The Infinite Monkey's Guide To… Failure

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BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

I'm Robin Ince, and this is the Infinite Monkeys Guide to...

Well, today is our

blooper reel.

Obviously, not bloopers from our show, as there just never are any, are they?

No, it's very professional.

Or the alternative description I've heard is that it's a sea of confusion.

Yeah, I have heard that our producers just kind of sit there and go, what are we going to do with this?

Well, we'll try our best.

So the bloopers that we are talking about today, not so much the newsreader not noticing his hairpiece slipping off.

It's really 70s sort of script line, isn't it?

That newsreaders don't wear hair pieces.

Well, that's, yeah, that's or they do, and they're much better.

Hairpiece technology.

I always think back to those kind of, it'll be all right in the night.

It will be newsreader conundrum, something going wrong with the weather person, and then it will be like a reporter who basically hasn't noticed that he's being chased by a Randy Bull.

Again.

Yeah.

No, in our show, it's usually when someone makes a scientific slip up, isn't it?

The famous one is, looks like we've proved cold fusion.

No, but I mean, this is an example of how science works.

So, the steady state theory, very famously, Fred Hoyle, brilliant scientists, and it was a reasonable picture of the universe until we discovered, for example, the cosmic microwave background radiation, which refutes that theory.

But that's how science works.

So, I wouldn't say they're mistakes.

No, and I think it's also very important to say that when sometimes people will say these things, well, they'll go, well, science got that wrong.

And you say, oh, do you know who found out who got the science wrong?

Some scientists.

Sorry, what was that?

Some scientist found out.

So it's like, you know, I always like to get a bit of Ludwig Wittgenstein in.

Yeah, every time.

We usually edit it out.

But I do love reading about Wittgenstein.

And he said, if people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.

Yeah, and you've turned that into a life.

Well, I think the reason that you're able to be so clever is because I'm so silly.

Here is Rufus Hound with anthropologist Alice Roberts discussing how failure is essential to science.

The one thing that really came to the forefront of my mind when I was asked to be here was, is it Benjamin Franklin's quote of who invented the light bulb?

I'm very impressed by this.

We've done just a minute and now we're on quote-unquote.

This is going to be a medley of all of them.

Who was Franklin's Edison?

Edison.

I think it was Edison.

He was one of them.

Yeah.

He's done a lot of light bulbs.

Who said, I didn't fail at inventing the light bulb.

I successfully proved 99 ways not to do it until I eventually found the one that

sort of underpins absolutely all science.

In fact, until Edison, no one could have ideas because there was nothing to appear above your head.

So it was.

Do you think it's an unnatural way of being?

Because it's certainly, as you said, central to a scientific education, that being wrong is the means by which we learn.

It is, and I think genuinely, I was thinking about this.

I know we were talking about earlier, that I'm delighted when I'm wrong in science because it means that I then know more about nature.

And it's, I mean, you kind of laugh, it sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?

But I think that's a central part of the scientific training, certainly in research.

I don't think it's unnatural.

I think it's about retaining a kind of childlike sense of playing with the world and accepting that some of the things you think about the world will change, will turn out to be wrong.

And that you need to preserve that into adulthood.

We mentioned Fred Hall, and I don't want to get too far off this.

Some people I was talking to earlier said, oh, well, he was a bad scientist.

But how do we define, you know, as someone who could have won the Nobel Prize?

How do you feel, Rufus, about the idea of someone?

Do they become a bad scientist, or do they merely have some areas of their knowledge where they're into bad science?

There is things that we would consider to be bad science.

I'm going to see if I can make Brian's head explode with this sentence.

Of course, science is really just a branch of philosophy.

Especially physics.

Especially physics, yeah.

That's why they sound a lot

philosophy with fact.

Yeah.

No, well, I say that to make Brian's head explode.

I don't actually mean it, but

you should mean it.

But what I do mean is

to

test anything like the nature of the universe or the physical world around us, you have to start with the idea, and therefore there has to be an idea in place, or you have to have read about somebody else's idea, or somebody else's theory, or somebody else's proof, then have an idea yourself about how that could be tested.

He's not a bad scientist because he clung necessary.

He was stubborn but human.

That doesn't make you a bad scientist.

Doing science badly makes you a bad scientist, I think.

Science as a process, as a cold logical process, cannot fail.

Test it, look at the evidence, refine, retest.

That's how progress is made.

The places where science in inverted commas is bad, it's because it's human beings who have to do the science and we fail.

But that is what being human is.

Now we went on to discuss whether the exciting idea of epigenetics proves that the grandfather of evolution Charles Darwin was wrong.

Here again are Rufus Hounds and Alice Roberts with geneticist Adam Rutherford.

Lamarck suggested that actually traits that were acquired during a lifetime could be passed on to offspring.

So, for instance, if a giraffe was trying really hard to reach branches higher up to get those leaves and grew a longer neck during its lifetime, then that could be passed on to its offspring.

And the strong arms of

a blacksmith, thank you very much, could again be passed on to the blacksmith's offspring, which I think now seems extraordinary to us because there's a distinction between characteristics that you acquire during your lifetime and characteristics that are there in your genes.

And those are the characteristics that you pass on to your offspring.

But actually, Darwin believed in soft inheritance as well.

So, you know, we celebrate him for being right about natural selection, but as Adam said, he was wrong about a lot of things.

And Darwin also thought that the that there would be a blending of characteristics between the parents as well.

I didn't he absolutely didn't understand that there were units of inheritance, which we now know to be genes.

But having said all of that, you know, we have to be careful about dogma because we've got this interesting theory of epigenetics which has arrived in the last few years, which is still very contentious, but it raises the possibility.

It raises the possibility of at least some level of acquired characteristics being passed from one generation to the next.

I should say, for the radio listeners, I should say that the, I don't know how to describe Adam Rutherford's face when epigenetics was mentioned, but it was kind of a strange, contorted.

I'd like a stab at it.

Imagine going for a wee in the woods and accidentally brushing a nettle.

and not with your arm.

Well, because then you'd have to pass on the slightly swollen arm to your children.

So, epigenetics breaks down into two things, actually, and it's basically the fact that around the DNA there are other molecules which become modified, and that affects whether genes are expressed or not, which makes a lot of difference to a cell.

The more controversial aspect of it is that some of those modifications around the genes are possibly heritable, which means that things that happen to you during your lifetime could be passed on to your children without a change in the DNA itself.

So there was an interesting experiment with either rats or mice being exposed to the smell of acetophenone, which apparently smells of cherry blossom, and being electroheated at the same time.

Nasty experiment.

And then the offspring of those rodents apparently expressed fear when they smelled the same cherry blossom smell.

And in fact, the offspring of his offspring as well.

But you do be forgotten.

That explains, and my mouse won't go to check off with me.

Now,

I've always wondered why.

I inherited it from my mad scientist uncle.

Now everything makes sense.

Now, there's a saying, isn't there, Robin?

I know some popular sayings.

Which one's this one?

You want to say that?

Every cloud has a silver lining.

Now, you know that to be inaccurate, don't you?

Yeah.

They don't have silver linings.

That's not the way water vapor works.

There's no silver in the clouds.

Yeah.

It was silver silver up there.

It'd fall to the ground.

It's too dense.

Yeah, it would be an absolute disaster.

I think it might be a metaphor, though.

Oh, okay.

So how's the metaphor work?

Run me through that.

Well, we used it as an example of how scientific failures can end with incredible inventions.

So the cloud would be the failure, and the silver lining would be the invention.

But I like clouds.

I think clouds are pretty.

Which true

cloud is a negative thing?

I agree.

Imagine a cloudless world.

I don't know who came up with this

I'm not happy.

There'd be no rain.

No.

Anyway, here's chemist Andrea Seller, who told us about the serendipitous discovery of artificial sweetness.

One of the stories that seems remarkable is that basically one of them was discovered because someone misread test for taste.

Yeah, absolutely.

Now, that could really have gone awry, couldn't it?

This is.

I think there's a supervisor.

His supervisor sent off the student or the co-worker and said, you know, send the samples off for testing.

And an hour later, the guy came back and said, hey, this one's sweet.

And the boss went, what?

And now it's called splenda.

You know, there are loads

of other examples.

I mean, another one was a chemist who went home in the evening to have dinner, but he hadn't washed his hands.

And he suddenly found that his bread roll tasted sweet.

I don't understand this.

As a chemist, the first thing I would do at the end of my day is go, I've got to wash my hands.

I'm a chemist.

Well, I mean, if I could.

I had my tongue fizzing and exploding.

Oh, I forgot to wash my hands.

Well, that's how you can tell that somebody's a chemist, Because they wash their hands before they go to the toilet.

I think also post-it notes.

They were a failure of glue design.

The 3M company, Minnesota Mining and Minerals, by the way.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

And an engineer invented glue that didn't work.

And so when they stuck something onto the wall, it fell off.

And they realized that that might be quite useful.

A very weak glue.

If you've been listening to the Infinite Monkey Cage for years on end, wondering where science got us, it's two achievements at Artificial Sweetener and weak post-it notes.

So

every time that you use weak glue, think, thank you, science.

Yeah, so when you see these people criticising science and scientists on social media, just remember that.

You know, write that on a post-it note.

Anyway, stick it on your window.

Anyway, later on in that episode, particle physicist Simon Singh told comedian Lee Mac about another failed drug that ended up being a success.

Viagra was was invented by Pfizer, and they were working on a heart drug.

And so they got it to the clinical trial stage, and so they kind of produced a whole box of these pills.

And the idea was to treat some kind of heart condition, so they gave them out to patients.

And the results were really poor.

So they asked for all the pills to come back.

People were very reluctant to return these pills.

And eventually they realized that they had another effect.

And

gosh, that's a two billion dollar industry when it was at its peak,

so to speak.

Can I ask you a question?

Was that a serendipitous gag, or was that?

Have you been building towards that for the last couple of years?

Now, it's interesting.

We are actually going to get into COVID, where there were multiple failures.

And there was a show that we did about a year before the COVID epidemic, wasn't there, where someone actually said the next thing that we're going to deal with in terms of the big human battle is going to be a pandemic.

You discuss apocalyptic scenarios on a radio show like this.

You do asteroid impact, the threat of AI, pandemic disease, and everyone goes, ha ha,

and then one happens.

In 2022, we made an episode where we looked at what we've learned from the pandemic, which, according to Dr.

Chris Van Tuliken, is not very much.

Are we looking at a world where what we've seen in the last two years is an incredible reaction to a virus?

That actually there are many things out there now, which, if it became a pandemic situation,

the wherewithal, the abilities, the knowledge would be able to come together and eradicate things which are in the world now.

I'd love to say yes to that.

I think I said in the green room that I'm a natural pessimist, and I'm often wrong to be a pessimist.

But

I think we've seen in the last

40 years of the, say, I don't know, two, three thousand new drugs that have been developed, we've seen around one percent or maybe slightly less have been developed for infectious disease in general and for particularly the infections of poverty.

So the diseases that affect so-called neglected tropical diseases, diseases that affect the poorest three billion people in the world.

And I wondered for a while if this pandemic would be this incredible wake-up where we'd go, we need to stop destroying the biosphere, we need to stop creating these interfaces that allow viruses to leap into the human population and cause pandemics.

And we need to reduce all the sources of pandemic disease.

And I'm not really sure that we are seeing that happen.

I think we are going to see increased funding to people like Sarah working on.

I mean, I know you're working on vaccines for diseases like MERS and other coronaviruses.

So we are going to see a bit of that.

But I feel like the revolution that I might have wanted hasn't quite happened.

And so we are seeing monkeypox.

we're seeing vaccine-derived polio in our sewers.

There is an ever-present threat of pandemic avian influenza, which could well make,

and I'm conscious I'm the company I'm speaking in, but a pandemic avian flu could make this coronavirus pandemic look pretty trivial.

And MERS as a threat coming out of North Africa and the Middle East, this is a coronavirus that the reservoirs, we think in camels, maybe bats,

this again could be catastrophic.

And this kind of viral chatter, where there is an exchange between

the natural world or the wild world and the human world continues.

And it may be continuing at an ever-accelerating pace as we destroy our wild places.

But we have to sort of think about what are the forces that are driving this?

Because it's not accidental.

It's because we don't put the external costs of the risk of creating pandemics on essentially the corporations and the profits that drive them.

So if we think of destroying ecosystems, that doesn't happen by accident.

It happens because there's a lot of money in doing it.

And there's never quite as much money in preventing a pandemic as there is in making money from the pandemic that happened.

So we see that a number of a huge number of corporations and individuals have made a huge amount of money and we've increased global inequality.

So poor people have got poorer, but the rich have got incalculably richer over the course of this pandemic.

And so until we understand that pandemics happen because forces drive them to happen, it's not accidental.

We can arrest it, but it will require the exertion of political power over private interests.

Next time on the Infinite Monkeys Guide 2, we'll be looking into the future.

Oh, you love looking into the future.

We won't.

I mean, we won't.

We won't be looking into the future.

Even though in a block universe it's there, we don't actually know what time is.

All the episodes we took clips from are available on BBC Sounds, and you can find all the details of those in the programme description for this show.

In the Infinite Monkey Cage.

Till now, nice again.

Hello, it's Zahn Van Tulliken here, and I'm back with my twin brother, Chris.

That's me.

In the third series of our Radio 4 podcast, A Thorough Examination.

And we're going to be talking about exercise.

Now, I really love it.

And this has been really annoying for me.

In fact, it's gone beyond annoying.

It's more like you've joined some sort of cult.

But I think Chris needs to do more.

In fact, I think everyone needs to do more.

There is a general crisis of inactivity in the UK that we should all be worried worried about.

So in this series we weigh up whether exercise really is the miracle cure for all that ails us or whether it's been oversold and actually lounging around is just fine.

Listen to us resolving the argument on BBC Sounds.

BBC Sounds.

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