still administered as two doses spaced three weeks apart,

they found that they could generate a similar level of immune response in children as they did in adults with the full vaccine dose. And they found that the vaccine was 90.7% effective at preventing symptomatic disease in these children. Naturally, some people are going to wonder how much we know about this vaccine in kids. What can you tell us about the risks and the testing that went into it? Well, one thing to consider is that we've already. distributed this vaccine to hundreds of millions of people in the United States and around the world. And that was a key factor in why these advisors felt very safe in administering this to children. Basically, we know what the potential side effects are. They're extremely rare. And in the clinical

trial, they did not see many of the severe side effects at all in these children. Now, this clinical trial that they did for children was much smaller. But again, they felt confident because, again, we have such a huge volume of data to draw on. Now, the other thing to consider, though, is that children are generally at lower risk for severe disease with COVID-19 compared to adults. And so the cost-benefit relationship is a little bit different. That said, we know that children have gotten sick from this disease. Children have died from this disease. And children can transmit this disease. And so that's why it's important to get those children vaccinated to close off that final route of transmission. And also why doctors want to make sure that we're not going to do

this through a mass rollout like we did with adults, but rather want children to go to their doctors and clinics and have a physician sort of do the one-on-one talk with them to make sure that they're perfectly eligible and that this is safe and effective for them in particular. So what happens next? Can we expect vaccine approvals for even younger kids, maybe? That is likely the plan. You know, Pfizer says that they are conducting clinical trials in younger groups as well, you know, as young as ages two and also in infants as well. You know, we want to make sure that very young children have weaker immune systems. And so want to make sure that they can have this level of protection in some of their most vulnerable states

and close off the final, you know, vulnerable populations and hopefully move us closer towards a more protected society. Moving on to other COVID news, there's been some potential legal action in Brazil relating to the pandemic. Tell me about that. That's right. You know, lawmakers in Brazil, the Brazilian Senate, recommended this week that the president of Brazil, Jaya Bolsonaro, be charged with crimes against humanity. for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, those charges will be handed off to Brazil's prosecutor general, who will have to pursue

those charges. It's not likely that they will. But the fact that the Brazilian Senate actually came to this conclusion is hugely remarkable. They put out this huge thousands of pages report looking at all the public health strategies that were pursued and weren't pursued by this government. For instance, on Bolsonaro's watch, Brazil suffered one of the worst COVID-19 outbreaks in the world that results in 600,000 Brazilians dying across the country. That's the second highest death toll in the world behind the U.S. Bolsonaro himself got COVID-19. And so there was a whole suite of

policies that he did that really exacerbated the situation. So are bad decisions criminal? That's kind of the thing to consider here. Yeah, we're in kind of uncharted legal territory. But that's what the Brazilian Senate is arguing, that, you know, even though we have hindsight, they say that at the time we knew that some of the tactics that the Brazilian government was pursuing were flawed. For instance, you know, Bolsonaro initially ignored the disease and then said that it wasn't a big deal. He was reluctant to impose restrictions on gathering and implement social distancing measures. Then he promoted hydroxychloroquine, this anti-malaria drug as a treatment for COVID-19, with very little evidence behind it. And then he also pursued this herd immunity strategy where basically

he thought that letting people deliberately get infected or letting the virus run rampant was a better way to get to widespread protection rather than actually trying to control the spread. And then a lot of Brazilian senators also said that he botched the vaccine rollout. So a lot of missteps along the way, they say, stem from a fundamental lack of preparedness and failing to take this pandemic seriously. Is this something he could actually be tried and punished for? Or do you think this is more of a censure in words only? At this point, it does seem like it's more of a political maneuver.

Some members of the Brazilian Senate said they want to submit these charges to the international criminal court. And like I said, it's up to Brazil's prosecutor general to file charges. And it's unlikely at this point because they may have some political relationship between them. And so it's not likely that he's going to go to jail. But again, this investigation, this public report that documented basically very thoroughly all the mistakes the Brazilian government made is also sort of a way to a lesson for the next pandemic. You know, this is an interesting public health document as well as a political one that sort of illustrates all the mistakes that were made. We spent a lot of time highlighting how some countries did a good job, but it's also

worth highlighting some of the big mistakes that are out there and what we can do to prevent them the next time another disease rolls out. In Better News this week, you have a story about helpful bacteria. Yeah, I was reading a piece in New Scientist by Michael LePage that looked at this really interesting microbiology experiment. And this was this team that in a preprint paper showed that they were able to create artificial symbiotic bacteria. These are bacteria that Not just infect cells, but actually live in them harmoniously. And in this case, they can actually produce beneficial proteins. Where did they come from?

So this is a bacterium called baccels subtilis, which is a common bacteria found in gut. And in this case, they were using them to infect immune cells from mice. And what the scientists found is that the proteins that these bacteria emitted, you know, could be used to modify some functions of the cell. And they say that theoretically, you could eventually use these kinds of bacteria to, improve healing. You could also improve tissue regeneration, eventually use them to even fight cancer. And the idea is eventually you can use these modified engineered bacteria as symbiotic helpers for human cells and use them to help treat diseases and other kinds of problems. It seems like if you could get them to release one kind of protein, you might be able to do

other sorts as well. That's exactly right. And you know, we have an example in our own cells already. We have these organelles called mitochondria, and they produce energy for the cell. And some scientists theorized that these organelles actually originated as symbiotic bacteria because these organelles reproduce sort of independently of the cell itself. And so that's one kind of relationship that's already occurred in nature. And they think that, you know, if we can cultivate this again, we can do other useful things. Not just for human cells, but also for things like plants, like they are thinking that, you know, you can incorporate nitrogen fixing bacteria directly into plant roots, which can allow them to essentially self-fertilize and help improve agricultural

yield. So that's another potential application. You also have a story this week about bionic glasses. Who are these for? Well, this was a specific case of a 58-year-old biology teacher who lost her site 16 years ago in a piece in The Scientist by Lisa Winter. She talked about how this teacher worked with a team at the University of Utah with an implant that went directly into her visual cortex and then connected to a set of glasses. And the research team found that over the course of a few months,

they were able to coach this teacher to actually be able to discern letters and shapes. So there's the glasses part outside, but there's also a brain implant involved with this. So this isn't something we're going to see for casual use, correct? Yeah, this is an experiment to be clear, and it was temporary. And so the researchers did remove the implant after six months. But it shows that this is potentially one way to help restore site. You know, this is somebody who was blind and was able to later see. And now the research team is conducting a clinical trial of this device and for other patients.

So potentially this could be something that is used in some instances to help people, you know, regain a sense that they have lost. And lastly, you have a story about a distant planet, but one that's very, very distant. Yeah, that's right. NASA team reported this week that they found the first planet or hints of the first planet for the first time outside of our Milky Way galaxy. You know, this is a whirlpool galaxy that's 28 million light years away from Earth called Messier 51. And they found this using this X-ray observatory. This planet, it's about as big as Saturn, but it's about double the distance of Saturn from its star. How do you even start to see something that's that far away?

That's a really good question. You know, with conventional measures, you know, the way scientists detect planets in our own galaxy, what they do is they look at the light coming off of a star and they watch for dips in the bright. as planets transit between the star and the observer. And by measuring how much that brightness drops off, they can calculate the size of the planet and how far away it is from the star. The problem is with visual light, it degrades over very, very long distances. And so you need to look at something that's more powerful.

And x-rays provide that. You know, x-rays can travel over much longer distances. They're much more energetic. And so by detecting x-rays, they're able to see these potential, from much further away. And I keep saying potential because the scientists say they want to verify this by waiting for the planet to transit across the star again. The problem is the next time that'll happen may not be for another 70 years. So that would be a really long-term experiment. Yeah, we need some very patient scientists or a next generation to sort of pick this up to make sure

that they're on the right track. And how confident are they that they've got something here? You said they wanted to confirm it, but is that more for peace of mind or is it something like that? that we should still be unsure about until they've got better evidence. They want to make sure that they're on the right track. They're using a technique that piggybacks off of existing techniques. But this is the first time it's been tested. So they want to try this out looking at other very, very distant stars as well to see if they also have planets. And yeah, it is going to take some time to make sure that this is still a viable technique.

But scientists do think that they're on the right track. And that's all the time we have. Umair Irfan, staff writer for Vox. for joining us, Umer. Thanks for having me, Sophie. When we come back, side channel surveillance, using approaches you wouldn't expect to gain information. Stay with us.

This is Science Friday. I'm Sophie Bushwick. You know how it works in the spy movies. The room is bugged with a microphone hidden in a potted plant. But what if the plant itself is the microphone? A few years ago, researchers found that video of a plant's leaves was enough to show the tiny movements that happen when the leaves vibrate in response to sound, and that they could reconstruct the sounds in the room using only silent video of the leaves. And recently, researchers reported that, with a lot of processing,

they could use video of a seemingly blank wall to reconstruct the shadows of the people inside a room and get an idea of their movements. In each case, you're not pointing a microphone or a camera directly. directly at your targets, but you're using some other object or process to get information about what's going on inside the room. Call it side channel surveillance. That's what we'll be talking about with my guests. John Callis is Director of Technology Projects for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Welcome. Thank you very much. Kevin Fu, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. Welcome. Thank you. Glad to be here. And Hay Young-Kno, she's an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford. Thanks for joining me today. Sure, thank you. Nice to meet you all.

So, Kevin, I talked about using this plant as a microphone or a wall as a camera. You've done work with using a hard drive as a listening device. What do all these things have in common? Is there a way to look at these different projects collectively? Well, I think, at least in the research in my laboratory, my students look at how sensors can be synthesized out of everyday objects. And so the group you're referring to at MIT looked at how to use a potted plant. In our case, we looked at how components inside spinning magnetic hard drives could inadvertently become a synthesized microphone, fully capable of reconstructing speech in the room. How does that work? How do you use a hard drive as a listening device?

Well, there's a lot of interesting angles on that, but the short answer is you can think of a hard drive, a magnetic hard drive as almost like a record player. And there's effectively a needle. It's called a head, and it moves around. Now, it turns out, vibrations in the room cause this head to jiggle just a tiny amount. And so there's a sensor effectively on the inside to make that head stay in the center of the track because you don't want to getting off the center of the track or you will not be able to read the data properly. And there's something called the position error signal, how many nanometers off the center of the track that head is? And so by looking at that error, that is how far off the center of the track, you can effectively synthesize what behaves like the membrane of a microphone. how much that head is vibrating is directly proportional to the sound in the room. Hey, Young, your work is on a bit larger of a scale.

You're using an entire structure, an entire building even, as a sensor. Tell me about that. Yes, yeah, that's correct. So the big, large structures like buildings and bridges or cars around us will usually think of them as something static, passive, a big chunk of concrete or metal just sitting there. But they are actually continuously interacting with humans inside or surrounding environment. For example, when you're in the building walking around,

your individual footsteps will create small vibration on the floor, which will propagate through the entire building through the structure. So by capturing these structural vibrations, we can find a lot of information about you, like who you are, where you are, what kind of activities you are doing, or even your health status or cognitive status. You can get all of that just from somebody's footsteps? Yes, that's what my group has been working on. And when you capture these vibrations and analyze it, there's a lot of unique gay patterns

associate with your identity or the activity types or your health status. Is that something you need vast amounts of training data? to know what a normal person walking sounds like? It depends on what your final goal is. If your goal is to look at what your health status is compared to all the other people, then, yes, we'll need to have a training data set from a large number of other people. But another way to look at this problem is just monitoring your gay pattern and how it has been changing from like a week ago or,

months ago. And especially if you are in certain medical treatment, then we can also monitor your gay pattern what it was like before the treatment started and afterwards and see how the effective treatment is. So in that case, you don't need a lot of training data set. You will just need the data from yourself. Kevin, one tool that can be used to eavesdrop is this chip bag, just like the way that a plant vibrates, a chip bag can also vibrate. And it seems like this is an analog object, but it's being analyzed in a digital way. And a lot of these techniques seem to involve these intersections between analog world and digital world. Can you talk a bit about that?

Yeah, the analog world is quite fascinating. It's having a resurgence because we've tried to make everything digital, converting everything to bits and bytes. And sometimes in the engineering field, we forget that beneath all this is fundamental physics. And so with the chips bag, for instance, when vibration hits a reflective foil bag, it scatters photons differently. And if you have an appropriate light detector, you can begin to discern what was the vibration in the room based upon the changes in the light. And there are all sorts of examples of these sort of bizarre ways that the physics can play out in that sensors can be synthesized through these kinds of materials, even if they weren't built in designed to be a microphone, for instance.

It's almost like these seemingly innocuous objects are being transformed into digital ones. That's right. And in fact, a colleague of mine and I, we, we, we. coined the term a transduction attack where you're tricking devices into doing sort of unintended transduction of physical phenomena into electrical signals, sometimes tricking the sensors into seeing a false reality, but on the other hand, sometimes causing the pickup of signals that you might think ought to be private. And that's why I personally think students really need to spend time, even if they're doing, for instance, programming or computer science, they need to appreciate some of the underlying physics to understand the limits of how some of these things work

and how they can fail in bizarre ways. John, you've been involved in security for a long time. Are these techniques, things that people are actually using? Should I be worried about someone hacking into my hard drive and eavesdropping on me? Or is this more of a fun academic exercise? I'm glad you brought that up because that is, in fact, one of the things that, that, that I'm concerned about as well, which is how much of this is practical and how much of it is a demonstration to tell us what is about our connected world. In a lot of these cases, they are, in fact, not particularly practical. Or if somebody wanted to do it for real to surveil you, there would be better techniques than to do that. We're at a point now where usable microphones and cameras literally fit inside a button. Devices that we have that have uses like Help Me Find Where I Left My Keys can in fact also be repurposed as tracking devices.

So there's some practicality here and some not, and it's useful for us to study this. so that we have an idea about how much we really should be concerned about these things. And Hey, Yang, do you worry that some of the research where you've got sensors scattered through a building or in a vehicle could create a privacy problem? Yeah. So these vibration signals certainly contains a lot of information about humans. However, since the sensor data we have is more indirect sensing data, meaning when you look at the data, it looks like just a bunch of a lot of noise. The signal we're collecting has very small magnitude of information compared to the other noise

included in the data. So it needs a lot of processing in order to extract out the, information we want. So in that sense, it has a lot less privacy concern compared to other existing sensing modalities, for example, regions or the sound data. But it is true that with proper processing of the data, there could be potentially a lot of information can be leaked. Is there anything I can do, anything I can do with my environment to really halt this kind of attack. One of the things that I think seems scary about this area of research is it turns all these everyday objects around me into potentially creepy surveilling objects. And short of, you know,

throwing everything away and living in an empty padded cell, is there anything I can really do to change that? There are lots of obvious things that you can do. I mean, you know, for example, a lot of work that is done that is based upon reflections that come off of windows, double-pained glass, curtains, these are these sorts of things that would reduce some of these issues. It is something that we understand intuitively, if you've lived in an apartment building or something else, you can hear other people around. and I think it is easy to recognize that when we are in any environment, the actions that we take radiate outward and then being able to modify that by having

better soundproofing in buildings, doing our own measures, can in fact reduce these things a whole lot. I'm talking with John Callis, Kevin Fu, and Hay Young-Know about unexpected methods of side-channel surveillance. I'm Sophie Bushwick, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. One of the side-channel methods I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation was a blank wall and using footage of a blank wall to determine what's going on in the rest of the room. One of the ways that researchers managed that in this study was training a machine learning algorithm by essentially acting out various activities in a room while filming the wall so that their system could learn to recognize what patterns of shadows corresponded to what motions or the number of people who were causing these shadows. I was wondering whether opening this up, any of you could comment on whether it would. in general, side channel techniques require a lot of training in that way, or whether there are some that work more immediately? I think it depends upon what physical modality that we're looking at.

Sound has the advantage that it travels very well through most substances and not very well through a vacuum. So it will move through solids better than it moves through air. And that is part of what gets us the effects that we've seen on everything from disk drives to potato chip bags. The light on a wall is something that, yes, indeed, you'd want to have a certain amount of training on. It's also understandable. It's like, I am trying to think of what suspense movie, what mystery did I see where the shadows on the wall flickering were a significant plot point. And acting things out is going to be trainable, but it is also going to be hard to figure out exactly what is going on. And also defense mechanisms will be

there too. I recently saw a small LED panel that could be programmed to mimic somebody watching television, and the idea would be that you would leave this in a room when you were away from home for a few days, and anybody who walked by your house would see the flickering of television going by, and they would thus think that the house was occupied. And this is a countermeasure for that very sort of the thing. I can add to that question, Sophie. So certainly collecting a lot of training data for these human activities takes a lot of time and efforts. So we've been working on developing methods that can reduce these data collection efforts. For example, there are many domain knowledge and physics-based models that we have developed. For example, we know how the way propagates,

within the buildings. And we have good idea of what kind of pressure is applied to the floor when a person walks. There are medical models and the mechanical models that people have developed over the past couple hundred years. And recently with the emerging technology from data science side, we can certainly analyze these sensor data, but by combining these physics-based models from the each disciplines like mechanics or civil engineering or medical science. With the data science, we can actually analyze these data with a lot of noise without requiring

a lot of training data. So we've been developing methods called like physics-informed machine learning approaches that can analyze very noisy data without requiring a lot of training data. So your question raises two interesting points in my mind. One is a public policy, one is a technical. On the public policy side, a question arises, what is a reasonable expectation of privacy? And when you have machine learning and effectively a supercomputer in everybody's pocket,

if you've trained this, you might be able to learn a lot more than a human in the room could just learn through observation. But then second, on the technical side, I'm continuously impressed with how much machine learning can discover through inference, also make mistakes. For instance, one of my students built a power outlet that used machine learning on the power consumption patterns to learn whether you were infected with malware and also what website you were browsing. So there's quite a bit of information that can leak,

and machine learning training can give you effectively superhuman powers. We need to take a break. We'll be back with more spooky surveillance hacks in a moment. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Sophie Bushwick. I'm talking with John Callis, Kevin Foo, and Hay Young-Kno about unexpected methods of side-channel surveillance. And Kevin, I wanted to revisit something you mentioned. We've been talking about using these techniques to observe or to listen in. but you can use similar approaches to change data or to make a digital device do something unexpected. Can you talk about that a bit? Sure. It's sort of the opposite side of the coin of a side channel.

Side channel is violating reading confidentiality, privacy. And then the opposite side is modifying and injecting false information. You can almost think of it as sort of inception. And so one of the things my laboratory studies is how to defend against malicious injection of signals into sensors. A couple years ago, we showed how to use lasers to inject false conversations into voice assistance through glass windows, through a bell from a bell tower, simply by causing minute vibrations on some semiconductors. There's quite a bit of research on this opposite side of the coin. And I think one of the hardest challenges is how to defend against it. And that's where we spend quite a bit of time.

There's many different ways for these systems to fail. Being the defender is a much more challenging job. And the research definitely takes quite a bit of effort to come up with solutions that you can measure and demonstrate to be effective. There's certainly quite a few solutions that have fallen away that didn't work as well as we had hoped. And for my final question, I'd like to open this up to all of you. Where do we go from here? Is this going to be a cat and mouse game of surveillance from here on out? Or do you think that we're going to be able to apply these in some sort of helpful ways, like better health monitoring?

I'll say all of the above. We are getting a good deal of health monitoring. through the devices that we carry from very simple things like your phone being carried with you can do things like measure step count just from its own internal measurements. We have devices that we're doing as health monitoring specifically and can potentially identify conditions, before they really become a parent, the question is going to be who has that data and what expectations that we have around the use of it. And that is a huge society-wide conversation that we're

only starting to have right now because everything is collecting data and the ability to use it is growing exponentially. Hey, Young. Yeah, I agree with what John's. said, we are going to continue developing our technology so we can better understand what human needs are so we can provide better services. But that inherently comes with the concern of these privacy issues and there'll be new ways of trying to leak the information and then we'll come up with a better way to defend those attacks. For example, we are looking at how we can inject signals, vibration signals into these structures so that we can actually reject a lot of attempts to listen into these vibrations for malicious purposes. So there are new ways being developed

in order to protect our privacy. This is always going to be a work in progress. But our final goal is always to better understand human needs and human activities so that we're always so that we can serve them better. Kevin, do you also think this is a work in progress that we're going to have this sort of back and forth be ongoing? I think for these types of technologies, there will always be sort of a dual use. But I think the promise is great,

especially in the health space. Now that instead of having to go to a doctor once a year for a physical, you can imagine future medical devices that are more longitudinal using larger quantities of data, Of course, at the same time, we need to be mindful of the risks and build in appropriate controls for those risks. That's why in the laboratory we're very concerned with defensive approaches to enable future technologies to give people the confidence to reduce that risk of privacy invasion and security threats. We've run out of time. I'd like to thank my guests.

Hey, Young-Know, she's an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford. Kevin Fu, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, and John Callis is Director of Technology Projects for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Thanks to all of you for talking with me today. Well, thank you for the discussion. Thank you. That was fun. When a baby fly hatches, it has one job, and that job is to get as big as possible, as fast as possible.

This is why we often find those babies. All right, they're maggots. In organic matter, like dead animals or sometimes are trash, hey, a kid's got to eat. That voracious hunger and taste for dead flesh is one reason maggots have been used to help heal wounds since antiquity. It turns out they work really, really well at getting infections out of the way so the wound can begin to close. But although maggots went out of fashion shortly after the invention of antibiotics, researchers want you to know that they're an old school remedy with increasingly appreciated benefits in the era of antibiotic resistance.

Here with more is SciFri digital producer and archive dweller Lauren Young. She's the mind behind a new piece up on the SciFri website about the recent and ongoing advances in medical maggots. You can check that out on our website. ScienceFriday.com slash maggots. Hi, Lauren. Hey, Sophie. What got you looking into the story of medical maggots? All right, yeah.

So it was a dark and stormy night. I was just kidding. I was pouring through the SciFri archives, digging around for stories for our series, SciFri Rewind. And I stumbled upon this in a 1997 conversation Ira had with author Michelle Brut Bernstein. When most people think about maggots,

They probably think about something that people used before they knew better. But I was surprised to learn and interested to learn that doctors are actually still using maggots to do something, right? They are. Maggots have been worming their way back into clinical practice. So thanks to this intriguing tidbit, medical maggots sort of wriggled their way into my curiosity. So I really wanted to find out more what researchers have discovered since this 1997 conversation. I had reached out to Dr. Yamni Nigam, a biomedical researcher and lecturer at Swansea University in the UK. She's been studying these tiny fly larvae since the late 1990s, and she's a big fan.

Most people are like, oh, wow, oh, they feel really amazing. And they're really, they're really cute, which is something that I've always said about, Maddo. You know, I definitely never thought of them as cute before. But, you know, when you watch them wiggle around long enough, they, they, they, they, they, certainly grow on you, not literally, of course. And more importantly, maybe they can actually help us. So when maggots feed on dead flesh and decay, they have to eat alongside other decomposers like bacteria and fungi. So it's caused them to evolve some cool protective chemicals that also happen to benefit us. Yamni told me about the research of William Bear, a doctor who

treated soldiers during World War I. He observed that soldiers who had maggots in their wounds were remarkably free of infection, even if they had gone days without medical care. It was super, yeah, super fascinating observation. So the thing Yomni and other researchers are learning now, though, is why maggots are so good at healing wounds. And Yomni was so great to talk to once that we had to call her up again. I interviewed her earlier this week. We started out by talking about how maggots can make a difference in the wound healing process.

Maggots are very speedy debriders. They are nature's debriters. And by debridement, we mean getting rid of dead necrotic tissue. If a wound has dead necrotic tissue, debris of old skin and so on, it won't heal. It will never progress. If a wound is infected, it will never progress through the stages of healing. What maggots do very, very effectively is they remove the necrotic tissue and they absolutely get rid of the biological burden, the bacteria in the wound, and they kickstart the healing process. So they have plenty of roles to play within wound healing and wound debridement. Yamni, I mentioned earlier that we stopped using maggots when penicillin was invented, but now they're hot again, aren't they? Indeed they are. I think the fact that we have so many resistant strains of bacteria that are not responding to our antibiotics anymore. They've evolved methods and ways of invading our antibiotics.

And yet, if you put maggots in a wound that has a resistant infection, that infection will be cleared up. So people are beginning to look back to maggots because they know that they actually can treat resistant infections in wounds. And your work in particular is looking at why that is. So what have you learned about that? So we've been looking at a couple of things. our main focus at Swansea has been looking at how exactly are maggots clearing a wound infection.

We know that they can do it, but we didn't know how. And it's only recently that we've discovered that maggots actually secrete in their spit and sweat, if you like. It's excretion, secretion, really. They actually produce these antibacterial molecules. And there are vast numbers of these molecules. A lot of them are actually tailored to the wound infection. So if you put a maggot in a wound that has a particular species of bacteria,

bacteria in it, that maggot will up its game to produce molecules that will specifically destroy that particular infection. That's called the inducible maggot activity. And many researchers across the world have shown this. But we, indeed, in Swansea, have identified a particular small molecule that we've trademarked that's called serratocin that we know killed MRSA and kills lots of other different types of bacteria that are present within the wound. And has there been any movement to take some of those compounds that you know they secrete and just use that directly instead of just putting the maggots on the wound? I think you have to watch this space, really. Certainly that's a huge goal of scientists, clinicians. The public, I think, in general, would prefer to have a secretion-based ointment, let's say, rather than the real-life maggots. But I myself have to say that I think the real thing is a factory of molecule production.

It's producing whatever it needs in that wound. Not only is it producing enzymes that will digest the dead tissue, it's producing antibacterial molecules, but we also know maggots produce molecules that aid healing. So if you've put the whole package together, you've got a factory, a maggot factory on your wound for three to four days. That's as long as we leave them. and you've got very good beneficial effects from the whole thing. Just a quick reminder that I'm Sophie Bushwick, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

Talking to biomedical researcher Yomni Nigham about the medical magic of maggots. And what would you tell someone who could benefit from maggot therapy but is maybe a little reluctant to try it? What would you tell them about what the process is like and what it feels like to have this therapy? The process is very simple in the sense that if the wound is suitable for maggot therapy and the clinician will assess that, they will then put tiny little baby, the cutest little baby maggots. They're a millimetre and they will go on the wound, usually in the small polystyrene bags and that's sealed so the maggots don't get out and these enzymes come out of the bag. They go onto the wound, the dead tissue. They turn the dead tissue into a digestible soup almost for themselves and then they drink that up. And that happens within two to three days very, very quickly.

So that's the process. The bag is then removed after three or four days, and the maggots are then removed from the patient. And the wound usually is absolutely sparkling clean at that point. So it is a very quick, efficient and very effective process. The feeling varies between patients. Some patients don't feel a thing. And some patients say it tickles. And then some patients feel pain.

And often we find that patients that feel pain might have some underlying path. physiology, or they might be very reluctant to have used maggots and therefore they have a negative association anyway. So we're finding all sorts of things. We are investigating really how people react to maggots. And if stigma is part of what's holding back research and the use of maggots in medicine, what do you think those who think that maggots are cute need to do to warm more people up to that point of view? We've launched what we call a lover maggot campaign. We've got websites of it. And I go out to the public, I go out to, not just the general patients, but I go out to nurses and doctors, too, because they often are also reluctant to use it. They're a little bit squeamish as well.

And so I think it all depends on changing a mindset. It's increasing awareness that maggots can work really, really effectively, increasing acceptance, changing the negative perception. And one of the ways that we've tackled this is by going into schools. So, you know, if you put a little maggot on a three-year-old's hand, they'll be like, oh, that's so cute. But if you put a maggot on a nine-year-old's hands, they'll be like, oh, get that off me. So somewhere along the line comes an association with negativity, whether it's parents, whether it's the child themselves associating maggots with smell in the dustbin or dirt or whatever. And so we need to go into primary schools and really we need to show children how brilliant

this particular medicinal maga is and how useful it can be so that when the child grows up or when the child goes home and his grandparents have chronic wounds, and leg ulcers and diabetic ulcers, he can actually say, but yes, I've learned that these maggots are brilliant and they're very beneficial. So we are tackling all aspects, all sides, really, to try and get it more accepted by the public. Is part of this stigma connected with the name maggot? And do you think that maybe there's a different name that we could be using? We've had this chat repeatedly with a lot of people. One of my team said, why don't we call them high genies or something, a different name? And that's brilliant.

But when you say, right, we're going to put hygiene on you. And then the patient says, well, what's that? Then you have to say, well, they're maggots. So I don't think you can get around it. I think the stigma is, you're right. The name maggot does instill fear and repulsion in a lot of people. But I think they need to be aware that this species is a good species of maggot. This will really, really help wounds to debride, to disinfect, to heal.

So I think it's all about explaining to patients really. rather than just trying to disguise it, I think. And I'm afraid we have to leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us. You're very welcome. A pleasure. Thank you very much indeed. Dr. Yamni Nigam, a lecturer in biomedical science

and self-described professor of maggots at Swansea University in the UK. You can learn more about her research and the status of maggots in medicine by checking out our producer Lauren Young's excellent piece on our website, ScienceFriiday.com. slash maggots. Thanks for that story, Lauren. This is all so cool. You're welcome, Sophie. I'm never going to look at a maggot the same way ever again. That's all the time we have for now. Here's Kyle Marion Viterbo with some of the great folks who make this show happen. Nahima Ahmed is our manager of impact strategy. Diana Montano is our outreach manager. Ira Flato is our executive producer and host. Valisa Mayors is our office manager, and I'm engagement producer Kyle Marion Viterbo.

Thanks for listening. Thanks, Kyle. BJ Leaterman composed our theme music. If you missed any part of this program or would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts. Or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. In New York, I'm Sophie Bushwick.