How Rosalind Franklin’s story was rewritten

Shamini Bundell

Welcome back to the Nature Podcast, this week: how Rosalind Franklin's story got rewritten...

Benjamin Thompson

...and the link between multisensory experiences and memory. I'm Benjamin Thompson.

Shamini Bundell

And I'm Shamini Bundell.

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Shamini Bundell

First up on the 70th anniversary of the publication of the structure of DNA, reporter Nick Petrić Howe has been reexamining Rosalind Franklin's contributions.

Nick Petrić Howe

Cambridge, England 1953.

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Nick Petrić Howe

In the Eagle, a pub and common haunt of Cavendish lab staff, two men burst through the door and breathlessly announce "we've, we've discovered the secret of life." This story is one you're likely familiar with. It's a famous anecdote from James Watson about how he and Francis Crick announced that they'd discovered the structure of DNA, and it most likely didn't happen. In a similar vein, you're probably also familiar with the story of how it wasn't actually just Watson and Crick behind this breathtaking discovery. Maurice Wilkins, who later shared the Nobel Prize with Watson and Crick, and Rosalind Franklin, were key to the breakthrough.

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Nick Petrić Howe

In fact, almost as famous as the story of the Eagle is the one that paints Franklin as a victim whose data and the famous photograph 51, of the DNA helix, were taken by Watson without her permission, helping him and Crick solve the structure whilst her role was diminished. But writing in Nature this week two biographers of Watson and Crick are revealing how this isn't really true either.

Nathaniel Comfort

It does a disservice to Franklin to portray her as the brilliant crystallographer who was cheated out of the structure. No, she was an equal contributor.

Nick Petrić Howe

This is Nathaniel Comfort, a historian of medicine from Johns Hopkins, who's writing a biography of Watson. This perspective is in contrast with a widely held view that Franklin had missed crucial data, in particular a very clear image of DNA, known as photograph 51, which then Watson stole to get the crucial insights. But according to Matthew Cobb, zoologist and biographer of Crick, from the University of Manchester, this is just Watson semi-fictionalised account.

Matthew Cobb

According to him, he sees photograph 51, he immediately realises DNA must be some kind of helix. And he and Crick then go on in the next few weeks to discover the structure. Now the implication of that is that this photograph, which was taken by Franklin and her PhD student Raymond Gosling the year before, the implication of this is that Franklin — who was a very smart person — sat on this bit of data and didn't get it. Whereas Watson, who knew very little about X-ray crystallography, he took one glance at it. And bingo, he instantly knew what it meant. And this just strikes any historian who studies this as being rather unlikely.

Nick Petrić Howe

And this rather unlikely account may have become even less likely, with Matthew and Nathaniel’s recent discovery of documents, which put Franklin’s contributions and the relationship between her, Watson, Crick and Wilkins, in a different light. Let’s go back to 1951.

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Nick Petrić Howe

At this time the structure of DNA was unclear. People knew that it had a phosphate backbone with A, T, C and G bases, but not a lot else. So, in 1951 Franklin joined John Randall and Maurice Wilkins at Kings College London. There they were using X-ray diffraction, a method to determine the position of atoms in a structure, to better understand DNA. She was looking at a very pure sample of DNA, which came in two forms. A crystalline A-form, and a less crystal-like B-form.

Nathaniel Comfort

She was able to change the A- into the B-form under the microscope and in the X ray beam, simply by raising the relative humidity of the sample chamber. So that differentiates these two forms.

Nick Petrić Howe

This resolved a problem that had confused researchers for a while; previously experiments had used a mixture of A- and B-forms which were impossible to fully interpret. But this wasn’t her only insight at this point.

Nathaniel Comfort

When Watson first got into the DNA problem, in November of 1951, he attends a seminar by Franklin. And in that seminar, she presented both A- and B-DNA and said they are big, both of them were a big helix, with the phosphate backbones on the outside with the bases pointing in, right, and gave some basic parameters of it that are essentially the ones that that they used to solve the structure. So that was already known.

Nick Petrić Howe

So, the famous photograph 51 of the B-form of DNA is unlikely to have given Watson a sudden insight into DNA being a helix, as aside from Watson not really knowing much about X-ray crystallography, nobody really doubted DNA was a helix at this time. Matthew and Nathaniel also discovered a programme from the Royal Society with a talk listed about the structure of DNA, and it was to be given by Crick, Watson, Wilkins and Franklin. That wasn’t all though, they also came upon an unpublished news article written for TIME magazine.

Matthew Cobb

And this is the article that was supposed to go with the very famous pictures, which we've all seen now, of Watson and Crick in front of the model. So, we knew these photos had been taken for TIME Magazine, but it was never any trace of this article. And then we find this in the Churchill college archives at Cambridge. And this article, which is a bit poor, from a scientific point of view, which is probably why didn't get published, presents the discovery precisely as a collaborative work between the King's people — Wilkins, and Franklin — on the one hand, and with Watson and Crick in Cambridge, on the other. And presents it in a much more egalitarian approach. And this article was written in conjunction with Franklin.

Nick Petrić Howe

This account also tallies with the three original papers on the structure of DNA that were published in Nature in 1953. One was much theoretical and came from Watson and Crick, whilst the other two came from Franklin and Wilkins, and their teams, and were much more data heavy. Now at the time, Watson and Crick did say that the structure they had come up with “rests mainly though not entirely on published experimental data and stereochemical arguments”, however, this was shortly followed up by another paper where they acknowledged that without Franklin’s data “the formulation of our structure would have been most unlikely, if not impossible”.

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Nick Petrić Howe

But if the contemporary narrative was this one of collaboration, why is that the story so many of us are familiar with is so different from this? What happened?

Nathaniel Comfort

Watson happened. And the Double Helix happened, that account that you and everybody else knows, is derived from Watson's account in his 1968 book, the Double Helix. It is a very strange book. It's treated as, as a historical account. But it's only partly historical. He makes stuff up, he takes literary licence in the book. So he's taking a good story and he's embellishing it, and turning it into this heroic discovery narrative, right, with all sorts of, you know, clandestine behaviour and, and theft and jokes and all kinds of things, right? And so to make it a good story. And the book has been read as straight history, and instead of this complicated mix of history, and fiction, and science writing, it's sort of all rolled into one.

Nick Petrić Howe

The account given in the Double Helix was also challenged by Wilkins and Crick, who even tried to stop its publication, in part because of how the book’s story dealt with Rosalind’s contribution. They were ultimately unsuccessful. Rosalind was unable to share her side of the story at that time, because she had died a decade before the book was published, from ovarian cancer at the age of 37. For DNA, her contributions were vital. She differentiated the A- and B-forms of DNA; she determined that the DNA molecule was enormous; and figured out that there was a symmetry in the DNA. Much of this was actually communicated to Watson and Crick through a report from her and Wilkins. However, she died some years before DNA was fully recognised for the important molecule we now know it as, and before Wilkins, Crick and Watson won the Nobel Prize for its structure. We can only speculate about how the story of the discovery of DNA’s structure might have been told had Rosalind lived longer or had that TIME article detailing her contribution actually been published. Instead, Rosalind Franklin has become a figurehead for marginalised and overlooked scientists. But stories can distort how we see the real people behind them. Because as much as she has become a symbol, Rosalind was also a real person.

Hannah Franklin

She was a super sort of dedicated, driven, passionate woman.

Nick Petrić Howe

This is Hannah Franklin, a PhD student at the Francis Crick Institute, and University College London. And Rosalind's great-niece. I should also say here that I have a personal connection to Hannah. She works with my wife. And so, when I started looking into this story, I was interested to speak to her and ask about what she made of the way her great-aunt is often talked about.

Hannah Franklin

She didn't suffer fools gladly. And I think people have that perception of her. And sometimes it's been misinterpreted as her being remembered as this quite cold character. And all she cared about was the science. But, you know, from what I've heard from family members, she was an amazing, warm woman.

Nick Petrić Howe

I've actually known her for a few years now, and she makes no claim to be an expert on her great-aunt. But she has grown up hearing stories about her from the family members that knew her. From Hannah's perspective, as important as we now think of DNA, for Rosalind, the double helix wasn't even the most important part of her life's work.

Hannah Franklin

She made significant contributions in the space of viruses and coal and carbon. And that actually, her time working on DNA were perhaps some of the unhappiest of her life. You know, at Kings, she wasn't allowed into the senior common room alongside her male counterparts. She wasn't allowed purely for being a woman. So when you think about in pubs, and in common rooms, the sort of informal scientific conversations that take place, she wasn't a part of that.

Nick Petrić Howe

In fact, Rosalind's gravestone mentions her work and viruses, but nothing about DNA. It was a small part of a greater life's work. To put it simply, Rosalind was a more complex and full person than merely a victim of the discovery of DNA structure.

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Nick Petrić Howe

In the end, painting Rosalind Franklin as a wronged heroine does her an injustice. She was an equal partner in the discovery of the structure of DNA. Stories about eureka moments and individual genius can be seductive, but they’re rarely the truth — especially in the collaborative fields of science. So how should we remember Rosalind Franklin?

Hannah Franklin

So, I think to be remembered for being a significant contributor in very impactful science, and not just because of the obstacles that she faced, and that she would have wanted to be remembered for the science and for the human that she was not just put on this pedestal of being some hero because of the obstacles that she faced. So, I think that's a really important message that I think and I've interpreted from the family is what they want her legacy to be.

Shamini Bundell

That was Hannah Franklin from UCL and the Francis Crick Institute here in the UK. You also heard from Matthew Cobb from the University of Manchester in the UK, and Nathaniel Comfort from Johns Hopkins University in the US. To read Matthew and Nathaniel's comment article, look out for a link in the show notes.

Benjamin Thompson

Coming up, how multisensory experiences create stronger memories in fruit flies. Right now, it's time for the research highlights read by Dan Fox.

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Dan Fox

Currently, there are almost 4000 miniature satellites circling the Earth, with most of them maintaining their orbits by using electricity to accelerate beams of xenon gas. But xenon is rare and expensive, and iodine is seen as a promising replacement. To investigate the possible risk of this switch researchers model the potential damage that iodine, released from propulsion systems, could cause to the ozone layer. They found minimal effects for a scenario where 40,000 new satellites were launched each year, injecting an estimated eight tons of iodine into the atmosphere. But scaling those numbers up by a factor of 100 could result in 2–7% depletion of stratospheric ozone in the Antarctic region. The analysis could help governments to ensure that the rapidly growing industry does not affect the ozone layer. To read that research in full propel yourself over to Geophysical Research Letters.

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Dan Fox

A team have developed a tiny pill-like device that can measure how much X ray radiation is being delivered to gastrointestinal tumors during radiotherapy. Measuring 18 millimeters by seven millimeters, roughly the size of an over the counter painkiller, the battery powered sensor is designed to be swallowed, and once in the body, it can monitor the amount of radiation reaching cancerous tissues in real-time. The device can also detect changes in pH and temperature, important measures for diagnosing and monitoring tumors. Inside it contains nano-scintillators, tiny particles that become luminescent after absorbing radiation. That glow is then read by a sensor and the measurements wirelessly transmitted to a mobile phone app. So far, the pill has only been tested in rabbits and to be useful in a clinical setting for humans, imaging methods will be needed to ensure that the pill is in the right location. And the authors say that refinements are still needed to anchor it in place. You can find that paper in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

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Benjamin Thompson

For our second story, I've decamped to a stairwell here at Nature Towers to take a big sniff of the air. And this actually does have something to do with a research paper about memory that's coming out in Nature this week. You see, earlier this year, I was walking up these very stairs, and I got a faint whiff of a very specific smell, the lemon scented cleaning product they use on the floors here. Not unusual, I hear you cry. But you know what that smell was exactly the same as the one I used to smell 25 years ago, as it was used to clean the student accommodation I lived in when I started at university. As soon as I could smell it, bam, I was back in my room all that time ago, I could see it perfectly in my mind. And I could hear my flatmates yelling at each other. While they played yet another round of Goldeneye on the Nintendo 64. It was like I was back there. And you know what? It turns out that memories and multisensory experiences are tightly linked. Most organisms live in a multisensory world. And research has shown that experiences that involve different senses can improve memory strength, compared to those that involve a single sense. Zenep Okray, from the University of Oxford, will explain, while I head back to my desk.

Zenep Okray

We've seen this in scientific studies. For example, in one of these studies with humans, that audio-visual cues helps memory performance more than just having a visual cue or an auditory cue. And this holds true also for insects and rodents and controlled experiments.

Benjamin Thompson

Studies have suggested that when you're making memories about something using multiple senses, the different parts of the brain involved with those senses, will all be working. It seems that interactions happen between these areas, which increases the strength of a memory. And later on if one sensory part of that memory gets activated, say the smell part, other sensory memories, say visual ones, can be activated too. Like how the smell of the cleaning products fired up the visual memories of my student flats, for example. Actually working out exactly how this happens has been tough, though. But this week, Zenep and her colleagues have a paper in Nature that details a mechanism for how this might work, in the brains of fruit flies. To find it, they had to give these fruit flies a multisensory experience. Now these animals are good at discerning between odors and colors, so the team set up experiments where fruit flies learn to associate a reward, sugar, with a specific smell a specific colour, or a combination of the two. Later the flies were tested to see if they preferentially chose those over a non-reward related colour, odour or combo, essentially did they remember what was associated with the reward.

Zenep Okray

And what we found is that the flies learn better if they had both the colors and odours to make that association. So if they learned with only one sense, then their memory was sort of standard. If they learned with two senses, their memory was improved. And what was also interesting is that even when there was only one cue, so either color or odour, the flies performed better if they had initially learned with two cues so both colour and odour to start with.

Benjamin Thompson

So learning with two senses, boosted the flies ability to remember, even if they were later presented with an experience that only triggered one. This sort of thing has been seen before. But because the fruit fly brain and all the cells and connections it contains have been so well mapped out, Zenep and her colleagues could zoom in to see exactly what was going on. And they looked in a specific area of the fruit fly brain known as the mushroom body, known to be involved in remembering experiences.

Zenep Okray

The mushroom body is what we consider the centre for learning and memory in flies. Where the sensory information is integrated with the meaning of the experience. So basically with, for example, is it a pleasant experience or a bad experience? And then it skews the behaviour directing neurons afterwards.

Benjamin Thompson

So, the team looked at the activity of neurons within the mushroom body to see what was happening in fruit flies, which had had a multisensory learning experience.

Zenep Okray

During learning the neurons that encoded the different sensory information they got connected. So there are the cells that are odour selected, normally, they don't respond to colours. And what happens if the animal learns with odours and colours is that these older selective cells now become responsive to colours. So with one colour, you can activate both the odours cells and the visual cells.

Benjamin Thompson

And the reverse was true as well, with the colour-related cells being activated by those involved with odour. But how? Were these two groups of cells directly talking with each other? Well, the team think that's unlikely, as direct connections between the two are sparse. Instead, it looked like a third player was involved that wired the two together.

Zenep Okray

We call it an interneuron. So it's a big, big, big, hefty neuron that sort of covers almost like a net over all of the sensory encoding cells.

Benjamin Thompson

This interneuron is vital to complete this circuit between the two groups. And it produces the neurotransmitter serotonin, which looks to have an important role in this crosstalk between the two, and allows one sensory memory to recall those associated with another.

Zenep Okray

Basically, what happens is that the odour information comes in, it's activating the other responsive cells, and then this activates the interneuron. And that excitation carries over to the visual stream.

Benjamin Thompson

But this begs the question, when the fruit fly smell something familiar, is it also picturing the entire scene in its mind's eye? Much like I can picture my student room when I smell the right cleaning product?

Zenep Okray

What would a mental representation look like in a fly? This is an interesting question… To anthropomorphize is difficult. But indeed, I think what's happening is that maybe it's not seeing it, but there's definitely a neural representation of all the components. What this means for the fly, I don't really know. But we also do know that it uses it to guide its behaviour. So perhaps it sort of is kind of aware that there's more to the story.

Benjamin Thompson

And there's likely to be more to the story of this brain circuit too. The team are still trying to figure out exactly how it works, and exactly how the system leads to the creation of stronger memories. There's the big question as well, of course, of whether this work is relevant to other animals. But Zenep says that finding this circuit, which explains how a single stimulus input can lead to multiple memory outputs, is a start. And it could help unravel more about how multisensory experiences can influence learning, memory generation, and ultimately, maybe why a lemon scent can take me back to the past.

Zenep Okray

We do believe that our work might reveal general principles about the neural circuits that underlie this behaviour. We don't of course, know that this is the case in higher mammals. But I think some of the fundamentals of what we discovered might hold true, it's important for us to understand the neural circuit mechanisms of memory and different forms of memory, because changes in our memory function are quite relevant to society, as we age as cognition changes during ageing, and also for neurodegenerative diseases as well.

Benjamin Thompson

That was Zenep Okray from the University of Oxford here in the UK. To read her paper, head over to the show notes for a link.

Shamini Bundell

Finally, on the show, it's time for the Briefing Chat, where we discuss a few of the articles that have been highlighted in the Nature Briefing. So Ben, what are we chatting about this week?

Benjamin Thompson

Today? I've got a story that I read about in The Guardian, and it's based on some research by a team in the US and the UK. Now, I don't know about you, but certainly for a lot of people, video calls — you know, FaceTime, Zoom, and what have you — really came into their own in the last few years. And I think these services helped folk keep in contact with their family and friends during lockdown and help with things like isolation and loneliness and what have you. And while this may have been the case for humans, researchers want to know if the same thing was true for parrots.

Shamini Bundell

I actually know nothing about the story this week, but I wasn't expecting parrots on Zoom calls. Tell me more.

Benjamin Thompson

So parrots often live in flocks, which is something they don't usually get a chance to do when they're kept as pets or in a small group, for example. And this can result in psychological issues. So the team behind this work wanted to see if they could improve things for the birds by letting them chat to other birds via a tablet and video calls.

Shamini Bundell

Ah that's as interesting because I suppose you don't often think about parrots as social animals. But of course, we do know that social animals... it's really important for them to have those connections and relationships and things but is a Zoom call gonna do the trick?

Benjamin Thompson

Well, this is what the researchers wanted to find out. And so, they recruited a small group of parrots from different species and their owners from an online educational site for parrots, okay. And what happened in this study was, firstly, they taught the parents to ring a bell, and then touch an image of another parrot from a group of parrots on the screen that they wanted to talk to you, right? But their owners obviously helped them do this, right? So, this was the assistance stage. And once they'd figured that out, the birds were able to make calls freely to their parrot pals. And over the course of the experiment then, 147 deliberate calls were made. And the owners were taking notes on how the parrots were behaving and what they were up to.

Shamini Bundell

I think my main question here is that when humans video call each other — you know, we're recording this podcast via video call right now, in fact — most of our communication is speech, is talking. Now, parrots I suppose, in one way are quite famous for being able to talk, but in what kind of ways were they interacting with each other over a video call?

Benjamin Thompson

Well, talking was certainly one aspect of it, they were also doing, you know, other parrot stuff; the sort of behavior that's seen during real life interactions, okay. So preening and that sort of thing. And some parrots repeatedly chose to call the same individual. So it seemed like there were some bonds being formed, then, of course, we need to be very careful not to overlay kind of the human condition on these birds. But it does seem like they were interacting and showing the sorts of behaviours that would be seen in other environments.

Shamini Bundell

But is there a way to distinguish, I suppose what kind of thing the birds were reacting to, you know, is it a sort of social interaction and connection? Or is it more the novelty of it? Or, you know, just sort of entertainment to alleviate boredom? Can you tell?

Benjamin Thompson

Well, good questions there, certainly. And I will say this is quite a small study. And the researchers do make the point in the paper, like with the same thing be seen if the parents watching a video of another parrot and interacting that way, but I think they make the point that in this case, they're not trying to trick the animals — they talk about the ethics of that — they're not looking at the sort of the cognitive responses of these birds, they're actually trying to enrich their experience—

Shamini Bundell

—Oh, okay—

Benjamin Thompson

—but they make the point as well, they need to be careful that the parrot owners don't suddenly go and do this because this was quite controlled and the parrot owners were shepherded in ways to do this in a way that wouldn't upset the birds, for example. But it could be an interesting way to enrich these birds lives in the future. The authors say that there's potentially 20 million parrots in homes in the US that maybe don't get a lot of parrots. And I learned that it's quite difficult sometimes for pet owners to meet up because there can be diseases that can be passed between the birds, so there can be some issues there. But video calling might be a good way for parrots to get together.

Shamini Bundell

Oh, well, that was interesting and unexpected. Thank you very much, Ben, I'll tell you about my story for this week, which is a Nature paper. And I am once again, going to tell you about something that I'm also making a video about. And it's quite cool, it's about how to recycle wind turbine blades.

Benjamin Thompson

Which is not something that I necessarily thought about as needing recycling, because I talked about recycling plastics last week on the show, and I guess you can imagine small scale plastic things — a plastic bag, or a plastic bottle, or whatever — but wind turbines are huge. And I guess I kind of naively thought that once they were there, they were kind of there forever just doing their thing.

Shamini Bundell

They do last, so they last I think like 20/30 years before you kind of have to replace them. So they've got a decent lifespan. But we're kind of coming to a place now where 20/30 years ago, people were putting up a lot of wind turbines. And now we're having to work out what to do with all of those things. And ultimately, this is a story about recycling plastic. But it's about how to recycle this specific type of material that the outer shell of wind turbine blades are made of. It's a super strong material: it's a composite of fibers like fiberglass, or carbon fibers with epoxy, so like resins that you make by mixing two materials together. And then the fibers are all embedded in them. So super strong plastic. But unfortunately, this particular material, super hard to recycle.

Benjamin Thompson

And so enter the new work then, this new Nature paper this week. Have they come about it in a different way then? What's their solution?

Shamini Bundell

It seems to be quite a new process that they've come up with, to find a way to recycle this epoxy material at all. No one's really been able to do that before in a way that gets some useful stuff back out of it. And they had a particular substance in mind, called Bisphenol A, it's sort of particularly valuable and it's one of the things that you need to make these epoxy resins basically. So they experiment to develop this process. Now this is very small scale at this point. In my video, you can see they're doing this like in a test tube. And what they do is they get their little piece of wind turbine, put it in a completely oxygen-free environment. They add some solvent, they add a catalyst, heat it 260 degrees and leave it there for quite a long time, several days, and they've got this catalyst which basically targets a particular type of bond, a really specific CO bond in this epoxy — one of the researchers described it as like a Pac Man coming along and like chomping down — so it breaks this bond. This is all sort of from the outside of the material, you know, it can only access the outside so it kind of chomp chomp chomps and then sort of exposes more of the inside. And eventually, chomps away at it all. And it all just sort of like dissolved into this solution. And then they can separate out multiple different materials from this mixture in their little test tube.

Benjamin Thompson

I mean, that sounds neat, but I guess there's a gap between a tiny test tube in a lab and these enormous great wind turbines, which I imagine the, you know, the sort of size of the Statue of Liberty or something like that.

Shamini Bundell

Yeah. So this is a proof of concept right? Now they're saying, hey, look, it is possible to find a chemical solution, so to speak, for getting something useful recycling this composite material. And this is a material they make wind turbine blades out of but also electric cars, aeroplane wings, fancy boats, things like that. So these epoxies are relatively widely used. The main issue, when I asked about scaling it up, they said the catalyst they used ruthenium is particularly expensive. So, you know, they've published this proof of concept, but I think they're looking at ways to make that ruthenium, more active, more stable. So basically, is there a way that they can do the same thing with a lot less of this expensive catalyst needing to be used up?

Benjamin Thompson

And what sort of difference do you think this might make then? How many wind turbine blades a year need to be recycled ultimately?

Shamini Bundell

Well, it's gonna be a huge number. Wind-use is growing in general. And clean energy reduces the need for fossil fuels, you know, helping slow down climate change, potentially. But this waste issue has been a little bit of a sort of thorn in its side of this whole sector. So lots of people have been really keen on trying to solve this problem. And you know, there are other solutions that have been worked on as we speak, future wind turbines could be potentially made of different materials, perhaps more easily recyclable. However, to answer your question, there's a lot. So there's an estimate that was in the paper, which is that by 2050, the world will have 43 million tonnes of decommissioned wind turbine blades to deal with. Now we're going to put that in context, right. So if you compare it to other energy production methods, coal fired power plants produce far more waste products every year. And that's even before you consider the waste involved in decommissioning them. And obviously, that's producing carbon dioxide as well. But the wind sector would like to be obviously as green as possible. And there you know, there are a lot of people who are very keen to stop wind turbine blades going into landfill. So potentially, this new chemical method could be one way to do that.

Benjamin Thompson

And if listeners want to know more about this, and maybe watch it in more of a visual medium, where could they go to find that out?

Shamini Bundell

That's funny, you should ask because yes, I have made a video about that. It's up right now on our YouTube channel. So we'll stick a link to that in the show notes. And yes, you can see for yourself the little pieces of wind turbine blades dissolving away.

Benjamin Thompson

Fantastic. Well, listen, let's leave it there then for this week's Briefing Chat. And listeners, if you want more about these stories, and where you can sign up for The Nature Briefing to get even more like them delivered directly to your inbox, look out for links in the show notes.

Shamini Bundell

And as always, you can keep in touch with us on Twitter, we're @naturepodcast, or you can send us an email to podcast@nature.com. I'm Shamini Bundell.

Benjamin Thompson

And I'm Benjamin Thompson. Thanks for listening.