Nine amazing stories about blood |
Robyn Williams: Now another reminder that you don't have to have a degree in science to enjoy the natural world or to appreciate scientific ideas. Rose George is a prime example. She studied modern languages at Oxford, and while there discovered the brilliance of Janet Vaughan who worked in blood, saved many lives and was even one of the first to investigate the concentration camps. Rose George was here for the Adelaide Festival.
So my first question to you is why do you take on such difficult assignments? You've got container ships, you've got shit, and now you've got blood.
Rose George: Perhaps I don't think they're difficult when I start, and it's only when I've been struggling with them for a couple of years that I realise that…I always resolve that I'm going to do an easier topic next time, and it never quite happens.
Robyn Williams: Where did shit take you?
Rose George: Well, it took me down the sewers, it took me to Japan, it took me to India. There's a lot of shit in India. A lot of good happening in shit in India as well.
Robyn Williams: Are they getting toilets? Because half the population in India don't have toilets.
Rose George: Well, every new administration in India has some kind of toilet campaign, and Narendra Modi's government is no different and they've been doing something called Swachh Bharat, which means Clean India. And ostensibly, according to the government, they are building a lot of toilets, but one of the things I found in the book which is really fascinating is that if you give someone a free toilet they tend not to maintain it. When I was there before this government, there was a lot of unused free government toilets lying around. They weren't very nice either, they were just basic toilets. And I think there's some reports saying that similar things are happening now. But is always massive ambitions about toilets in India. From Gandhi who said that toilets were more important than independence, which is quite a thing to say from the father of independence in India.
Robyn Williams: Container ships, did you have to go away and sail on them?
Rose George: I thought that was the first thing I should do so I had actually been on a container ship before a few years earlier for a week. I went to sea with 22 Indians and crossed the Atlantic in midwinter on the path of the Titanic, which was quite an extraordinary trip as you can imagine. I also didn't touch curry for three years afterwards.
So when I was coming to think of another book I thought I'd really like to do that again because it was such an extraordinary world, there was nothing like it because you're on this massive, massive object in the middle of the wildest element in the world, the most dangerous place on the planet I think, the ocean, but at the same time you're in such a claustrophobic environment because you're in this small accommodation house which is where the crew has to live, work, play. You cannot escape. It's essentially a prison. I think it was Samuel Johnson who said that seafaring was prison without a salary. But it's such an interesting combination of circumstances, there is really nowhere like a working ship at sea, so I had some experience of that so I wanted to do more of it, so I went back to sea for five weeks. And I went from Felixstowe to Singapore through the Indian Ocean at the absolute height of Somali piracy. I have no idea why Maersk let me do it. I was the last passenger there allowed to go through, and we were fine, but that was just luck really.
Robyn Williams: And what was the stimulation perhaps for blood, Nine Pints in other words? Was it giving your one pint in Tooting Broadway to the blood bank?
Rose George: I do enjoy giving blood. I don't think that was the stimulus, it was more that when I wrote the book about sanitation I looked a little bit at what was called menstrual hygiene, which is this wonderful NGO clunky term. Periods essentially. But it was really fascinating and disturbing that a connection was being made between girls dropping out of school permanently and maybe it was when they were reaching puberty, and there were no toilets in schools. Obviously when they started their periods that became an even bigger issue than it had been before. So this connection, which is not entirely robustly proven by evidence but there's quite a lot of anecdotal evidence that there is that connection, I just thought that was such an extraordinary thing, I thought I'd like to explore that more. But I didn't want to write a book just about periods, so I started looking at more aspects of blood and I started thinking, well, why is menstrual blood considered bad, it has to be hidden and it's stigmatised, even now. And why is blood that comes out of your arm, why is that considered such an unallied good, and what's the difference between the two? And so that kind of juxtaposition of those two types of blood was a bit of a jumping-off board.
Robyn Williams: And of course the famous Janet Vaughan whose portrait you've been looking at. Did you ever meet Janet Vaughan?
Rose George: I didn't and I really regret that because she was still alive. When I was at Somerville, 1988 to 1992, I think she died in 1994, so I think she was still probably zooming around Oxford in her mini. Apparently she drove like a kangaroo.
Robyn Williams: Yes, I saw that in your book and wondered, ga-doing, ga-doing.
Rose George: Yes, exactly. But yes, I really regret not meeting her. I suspect she would have been quite intimidating, I think she would have been quite brisk. From all accounts she was extremely kind and extremely generous, and she was a very good principal, I think she was very well loved. When people were ill with a bad bout of flu she would take the trays of food to the sick bays herself and things like that. And then there was that lovely story of when in the war when she was doing her blood transfusion supply service and she came across a girl who had been horribly burned actually in a house fire, it wasn't actually a bombing, but she thought the girl was dead and dying, so she left her and attended to other wounded, and then she came back to her and thought, well, I can't get blood into her vain because she was so badly burnt, so she thought I'll just experiment, and she'd read that you can put blood into bones, which makes sense when you realise that bones make blood, so she stuck a needle into this girl's bone and she saved her life. And then years later the girl applied to Oxford, and the only college she applied to was Somerville.
Robyn Williams: That was a very moving story. And of course Somerville is a great scientific college because not only is the name associated with the first person in history to be called a scientist, Mary Somerville the mathematician, as we broadcast in The Science Show with a program about Whewell, but you've got one of the greatest scientists of all time, another woman Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin was there and she was in charge of Margaret Thatcher when Margaret Thatcher was a chemist, wasn't she.
Rose George: Was she the one who said that Margaret Thatcher was a bit of an indifferent chemist? I can't remember…
Robyn Williams: Well, the legend was, and I've checked this, that Dorothy Hodgkin gave Margaret Thatcher assignments that were too bloody difficult, and eventually Margaret Thatcher gave up. She got her chemistry degree and then specialised in ice cream, funnily enough, that twirly ice cream that you get, but then she turned to law and was put off by the fact that Dorothy Hodgkin was somewhat trying. I don't know whether they didn't get on because of politics because Dorothy Hodgkin was terribly left-wing. But is there some sort of memorial to both of them in Somerville now?
Rose George: There's a building called Hodgkin, there's a building called Vaughan, and there is a building called Thatcher actually but that's newer, that was not popular with a lot of the college students. I know there is a bust of Margaret Thatcher which is allegedly behind bullet-proof glass, I think that's probably a rumour that was just too good and probably isn't true. There are portraits all along the walls of Somerville of pretty astonishing women who really fought serious misogyny and serious sexism and achieved great things. There's a big campaign for Dorothy Hodgkin to be on the next banknote, I think it's the £50 note. I actually want Janet Vaughan to be on there. Janet Vaughan doesn't even have a blue plaque anywhere.
Robyn Williams: That's puzzling because, you see, I had not heard of her before I read your book and I find that astounding.
Rose George: I don't think she blew her own trumpet. She was very established and distinguished, she was on all sorts of committees, but I think she was so busy doing science, she was a working scientist throughout her career. As principal she would get up at five and deal with all her correspondence and then head to the lab. But I don't know why she isn't better-known.
Robyn Williams: I am pretty damn sure that the chapter on Janet in your book is one of your favourites because it kind of glows with the enthusiasm for what she did. Another chapter is on HIV. Why do you think that has had less attention?
Rose George: I wanted to understand why HIV amongst my generation but particularly the generations below me is considered a done deal and not a big deal, and it's just something you can take medication for and live with. It is true if you take your meds properly then you can have a normal lifespan. They are not absolutely benign, you might have some side-effects, but it's not the killer that it was that we were all trained to be terrified of in the 1980s.
So when I started looking at HIV, because I wanted to write about a blood-borne disease, I started looking at HIV and I came across this extraordinary quote from the head of UN AIDS which was AIDS is now an epidemic of women, it's an epidemic of straight women around the world globally. And I found that so astonishing and disturbing that I started looking at that. And I kind of resisted going to South Africa because it's such a clichéd place to go to when you write about HIV, but when I looked at the facts and figures about what was happening in South Africa, particularly amongst young straight women who were being infected by older boyfriends, I found it too compelling and I just had to go there. But it bothers me that that chapter hasn't really been written about in reviews or anything.
Robyn Williams: Presumably people think that that's kind of period is passed, because before Mandela there was Mbeki, a very intelligent guy, who nonetheless was persuaded that the HIV story was wrong and at that time I think it was a many of the men who travelled a lot and in various villages they had women and they went for the young ones because they thought, well, having a virgin would be some sort of protection against any disease. And that was maintained by the African establishment who were running the government.
Rose George: Well, there was one recent South African president who thought you could get rid of HIV by having a shower, and that was in the last 10 years, which is…it leaves me speechless. But South Africa should not have a problem with HIV now because it has free meds for anyone who needs them, antiretrovirals, and yet the rates are still going up and they are going up amongst young women.
So if you talk to, as I did, the experts at Médecins sans Frontières who set up the first clinic for HIV in South Africa many years ago and are still there, they're really worried because the kids who are born with HIV, for example, are now teenagers or early 20s, and they are getting to the point where they also think it is not a big deal, so they are tired of taking medication every day, they are tired of having this condition and they are going off their meds. So that's an issue because that can breed resistance to what is called first-line drugs. So then you're on second-line drugs. But then what if you breed resistance to the second-line drugs? And then there isn't the money for the third-line drugs.
So there are a lot of people who are very, very concerned about where we are now because on the one hand funding for HIV and AIDS funding which is being reduced because it's seen as beaten in the western countries which, by the way, it isn't, if you look at rates among gay black men in America they are absolutely horrific. So the funding is drying up, but yet the rates are not going down. There's been a lot of progress in HIV AIDS, massive, massive progress. And amazing scientific discoveries, antiretrovirals are just one of the best medical discoveries ever. But things are still wrong. We still need to pay attention to HIV.
Robyn Williams: What about in Uganda where the progress seemed to be so fine, and then I think the evangelists moved in?
Rose George: Well, yes, Uganda was doing really well, it had reduced its HIV rates, it increased condom rates, it had this wonderful behavioural change campaign called 'zero grazing', encouraging people to only have one partner rather than several, so, you know, just stick to your main meals rather than your snacks. And that all worked very well. And then suddenly slowly American funding came in that apparently had conditions about not encouraging condom use, so it was more conservative, it was more religious, and progress went backwards. It was seen as this great success story for HIV AIDS, and now it's not.
Robyn Williams: When you travel for your books, do you ever feel vulnerable and at risk?
Rose George: Well, for example, in South Africa I was being hosted by Médecins sans Frontières, so no, I didn't feel vulnerable there. Where their clinic is in Khayelitsha and their headquarters in Khayelitsha, which is a big shantytown outside Cape Town, it's considered very dangerous. I wasn't allowed to cross the road by foot, I had to take a car to cross a road.
Robyn Williams: Down sewers?
Rose George: I didn't feel vulnerable down sewers, no, again I had all the right protection, big burly men all around me…
Robyn Williams: Big burly rats as well?
Rose George: I didn't see any rats. I saw some pretty scary cockroaches down the American sewer, and I'm not a big fan of cockroaches. On the ship I was a little bit concerned because even though I'd been given permission to go aboard as what's called a supernumerary, so a non-paying passenger, and I'd been told who the captain was but they couldn't know who the crew was or how they would receive me or accept me. So for a while I did make a point of only wearing trousers and not skirts.
Actually there was another woman on board when I got on board which was a relief, the cook was a woman, Pinkie. But most of the crew, there were only 22 of them but they were obviously all men because hardly any women work on container ships. So I wore trousers. And then after a couple of weeks I felt safe enough to wear skirts, and after a week I would leave my cabin door unlocked, and then I would leave the door propped open like everybody else, and eventually it was fine. I was very lucky with the crew and the captain on my ship.
Robyn Williams: Rose George's extraordinary book, just published, is called Nine Pints, and we shall talk about it and blood at greater length in The Science Show later in the year.
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