Experimenting on her audience

Abstract

It's not often that an academic has to seek permission from her ethics committee before giving a public engagement with science talk, but that's exactly what Dr Clare Taylor, Lecturer in Medical Microbiology at Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, UK, did for The Antibiotic Apocalypse Threatens Us All! on Aug 27, 2016, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world's largest arts festival. Taylor used her show to kick-off a scientific experiment. “I was looking through some of the scientific papers that have been published exploring how widespread antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is and one thing I noticed was that almost all of the studies that I looked at were from people in hospitals or people who had a condition that meant they had to go to the doctor', she explained to her audience. “You might expect people in hospitals to be ill and so they're an easy target population for people to do research on. I couldn't find any papers where people had looked to see how far-spread AMR is in the general population. So I thought what better way for us to try to understand AMR than by all of us taking part in a research project together?'' Genetically modified bacteria could save your lifeSalmonella often gets a bad press. Many people blame the UK's former Health Minister Edwina Currie, who was forced to resign in 1988 after claiming, without justification, that most of the UK's eggs were infected with the bacteria. But Clare Taylor from the School of Health, Life and Social Sciences at Edinburgh Napier University (Edinburgh, UK), jumped to Currie's defence at the start of her talk on Aug 9, 2015, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe . “One of my heroes is Edwina Currie,” joked Taylor. Full-Text PDF