40 - Phage

What does it mean when a computer can make better medical decisions than a human? The progress in large language models, and in particular the popularity of ChatGPT, has brought these questions to the forefront in 2023, but we've been discussing this for over 50 years. In this ep ...  Show more

What happens when a patient far from surgical care – say, at the bottom of the Pacific ocean on a submarine, or at a research base in Antarctica in the middle of the winter – develops a surgical abdomen? This dilemma was the impetus to build the first truly effective clinical dec ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the most abundant lifeform on Earth: the viruses that 'eat' bacteria. Early in the 20th century, scientists noticed that something in their Petri dishes was making bacteria disappear and they called these bacteriophages, things that eat bacteria. F ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the most abundant lifeform on Earth: the viruses that 'eat' bacteria. Early in the 20th century, scientists noticed that something in their Petri dishes was making bacteria disappear and they called these bacteriophages, things that eat bacteria. F ...  Show more

We are running out of ammunition against certain infections, as bacteria increasingly evade the antibiotics we’ve relied on for nearly a century. Could bacteriophages – viruses that hunt and kill bacteria – be part of the solution?

In 2019, CrowdScience travelled to Geor ...

The development of antibiotics was one of the greatest turning points in the history of medicine. Bacterial infections that were once death sentences were cured within a matter of days after administration of these lifesaving compounds. But the honeymoon didn’t last long, as resi ...  Show more