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March 9, 2018 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
52:22
Edition 336 - New Science

Cutting edge science in hydrogen power, batteries, cancer research, and time at the UK'sNational Physical Laboratory...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
Coming to you from a rainy London town, but at least spring is just about here.
Thank you very much for being part of this show.
Keep the emails coming.
If you want to send me an email, I get to see them all and react to them.
Send me an email through the website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and you can do that from there.
And if you'd like to make a donation to the show, you can also do that at the website.
And the website, designed, created and owned and currently being updated by Adam from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
Now, a very different edition of the show this time.
I've taken the show out to one of the most important scientific sites in this country.
In fact, one of the most important scientific sites in the world.
You know, at the masthead of the unexplained, I guess our mantra is hard science, weird science, and pure paranormality.
Those are the things that we cover here, which gives us a pretty wide canvas to paint on, don't you think, and a pretty big palette of colours to do the painting with.
So the place we went to, National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, Southwest London, which is on the fringes of Middlesex and Surrey, but well and truly part of London.
And you could easily drive past this place and not realise how important it is.
I have lived not too far from it for many years, and I didn't know what went on there.
The only thing I ever knew about it was that it was involved in the testing of the famous bouncing bomb in World War II for the Dam Busters raid.
Look it up.
It was a very, very important and pivotal part of the war.
And so it was developed here at the National Physical Laboratory.
These days, they do work on a lot of cutting-edge technology and science.
In fact, just about every important development from space and the instruments that are used in space and calibrating them to cancer research, the nature of cancer cells they're researching, which we'll hear on this edition of The Unexplained, hydrogen and the hydrogen car.
They've actually got one that you can drive around the site in, which I did.
Graphene, the new wonder material, 5G mobile phone technology.
You name a technology that's important and is being worked on and is cutting edge right now, and they're doing it there.
And they have a huge team of the biggest and brightest brains in the world there.
You know, mostly young people at the very, very cutting edge of everything that they do.
It was humbling for me to be there.
I spent the better part of a day there.
And thank you to Mary, the press officer, and JT, who's one of the people in management there for helping me to make this happen.
So let's hear it then.
This is my visit to the National Physical Laboratory.
It actually happened on the day that I started getting the flu, but I managed to get through the day.
And I think you'll hear from this selection of material that I recorded there, and I recorded a total of about two hours, so I've still got some to come.
But I think you'll hear how interesting the people are and how interesting the work they're doing is.
Of course, they're not entertainers.
These people are scientists.
So just bear in mind when you're listening, they're not here to entertain you.
They are people who work in cutting-edge science, and they sound like that, which makes them as credible as they need to be.
I found it a humbling and amazing experience to spend the day there.
So I hope that you're going to enjoy some of the material that I now roll out for you, recorded at the National Physical Laboratory in the UK.
It's always nice to take the unexplained out on the road whenever we can.
And today, I haven't traveled to South Africa.
I'm not recording in Los Angeles.
I'm actually recording very close to where I live, the site of the National Physical Laboratory, the NPL.
Now, I never knew what exactly goes on here, but what I do know is some of the most important science in every area that affects all of us directly and in the future is being done right here.
They do everything from important health cancer research to defining standards for nuclear reactors, work on 5G mobile phone technology, work on hydrogen power for cars, batteries, which of course is so important for every device that we use.
If your phone's running down now, you'll know what I'm saying.
All of that happens here.
Even the time signal that some radio stations broadcast, the PIPs as they call them, come from here.
There's something else I never knew.
So here we are in Leafy, Teddington at the NPL, and this is JT Jansen, who is kind of in charge of the place.
What's your title, JT?
I'm the research director at NPL, so I look after all the science we do in the laboratory, but I'm not in charge.
Well, it's like, okay, but deal with an important job though, JT.
It's almost like being a kid and having the biggest and the most sophisticated train set that anyone in your town has got.
Yeah, my kids absolutely love the fact that I work here and they always want to come into work and see what's going on in the laboratories.
We've got about 350 laboratories here and each laboratory does something different.
Somebody said to me that the site, which if you come past by bus or you drive past as I do every day, it doesn't look very big, but it actually goes back as far as the length of five Wembley Stadiums.
It does, yeah.
So it goes all the way back to Bushy Park.
So MPL started over 100 years ago in Bushy House, which is at the other end of the site.
And we built all the way from Bushy House down to here to Hampton Road in Teddington.
And of course what a lot of us locals know only because everybody talks about it and the man made his imprint on this area is that Alan Turing, the father of computing, the man who's getting his rightful recognition these days, actually worked here.
Yeah, just after the war he worked here and he built one of the first automating computing engines, ACE, here.
All right, let's walk into the building now then.
This is the reception building here.
It looks like a very modern white spa hotel.
It all does, but it's much more than that.
Walking into the foyer now with JT.
So this is where it all happens, or at least this is where the public see first.
How many people work here in Tuck?
So it's about 800 people who work here on site, of which about 600 are actually practicing scientists in the laboratories.
And then we've got another 200 visitors, which are usually students, PhD students, guest workers, joint appointments.
So it's a busy site.
All right, JT, we're going to look around this place today, and thank you very much for the staff here because they've really put together an incredible schedule for me.
I've never seen a schedule as well put together and comprehensive.
So we're going to try and cram in a lot of it in not very much time.
So JT, let's go.
Yep, let's go and meet Gareth Hines, who looks after our electrochemistry department.
So that was JT.
You heard about what he does and some of the history of this place.
This is Gareth Hines.
Hello, Gareth, what do you do?
Hi, Howard.
I work on electrochemistry.
So that includes energy storage, batteries, fuel cells, electrolysers, and hydrogen, but also catalysis and corrosion.
So are you working on the thing that bugs me and my colleagues most?
And that is how, you know, you've got a mobile phone, you need it for work, you need it for everything, but it never has enough, you know, puff to keep you going for the whole day.
Yeah, by the time we're finished, you will have enough puff enough phone, don't worry.
All right, we're going to this cool car now, which is a hydrogen-powered car.
Yes, it is indeed.
It's powered by compressed hydrogen, which is stored in the tank.
So that hydrogen is then fed to a fuel cell, which converts the energy in the fuel directly into electricity, drives an electric motor.
Essentially, it's like a Tesla, but instead of having a battery, it has a fuel cell and a tank full of hydrogen.
So the only emissions from the tailpipe are water vapor.
Now here comes a question straight from somebody who's not scientific, which is the truth about me.
Isn't that dangerous?
Well, funnily enough, people have this perception that it's dangerous.
And of course, any fuel is dangerous.
Batteries are dangerous, gasoline is dangerous, diesel is dangerous.
But when it's looked after properly, there's an argument to say that hydrogen is actually safer than any of those other fuels.
Because when it burns, it just forms water.
It's also very light, so it goes straight up in the air.
It doesn't give you any choking fumes.
It doesn't pool on the ground.
So actually, as fuels go, it's one of the safer ones.
But there is a public perception to address.
Right, this car is a big, white, and very impressive-looking Toyota, which shames my little Toyota.
Has it got a boot full of kit?
Because it's a prototype.
Has it got a boot full of gear?
No, I can show you the boot.
It's got a spacious boot.
What it has is an electric motor under the bonnet, a fuel cell under the driver, and then two hydrogen tanks underneath the back seats.
We're going to have a ride in this, aren't we?
Yep.
Right, let's do it.
Now, we're inside this car.
Let's close the door.
What kind of Toyota is this?
I don't recognize this.
This is a Mirai.
Okay, that was above my pay grade, but very nice.
Now, this car is powered by hydrogen.
You will know about hybrid electric cars that run on petrol and electricity.
This is a hydrogen car, and let's just listen to its startup.
It's on there.
You can't hear anything.
What?
So, hang on.
My car sounds like this, i.e.
silent, when I'm at traffic lights and it goes into eco mode and turns the petrol engine off.
You're saying this thing is ready to roll?
Yep.
Let's do it.
Okay, here we go.
There's a small wine there.
What was that?
That was just the brake, because it's cold.
Okay.
That's very, very impressive.
So we're literally rolling out into the sunshine, and it's not even making as much noise as a milk float.
For those of you who know that term.
That beeping is because you're not wearing your seat belt.
Oh, right.
Okay.
Sorry about that.
Let's put that right.
It's just like my car.
And we're now driving in this hydrogen-powered car.
This is a great way to start this.
Through the site here, which we said is the size of five Wembley Stadium football pitches.
If you're listening in the US, that's pretty damn big.
And driving around the site of these incredible buildings where so much work goes on.
And just have a listen.
Simon and Garfunkel once sang, that is the sound of silence.
How amazing.
How economical would this be then if it was put into production and we were able to get hydrogen easily?
Would it be cheaper to run than a petrol car?
In the future, yes, if the infrastructure is put in place, but obviously there is some capital expenditure required to do that.
But we're working on all these technologies to make them cheaper, more affordable and more robust, including battery technologies and hydrogen.
The big advantage of hydrogen is if you can link it to heating, in other words, converting the gas grid into hydrogen, then you have a source of hydrogen that's already distributed across the UK and that would have significant cost savings.
I'd never heard of this.
I really thought we were moving towards electric vehicles.
Is this, do you think, going to be a serious contender?
I guess you have to say yes.
Yes, I mean, I'm also working on electric vehicles, so I have a foot in both camps.
I don't see them as necessarily competing.
Batteries are always going to be better for small vehicles and city travel, but for longer distances and bigger vehicles, fuel cells will always win.
Actually, one thing I wasn't expecting, we've just driven forward to the hydrogen petrol station on this site.
It looks like a very, well, it looks like the big brother of a petrol pump.
And you could drive past this on a motorway and you'd think, oh, well, that's for trucks.
And that's actually here on the site.
Talk to me about this.
So this is a hydrogen refueling station.
It's the first one in London that's open to the public and powered by electrolysis.
So the hydrogen is actually produced from water on site.
That's astonishing.
I mean, you say it's created by electrolysis.
Does that mean that it's sort of back-engineered from water?
How does that work?
Yes, it's a device that simply takes water and mains electricity and converts it into hydrogen and oxygen.
It vents the oxygen to the atmosphere, stores the hydrogen in a big tank, and then it can dispense it into the hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in about three minutes.
This is open to the public?
This is open to the public, yes.
How many people would be able to use this, if you know what I'm saying?
How many people have got vehicles or devices or whatever that would be able to make use of this?
So at the moment there are about 100 fuel cell vehicles in the UK.
Well no, let me rephrase that.
At the moment there are fewer than 100 fuel cell vehicles in the UK, but that number is set to increase exponentially over the next few years, as is the number of hydrogen refueling stations.
And if the raw ingredients are electricity and water and a lot of technology, then I would assume it's going to be much cheaper than importing petrol and shoving it on great big tanker ships and bringing it into the UK.
In the future, that's the view.
And I expect by 2030, 2040, you'll be seeing a lot of this technology.
But at the moment, there is still work to be done to reduce the cost of these electrolyzer systems.
If you're at all interested in science, if you read the newspapers, if you listen to the radio, watch the TV, it's quite probable that you will have heard the mention of a material called graphene.
It's basically thin, thin, thin shavings of what you've got in a pencil lead.
And it's only been recently discovered, but it is a miracle material.
It's the kind of thing that will allow display screens to be ultra-thin, put absolutely anywhere, that will allow things to communicate faster, be lighter, be better.
It's a miracle material, and that's why the government and many other people around the world are so excited about it.
And of course, they are at the cutting edge of that here at the NPL in Teddington.
This is Andrew Pollard, who works in graphene.
Andrew, thank you very much for doing this.
You're holding in your hand the molecule layout of graphene.
Talk to me about that.
What is it?
Well, it's atomically thin carbon layer.
So again, graphite, which you find in many different applications, but as you described, a pencil, it's one layer from this.
Now, the reason why we call it a miracle material is the amazing properties.
So not only does it have amazing strength, so proportionally it's 200 times stronger than steel, it's also extremely conductive in both electrical conductivity and thermal conductivity.
It's also the fact that it's flexible gives it lots of applications as well.
So there's lots of really amazing properties that could mean that it's very powerful for many different applications.
They're talking about in the future, you being able to have a computer screen that you can roll up, put in your pocket, and then go and have your lunch, roll it out on your table in front of you and do your computing.
It's that exciting.
Exactly.
Yeah, that's a great example in terms of flexible electronics.
They sort of look into the future.
They want to develop it, but you need to have those materials that are both flexible and conductive.
So, you know, again, now you could be looking at graphene, replacing ITO on the screen of your phone or screen of a TV or a touch screen.
So it's exciting in that area, but also exciting.
There's an example recently of the graphene golf ball where actually it's the strength that's putting it into a composite in that case.
But how is graphene?
I read that story about the graphene golf ball a week or two back and the fact that it was performing better, flying faster, easier to do a hole in one with one.
I didn't quite understand what graphene was doing to the ball.
Well, it's actually not just golf balls but many different areas where you're looking at a composite material.
So you look at aeroplanes as an example now being made out of composites.
If you can put graphene in there and improve the strength of the composite and therefore you can either make it lighter or stronger.
Obviously if you think about a golf ball, lighter golf ball but as strong, therefore you're going to get these at the moment I think very long drives with the golf ball.
Same time if you're looking at a plane, you can make it lighter, therefore that you use less fuel.
At the same time because it's got great electrical conductivity, if we take the example again of a plane, you actually have to have essentially a copper mesh so that if you had a lightning strike or essentially dissipate the energy.
If you had electrically conductive composite, that would also mean you could get rid of that copper mesh.
So again, you make the plane even lighter.
So this is something actually Richard Branson's been talking about.
Graphene planes has been possibly something for the future.
You know, all of these things that we've been talking in really excited ways about graphene for a couple of years now.
And when it was first announced, we were told here was this obvious material that's been under our noses all these years and we've suddenly discovered how fantastic it is.
But a bit like the car that runs on water, the actual practical developments, the technologies, the devices that we can buy and use, they're not there yet though, are they?
I mean, we haven't got the car that runs on water yet, although everybody says it's coming.
And the same with graphene.
Everybody says all these great things are coming, but we haven't got them yet.
Well, this is actually a really good point because it's the barriers to commercialization of any new material.
And you see this with, you know, through history, things like silicon, as example, can take decades to get to market.
And it's these barriers to commercialization that companies need to take it out of the lab and get it on into a product that we can all use.
I mean, one of those big barriers is what we're addressing here at MPL, actually.
That's looking at understanding what your material is.
Now, we've said this is atomically thin carbon, so it's very difficult to measure.
Actually, what do you have?
Now, we think of it in a perfect way that it's just this one sheet, but actually, a lot of the graphene that you'll get will be in a powder.
So it's a black powder or a black liquid that you get it.
Now, what's in that liquid or that powder?
Is it graphene?
Is it graphite?
What's the size?
What's all the different properties that can affect your application?
Again, for batteries, you might want small flakes with lots of defects in them, but for composites, you might want large flakes with no defects in them.
So it's going to take a long time to develop the specific materials involving graphene, but we're getting there.
Definitely getting that.
I mean, we work with a lot of companies on the specific measurement issue and standardization issues, going, well, so they can understand that when a big company comes along, let's say aerospace or electronics, they want to buy material of a company that's producing it.
They need to be able to look at the data sheet and go, okay, I can compare those properties because I know for my application I need this type of graphene or this type of graphene.
So really it's about getting those standardized measurements that all companies can therefore have trust in the supply chain.
Apart from the graphene golf ball then, what are we going to see first?
I think there's a lot of things that we're seeing in near term.
Actually there was a good example of a graphene light bulb recently up at University of Manchester and it's not something you'd necessarily think about straight off but actually it's the thermal conductivity properties they're using that's actually making the lifetime of the normal LED light bulb longer.
So essentially it's making a more efficient light bulb for you.
And does this all come at a great cost?
Any new technology is expensive or more expensive than what you had before?
Does this mean that yes you can get this wonderful long-lasting graphene light bulb but it might cost you 40 pounds?
Well it's a good question.
Yes definitely all new technology tends to be more expensive but one thing we've definitely seen in the last few years is graphene the cost coming down because now you've got companies all around the world, hundreds of companies that are essentially producing lots of this stuff now.
So obviously as that you know the production increases the cost comes down.
Are you playing with graphene here?
I say playing.
Are you working with the actual material here?
Yes definitely.
We're working with graphene and other 2D materials now as well particularly with companies.
So examples of A company we worked with recently to understand their quality control process.
So, if they've got a large reactor that might produce a ton of powder every year, how do they understand that their quality is the same over time?
Another company that's looking at battery applications, actually looking at supercapacitors and energy storage, understanding what properties they need in their actual 2D material, their graphene or other 2D material, that makes their battery your supercapacitor better.
Right.
So, this is really important cutting-edge stuff, and you're doing it all here.
Yes, definitely.
I mean, again, the really important thing for me is the commercialization, working with companies, helping them understand how to make a better product.
At home, I use a computer, you'll laugh, it's probably got six gigs of memory, of random access memory, it's got one terabyte hard drive, and I'm quite happy with it.
It takes up a certain amount of space in my little flat, but I do everything on it.
I couldn't exist without it.
In the future, what kind of space and ability will a computer in my home have with this?
Well, it's a good question.
It might be that it's more a case of we talked about flexible electronics.
Your computer is now something you wrap around your wrist, but at the same time, it has a sensor in it, so it can sense things such as if there was gas, for instance, the oxygen level dropped or something like that.
At the same time, there's looking at membranes, so it's actually some great graphene oxide membranes that are used for very low-cost water desalinization.
So, imagine in terms of water problems in some sort of carbon.
Well, that's terribly important because if you look at Cape Town, even California, you know, they're having water situations now.
Yes, definitely.
So, this would be a low-cost solution that essentially you could be taking seawater and turning it into drinking water or using it in a way to actually clean the water of contaminants.
Did I read somewhere that they were talking about using graphene in clothing?
Yes, well, wearable technologies is a big area at the moment.
Again, you need some flexible conductive materials.
So, again, it comes back to the kind of flexible electronics area.
But at the same time, if you can make a flexible electronics with a battery, a flexible battery, you start thinking, well, actually, you can put this all into clothing as well.
So, we're talking about a computer that you can wear.
Yes, definitely.
So, again, the conductive, you know, flexibly conductive connectors, there's talk about, you know, for instance, in military applications, if you need, you know, you've got the headset, but also you've got battery packs across your body, how do you connect it in the suit that you're wearing?
So you need something conductive that's not going to stop being conductive as soon as you bend it.
It's incredible technology.
And, you know, we joked about the car that runs on water, but of course here at the NPL, as we saw earlier, the car that runs on hydrogen that's generated partly with the use of water is happening here now.
So it's all getting close.
The graphene technology, though, that will be so exciting and so revolutionary.
How far away do we think is it?
Am I going to see it in 10 years, five years, two years?
When will we start getting these things filtering through?
It really depends on the application.
So if you look at very high-end electronics, then definitely that's further down the line.
But if you start looking at, again, composite materials or maybe batteries, we're looking at more sort of shorter term.
People are now bringing out things such as bikes that have graphene in tyres that have graphene in to improve it.
There's even a car that's a BOC Mono that has parts that are graphene in it to improve the stiffness of parts of the car.
So definitely on the shorter term, you're looking at those sort of applications.
It's only a matter of time before, I mean, I remember, I'm old enough to remember Chris Boardman with his carbon fibre bike.
Then presumably there'll be somebody in the future at the Olympics with a graphene bike.
Yeah, definitely.
You're seeing already people producing bright bikes and taking them out and testing them and showing that they're essentially improving the speed of their track times.
I think this is one of the most exciting things that you're doing here and it's amazing to be working at the cutting edge of it all.
You must be very excited.
It's great and it's great to actually work with the graphene community around the world as well because it is a very worldwide area of research and in terms of the companies around the world as well.
We've got to make it clear for people listening to this, this is going to change everything.
It will change the nature of everything.
It's just a matter of time, isn't it?
As you say, it's the applications, it's developing them, but it's happening.
Definitely.
I mean, that's the hope.
That's the hope, definitely, that we will see definitely lots of applications, different application areas, yes.
Thank you for telling me about it.
No problem.
The most impressive laboratory that I've seen today, and as you will have heard, I've seen a few here at the NPL in Teddington, is the one that I'm standing in now.
It does look a lot like a hospital research facility, and there's a very good reason for that, but it is very large, it is very bright, and it is full of very high-tech medical-looking gear.
With me is Professor Josephine Bunch, who presides over all of this.
What is this for?
So welcome to our quite new laboratory here.
This is the Multimodal Mass Spectrometry Imaging Laboratory.
Everything we do here is chemical imaging, and we use mass spectrometers to produce our pictures.
The main project that we're delivering from this laboratory at the moment is funded by Cancer Research UK.
It's their Grand Challenge programme.
And in this project, we're trying to produce two and three-dimensional interactive images of tumours and all the molecules in them.
And we can show you some of the different instruments that we need to do that.
That's fascinating, isn't it?
Because tumours, from what I understand, you know, I am not a scientist, but they are a bit of a dark art.
We're not sure how they spread, develop, and grow, are we?
We're not as clear on that as we ought to be.
No, it's true.
I mean, the aim of our project is to, first of all, understand the molecules in different cells and the different cells in different tumours, how those are organized together, how they talk to each other.
We have numerous instruments in this lab, and they're all useful for measuring slightly different aspects of those molecules in tumours.
So molecules can be very small molecules and they can be very large molecules and we have instruments for measuring and identifying all of those kinds and we can do this from within single cells all the way up to the kind of measurements that might be suitable for performing in a surgeon's hands in an operating theatre.
Because when you're working at this kind of level, it is all about the mechanism of the cancer, isn't it?
There is a point at which a cell will become cancerous when beforehand it wasn't.
And that is all, it always seemed to me when doctors have talked to me about this to be a very fine line.
And understanding that, I presume, is a very complex thing.
We want to be able to measure things that are happening in a cell before that cell looks different.
So all of our cells are performing really complex tasks.
They're using energy, performing tasks in ways that we haven't really been able to map in situ at their location before.
But if we could do this and understand at what point The metabolic wiring of these cells starts to go awry and could map that from early stages, then we would have a better way of diagnosing cancers, but also have a better understanding of the chemicals which could form useful targets for new drugs.
So, might it be possible one day to identify the point at the precise point at which that change happens and then discover what causes that change and somehow reverse it?
That's a wonderful vision.
I can't answer all of that, partly because what we're doing, we're not measuring always in real time.
We get snapshots, and those snapshots are because we have thin sections of a patient's biopsy that was collected at a particular point in time.
I think to do what you just described, we'd be having to measure everything that was happening all the time, and we don't quite have the methods or the instruments to do that yet.
But you're exactly right that without a knowledge of what's happening in these, we can't possibly start to think about how to either arrest it or to reverse it.
So, this is an early stage of something very important?
It's very early stage, and it is extremely important.
I should add that we are using many techniques that are well established.
Some of these techniques do exist in hospitals, some of them are being trialled at the moment as new surgical tools for measuring molecules in tumours as a surgeon's cutting.
But I think using these techniques together and looking at the data in the way we're looking at it is very new.
The reason that we're doing this at the National Physical Laboratory is because these measurements are so exciting and starting to appear in so many different laboratories that labs like ours need to ensure that these are being done with equivalence in mind, that we're all making the same measurements in the same way so that different hospitals in the future can gain similar quality of results.
As you said, you work very closely with Cancer Research UK in this work.
Is this, do you think, and this is the question that journalists will always ask because you have to, but is this taking us closer towards a cure for cancer?
You know, all these headlines we've read, even this year, there'll be a few stories that have said very optimistic things.
There was a piece of research that you might have seen out of New York only a month or so ago that said researchers were a very, very exciting phase.
I think they were looking at cells or something.
And it's possible for the media like myself to get overexcited, but what I'm saying is, do you think that you're taking us down the road that will lead to that holy grail?
Yeah, of course I hope that we're doing that.
I think what we're doing is we're providing additional information and evidence to show us quite how diverse a state cancer really is, how many different kinds of diseases this broad term cancer really is, and we're studying quite a few of them in this project.
And really, without that fundamental knowledge, we really can't start to advance treatments and diagnostics.
And is it true that every cancer is in some ways individual to the particular person?
It's always different?
That's one of the questions that we want to answer.
One of the things I'd like to know is how many common types of tumour or phenotype are there?
So what we've learned over the last few years is that in one single patient there are lots of different kinds of tumorous cell.
What I want to know is if I looked at 200 patients, how many different kinds are there?
Are there 200, 600, 20?
How many times do we see the same things in different patients?
And that would give us a real insight to how to design personalised therapy and combination approaches.
And that's where the future is, isn't it?
It has to be tailored to the person.
Yes, I think it probably does.
That's very exciting.
A lot of people would have thought that we were there already.
It's a big, long, hard road this.
It is, but there are extraordinary labs and collections and consortia of people working on it.
We're one of the four Grand Challenge teams.
Each of these teams comprises six or ten laboratories doing extraordinary research in both genetic science and some of this molecular chemistry.
Talk to me about some of the equipment that you've got here.
I mean, I can see, I think we used to call this when I did science a screen here.
You've picked not the most glamorous.
This is the fume cupboard.
The fume cupboard.
This is the fume cupboard.
So this is where we handle samples that are a little bit nasty to inhale, particularly volatile compounds, and where we've placed one of our robots that we use to spray our samples.
So everything that we do here is about measuring molecules from a tissue.
And if we're going to measure that molecule, we've got to get the molecule out of the tissue.
And we do that by a process that we call desorption ionisation.
So desorption is the opposite of absorption.
It just means bringing out of the surface.
And ionisation means attaching charge to it, inferring a charge.
Because if a molecule's charged, it's what we call an ion.
And mass spectrometers, and you can see 12 of them in here, measure ions.
They discern the mass-to-charge ratio of ions in the gas phase.
And to a mass spectrometrist, that's an insight to the identity of that molecule.
Outside this device, there is a red line.
It says red line identifies operator-only zone.
I've just been standing in it, you were.
Yeah, but I wasn't operating anything.
Right.
So how safe is this thing?
Oh, this, I mean, this is to make things safe.
Absolutely.
This is to make things safe.
This is so that you can see that there's ventilation, wind blowing.
All of this is being safe.
Negative air pressure, yeah.
Absolutely.
So this is all safe.
And in fact, everything that we're doing in here is safe.
It's even if we're using class four high-energy lasers, they're fibre-coupled, so they're delivered through an optic fiber into the instrument.
So this is not an unsafe place to work.
But we can show you the different things.
These are just sort of basic punters questions.
But your scientists and yourself, are you checked?
Is the state of your health checked from time to time?
Only by my GP.
But then I'm not handling radiation and I'm not handling something that I think NPL will be worried about me handling.
Had to ask.
Okay.
Walk me around a bit further.
So this is a device called Desorption Electrospray Ionization.
This is actually invented by one of the partners in our consortium.
Desorption electrospray ionization.
Exactly.
So electrospray is the process by which we have charged droplets and those droplets are shrinking.
And as a droplet shrinks and gets smaller and smaller and smaller, all of the charges around the outside of that get closer and closer together.
And as they get closer and closer together, there becomes a point at which the charges are alike and too close and they can't bear it anymore.
And so they become a molecule or an ion of the gas phase gets ejected from that molecule.
And we take advantage of this.
We're really just spraying the surface of something with a charged solvent.
And we're hoping that some of that solvent makes contact with the sample, wets it just long enough to dissolve some of the analytes from that surface into it before we have that ejection of the gas phase analyte.
And so, really, this is like using a pressured hose pipe on your patio and measuring the muddy splash back, collecting all of that in a bucket and working out what kind of mud you had there, except that to us it's not mud, it's the molecules on the surface of a tissue section.
And how will that help?
So, that will help because, and you can see here a very, very thin section, this is a section of patient biopsy, because if we measure the molecules at every location on that biopsy, then we could measure thousands of molecules every few microns, and we end up with a vast amount of data that we describe as a hyperspectral data cube.
And that means you could ask me to give you a picture of where any particular molecule that we'd measured was in that whole thing, or to produce patterns showing you where different molecules on one side of a tumour margin were compared to the healthy tissue.
And in terms of how that's going to help a researcher or a medical professional, how would that work?
This is like a high content or high information form of digital pathology.
It's always been helpful to have a look at tissue sections to understand the cells present and we've always been able for a long time to look down a microscope and differentiate healthy from diseased or cancerous tissue.
What we're doing is trying to understand why those cells look different.
What are the molecules that's different in those different cells?
It might end up being a relatively high throughput, high information diagnostic screen, or it might be a way of us understanding whether or not certain molecules are expressed by a patient and therefore whether or not they would be susceptible to different treatments.
But we're becoming quite familiar with not all treatments working for not all patients.
So we do need to know what molecules are present in different patients' tumour samples.
Will you start to understand, because we read about this all the time, how, and it almost, it's like a mystical, magical arc, isn't it, that for some patients a new drug trial will work brilliantly, and for another patient who's got exactly the same condition, we think, it'll completely fail.
Will you be helping to understand that process?
That's exactly what the kind of thing that we're trying to look at.
We're trying to understand for individual patients, individual regions of different patients' tumours, what molecules are present in the cells and whether or not they're likely candidates to be usefully treated by particular compounds.
Excellent.
Anything else to see that we need to talk about?
Sure, well I thought maybe they'll go this way.
Silly question really, there's so much in here.
You can see that all of this is cutting edge.
This is the same instrument but coupled to a different kind of mass spectrometer.
These instruments here.
These look the same at the back, so these are still what we describe as a hybrid tandem mass spectrometer.
And really that just means there's two different mass spectrometers bolted together to give us higher performance in how we measure the mass decharge of different ions.
But this one, you can see this large box and this box is containing a laser and a vacuum source.
So this is a technique called matrix assisted laser desorption ionization.
And all these acronyms always sound very complicated, but they really do describe just how the technique works.
In this technique, we coat our sample of interest in a compound that we call a matrix.
And a matrix is just something that absorbs energy very readily, absorbs the energy at a wavelength of the laser that we're employing.
And in our experiments, we're using an ultraviolet laser.
We raster an ultraviolet laser across that matrix-coated sample.
And the matrix absorbs the energy of the laser, and it imparts it to the analyte quite gently, so that again we end up with this desorption-ionization event as a secondary reaction, this time in vacuum.
And then everything else is the same.
We're doing this at discrete locations.
We're doing this so that we can map and measure molecules across samples, which often in this laboratory are tumour samples.
And we're using high-performance mass spectrometers so that we have high confidence in the mass assignment.
And it's through knowing a molecule's mass that we're able to identify molecules.
So boiling it all down, it's about getting an accurate picture of what you're analysing.
Absolutely, and in this laboratory, it's about helping other laboratories do that in a routine and repeatable way.
A large part of this work, in terms of helping other people, concerns what we do with these vast volumes of data.
So we have undertaken an enormous amount of work to think about how we visualise those data, how we review the raw data, how we pre-process all of our spectra, how we store data, how we share data, and how we disseminate it.
And this is a big new focus of this laboratory at NPL.
And as the hunt for the causes of and the cures for cancer intensifies and becomes more detailed and you're having to go further and further down into finer and finer detail, presumably that's where the accuracy that a place like this can deliver is important, presumably that's where it comes in.
It's more that when I produce an image for you and I tell you that's an image of where a particular drug in a tumour is, you need to have confidence that it's really an image of that drug.
So the better the mass spectrometer I use, the more confident you can be that it's a drug rather than another molecule which is quite similar.
And we're literally at a stage now where sometimes those things can be in doubt.
It's not that there's a new stage of doubt in any way, it's more that it's an era, a new exciting era where these things can even be measured.
So it's about better working out how the drugs that you're giving people are affecting the problems that they've got.
In this lab we're surrounded by truly exciting techniques which people have not been using for that long and with that comes a burden of responsibility to make sure that the measurements that we're making are being performed in a robust way and that any information we're sharing about how we made them can be repeated by other labs.
The samples that you get here, do the people who have let you have those samples, do they have to, are they asked by the hospital whether they can be used for experimentation here?
Is that how that works?
We have samples from a mixed range of sources.
Yes, certainly in the samples that have been recently collected we have patient informed consent that describes why we want their samples, how they're helping us study, the kind of measurements we can make from them.
Usually people have donated samples to a biobank and we're accessing samples through a biobank.
Another one of those journalist questions, and it's only a ballpark answer that you probably can't give, but here goes.
How far away do you think we might be from a cure?
I can't answer that, and it wouldn't be my place to.
I'm trying to make the best measurements I can in the greatest detail to equip biologists and clinicians with information that might give them new insight and might help them answer some of those questions.
And is it true that the more questions you answer, the more questions get thrown up?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Another corridor, another laboratory here.
This one is all about time.
And the man who's in charge of this, who is the Time Lord, is Peter Wibbley.
Peter, thank you for doing this.
Lots of computers, lots of readouts.
What's it all for?
Well, part of MPL's responsibility as a national measurement laboratory is to keep time for the UK.
We have the national time scale here, a group of atomic clocks which keep time very precisely.
I thought that came from Greenwich.
Not anymore.
Greenwich is now just a museum.
MPL now is the only precise time centre in the UK.
So we have the national time scale here and we disseminate time across the UK for everyone in UK industry and commerce who needs precise and accurate time.
So when I work for those radio stations that use the time signal, it's all coming from here.
Very much so, yes.
There are many different sources of time.
Some people use GPS, the navigation satellite system, for example.
But if you want traceable time, if you want to know precisely where it's coming from, to make sure you have very accurate and traceable time back to a known source, then we can provide services that will give them that.
And in particular, we're now developing a new service, NPL Time, which aims to provide time to the financial sector around London.
And we're disseminating time over optical fibre links from our time scale here at NPL out to a range of organisations across the London area and beyond.
Okay, so why is it important if you buy pork bellies at 1118 and 10 seconds, why is it important to be hugely, massively accurate about that?
In the finance sector, for example, there are regulations which prohibit things like insider dealing.
And to regulate that, you've got to know precisely when events occur.
And so it's important that financial transactions are time-stamped very precisely and to an accurate source.
And so new regulations in Europe actually specify that you have to do that to 100 microseconds.
100 microseconds.
That's right, yes.
And we can actually provide time much more accurately than that.
But disseminating time to users is actually quite difficult.
Time takes actually time to get to the user.
If you're sending time through optical fiber links, for example, there are delays involved in that.
And those delays can vary.
So you have to have special techniques to measure the delay that the time signal takes to get from your reference clock to the users and actually correct for that.
Right, so you have to send the time slightly ahead of when it will be received, or rather, you've got to allow for the delays in the transmission chain and know what those delays might be.
I'm getting a headache.
Exactly that, yes.
You have to essentially measure the delay by sending time signals backwards and forwards between your master clock and the slave device you're trying to synchronise.
And that allows you to measure the offset of the clock and correct for the delays in the network.
For most organizations and applications, why is it important for people to be able to measure time that accurately?
I mean, you know, 11.18 in 10 seconds is 11.18 in 10 seconds, isn't it?
Well, I've already mentioned the financial sector regulations that have come in across Europe, which actually require precise timing.
But other applications, for example, satellite navigation, is based around very precise clocks.
There are atomic clocks on board the satellites keeping time to nanosecond, billionth of a second precision.
And those clocks all have to be synchronized back to a reference time scale.
And in fact, we now have a single global reference for timekeeping, but which is maintained by around 70 laboratories around the world, of which MPL is one.
And each of these 70 laboratories maintains a realization of the global time scale, accurate to a billionth of a second.
A billionth of a second.
And do you have to coordinate with them?
You must, mustn't you?
We do, yes.
We exchange timing signals continuously via satellites with other laboratories around Europe and beyond.
And that allows us to synchronize our time scales together.
Talk to me briefly about the equipment in this lab then.
I have no idea, apart from the computers and screens, I have no idea what any of it might do.
In this laboratory, we have equipment for time transfer.
In front of you here, you can see an equipment rack which has a device which actually generates the time signals that we send out to a satellite dish on the roof and then it's transmitted from there via a communication satellite down to other timing centers around Europe, other national labs.
And those labs send signals back to us simultaneously.
And again, by looking at the two-way measurements, we can correct for the path delays and actually synchronize our time scale here with those in other countries at the nanosecond level.
But we're also generating time even more precisely within the laboratory.
We have very precise clocks that measure the length of the SI second very precisely, and we use those clocks to keep our time scale here very precisely synchronized with the SI second.
And that allows us to keep our time scale continuously within about five nanoseconds of the global time scale.
And as a researcher, what's the attraction of working in time for you?
It's a very challenging area, but also fascinating.
It's one that has a lot of public interest, of course, but also this leading age science going on.
We're developing the next generation of atomic clocks here, optical clocks at NPL.
And there's a lot of work to actually try to incorporate these clocks into time scales to make them more reliable and resilient and to find ways to compare those clocks with those in other countries.
For example, using optical fibre links rather than satellite links.
Isn't it amazing to think that it's not that long ago in this country where we had different times in different parts of the UK?
It is, yes, but now the world is so interconnected.
We have to have time synchronised around the world and kept down to the billionths of a second level.
And when you have lunch with somebody and you invite them to lunch at 1.15pm and they arrive at 1.15pm, do you look at your watch and you say you're late?
I'm actually probably more likely to be late myself.
That says a lot.
Thank you very much.
The NPL is a place where a lot of cutting-edge medical research is being done.
I'm standing in a room now that looks like an expanded version of a place where you might go and get x-rayed at your local hospital or you might have a CT scan.
But this equipment is very different.
And it is cutting edge.
With me is Rebecca Nut Brown.
And I'm going to let you tell me your job title because I'm going to get it wrong.
So I'm head of meteorology for medical physics at NPL.
What is that?
So, within any hospital, within most hospitals within the UK, they will have a medical physics department.
And the work that we do here supports measurement, the measurement infrastructure to support medical physics in the UK.
In particular, the facility that we see here, we provide support for radiotherapy.
Now, this room looks to me like the kind of room that you might come to in a hospital, but it would be a hospital way into the future because the hospitals that I've been to having x-rays and last year a CT scan didn't have equipment that looked like this.
Right in front of me is a unit that appears to be on some kind of concertina that moves it up and down.
And then on top of that is a table, a board.
It looks like it's some heavy black metal here that presumably a patient would lie on.
And then above that, if this thing is moved into position, there is something that looks like a great big camera that you might see on those undersea exploration documentaries.
And then there is some other equipment behind that.
It looks very high-tech and complex.
And there's a sign on the wall saying radiation off.
What happens here, Rebecca?
So what we do here is we provide the measurement infrastructure to support radiotherapy in the UK.
So the concertina arrangement that you see here with the table, this is actually where the patient would lie.
We don't have patients here at the NPL.
The reason that the table is thin is because actually this camera, as you call it, rotates around the patient.
So we actually could be treating from underneath the table.
So you need to minimize the amount of material between the treatment and the patient.
And the concertina that allows the bed to be moved, moves the patient into the exact position so that we're able to treat very precisely to where the tumour is and spare healthy tissue.
So this very large thing that looks like a big camera would actually deliver the radiotherapy to the target area?
It would, yes.
And it is a very complex piece of equipment.
And the reason it looks state-of-the-art to you, or it looks different to what you'd see in a hospital, is because actually we take the covers off because we go inside and make changes within the head itself.
When this is in a hospital, it will have covers all around it, so it will just look much simpler than this.
But this allows us to see the arrangement of equipment that will allow us to shape the radiation beam.
And the reason we want to do that is because we want to put all of the radiation into the tumour and as little as possible into the surrounding healthy tissue.
And there's leaves that are within the head there that are made out of a very heavy metal that will stop the radiation in certain areas and allow it to pass through.
That's very, very important, and that's what you're developing here.
So it's making sure that that important therapeutic radiation gets to the right place and doesn't spill over into the wrong place.
And that's where the measurement comes in, I assume.
So what we do here is we will provide a calibration to the hospital so that they know when they're delivering a certain amount of dose, that that's traceable back to us and that dose is correct.
But also what we do here is we design end-to-end verification techniques.
So what we can do is we can go in and we can check where a hospital is delivering a new type of radiotherapy.
So there are these new forms of radio therapy coming out, such as they've got fancy names like stereotactic radio surgery, stereotactic ablative body radiotherapy, but they're actually very complex treatments.
So what we do is we have a phantom, which is basically a bit of plastic that looks like a patient and it will have properties that mimic the patient properties.
And in that we will put measurement devices and we will ask the hospital, can you deliver a treatment to that piece of plastic as if it's a patient?
And so we can measure in those measurement devices we can detect how much radiation has gone to the tumour and how much has gone to the healthy tissue and we can check that they've delivered what they think they've should have.
So you're helping real world hospitals right now.
Yes, absolutely.
And talking real world hospitals, we've got here Catherine Clark from the Royal Surrey Hospital.
You're collaborating on all of this.
How's this helping?
So this is helping the hospitals to have much more confidence in what they're doing.
So when we visit and do what Becky's just described, which is the end-to-end verification, often that's straight after they've just set up a new technique.
So the IMRT, the intensity modulated radiotherapy, that kind of thing, they will have spent quite a while setting it up really carefully.
And then we come in as an independent check to make sure that what they think they're doing is what they're actually doing.
That's a lot of words that we've just spoken in this room, but the important part is the benefit for patients and how's that going to benefit patients?
Presumably by giving them better, more efficient treatment and while they're having the treatment, making them have fewer side effects from it.
So yes, the more advanced techniques in radiotherapy do exactly that, as you've just said.
But also by going around the whole country, it means that we can ensure that it doesn't matter which hospital you're treated in, you will get exactly the same radiotherapy.
And that is particularly important in clinical trials where we're trying to test new techniques against more standard techniques.
And we can be absolutely sure that, again, lots of radiotherapy hospitals will be contributing to those trials and that exactly the same treatment will be given in all of them.
And then we can get the answer about whether the new technique is actually an improvement or not.
We have to remember that a lot of the population in this country, in every country, is touched in some way by cancer.
So this is very important here that you're developing these techniques, but also to have the certainty that if you have a problem in Liverpool, you're going to get the same treatment as if you came to the Royal Surrey or you went to a hospital in Edinburgh.
It's all going to be the same, and that's partly down to the work being done here.
That's right.
Thank you very much.
And my sincere thanks to everybody who helped me across the day at the NPL, the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, UK.
Look Them up online, and you will see a little bit about the cutting-edge research that they are doing in so many areas.
It was certainly an eye-opening visit for me.
Thank you very much for being part of this show.
More great guests in the pipeline.
So, until next, we meet here on The Unexplained.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
This has been The Unexplained, and please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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