Feature: Culture - BLOOMSBURY FESTIVAL - October 22nd to 24th - Exhibition: Microbes and Me, Sunday 24th
Published: 14 October 2010
by JOSH LOEB
THIS year’s Bloomsbury Festival has something for everyone – and every thing. While some might point to the multicultural events on offer as proof of the celebration’s amazing breadth, those of a scientific bent will twig immediately that the organisers have tipped their hats to what is by far Bloomsbury’s largest constituency: its vibrant microbial community.
The area is hardly unusual in this sense. Microbes – a group of microscopic organisms that include species of fungi and bacteria – are the pre-eminent life form everywhere on Earth, including in our own eyes, guts, mouths and other orifices.
“We are only 10 per cent human,” says Dr Derren Ready, a clinical scientist in UCL’s Eastman Dental Hospital. “In terms of cell numbers – not in terms of volume – we are 90 per cent microbial.”
This poses interesting questions about our identity but should not be cause for alarm. Vast colonies of bacteria dominate our bodies and, by and large, are good for us.
“We definitely wouldn’t be the same without them,” says Dr Ready, honorary lecturer in microbial diseases at University College London. “We generally start off sterile and once we are born we become contaminated or colonised by them. From then on we have an extremely intimate relationship with them. We have more microbial cells than human cells in our body. They are an integral part of us, but that is not to say they are dictating what we do.”
Dr Ready and his colleagues, including Dr Jonathan Pratten – senior lecturer at UCL – are aiming to do their bit to help amaze the masses with science. “We want to show that science is a big part of Bloomsbury,” says Dr Ready. “There are so many institutions and researchers based here.”
On October 24 the team will be based in a marquee in Russell Square, where they will be demonstrating – via a range of interactive displays and games – why micro-organisms are so fascinating.
“They are incredible,” says Dr Ready. “They can survive for years in a dormant phase and then come back to life. You can freeze them at minus over 100 degrees and they will survive. They can survive just floating around in the air for long periods of time. You inhale eight every minute. Without doubt, they are the most successful life form.”
Alexander Flemming’s discovery of penicillin – a substance that inhibits the growth of bacteria – began a new era of antibiotic medicine in the 1920s in which disease-causing bacteria were partially tamed by man.
Now some fear that antibiotics may be redundant in a few decades’ time as the organisms they are designed to kill will have evolved to resist them.
Dr Ready accepts this is a problem for medicine. Part of his work involves developing alternative methods of killing harmful bacteria – such as the use of lasers fired into dyes placed in the body, which then release “oxygen radicals” that blast the organisms.
“Some can double their population in just 20 minutes,” he says. “So they have a 20 minute generation – whereas we have, from parent to child, maybe a 30-year gap.”
In the evolutionary arms race, this speed of change is staggeringly unequal. However, Dr Ready says we still have plenty of time before antibacterial substances created by humans lose their efficacy. So for now, as others celebrate Bloomsbury, Dr Ready and his team will be celebrating bacteria. Visitors will be able to vote on whether they think microbes are generally good for us, bad for us or make no difference. They would all do well to bear in mind that if democracy means respecting the majority, the microbes will always triumph.
• Microbes and Me – bacteria spectacular” is in Russell Square, WC1, on Sunday October 24. It is a UCL Public Engagement Unit project. Free.