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AncientBiotics With Steve Diggle and Freya Harrison

Meet The Microbiologist

Release Date: 06/02/2023

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Dr. Steve Diggle, ASM Distinguished Lecturer and Microbiology Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia and Dr. Freya Harrison, Associate Microbiology Professor at the University of Warwick in Coventry, U.K., discuss the science behind medieval medical treatments and the benefits of interdisciplinary research.

Ashley's Biggest Takeaways

  • Diggle and Harrison met in Oxford, where Harrison was finishing up her Ph.D. and Diggle was doing background research for his work studying evolutionary questions about quorum sensing.
  • When Diggle began searching for a postdoc, Harrison, who had been conducting an independent fellowship at Oxford and studying social evolution, applied.
  • The AncientBiotics Consortium is a group of experts from the sciences, arts and humanities, who are digging through medieval medical books in hopes of finding ancient solutions to today’s growing threat of antibiotic resistance.
  • The group’s first undertaking was recreation and investigation of the antimicrobial properties of an ancient eyesalve described in Bald’s Leechbook, one of the earliest known medical textbooks, which contains recipes for medications, salves and treatments.
  • The consortium found that the eyesalve was capable of killing MRSA, a discovery that generated a lot of media attention and sparked expanded research efforts.  
  • The group brought data scientists and mathematicians into the consortium (work driven by Dr. Erin Connelly from the University of Warwick).
  • Together, the researchers began scouring early modern and medieval texts and turning them into databases.
  • The goal? To mathematically data mine these recipes see which ingredients were very often or non-randomly combined in ancient medical remedies.
  • The group recently published work showing synergistic antimicrobial effects of acetic acid and honey.
  • They are also working to pull out the active compounds from Bald’s eyesalve and make a synthetic cocktail that could be added to a wound dressings.


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