Speaker 1: Pushkin a warning before we start. This cautionary tale discusses
Speaker 1: death by suicide. If you're suffering emotional distress or if
Speaker 1: you're having suicidal thoughts, support is available, for example, from
Speaker 1: the nine eight to eight Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in
Speaker 1: the US. Funeral director Ron Fleet is driving his van
Speaker 1: to a hospital in Catherine de Barnes, a quiet village
Speaker 1: in the countryside near Birmingham, England. Catherine de Barnes is tiny,
Speaker 1: just a few dozen houses and a nineteenth century pub.
Speaker 1: To get to the hospital, you drive half a mile
Speaker 1: out of the village down a narrow lane flanked by
Speaker 1: hedgerows and fields. The hospital is a big, old building
Speaker 1: and twenty acres of grounds. The year is nineteen seven eight.
Speaker 1: You might expect this to be a journey. Ron Fleet
Speaker 1: knows well. Funeral directors do tend to become familiar with
Speaker 1: their local hospitals. But no. The hospital in the village
Speaker 1: of Catherine de Barnes hasn't seen a death for years.
Speaker 1: It hasn't seen a patient for years. It's an isolation hospital,
Speaker 1: kept empty but ready just in case someone gets some
Speaker 1: appalling infectious disease that requires them to be confined safely
Speaker 1: away from the public. Year after year after year, the
Speaker 1: hospital's husband and wife caretakers have kept award with sixteen
Speaker 1: beds on constant standby, ready for patients who mercifully never came.
Speaker 1: But now they have had a patient and she's died.
Speaker 1: Ron Fleet assumes that the body he's come to collect
Speaker 1: will be in a morgue or a fridge. It isn't.
Speaker 1: He's directed to a garage some distance away from the
Speaker 1: main hospital building. In the garage, he finds a transparent
Speaker 1: body bag. It's clear that this woman must have suffered terribly.
Speaker 1: Her body and face are covered with saws, scars, and
Speaker 1: fluid filled pustules, and the body's on the floor, not
Speaker 1: a trolley. How's he going to get it into his van?
Speaker 1: He goes back to the main building to ask someone
Speaker 1: to help him. Nobody seems keen. Fleet opens the back
Speaker 1: doors of his van and heaves the body inside. Some
Speaker 1: kind of liquid sloshes around inside the transparent body bag.
Speaker 1: I really hope this bag doesn't split, thinks ron Fleet.
Speaker 1: I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to cautionary tales. By
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties, smallpox had become rare enough in England
Speaker 1: that when someone got it, it was often misdiagnosed. In
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty six, for example, a young man called Tony
Speaker 1: became ill with what seemed like flu. Tony called in
Speaker 1: sick to his job as a medical photographer at the
Speaker 1: University of Birmingham and spent a few days in bed
Speaker 1: with aches and a fever. Then came the rash, when
Speaker 1: he thought he'd better get a doctor to look at it.
Speaker 1: Maybe a sweat rash, said the doctor. You'll have been
Speaker 1: sweating with that fever, or it could be a reaction
Speaker 1: to the medicine you've been taking. Anyway, nothing to worry about.
Speaker 1: Tony starts to feel better, well enough to resume his
Speaker 1: social life. He needs to freshen up a bit, so
Speaker 1: he borrows his dad's raisor to shave. He's got to
Speaker 1: be careful as he's still got that rash on his face,
Speaker 1: and he accidentally slices through one of the pustules. He
Speaker 1: goes to the pub with his dad and his girlfriend.
Speaker 1: The barman winces sympathetically nasty attack of acne. A week
Speaker 1: and a bit later, Tony's dad gets a spot on
Speaker 1: his face where he's nicked himself with the razor Tony borrowed.
Speaker 1: He then gets a fever and more spots. An old
Speaker 1: man who'd been drinking in the pub gets hilled too,
Speaker 1: who he infects his teenage grandson, who infects a hitchhiker
Speaker 1: he meets at a roadside cafe while on a trip
Speaker 1: to the beach. A couple of hours drive away. The
Speaker 1: hitchhiker gets home to another part of the country and
Speaker 1: infects his mum. Various people go to doctors who say,
Speaker 1: probably flu or that looks like chicken pox. It's eight
Speaker 1: weeks before someone sees a doctor who seen smallpox before
Speaker 1: and says, hmm, let's test for that. There are two
Speaker 1: types of smallpox. Veriola major was the one you really
Speaker 1: didn't want. It killed about thirty percent of those it infected.
Speaker 1: Veriola minor was much less serious, but still no joke.
Speaker 1: Its fatality rate was one percent, comparable to COVID. Once
Speaker 1: the tests confirmed that Variola minor is at large, the
Speaker 1: medical authorities start to put the pieces together. They find
Speaker 1: seventy three people who've been infected. Luckily, nobody's died. The
Speaker 1: medics trace back the roots of infection, and they seemed
Speaker 1: to converge on young Tony. But where had Tony got it? Well,
Speaker 1: smallpox might have been rare in England at the time
Speaker 1: that it was still common enough in the Indian subcontinent.
Speaker 1: The last outbreak of small pox in Britain four years
Speaker 1: earlier turned out to have started with people recently arrived
Speaker 1: from Karachi. Birmingham had a high rate of immigration from
Speaker 1: the subcontinent. Tony enjoyed a varied social life with friends
Speaker 1: from all backgrounds. It was perfectly possible, as Tony's own
Speaker 1: case showed, to go out on the town while not
Speaker 1: realizing you're infectious with a mild case of Veriola minor.
Speaker 1: Most likely Tony had picked it up from someone he
Speaker 1: had met at a party. The building at the University
Speaker 1: of Birmingham where Tony worked as a medical photographer, also
Speaker 1: housed a laboratory that did research on smallpox. The lab
Speaker 1: was run by a man called Henry Bedson, a well
Speaker 1: respected smallpox expert. Bedson had been cultivating strains of Variola
Speaker 1: minor just over a week before Tony's symptoms started. The
Speaker 1: incubation period for smallpox is typically between a week and
Speaker 1: a fortnight. Quite a coincidence. Was it just a coincidence?
Speaker 1: Nobody seemed too worried. At the time, the university didn't
Speaker 1: feel the need to hold an investigation. Tony's office wasn't
Speaker 1: even on the same floor as the smallpox lab, and
Speaker 1: everyone knew smallpox didn't spread that easily. It needed both
Speaker 1: close personal contact and a dose bad luck. Think about
Speaker 1: the outbreak Tony started. Yes, it passed it on to
Speaker 1: a few people, but he met many more who didn't
Speaker 1: get infected. In eight weeks, only seventy three people had
Speaker 1: picked it up. The idea that virus particles might have
Speaker 1: found their way out of Bedson's lab and wandered around
Speaker 1: the building, missing everyone else, until they met Tony on
Speaker 1: the floor above seemed fantastical. Still, the coincidence was striking.
Speaker 1: It occurred to Bedson's boss, the head of the department,
Speaker 1: that he should probably get an outside opinion. He asked
Speaker 1: another smallpox expert to visit the university and check that
Speaker 1: Bedson was taking adequate precautions. All looks perfectly standard, said
Speaker 1: the expert, Same as any other smallpox lab. By nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy eight, twelve years later, Henry Bedson has moved up
Speaker 1: in the world. He's still at the University of Birmingham,
Speaker 1: but he's now the head of Department of Medical Microbiology.
Speaker 1: He's forty eight years old, married with three young kids.
Speaker 1: He looks like a stereotypical academic scientist, bald, softly spoken,
Speaker 1: tweed jacket. With his new departmental duties, Bedson no longer
Speaker 1: has time to be so hands on in his old
Speaker 1: smallpox lab, but he has a PhD student doing research,
Speaker 1: and that research is important. In those twelve years, much
Speaker 1: has changed. Smallpox is no longer common on the Indian subcontinent,
Speaker 1: or indeed anywhere. It's been wiped off the face of
Speaker 1: the earth. Teams of workers led by the World Health
Speaker 1: Organization have been visiting the furthest flung villages of the
Speaker 1: world's poorest countries, persuading people to be vaccinated, tracing contacts
Speaker 1: where they find a case. Henry Bedson himself has been
Speaker 1: involved the who sent him to Afghanistan and Pakistan as
Speaker 1: part of an expert committee, and all that hard work
Speaker 1: has succeeded. It's been eight months now since the last
Speaker 1: report of a case of smallpox anywhere in the world.
Speaker 1: That case was in Somalia. It looks likely to go
Speaker 1: down in history as the very last time any human
Speaker 1: gets this terrible disease. Ever, but what if there was
Speaker 1: a way smallpox might come back? What if there was
Speaker 1: a similar virus lurking in some population of wild animals,
Speaker 1: liable to cross over to humans at any time? Smallpox,
Speaker 1: after all, like many human diseases, originally came from animals,
Speaker 1: maybe camels, gerbils. It's not entirely clear, and two recent
Speaker 1: discoveries were troubling Henry Bedson. Researchers in the Netherlands and
Speaker 1: Russia had found a virus that looked very much like smallpox,
Speaker 1: lurking in samples taken from wild monkeys and rodents. This
Speaker 1: new mystery virus had become known as whitepox. But what
Speaker 1: was whitepox? How exactly did it differ from the various
Speaker 1: strains of Variola major? Might it pose a threat to humans?
Speaker 1: These were the questions Henry Bedson had his PhD student
Speaker 1: investigating that Bedson had a problem because the wighthow was
Speaker 1: worried about another way smallpox might come back. What if
Speaker 1: it leaked from a lab? Plenty of labs around the world,
Speaker 1: like Bedson's, were working on smallpox viruses. The wh show
Speaker 1: wanted to restrict all future research to just a handful
Speaker 1: of labs that would meet more stringent new safety standards.
Speaker 1: Bedson's lab was not on the list. Henry Bedson wrote
Speaker 1: to the World Health Organization, Can I have a few
Speaker 1: more months to finish up my white box research? My
Speaker 1: lab's been scaling down. I promise I'll be done by
Speaker 1: the end of the year. Bedson was arguably being economical
Speaker 1: with the truth. The lab had scaled down compared to
Speaker 1: a few years ago. It had just one PhD student now,
Speaker 1: but in the hope of completing his white box work
Speaker 1: before his lab had to close, Bedson had just scaled
Speaker 1: up his stocks of smallpox, taking delivery of twenty two
Speaker 1: new samples of different strains of the virus. The World
Speaker 1: Health Organization wrote back, okay, then just until the end
Speaker 1: of the year. Bedson was relieved, and then one evening
Speaker 1: in August at home, his phone rang. It was a
Speaker 1: doctor he knew, calling from the hospital. Henry said the voice,
Speaker 1: I've got a patient here with a suspected case of smallpox.
Speaker 1: Cautionary tales will be back after the break. By nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy eight, young Tony has left his job as the
Speaker 1: medical photographer at the University of Birmingham. There's a new
Speaker 1: photographer now working on the floor above Henry Bedson's smallpox lab.
Speaker 1: Her name is Janet Parker and she's forty years old.
Speaker 1: On the second Friday in August, Janet begins to feel unwell.
Speaker 1: A few days later, she starts to get a rash.
Speaker 1: She sees a doctor chicken pox. She also has sostiitis,
Speaker 1: and the doctor prescribes antibiotics for that. A couple of
Speaker 1: days later, the rash is much worse. She sees a
Speaker 1: second doctor, maybe an allergic reaction to the antibiotic. He
Speaker 1: prescribes a different antibiotic. Days go by and Janet's condition
Speaker 1: gets worse and worse. She sees a third doctor. This
Speaker 1: doctor calls the infectious diseases unit at the hospital. I
Speaker 1: don't think it's chicken pox, she says. But I'm stumped.
Speaker 1: Can one of your infectious disease specialists visit her home
Speaker 1: and take a look. We don't do home visits, say
Speaker 1: the hospital. That's the policy. Well, let it's smallpox. No
Speaker 1: chance of that, says Janet's doctor. She hasn't been out
Speaker 1: of the country for five years. The hospital will send
Speaker 1: an ambulance and it is admitted to the infectious diseases unit.
Speaker 1: The specialist there takes a close look at Janet and
Speaker 1: makes some notes. Parsicular rash, most pronounced on the face,
Speaker 1: lesions half a centimeter, white fluid, more advanced lesions with
Speaker 1: darkened centers, no lesions in the mouth, febrile question mark
Speaker 1: drug reaction, then question mark, question mark, question mark variola.
Speaker 1: The doctor consults her colleagues it can't be smallpox, but
Speaker 1: they're sufficiently puzzled to want to rule it out. The
Speaker 1: trouble is none of them have experienced with smallpox. They've
Speaker 1: only seen it in textbooks. But they still have access
Speaker 1: to a designated regional smallpox consultant, a doctor who's worked
Speaker 1: in Bangladesh and knows the disease. They find his number.
Speaker 1: It's seven point thirty in the evening, and the regional
Speaker 1: smallpox consultant is about to open a bottle of wine
Speaker 1: at home when his phone rings. He doesn't get many
Speaker 1: calls like this, maybe once a year, but he doesn't
Speaker 1: mind because he gets a fee for every call out.
Speaker 1: So far, it's always been either a bad case of
Speaker 1: chicken pox or an allergic reaction to a drug. He
Speaker 1: puts his wine aside, drives to the hospital, finds Janet's
Speaker 1: room and that looks like smallpox. But who is this
Speaker 1: woman and how on earth has she got smallpox in Birmingham,
Speaker 1: eight months after the world's last recorded case in Somalia.
Speaker 1: The doctors fill him in on Janet's details. She works
Speaker 1: as a medical photographer at the University of Birmingham. Hm.
Speaker 1: The consultant, of course, knows all about the smallpox lab
Speaker 1: at the university. It'd better call Henry Bedson, Henry, he says.
Speaker 1: When Bedson answers the phone, I've got a patient here
Speaker 1: with a suspected case of smallpox. It's a lady who
Speaker 1: works as a photographer at the medical school at the
Speaker 1: other end of the line. Henry Bedson is too stunned
Speaker 1: to speak. The consultant takes a sample of the fluid
Speaker 1: from Janet's postules and drives to the medical school to
Speaker 1: meet Henry Bedson. Together the two men open up the
Speaker 1: lab and put the slide under the microscope. Bedson looks
Speaker 1: first without a word. He moves aside to let the
Speaker 1: consultant see. There's no doubt it's smallpox. They'll need to
Speaker 1: run more tests to confirm that its very ola major
Speaker 1: and find out exactly which strain. Bedson sets the tests
Speaker 1: in motion. The regional smallpox consultant picks up the phone
Speaker 1: and makes the call that he's never had to make before,
Speaker 1: open up the isolation hospital at Catherine de Barnes. As
Speaker 1: the fictional Dr Duffenschmertz might put it, if I had
Speaker 1: a nickel for every time a medical photographer at the
Speaker 1: University of Birmingham got smallpox, I'd have two nichols, which
Speaker 1: isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.
Speaker 1: Back in nineteen sixty six, when Tony got smallpox, it
Speaker 1: had seemed ludicrous to think that the virus might have
Speaker 1: gone walk about from Henry Bedson's lab around the building.
Speaker 1: But soon after, in nineteen seventy, a young man in
Speaker 1: Germany developed fever and a rash a week and a
Speaker 1: half after flying home from a backpacking trip to Karachi.
Speaker 1: With that travel history, German doctors suspected smallpox right away.
Speaker 1: They put the man in strict isolation. Still, somehow, seventeen
Speaker 1: other people in the hospital developed smallpox, including patients two
Speaker 1: floors distant who never left their room. How One explanation
Speaker 1: was that smallpox might be more capable of airborne transmission
Speaker 1: than had previously been thought. Investigators set off a smoke
Speaker 1: device in the room where the man had been and
Speaker 1: tracked how the smoke wafted into the corridors, up the stairwells,
Speaker 1: and into other rooms. The results mapped pretty well onto
Speaker 1: the pattern of infections at the University of Birmingham. Henry
Speaker 1: Bedson and his colleagues stand in the courtyard ou side
Speaker 1: the medical school. They're checking how close the photographer's office
Speaker 1: is to the smallpox lab. Not very close. They're at
Speaker 1: least forty feet apart. If the virus particles wafted through
Speaker 1: the air to Janet, it's far from obvious what route
Speaker 1: they might have taken. By now, various authorities are competing
Speaker 1: to take the situation in hand. One insists that everyone
Speaker 1: who has anything to do with the smallpox lab has
Speaker 1: to go into quarantine, including Henry Bedson. That seems like overkill.
Speaker 1: Bedsen's been thoroughly vaccinated, and if it'd got smallpox at
Speaker 1: the same time as Janet Parker, he'd have known about
Speaker 1: it long before now. Still, though Bedson's told stay at
Speaker 1: home you can't be too careful. Another authority insists that
Speaker 1: the smallpox lab be immediately fumigated to kill any virus
Speaker 1: particles that might be Only afterwards that they realize this
Speaker 1: means they've killed the samples from Janet Parker that Bedson
Speaker 1: had been testing to identify which strain of smallpox she'd got.
Speaker 1: That Bette get another sample while they still can. At
Speaker 1: the hospital in Catherine de Barnes. Janet is still just
Speaker 1: about clinging to life. They call the smallpox lab at
Speaker 1: the University of Liverpool and ask one of the professors
Speaker 1: to drive the one hundred miles to Birmingham to visit
Speaker 1: Janet and take samples back for testing. We'll arrange a
Speaker 1: police escort, of course, they say. As the professor leaves
Speaker 1: the motorway near Birmingham, he's met by a policeman on
Speaker 1: a motorcycle who leads him through the city and down
Speaker 1: the quiet country lanes to the twenty acre site of
Speaker 1: the hospital at Catherine de Barnes. The policeman thinks his
Speaker 1: job is done and says farewell. The professor is confused, Wait,
Speaker 1: you're leaving me here, but surely the whole point of
Speaker 1: a police escort is to get me safely back to
Speaker 1: my lab when I'll have highly contagious samples of smallpox
Speaker 1: in my car. Now, the Policeman's confused. Nobody's told me
Speaker 1: anything about that, sir. All the way back to Liverpool.
Speaker 1: I've finished my shift at five o'clock. At five o'clock,
Speaker 1: they're still gridlocked in central Birmingham. The policeman waves goodbye,
Speaker 1: screw this, Thanks the professor. He decides to give the
Speaker 1: rush hour traffic time to clear and detours into the
Speaker 1: suburbs to call in at the home of his old friend,
Speaker 1: Henry Bedson. Bedson is not coping well with quarantine. He
Speaker 1: hates being holed up at home when he could be
Speaker 1: doing something to help. The phone keeps ringing, and he
Speaker 1: keeps thinking he'd better answer it in case it's important.
Speaker 1: But it's always some journalist trying to get into admit
Speaker 1: that he's to blame for all the chaos that's unfolding
Speaker 1: in the city. The desperate search to trace and quarantine
Speaker 1: and vaccinate anyone Janet Parker might have met. Bedson's friend
Speaker 1: tries to lift his spirits, but the next morning Bedson
Speaker 1: writes a note I'm sorry to have misplaced the trust
Speaker 1: which so many of my friends and colleagues have placed
Speaker 1: in me and my work. Bedson writes. I realize this
Speaker 1: act is the least sensible thing I have done, but
Speaker 1: it may allow my wife and children to get some peace.
Speaker 1: Bedson calls to his wife, I'm just going to the
Speaker 1: garden shed. Cautionary tales will be back in a moment.
Speaker 1: Henry Bedson is still alive when his wife finds him
Speaker 1: in the shed, though he's losing a lot of blood.
Speaker 1: She runs back to the house. As she's about to
Speaker 1: pick up the phone, it starts to ring local radio news.
Speaker 1: Can I speak to Professor Bedson? Get off the line,
Speaker 1: yells Bedson's wife. She slams the receiver down and picks
Speaker 1: it up again. I don't know it's the wife, she says.
Speaker 1: She wants us to get off the line. Henry Bedson
Speaker 1: survives for five days on life support before doctors conclude
Speaker 1: that he won't recover. Five days after that, Janet Parker's
Speaker 1: life finally ebbs away. Funeral director Ron Fleet is sent
Speaker 1: to collect her body. Janet is cremated, then they fumigate
Speaker 1: the crematorium just to be safe. Janet Parker has infected
Speaker 1: only one other person, her mum. Once her mum recovers,
Speaker 1: humanity is once again free from smallpox. But if it's
Speaker 1: going to stay that way, it might help to find
Speaker 1: out how had Janet got it. The government appointed a
Speaker 1: committee to investigate. They tried the same kind of test
Speaker 1: as in the German hospital, setting off a smoke device
Speaker 1: in the smallpox lab to understand where the airflow might go.
Speaker 1: The smallpox lab was a small inner room connected to
Speaker 1: a larger outer lab. If the door between those rooms
Speaker 1: was open, the air from the smallpox lab could get
Speaker 1: into the outer lab, and the door was open sometimes
Speaker 1: because the smallpox samples were stored in that outer lab,
Speaker 1: But if smallpox parts got loose in that outer lab,
Speaker 1: it shouldn't pose a risk. Everyone who was allowed into
Speaker 1: the outer lab had been vaccinated against smallpox. But a
Speaker 1: little bit of the smoke drifted further, some beyond the
Speaker 1: outer lab and into a corridor, and some into a
Speaker 1: service duct, and from the service duct threw a badly
Speaker 1: fitted access panel into a room on the floor above
Speaker 1: not Janet Parker's office, another room used for storage, but
Speaker 1: that also had a telephone with an outside line. Janet
Speaker 1: Parker's office phone didn't have an outside line, so when
Speaker 1: she needed to make orders for supplies of photographic materials,
Speaker 1: should use the phone in that storage room, sitting close
Speaker 1: to the badly fitted panel. The investigators determined that Janet
Speaker 1: had placed an unusually large number of orders on the
Speaker 1: line last Tuesday in July, two and a half, weeks
Speaker 1: before she began to feel ill. That timeline doesn't quite
Speaker 1: stack up. The usual incubation period for smallpox is one
Speaker 1: to two weeks, not two and a half. And you
Speaker 1: can query how relevant that German hospital really is. There
Speaker 1: you had a young man with smallpox coughing up clouds
Speaker 1: of virus particles. Here you had a lab with workers
Speaker 1: trying carefully to minimize contamination. Still, the investigators conclude infection
Speaker 1: through the service duct is the most probable route that
Speaker 1: they could find. Armed with the investigator's report, a government
Speaker 1: agency decides to sue the University of Birmingham for failing
Speaker 1: to ensure health and safety at work. In his book
Speaker 1: The Last Days of Smallpox, the author Mark Pallin describes
Speaker 1: the case in detail. Witness after witness attests that Henry
Speaker 1: Bedson was known for being meticulous about safety procedures. You
Speaker 1: can't eliminate all risks from lab work. As one expert
Speaker 1: witness says, perfection is impossible. But Henry Bedson's smallpox lab
Speaker 1: was doing nothing ntypical by the standards of the time.
Speaker 1: What about the pox in the ducts hypothesis? The university's
Speaker 1: lawyer calls a professor to testify for the defense. I've
Speaker 1: been doing some calculations, the professor says, based on how
Speaker 1: much smoke made it from the smallpox lab into the
Speaker 1: room with a telephone, and how many virus particles typically
Speaker 1: get into the air from routine lab work, I reckon
Speaker 1: you might expect virus particles to make it into the
Speaker 1: telephone room at the rate of one particle every two
Speaker 1: to twenty thousand years. The lawyer for the Health and
Speaker 1: Safety agency calls an expert witness, too, but it seems
Speaker 1: that he hasn't researched his experts views. When asked about
Speaker 1: the investigator's theory that Janet had got the virus through
Speaker 1: the service duct, the expert says he thinks it's highly implausible.
Speaker 1: The lawyer's taken aback his own witness has just dismissed
Speaker 1: the central plank of his case. But if we discount
Speaker 1: the duct hypothesis, the lawyer asks, with what does that
Speaker 1: leave us? The expert replies, it leaves you with a puzzle.
Speaker 1: Say the words lab leak. Now, of course, and the
Speaker 1: city that springs to mind isn't Birmingham, It's Wuhan. A
Speaker 1: novel coronavirus pandemic just happens to start in a city
Speaker 1: which has a lab that does research on novel coronaviruses.
Speaker 1: Quite a coincidence. Was COVID a lab leak? That debate
Speaker 1: rumbles on, But I wondered if the Birmingham story might
Speaker 1: give us any general lessons about lab leaks. I think
Speaker 1: there are two lesson. Number one, the puzzle might never
Speaker 1: be solved. We might only ever have competing stories and
Speaker 1: our own best guess as to which makes most sense.
Speaker 1: The second lesson starts with another observation from that trial,
Speaker 1: Perfection is impossible. No matter how careful you try to be,
Speaker 1: there'll always be something you might overlook. Think about that
Speaker 1: evening before Henry Bedson despairingly went to his garden. Shed
Speaker 1: Bedsen's at home, forced to quarantine because you can't be
Speaker 1: too care but parked outside on his drive is his
Speaker 1: friend's car containing highly dangerous smallpox samples from Janet Parker.
Speaker 1: The professor then drives his car one hundred miles up
Speaker 1: the motorway with no police escort. What if it had
Speaker 1: a crash? Or think about fumigating the crematorium after Janet
Speaker 1: Parker's body was burned just to be safe. Yet nobody
Speaker 1: had thought about the risk to funeral director Ron Fleet,
Speaker 1: who had to lug Janet's corpse into his van without help,
Speaker 1: praying the body bag wouldn't burst. There'll always be something
Speaker 1: you might overlook. In twenty fourteen, in a lab in Bethesda, Maryland,
Speaker 1: half a dozen glass pals of smallpox were discovered in
Speaker 1: a cardboard box at the back of a cupboard, forgotten
Speaker 1: since the nineteen fifties. If we're going to do research
Speaker 1: on deadly viruses, we have to accept some risk that
Speaker 1: something will go wrong in some way we hadn't considered.
Speaker 1: So the second lesson I want to suggest is this,
Speaker 1: we'd better be damn sure that that research is worth it.
Speaker 1: Perhaps in the case of Birmingham, the puzzle has an answer.
Speaker 1: In twenty eighteen, the author Mark Pallin tracked down the
Speaker 1: lawyer who had represented the university in the court case.
Speaker 1: The lawyer was now eighty five years old. The author asked,
Speaker 1: do you know what really happened? Well, said the lawyer,
Speaker 1: there was a rumor, a very strong rumor. I could
Speaker 1: never get anyone to say it on the record, but
Speaker 1: the rumor went like this, back in the nineteen seventies, Remember,
Speaker 1: nobody had smartphones or digital cameras. To make holiday photos,
Speaker 1: you needed roles of film, and they were pricey. A
Speaker 1: photographer at an institution like a medical school could buy
Speaker 1: those films in bulk at a discount. There was a
Speaker 1: well established tradition in the medical school. The rumor went
Speaker 1: that the photographer would get you cut price films. That
Speaker 1: might explain why Janet was placing so many orders in
Speaker 1: the last week of July, just before everyone went on
Speaker 1: their summer holidays. And what if a few days later,
Speaker 1: Janet had gone around the building delivering to her colleagues
Speaker 1: the supplies she'd got for them. What if she had
Speaker 1: popped into the outer lab just for a moment to
Speaker 1: drop off a roll of film. What if this year
Speaker 1: she had chosen just the wrong moment when there were
Speaker 1: virus particles in the air or on a surface she
Speaker 1: happened to touch. It's only a rumor, just one more
Speaker 1: competing story. But if Janet had encountered the virus a
Speaker 1: few days after the investigator's guessed, it would make the
Speaker 1: incubation period line up. And if the tradition of photographers
Speaker 1: delivering film to their colleagues went back to young Tony,
Speaker 1: that would also neatly solve the two nickel question of
Speaker 1: why an infection might have happened twice as one more
Speaker 1: loose end to tie up. One final irony was the
Speaker 1: research worth it. Henry Benson, remember had been anxious to
Speaker 1: complete his work on whitepox, the mysterious virus from labs
Speaker 1: in the Netherlands and Russia. If whitepox was similar to smallpox,
Speaker 1: it might live in wild populations of monkeys and rodents
Speaker 1: and then jump back to humans. After Bedson's death, other
Speaker 1: researchers finished the job. They found that white pox was
Speaker 1: a mirage. These viruses weren't just like smallpox, they were smallpox,
Speaker 1: and the smallpox didn't come from the animals. The samples
Speaker 1: from rodents and monkeys in the Dutch and Russian labs
Speaker 1: had been contaminated with smallpox. In the labs themselves. The
Speaker 1: monkeys and rodents had never had a pox like virus
Speaker 1: at all. That kind of contamination shouldn't happen in a lab,
Speaker 1: of course, but sometimes it does. Perfection is impossible. If
Speaker 1: the work in Henry Bedson's lab had been perfect, Janet
Speaker 1: Parker could never have got smallpox. But if the Dutch
Speaker 1: and Russian labs had been perfect, Bedson wouldn't have been
Speaker 1: doing that work in the first place. A key source
Speaker 1: for this episode was Mark Pallon's book The Last Days
Speaker 1: of Smallpox Tragedy in Birmingham. For a full list of
Speaker 1: our sources, see the show notes at Timharford dot com.
Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales as written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright,
Speaker 1: Alice Fines, and Ryan Billy. It's produced by Georgia Mills
Speaker 1: and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are
Speaker 1: the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound design is by
Speaker 1: Carlos san Juan at Brain Audio. Bend Dafhaffrey edited the scripts.
Speaker 1: The show features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford,
Speaker 1: Oliver Hembrough, Sarah Jupp, Massaam Monroe, Jamal Westman, and rufus Wright.
Speaker 1: The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work
Speaker 1: of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohene, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody,
Speaker 1: Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is
Speaker 1: a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardoor Studios
Speaker 1: in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show,
Speaker 1: please remember to share, rate and review. It really makes
Speaker 1: a difference to us and if you want to hear
Speaker 1: the show, add free sign up to Pushkin Plus on
Speaker 1: the show page, on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm,
Speaker 1: slash plus