here we can see arsenic atom , a shimming metal purple atom bound to this golden looking atom which selenium , there are two sulphurs and they are incidental to this point. The point is it’s a one to one selenium complex. There is one selenium to one arsenic in this molecular form. We were thinking about what is happening in Bangladesh .there still is a very major problem of low level of arsenic in the drinking water in Bangladesh. It affects an enormous number of people. basically the arsenic is coming from what they call tube whales which are just simple actinium whales , perhaps some of you get your wear from artesian whales . It turns out to that there is a small amount not a huge amount of arsenic in the drinking water. It affects 30-7 million people. That’s just an awful lot of people. Neil told you I mobbed to Canada, 13 million is the population of Canada. I’m English, 75 million people is more than the entire population of the United Kingdom. This is an enormous number of people that are affected by this problem and this is not the only place in the world that we have this problems foxing on. There is problems in china and other places too. however they are some locations in the world which have similar arsenic levels in the water but have less sever health problems, why should one population be affected poorly while the other is barely affected at all. The mechanism of this low level arsenic problem is really unknown.
What are they atoms? I won’t go into lots of details but they involve a whole lot of skin problems, malignant tumours and death. there is no good information on how many persons in Bangladesh have died and these are typical pictures of what the medics calls arsenic legions on the hands and feet’s of Bangladeshi suffers and you can tell it looks pretty unpleasant . As I mention selenium is an absolutely essential trace element and deficiency results in skin problems, malignant tumours and death. Many of us take selenium on a semi regular basis. For every arsenic that is removed by the formation of this molecule one selenium is lost. Our hypothesis that we published was does the low level arsenic poisoned in Bangladesh actually cause selenium efficiency? We still don’t know for sure. We can’t do experiments on human being but its striking that the symptoms of selenium deficiency and low level arsenic poisoning are indeed very similar. there are other parts of the world , the Bangladesh and the other regions of the world that are affected by this so called chronic low level arsenic poisoning are actually low in dietary selenium so they don’t have much selenium in their diets anyway . Perhaps this is an explanation of what’s going on. We hope so.
it turns our there is a chines group studying one of the affected areas in china and administering selenium supplements and indeed in that case in appears to have striking benefits . Singrotum radiation perhaps allowed us to help quite a lot of people we hope in due course that’s true.
I’m going to say a few words about hats next. I’ve told you a lot of problems, what do we want to do next? Many of the things we want to do or to understand have to do with mercury. Arsenic is close to be in solved now at least from a molecular point of view. We want to understand the methyl mercury latency. We want to understand the fertile nature of mercury selenium interactions and we want to push detections limits to even Lowe levels. one thing I haven’t mentioned is what has made all these experiments possible are really the super bright x-ray beams at facilities like the sigrotum radiation laboratory, slack and other places in the world but all of these experiments were actually done at SSRL and the new detectors, highly stable, holy automated experimental facilities here basically have allowed us to push detection limits to really low levels, levels that people really can’t achieve elsewhere.
when you publish a paper in a scientific journal like Science you get revived by other scientist and one of my reviewer wanted to know why I was able to do experiments with a 1000th of the samples that he could . The reason is that here at slack they are very good at doing what they do. we want to push detection linnets to even lower levels and we want to look at something custom collators which I believe is the promise of the future and I’m going to talk about those . Once we know the molecular forms in our bodies we are in great shape to design a way to get it out. what we’ve been doing is we’ve been using some fancy computer techniques to design specific candidate drugs, they’re into drugs until they’re really ready to use for treatment of poisoning. One way you can view this is that a custom collator works like a clock and a key. It’s very key specific, the metal is the key, and the key later is the lock for example. They only go together with the right lock and key. Other metals really won’t fit as well as the target metal. This is a molecule that is tailored to fit that particular thing you’re trying to grab and removed and make it unavailable for poisoning in the body and the goal of course is to remove the metal from the body. this is on candidate molecule and you can see it has grabbed a mercury atom here , there are three sulphur atoms that have positioned in the absolutely ideal place for binding and I should say this is a molecule that doesn’t actually exist yet. It only exist in the compute. It’s calculated and we understand a lot of its property from what the computer can tell us but it doesn’t really exist yet but it will.
I would like to summarise, molecular form matters, it’s really important to know the details .there is absolutely no use understating how much lead, mercury, whatever the metal. You really have to know what the molecular form you’re dealing with. You really need to understand the molecules not just the levels of the metal. Molecules are very important they can make all the difference. We must in our research examine this and not just the levels. its tradition specially their medical research people have used methyl mercury compounds without even saying what the methyl mercury compounds is and there are published papers in literature many often that say ” methyl mercury was added ” and we don’t know methyl mercury thing they added was . It is very important we must understand the molecules. Syngotrum radiation hopefully provides a key promise of better health for all of us. I’m going to acknowledge Stanford Singotorum Radiation Laboratory. The faculty here is really outstanding and without the benefit of those none of this could have been accomplished and what we do is a very small part of the overall research at SSRL which is supported by the department of energy in the NIH and these are all the people who have given me grants and lastly I will like to thank you for your attention.
I think we have time for some question.
Audience: with x-rays is it possible to distinguish between bots in the molecules <inaudible>
graham : with the technique that we called x-ray absorption spectroscopy we can tell what the neighbouring atoms are in a molecule , ordinary x-rays like your doctor’s office x ray won’t do that. It will just tell you that a there is something that’s dense to x-ray.
Audience: how do you get to the compound that you want to x-ray, do you have to get to single molecule?
Graham: we don’t need to get a single molecule we can take a whole piece of tissue. People wouldn’t put a finger in the beam they would be a bit foolish to do so. They wouldn’t be allowed back in the facility if they put a finger in the beam. In principle you can put a piece of biopsy in the x-ray beam den look at it directly. You couldn’t damage the tissue not significantly.
Audience: how are you able to isolate?
Graham: you get what is called a spectrum what you do is you vary the energy of the x-ray and you look at the different ways in which it is absorbed. I don’t really want to go into details here because its kind goof complexed and it would bore most people. You want to get into details more I will tell you after.
Audience<inaudible>
Graham: mercury 199 MMI is a useful probe. In fact that’s what Karen Whetham was doing when she was poisoned. Unfortunately its sensitivity is way too low to actually measure a real sample. You couldn’t put fish into a MMR machine and see anything. Our sensitivity is perhaps a million times greater than MMR.
Audience: <inaudible> sheep with the mercury fillings in their teeth, why haven’t you had your fillings out?
graham : the simple reason is if you have your fillings pulled , that’s a great question actually , that’s probably something I should have said . If you have your fillings removed you get a way bigger dose of mercury than you’re going to get if you leave them in. the action of pulling them out would be much worse than leaving them in place. Mine us staying put. Why? Because some is lost and some is ingested. Dentists are very careful with mercury these days. Many of them put on a thing they call a dam which fits around you tooth and prevents any little drops getting lost in your mouth and swallowed but inevitably there is always some ingestion. Its better that they stay put
Audience: I just went to the dentist and was actually talking to him. He said the mercury that’s still in the cavities is sealed inside so there is a little risk but it’s not open faced in your mouth
Graham: if you look in the mirror and you see a grey metallic looking substance in your mouth that is silver mercury and Malcom. It’s not very available, not much of the mercury comes out so I wouldn’t worry too much about it.
Audience: do you have the same problems concerned with mercury, arsenic and lead in that the molecular form of lead
Graham: yes the molecular form of lead is important, the same rules applies.
audience: you mentioned selenium but another things like quitsanmine and thimene and some of the others are also like combining with mercury and they also make something else which then makes it worse and possibly nathinene deficient .
Graham: I don’t know of anyone become methionine deficient, nathainein is a very common amino acid in all the protein.
Audience: there’s a Russian book by Eli Tactinburg and it as written in 1974
Graham: are you sure its emethaninie? I don’t know that it works.
Audience: meth amine has a sulphur component it’s a very attractive stimulus
Graham: not in methionine because it’s a fayoeater so it will not form very strong curvalum bombs like thyols will.
Audience: there was a study that they did on animals
Graham: ok I will look that up.
Audience: wanted to share a counter opinion not he mercury and fillings. Just as my understanding mercury in a filling is not a molecule, it’s an alloy so it really is mercury with silver that is inter mingled. read some research that suggested that the mercury that gets into your mouth in concert with the organism that grow on your mouth it may be becoming more bio active . I know that mercury may not be that dangerous but there is not a lot of evidence that it’s staying elemental mercury.