Living as we do in a relatively wealthy society it is easy to forget that most of the World’s population do not have easy access to professional health care and our prescription medicines. They have to rely on traditional medical treatments, frequently herbal remedies, using knowledge passed down from generation to generation often from mother to daughter. We also tend to draw a sharp line between “medicines” and “foods” that would also seem strange to traditional practitioners, who believe that just as some foods certainly cause us harm, others must do us “good”. (Indeed, some books on Indian cookery happily discuss the diverse health benefits of the various spices employed.)
We should not, of course, be surprised that many plants contain medically “active” compounds: evolution has given them a variety of chemical defences against consumption by animals. Nor should one be surprised that intelligent observation and experience can produce effective practical action - even if it is not labelled as “science”. Nature is frequently more ingenious that pharmacologists in their laboratories.
Drug companies have, of course, frequently looked at traditional remedies for new ideas but also have interests and motivations that run counter to the those of the communities that are the source of the original knowledge. They are in business to make money, and in particular to establish patents that grow strong income streams, and those are typically associated with synthetic production methods for the active compounds, with little return to the original owners of what is increasingly agreed should be regarded as intellectual property. In the current commercially driven World without a profit there is no investment that is able to bring new medical treatments to a wider community.
Even if we stay in the garden, not all is rosy. Traditional medical treatments sometimes get it wrong: having an effect is not the same as a cure - and people are always strongly inclined to attribute the alleviation of a naturally self-limiting condition to whatever way they choose to treat themselves - even if it nearly killed them. Furthermore, plants are highly variable: concentrations of the active compound may vary widely depending the precise variety grown, on how the plant was cultivated and how the crop was then stored and treated. (I do, in fact, remember the story of a gardener who did nearly kill himself by growing his own tobacco: he had managed to produce a crop that contains substantially higher levels of nicotine than the commercial product, and smoking a couple of pipes put him in hospital.) Plant species that become fashionable among the herbally inclined are also quickly over-exploited leading to poor quality and even substitution by related but less active (or occasionally dangerously overactive) varieties.
Professor Heinrich led us through the fascinating complexities of this situation with great expertise and argued that the current order of things needs to change, with a recognition that the current western approach to pharmacology will not provide long term answers to the much of World’s medical needs

The tenacity and shear optimism of space scientists is really admirable. They put a lot of effort into developing the proposal for an experiment on a spacecraft (most get rejected) then they spend years developing instruments which need to be at the forefront of technology, but they have to use spacequalified electronic components which are necessarily using decade-old technology. After maybe ten years of work they put their precious baby on top of a rocket which may explode or crash if any one of hundreds of thousands of components working at their limits of endurance do not behave perfectly. Then, as in the case of Rosetta, and assuming the launch is successful they wait maybe another ten years while the space craft finds its way across half the Solar System to an almost invisible lump of black ice a few kilometres across and travelling at an extremely high speed. You then drop your delicate package onto an uneven, rock strewn surface, hoping that it will land somewhere safe…and manage to stick it down in an orientation where the instruments can do the job they were designed to do. If they don’t, well, there may be another space craft coming along in twenty years.
We have, I think, became rather too used to extraordinary space missions actually succeeding and forget what a white-knuckle ride most must be for those who bet entire careers on the chance of nothing going wrong. Well, Rosetta as a whole was an extraordinary success, though the Philae lander, for which Dr
Andrew Morse help design the Ptolemy mass spectrometer, did not work completely as expected, for it turns out to be very difficult to stick yourself down on a comet. The engineers were told that the surface might be anything from the consistency of candy-floss to hard concrete, and in fact it turned out to be an
impossible combination of both: a layer of extremely soft material overlaying exceptionally cold and very hard ice. None of the several hold-down methods managed to grab on, so Philae bounced across the surface, claiming, as Dr Morse pointed out, the first four landings on a comet. It finally ended up on its
side, in the shadow of a boulder, which meant that the solar panels could not recharge the batteries, so they were limited to a day or two of data gathering. Given all these formidable difficulties it highly impressive that about 80% of the science targets were accomplished. In fact, some of the technological wizardry for getting samples into the mass spectrometer turned out to be unnecessary, because the first impact kicked up so much dust that the instruments were able to sniff the composition while Philae was tumbling. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that this method will be adopted as the favoured method of collecting surface samples in the future.
We should not forget the science, which after all is why researchers go through this process. Comets are pretty much guaranteed to be the (more-or-less) unprocessed remnants of the original material out of which the Solar System formed. Everything else we can reach has been extensively cooked in various
ways. Of course, it is not quite that simple: comets may have been sitting a few degrees above absolute zero for four and half billion years (not an environment is which we expect chemistry) but have also been exposed to a small but significant flux of high energy cosmic rays for all that time. Their surfaces (as
Philae confirmed) may consist of various polymerisations of the low concentration basic organic compounds (e.g. methane) that form part of the bulk composition. That is probably why they are so black - think of the bottom of a pan left on the cooker for far too long. However, as the comet approaches the Sun and heats up, volatile material from below the surface evaporates and emerges as jets, which can be sampled by the Rosetta orbiter. Rosetta shut down in 2015, its mission accomplished, but the science goes on and will go on, no doubt until the next spacecraft attempt a comet landing (maybe in twenty years from now?) because the data from Rosetta is unique and of enormous importance to those who seek to understand the original of the Solar System.
Dr Morse presented the society with a fascinating and extremely well illustrated lecture on the work of this exploratory space project.

Metals in Medicine – The Use of Stents
Derek Edwards, The Christie Institue

What is the connection between American fighter jets and the Christie Centre in Manchester? Answer: they both make use of memory shape alloys.
NiTiNOL is a remarkable material: it is super-elastic (you can stretch it, and stretch it….) and it then always returns to its previous shape (a shape that you can set by heating it to 500 degrees Centigrade while holding it in the desired configuration). Combine these properties with corrosion resistance and bio-compatibility and you have a highly desirable material for use in medical stents. The memory-shape ability and elasticity means that a stent designed to hold open a body passage (such as the Oesophagus or the bile duct) can be compressed inside a small tube that can be fed down to the target location. When the stent is pushed out of the insertion device it expands back to its original dimensions (preferably somewhat gently) and, for example, now provides a route for food to patients who previously had difficulty swallowing.
The Christie, supported by Derek Edwards, make use of stents to provide palliative care for sufferers from Oesophageal cancer, but to some extent they have been victims of their own success in extending life.
Patients are surviving sufficiently long for them to discover that NiTiNol is not quite as corrosion resistant to stomach acids as they at first thought, and they have now had to develop sophisticated methods of removing stents that after many months are starting to break up. This looked like a decidedly non-trivial process, because spreading cancers can grow around the stent wires. The search is on for more resistant materials that can also retain the highly desirable properties of NiTiNOL (e.g. by coating the wire in platinum).
Derek Edwards was clearly a man overflowing with enthusiasm for his work (for which, being formally in retirement, he no longer gets paid - as a matter of choice), but it is clearly an all consuming activity that he will never be able to leave alone, and for which we should all be highly grateful.