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The Current Transcript for May 24, 2017

Host: Duncan McCue

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

This seed contains traits that might end up being necessary for the survival of the species and we just don't know yet.

DUNCAN MCCUE: The deep Arctic is home to a vault that's keeping almost a million seed varieties safe last week rising temperatures caused flooding near that seed safe house putting them all at risk. In an hour we're asking how safe the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is, and why human kind’s very survival could depend on it. And today the sloppy world of science sometimes puts big bucks ahead of hard facts.

SOUNDCLIP

If you look at the scientific literature overall particularly the biomedical literature I think there's a pretty strong argument that about half of what gets published is wrong.

DM: Biomedical researchers are always looking for the next breakthrough. But that search comes at a high price. In half an hour, why the quest for a flashy headline worthy studies is creating worthless cures, crushing hopes, and wasting billions of dollars. But first, the UK was already on high alert before Monday's deadly attack in Manchester. Now the stakes are even higher.

SOUNDCLIP

It is now concluded on the basis of today's investigations that the threat level should be increased from severe to critical.

DM: Coming up why England's security services even with armed soldiers patrolling the streets face a sisyphean task of keeping the country safe from danger from within and outside of its borders. I'm Duncan McCue sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti. And you're listening to The Current.

Manchester attack: Can U.K. stop homegrown terrorism?

Guests: Will Geddes, Loretta Napoleoni, Hamed El Said

SOUNDCLIP

We mustn't underestimate the fact that Daesh or ISIS really want to commit these terrorist acts, and constantly trying to radicalize people British born people to make sure that they do take up arms against us.

DM: That was UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd speaking about the high risks of homegrown terrorism, in the wake of Monday's attack in Manchester. Salman Ramadan Abedi, 22 year old British man of Libyan descent has been identified as the suicide bomber. He lived in Manchester. There are over a thousand people on the UK’s terror watch list with hundreds of them having returned from joining ISIS. Mr. Abedi was known to security services but not considered high risk. Following Monday night's attack in Manchester there are growing questions about how the UK’s security apparatus is monitoring suspected terrorists. For more on that I'm joined by Will Gettys. He's the chief executive of the security consulting firm International Corporate Protection Group and he's in London. Hello.

WILL GEDDES: Good morning.

DM: What do we know so far about Salman Abedi?

WILL GEDDES: What we know so far as this individual was very young. He's 22 years old. Within this community we see the same typical [unintelligible] of an individual where close friends and associates, on the whole, would say they were perfectly normal individuals. However, what is subsequently beginning to come to life, is that he is like any, man did actually notes knows and has made comments that he saw an increasing concern of radicalization obviously within this individual. And that lies the problem. In terms of not only his family but his Imam, that there was seems to be some fall down. Either in the fact that they didn't report it to reach the authorities or as they did, there wasn't a sufficient follow up that could obviously investigate it further.

DM: What kind of surveillance was he under?

WILL GEDDES: Well, that was no surveillance actually under him at this particular time. And from what we understand from the information being disclosed by The Home Secretary is that he was sort of on the peripherals of the intelligence agencies radar. So, he was not what one would deem a key asset or key person of interest, which would fall within the general parameters of then keeping a watchful monitoring.

DM: There have been three arrests today. What's the likelihood of him having accomplices?

WILL GEDDES: There is a very good likelihood that they will have accomplices. And all current concern in the house, being, is that due to the specification of what we're learning the device actually was compiled and composed of. That there are evidently other individuals which would have had the track of ability to be able to provide or train in praising that device.

DM: And are these arrests that happened today, are they linked to the rising of the threat level?

WILL GEDDES: Most especially. In light of this particular attack, we have over in the United Kingdom about 3000 persons of interest. Security services are constantly reviewing and assessing. Now this particular individual would appear [unintelligible] as I mentioned, particularly on the radar for the security services and I think in the light of that, and the sophistication of the attack, because this was not a spontaneous attack as we saw previously, with for example the Westminster's attacks. This was something that was evidently well planned and well considered and well constructed that evidently from the back of that, that means there will be accomplices of which these are persons unknown. And to mount on the fact of this scale would have required up to a great degree of capability which the security services would obviously feel, I think to a degree, somewhat responsible to advising that we escalate to our highest levels.

DM: You mentioned that the security forces are actively watching a number of people. How do they prioritize who to watch?

WILL GEDDES: Well, there are a number of different factors which will be composed within that risk assessment process. And again they will be only focusing on those that they feel are the most immediate risk or threat to worry about their communities, or to the state, in terms of the advancements of their force. And bearing in mind that a lot of evidential gathering that will be compiled in prior to arrest to ensure there is a successful prosecution. On average here in the U.K. there is an arrest related to terrorism, almost every single day. There is such a large scale problem that the security services have to focus our attention on those that they feel hit the high criteria. That inevitably, as we've seen before, and as we will no doubt see in the future, will [unintelligible] resource that they have at their avail. There will be those that will slip through the net.

DM: If there is an arrest happening every single day, how many of those are being prosecuted?

WILL GEDDES: Well there are quite a few of them which are being currently held in custody that are being processed and quite a few of them are being successfully prosecuted. So, there is also a question of where individuals who will be sufficiently attracting of the law to be arrested. But it will be a strategical tactical move by the authorities to why to diffuse, intercept or to disrupt a potential cell by removing one of their key players. It is also working on to a certain degree, the process of what we call the pebbles in the pond, which is to, obviously, drop the pebble in the pond to see the vibrations or waves of its effect. Ultimately, removes that key player to see what's their associates, then ultimately do it.

DM: It does seem that the security forces, an incredibly massive task. I mean, they have to track a target and let that target run until they have got enough evidence to prosecute. And and it's kind of a Goldilocks problem. You know they have to, not too soon but not too late. It just seems like such a massive task for security forces. Are they up to it to be able to track all the potential terrorists?

WILL GEDDES: Well, they are to the best degree they possibly can. I mean we have many years and decades of experience of dealing with terrorism domestically. And therefore, there's a lot of capability that is already banked to putting it in the best space we possibly can. However, and having said that, the challenges are immense and they are to a degree somewhat insurmountable. Especially, when you consider the number of individuals that we are potentially facing that do pose a risk of varying degrees. The Security Service is also bound by the legislation and also by the legal framework [unintelligible]. Which obviously, prevent them from carrying out certainly elements which I feel could be justified of intrusive surveillance on individuals that is justified.

DM: Will Geddes thank you for sharing your expertise.

WILL GEDDES: Thank you sir.

DM: Will Geddes is the chief executive of the security consulting firm International Corporate Protection Group. He was in London, England. My next guest believes that more of these homegrown attacks are inevitable across Europe. Loretta Napoleoni chronicled the rise of ISIS in her book The Islamist Phoenix. She's based in the United Kingdom but today she's in Whitefish, Montana. Hello.

LORETTA NAPOLEONI: Good morning. I

DM: ISIS has claimed responsibility for this attack. How involved do you think they were?

LORETTA NAPOLEONI: Well, ISIS claims responsibility now for any type of attack, so we don't know how responsible they are. Meaning, how much they plan and plot this attack. But I would say that their role is mostly inspirational. So, the idea is do not come any more to fight in Libya or in Syria or in Iraq. So, wherever you know, there is a presence of ISIS is. But, stay home and do whatever you can. Whatever finances you have. In other words, you know, bring that fight to The West, to Europe, to wherever you can.

DM: So if ISIS isn't encouraging its followers to join them in Syria in Iraq anymore and the UK is monitoring about 600 British fighters who have returned from joining ISIS, how much of a threat do they pose to the United Kingdom?

LORETTA NAPOLEONI: Well, I don't believe that the threat posed by the fighters that are coming back is so serious as the authorities are saying. I mean number one, most people we've seen coming back especially in the northern country, in the Scandinavian countries this were the first ones to come back, were actually people that did not want to stay there any longer, they were very much traumatized young people. I do not also think that ISIS will send back valuable fighters because you know it is fighting to the bet to win The Caliphate. Also, in Libya, the presence of ISIS in Libya is actually you know quite considerable. Libya is after Syria and Iraq. You know, the most important area. They targeted Libya because of the similarities also between you know Libya and this region in Syria and Iraq where they created The Caliphate. So these are very fragmented territories with, you know, a lot of tribes. So, I think the real threat is actually posed by people who leave in the United Kingdom, this is clearly the case of what's happened in Manchester, who have been radicalized, who never lived abroad never actually went to fight abroad. But they would have, if they could. But because the situation changed in The Caliphate and also in other regions like Libya for example they turn into a sort of local terrorist. So, they have become what the traditional suicide bomber was. Also, you know in 2003, you know when the war in Iraq started.

DM: So Salman Abedi was British born of Libyan descent. What do you think this attack says about the British government's ongoing efforts to fight radicalization?

LORETTA NAPOLEONI: Well, I think the British government has pursued its strategy which is fairly successful. But unfortunately, the United Kingdom has somewhat the same characteristics that was seen in France. There’s a very, very large community of Muslim. It is a community that emigrated long time ago. So, we're seeing now the second or even third generation is not integrate. Part of it, it is, but you know, part is not. And it is within the disenfranchise young people, within the groups who have not been integrated properly, that we find the potential members of Islamic State, of Al Qaeda, or any kind of groups of Islamic fundamentalists. They can become a serious terrorist. And this is an issue which is very difficult to address. Because it requires, number one, the active participation of the Muslim population because I think most of these people live in certain areas, sometimes even in sort of ghettos as is the case on the outskirts of Paris, for example. So a very strong effort to bring on board the Muslim community, needs to be done. Whatever we've done so far is insufficient. Without that kind of support it would be very difficult to monitor everybody. And the second approach is integration. So something has to be done to improve the degree of integration of, especially of the young people because these are the people that are most vulnerable. They're mostly fascinated also by the message of Islamic State.

DM: Napoleoni, thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us.

LORETTA NAPOLEONI: Thank you.

DM: Loretta Napoleoni is the author of the Islamist Phoenix. She was in Whitefish Montana. A suspected suicide bomber was a Manchester native who attended a local university before dropping out. He's revived the conversation about the radicalization of young Muslims in Britain and what more could be done to prevent it. Hamed El Said is a professor of international political economy at the Manchester Metropolitan University. He's also a senior advisor to the United Nations Counter Terrorism Implementation Task Force. He's in Manchester. Hello.

HAMED EL SAID: Hi there. Hi thanks for having me.

DM: You've been watching your city deal with the aftermath of this attack. How has the community been responding?

HAMED EL SAID: It's been a fantastic response actually to be honest. You know, we've seen the community coming together and facing all of this. Community members and community leaders came together in different parts of the city yesterday to support one another. It's been an amazing symbol of actually unity. Standing together, condemning, you know, what happened. All members from the Muslim community, from the Jewish community, from other communities and cultures, actually stood together. A large number of them yesterday chanting in the middle of the city that we love Manchester, we will not be defeated, carrying different slogans against terrorism and the terrorists as well. A lot of number of them were actually distributing food and drinks to the police, to the security, to the press, you know. It's been really a fantastic response and that's really what we need at this stage in a period like this. It's been very touching, it’s been very impressive indeed.

DM: Which is what you'd love to see but not after an attack. I'd like to ask you about the U.K.'s counter radicalization strategy which is called Prevent. It's been around for years but it's fairly controversial. Why is that?

HAMED EL SAID: It's a very good question, actually. Whatever you do unless it is received very well and perceived very, very well by your community then you're efforts really are not going to be 100 percent successful. Obviously, we will never be able to actually prevent every single attack. That would be impossible. But unless the your community members or your community in general, have a trust in what you are doing, they believe in what you are doing and they actually perceive it positively and very well, you have difficulties. And I think that's one of the major problems.

DM: And there has been a lot of opposition within the Muslim community to this program. Why is that?

HAMED EL SAID: There has been and in fact one of the main reasons why this is the case is that the Muslim community do not really feel that Prevent is about the Muslim community as it really should be. The feeling that it's more interested in intelligence and information gathering than anything else. And that really has given Prevent, you know, a negative sort of you know description and in the mind of most Muslim communities and they haven't really embraced it fully. Having said that, there is collaboration going on but unfortunately we don't really talk about that collaboration. But the Prevent in particular had a problem as well. Problems with choosing the right messenger. You know, the people who are also would be acceptable, credible and competent from the community point of view. So you really need massive engagement with the community. The community you must feel they own preventive initiatives and they really must be an integral part of Prevent, any preventative strategy. That's not the feeling that most members of the Muslim community have here in the UK and I believe that has made that Prevent in the UK more difficult to achieve targets.

DM: So if they haven't been very good at building relationships and instead the community feels like it's being spied on or even in some cases you know they're suggesting there's human rights violations. Are there any examples of other countries where we're counter radicalization programs have worked?

HAMED EL SAID: You really have to bear in mind that such programs are very new you. They have been introduced very recently in many European countries. And it's too early to judge their success completely. However, we have decent examples coming now from Denmark and particularly in the so-called Aarhus program, which was based you know on community led initiatives which is really based on a strong relationship with the community and very strong engagement with community members. The community members are very much involved in the running of the program.They're very much involved and, you know, identifying vulnerable individuals. Very much involved in providing solutions. The state itself does not have the resources to deal with all of this, all aspects of this problem. We have seen here in the UK now the security officers are massively overstretched. They have asked the army to step in. Another sign that really the state is overstretched the security forces are overstretched and they're pre-event and counter prevention emphasis. But the community has enormous resources. They know their members very well. They know them better than anyone else. They are more capable of identifying the early radicalization signs. They are better equipped to deal with such a narrative and to provide better solutions. So, I really think that you know they are Aarhus now program in Denmark is it providing an example along those lines. And this shows how important the engaging with community members can be.

DM: Well thank you very much for sharing your expertise with us.

HAMED EL SAID: Thank you for having me.

DM: Hamed El Said is a professor of international political economy at the Manchester Metropolitan University. He was in Manchester. I'm Duncan McCue sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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Sloppy science creates worthless cures and wastes billions, says author

Guests: Richard Harris

DM: Hi I'm Duncan McCue sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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DM: Still to come it's supposed to protect the Earth's future food supply from disaster. But warmer than usual temperatures in The Arctic have caused flooding and planted seeds of doubt that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a safe place. That story in half an hour. But first, why you shouldn't believe everything you read even in the most prominent medical journals.

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DM: Whether it's for cancer or diabetes, ALS or any other serious disease the search for breakthrough treatments or the next big cure is big business. In the U.S. alone, 30 billion dollars a year gets poured into biomedical research. But my next guest says that's money not well spent. Richard Harris has been a science correspondent with National Public Radio for 31 years. His new book details the flaws in biomedical research and their dangerous consequences. It's called Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless cures, Crushes Hope and Wastes Billions. And Richard Harris joins me from Washington. Hello.

RICHARD HARRIS: Hello.

DM: What were you seeing that made you want to dig deeper into this, Richard?

RICHARD HARRIS: Well first of all I had been sort of reassigned to do biomedical research is my beat after having done climate change and a lot of other things over my many years at NPR and I thought I better get oriented First of all and I very quickly discovered that the budget for the NIH had doubled between 1998 and 2003. And after that point it was basically on a very slow glide path down toward lower and lower money in terms of spending power for the NIH budget and I thought this can't be good. The budget doubled. Everyone hired a bunch of new scientist, they built new labs and so on and now the budget is is starting to wane away so. So that was a red flag to me that has to be causing some sort of trouble. The other thing I noticed were a couple of papers about the fact that scientists and in drug companies had been trying to reproduce work that had been done in academic labs and they were having a terrible time trying to just get the same results that the academic labs had reported. One in particular was a drug company called Amgen, in which the chief scientist there involved in cancer research, a guy named Glenn Begley was really interested in 53 studies that he thought if these studies pan out these could be really good important leads for new drug. So he tried to reproduce those 53 studies and he discovered that only six of them could work. In fact, even when he enlisted the help of some of the scientists who did the original studies. So that's 11 percent. That's that's a really that's a bad thing. And so I started to realize there's a problem with reproducibility in biomedical research that scientists are starting to talk about. And this funding crunch in the United States which is obviously putting more and more pressure on scientists this is not a formula for happy news.

DM: That's quite shocking. I mean that he could only reproduce six and you call it the reproducibility crisis. When you ask other scientists if they can't reproduce their findings, well, what are they talking about.

RICHARD HARRIS: Yes. The reproducibility crisis is a real thing. The Journal Nature did a study last year, a survey of more than a thousand scientists, saying is there a reproducibility crisis. More than half of them said yes there is a crisis. Another 40 percent said there's a slight crisis. Not sure exactly what a slight crisis is, but at any rate add it add that up and 90 percent of scientists out there say there is at least some significant problem with reproducibility. Whether it's a crisis or not is an interesting question because I think some of these problems when I track back in my book and looked at the history of this stuff some of these problems date back to the 70s and before . So, I think that certainly the recognition that it's a problem is has peaked right now. And I also think that the recognition that we need to do something about it is here. So, that's all for the good. But it is true that there are a lot of problems that need to be paid attention to.

DM: One of the problems you explore is that the research is based on a system that rewards wrong behaviors. What do you mean by that?

RICHARD HARRIS: Well, unfortunately, scientists find themselves in this really difficult situation as a result of the funding crunch where they have to do something to keep their grants flowing. And so basically they need flashy results. They need exciting findings and they actually are discouraged from actually finding flaws in their own studies which is of course a normal part of science. Science is not perfect it shouldn't be perfect. We should be worried if everyone did everything right the first time. I would I think that means they're not trying hard enough to move the frontiers of science. But the problem is these incentives are for scientists to produce squeaky clean results exciting results full of words like novel and unprecedented and robust and so on, which have grown the use of those words by the way has grown dramatically in the scientific literature in the last few decades. So, scientists are being pressured to do that even though they might know in the back of their head, you know, maybe I should take a little bit more time, I should do a few more experiments before I rush this into print. But the incentives, unfortunately, to get grants to keep their labs going to keep their careers alive are against doing science as carefully as they might.

DM: You write about the publish or perish syndrome what's that?

RICHARD HARRIS: Well, that's part and parcel of this. Basically, if you're not producing a lot of results and getting them out there in the world for other read, you're judged harshly. And there's a story of a psychology professor named Brian Nosek, who is at the University of Virginia. He was up for promotion and the chairman of his department said print out all of your papers for me and he said what do you mean printed all of my papers? I publish like a 100 papers you're not going to read 100 papers to decide whether I'm deserving of this promotion. And the chairman said, no that's the way we do it. Print them all out. And so he did. But he said his career would have been shaped a lot differently if when he'd gotten to the university he'd been told when you were up for promotion. Just bring us your two or three best pieces of work. And he said if that had been the case, as opposed to just publishing like crazy he would have thought a lot differently about how to pursue his research agenda. He would have done fewer things but he would have done them with more care and more depth. He thinks, and I have no reason to disagree with him, that that could have been better for the process of science than sort of being stuck in this publish or perish hamster wheel that many academics find themselves in.

DM: And you talk about the academics and scientists wanting to get that praise for being in a journal like Science or Nature or being first, you know, rather than being right. What are the implications for that when it comes to developing new drugs?

RICHARD HARRIS: Well, if you are first with something that isn't exactly right you can be just misleading everybody. And there certainly are stories of people who have been spent who've spent quite a number of years chasing after a very exciting finding that turns out not to be true. And one story I tell in the book is about scientists, around 1999, announced that they discovered that they could take blood cells out of the bone marrow and turn them into any other kind of cell in the human body which would which would be fabulous as a tool for research. And by one scientist count a couple of hundred people jumped on the bandwagon publish studies about this and dropped what they were doing and it was it was all the buzz for a couple of years. Until finally, some scientists at Stanford University said wait a second, you know, no one has ever gone back to look at this and do the really careful study to see whether this underlying discovery is true. And they went back and did an incredibly careful series of experiments and they determined actually this was just a mirage. This wasn't even happening. And once they published their study everyone said oh well that was wrong and will go on and do something else. So that was a lot of wasted effort a lot of wasted money and the hope that this was leading to an important research tool turned out to be not true.

DM: But take me. Help me understand this. I mean if the underlying research wasn't true, don't scientific journals have really rigorous panels that make sure that the science is sound before these things get published? Isn't that what peer review is supposed to be all about?

RICHARD HARRIS: Well, peer review is supposed to look at your results and see if you've made any obvious methodological errors. Sometimes they look at your statistics and see if you've done your statistics right. Although not always very well, but peer reviewers don't try to reproduce your studies. They don't try to redo them. And there's a certain sense that that review is a fairly rough index of whether something is correct or not. Because if you look at the scientific literature overall particularly the biomedical literature I think there's a pretty strong argument that about half of what gets published is wrong. And that's not exactly a strong testimony for the success rate of peer review. On the other hand scientists I think intuitively know that a lot of stuff that's in the literature is not really believable so they tend to be they tend to take it with a grain of salt.

DM: You looked at a study on breast cancer that use the cancerous cells of a young woman from 1976. Can you tell me about that?

RICHARD HARRIS: Yes. That's quite a story. This started in as you say in 1976 in Houston at the M.D. Anderson Hospital. The scientists there were trying to collect cells to build new cell lines to build new sort of immortal cell lines that could be studied in the laboratory instead of having to study people. They were trying to extract cancer cells from individuals to use as laboratory tools. This particular cell line is called MDAMB 435, and it came from a 31 year old woman with breast cancer and it quickly became one of the leading cells used in the world to study breast cancer. In fact, the National Cancer Institute has a list of the 60 sort of greatest hits cells that are the cells that scientists turn to, time and again, to study particular cancers. And this was one of those the cells that represented breast cancer. So what happened was around the year 2000 some scientists on The West Coast decided to take a look at all of these 60 cancer cell lines and see what they could learn about their genetics. What genes are turned on and what genes are turned off. They did this this broad exploration and it discovered that lung cancer cells all had similar features with each other and liver cancer cells did and breast cancer cells did with one exception which this this particular cell line turned out to be a dead ringer for a melanoma cell line. Kind of skin cancer cell line. So, the scientists noted that this is apparently not a breast cancer cell at all it's a melanoma. The National Cancer Institute put a little note on it on his Web site saying beware this is probably a melanoma, appears to be a melanoma. It's not a breast cancer. Yet, even since that year 2000, when that paper first came out or the warnings went up, there have been 900 more studies published on this as a breast cancer cell. In fact I just looked last week and there are fresh papers in the literature, even as we speak, calling this melanoma, this misidentified breast cancer, they're calling it a breast cancer when it's in fact a melanoma. So, this is indicative of a big problem in cell lines and there are more than 450 misidentified cell lines that are being used in laboratories around the world.

DM: Wouldn't the scientists try to confirm what kind of cells they're working on before they started, isn't that part of the process?

RICHARD HARRIS: It should be. Well, certainly in the 70s and 80s and 1990s it was not a trivial matter to figure out what a cell line was. But since the turn of the century the tools have advanced very rapidly and in fact it's actually a very simple test now to identify what your cell line is. These days there's no excuse for not doing that except it costs something a couple of hundred dollars every time you want to do it. And if you're running a study with eight cell lines and you want to test them before and after, then you're talking you know you're starting to talk some thousands of dollars. But even so The National Institutes of Health agrees with you that scientists should in fact go and check their cell lines before they declare what they're working with. And make sure that they know what they're working with and that was a dictum as of last year that if you're getting NIH money you should check your cell lines. It's early days to figure out how successful that has been but, you know, that was one relatively easy fix that this is a fairly substantial problem in biomedical research. And if scientists actually do follow these rules this probably will eventually get cleaned up.

DM: Well it does raise the question, is that case of the woman and the breast cancer from 1976 is that an isolated case or cell line contamination? Is it a bigger problem?

RICHARD HARRIS: It's a huge problem in fact, it dates back to 1951 which was the very first cell line ever collected and isolated and grown in the laboratory from Henrietta Lacks. This was at Johns Hopkins she's she's famous for this now because of a wonderful book about her and a movie that's also out recently about her story. But that cell line actually got out of control rather quickly and it became a major contaminant in experiments through the 1970s and 80s and beyond. In the 1970s there was a scientist named Walter Nelson Reese who decided that this was just intolerable. He went out and was forever going to scientific meetings and exposing problems in all of these laboratory experiments based on people [unintelligible] one cell line. But the HeLa cell just spread so rapidly. It turns out that they were inadvertently using this contaminated cell line. He was identifying those problems but he was also a very abrasive human being and so a lot of scientists instead of really listening to his message that they need to clean up their science just said oh he's such a pest and he actually never succeeded in fixing this problem. Others have taken it on as a challenge since then. And I think there's some progress but there are still 450 cell lines that are not what they portend to be on a on the international list of contaminated cell lines. More than 100 of them are these HeLa cells. So, it's a very widespread problem.

DM: And not only a problem for scientists in the labs but a problem for people that are suffering from disease. Problem for you and I. I mean, you talk about medical science being in the doldrums that there are you know 7000 diseases out there we've only found treatments for 500. What impact does it have on patients who are waiting and hoping for scientists to find a cure and treatments?

RICHARD HARRIS: Right. And I think what we can say is that this is slowing down scientific progress. It's unclear whether they would be curious to many of these diseases even if scientists had worked perfectly because they're dealing with very difficult problems. I mean, these are tough diseases many times to understand and study and even if you understand it it's really hard to figure out a drug. So, I'm sympathetic that these are really difficult problems that people are wrestling with. But what I can say is that if scientists paid attention to many of these avoidable errors science would move forward faster. And that's really the subject of the book that's the idea that's driving behind us. Which is let's try to reduce the avoidable errors and move science progress forward.

DM: You talk about the problems of biomedical researchers relying on mice for their experiments so many of them use mice. Why aren't mice a reliable source for research?

RICHARD HARRIS: Well, a couple of reasons. One of which is that sometimes scientists simply don't use enough mice. They're very expensive and if you're an academic scientist maybe doing one of these experiments correctly it costs a hundred thousand dollars. And even if you're supported by The National Institutes of Health you're not going to have that kind of money. So you're going to do it with far fewer mice and you're going to call it a pilot study and you're going to cross your fingers and hope that worked, and a really a an under-powered study will actually translate in real life. And very often unfortunately that's not the case. I think there are other sorts of other issues with mice as well. Which is that I think we're sort of lulled into the sense that they are just little furry versions of human beings and scientists know at one level that's not true. But on the other hand, that's the hope when people turn to mice. They say well, they're little mammals like we're mammals. They grow rapidly. There's a whole infrastructure built up around taking care of mice, and so and so. So, we'll use mice and it by the way everybody else in my field uses mice. So, everybody will be when I publish my results no one will say why are you using mice? Because that's sort of the default. I explore in my book thinks that scientists can do to make mice more reliable in experiments. Partly, mice are very vulnerable to things like even the sex of the handler the human being who handles the mouse the mice will react very differently to a male versus a female handler. So, if you're consistent and in fact preferably using female women to handle the mice as opposed to men that will help a lot.

DM: How do they react to men?

RICHARD HARRIS: Well, apparently they pick up on our male scent. There was an even an experiment where somebody took a man's t-shirt and threw it into the laboratory with the mice, and the mice reacted very, very poorly. They get more aggressive. They just they basically have this fight or flight reflex that is not evoked when women handle them. I mean, these kinds of problems you can appreciate how hard science is. Because I mean who thought well, we have to think about what sex the mouse handler is.

DM: So, the gender of the mouse handler is cueing the science as well? But what are the alternatives to mice?

RICHARD HARRIS: Well, one thing you can do is you can do mouse experiments at a little bit more care. To use more mice and to think more carefully about and try to avoid as many of these sorts of problems as you can. But there are also some very intriguing things happening right now where scientists figured out ways to grow human cells chips essentially. You can hold one in your in your hand. And these are very interesting provocative experiments where if you put these human cells together they'll even though even organize themselves in a way that they're found in the body. For example, I looked at a chip involving lung tissue and the lung tissue actually had organized itself so it had all the little hairs in your lung called cilia which beat and push pollen and so on out of your lung those were all beating in unison in this you know on this chip in this laboratory. So, and likewise there are liver chips and chips for many of the different organs of the body. The hope is that even though these are not perfect stand ins for human beings either, by any stretch of the imagination, the hope is that if you if you combine this with animal studies and use them in creative ways, it is possible that you'll get better results out of studying human cells than you would out of studying mice.

DM: When we started talking you talked about how there's so much emphasis and pressure on scientists to find something flashy and exciting and new and it does seem like every other day there's new research saying that you know a diet drink or drinking red wine is good for you or bad for you depending on the study there's a lot of conflicting research. What do you make of that when you see those studies being published?

RICHARD HARRIS: Nutrition studies have always been notoriously unpredictable. They're very hard studies to do. And we all know you know coffee is good for you on Tuesdays and bad for you on Thursdays or whatever. I think there's sort of an intuition we have that the nutrition studies should not be taken at face value. And I've come to the conclusion that many of the medical studies also particularly the first discovery of phenomenon X Y or Z often turns out not to be true. In fact there was a paper published earlier this year about that. They found about half of all studies that were published in newspapers around the world in English language newspapers, and then where there was good follow up science about half of them were wrong. About two thirds of the ones that were flashy and new and sort of cutting edge things were wrong. So my sense is that we as journalists of course are interested in telling the latest greatest the news but we have to be really careful and say please be aware that about half the time the news does not end up being true on further scrutiny. So, we need to we need to a little bit more careful about the way we present this stuff. We need to also work hard to follow up if we've made a big deal out of something. It's important for us to go back a couple of years later and say well did that turn out to be true or not.

DM: You do come down hard on biomedical research in your book. You question whether rigor is in fact dead, the name of the book Rigor Mortis. But when you look at the long term medicine it has improved pretty dramatically even just in our lifetime. Aren't there some advances that are stemming from good research?

RICHARD HARRIS: Oh, absolutely. And I don't mean to. In the book I say rigor mortis, was sort of a play on words and I don't mean to imply that rigor is dead. It is not at all. There certainly is and certainly you know there are many advances in health but many of them are very incremental particularly in cancer research. There's you know, a new drug announced all the time and in this country they are extremely expensive and they're often very marginal in terms of what they actually do in terms of extending lives. So, we've seen huge improvements, for example, in cancer rates have gone down largely because of efforts like stop smoking campaigns. And there's certainly is no question that our health as a whole has been getting better, by and large. But there's so much room for improvement in drugs cost. More and more to develop and they are more and more expensive when they are developed partly because there are so many false starts in the drug development process.

DM: How are biomedical researchers going to improve so that they're not going down blind alleys, so that they're not having to choose between you know doing it right or trying to keep their career afloat?

RICHARD HARRIS: Yeah. Well, there are a number of things that scientists can do. They can, first of all, make sure that they're checking their materials like the cells they use to make sure that they are what they think they are and that they're using them correctly. They can also be more careful in their methods that they use and design their experiments with a little bit more care. That may take a little bit of education to help them do that. And so part of the issue here is better training for young scientists so that they go into the career knowing a little bit better how to put experiments together. The other thing that I think would help would be to increase the amount of transparency and sharing that goes on in science. Because if you have done an experiment and you want to publish it you should also publish all of your underlying data. And if you have computer code that generated it publish that too. So if somebody else can take your computer code run your data through it and see if they get the same results you do. This would not only help shorten the cycle of, you know, if somebody has made a mistake it gets discovered sooner. But I also think it would make scientists realize well gee if other people are going to be doing this maybe I should check my data one more time just to be a little bit more careful here. And so I think that the idea of openness and sharing is a provocative idea that quite a number of people who I whom I interviewed for my book recommended it as a way to go forward. Finally, I think there are some scientists out there who are saying it's time to study how research works. We're going to research the research process and this is called meta research. And they are thinking about understanding why these problems crop up in greater depth and understanding incentives that they could create within the world of science that would discourage them and speed progress.

DM: Fascinating stuff, sir. Thank you very much for joining us.

RICHARD HARRIS: It was my pleasure.

DM: Richard Harris is a science journalist with National Public Radio. His new book is Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope and Wastes Billions. He was in Washington. Coming up in our next half hour. The deep chill of the Arctic was supposed to be a safe place to keep almost a million seed varieties that hold the future of our food supply. But last week brought with it higher than usual temperatures and flooding that threatened to put it all at risk. The father of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault tells me why the safe house is more important than ever and why saving those seeds could mean saving ourselves. I'm Duncan McCue, sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti, and you're listening to The Current.

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DM: Hi I'm Duncan McCue sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current. On Monday we dove into the debate over Bill C-16. That's the federal bill that would protect the rights of transgender people and add gender expression or identity as a protection under the Canadian Human Rights Act. We heard from Hilla Kerner a member of the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women Shelter who testified against Bill C-16 in the Senate. Ms Kerner says the legislation will erode the work that's been done to recognize the unique challenges facing women and girls.

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We definitely think that transgender people do need services and need shelters and other support. And like everybody else they deserve and must live in safety dignity and liberty. We're saying for women who are organized based on thier sex based oppression, we need to have autonomy and rights to define their own membership and how we operate.

Then we heard from Marni Panas a diversity and inclusion professional and trans woman.

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She has this clear bias and belief that transgender women are not women. I can tell you, I may have been assigned male at birth because I may have been born with a penis but I've been born, I was born a woman, always a woman. And I can assure you that the oppression that transgender women and transgender people in general face is quite profound. That doesn't make us any less a woman or any more women. It just makes our own experiences unique.

DM: And then we heard from many of you. We received this email from Patty Jarvis in Toronto, as the parent of a trans teenager. I've been forced to examine my own understanding or lack of understanding of gender. Ms Kerner seems to believe that she has the exclusive definition of gender. I'm not so sure. She seems to be able to understand the experience of trans men and women but does not support the idea that trans men and women understand the experience of biological men and women. On Facebook. Kim Gyan Stewart wrote, Vancouver Rape Relief argues that a trans woman is not suitable to counsel some of their clientele. As these traumatised women may not feel safe with a counselor who once had the features of a man. This could be a trigger for PTSD. As someone who understands trauma, personally,I agree. Cindy Holmes tweeted this. The majority of feminist anti-violence organizations are inclusive of trans women. The Vancouver Rape Relief and women's shelter does not represent us. Monica B.T. weighed in on Facebook. Thank you Hilla for speaking for us who have been and continue now to be silenced by the transgender contingent. They shut down any discourse that is not in line with their feelings. How is it right that women who have sought protective shelter are the ones who need to leave that shelter, when a male transgender is allowed in. How do we not have the right to speak up about a male individual being in our space a male transgender is not, never will be a female. And Laurie English tweeted, my feminism is intersectional trans women are real women. If you missed that discussion on Bill C-16 you can find it on our Web site at cbc dot see a slash the current or listen on the CBC Radio app. It's free from Google app or the App Store. And as always, we'd love to hear from you. Find us on Facebook or on Twitter at The Current CBC or send us an email. Just go to our Web site at cbc dot see a slash the current and click on the contact link.

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DM: You're listening to the current on CBC Radio 1 and SiriusXM. I'm Duncan McCue. The Doomsday Seed Bank under threat.

Global seed vault at risk — and climate change is to blame, say experts

Guests: Hege Aschim, Cary Fowler, Maria Zytaruk

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We walk into a long cement foreboding hallway safety helmets lined the wall, protection against falling ice.

So that's about 150 meters down into the mountain. This is becoming the permafrost here in granite.

Michael Koch with the Crop Trust that oversees the vault, guides us deeper into the mountain. With each step the temperature drops.

It's like something out of a movie.

It is like a holy place. Every time I come here I feel like I'm in a cathedral. This is a place to pause and to think because it's a very unique place and it's a very important place for humanity.

DM: The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened nine years ago in the deep chill of The Arctic. It was designed as kind of a doomsday bank to protect almost a million seed varieties, and the Earth's future food supply from manmade or natural catastrophes. That CNN report on the vault was from 2015. But last week there were reports that the seeds could be at risk after flooding caused by warmer than usual temperatures. Hege Aschim is a communications director for Stars Big, the Norwegian organization responsible for the administration and technical operation of a vault. We reached her in Oslo Norway. Hello.

HEGE ASCHIM: Hello.

DM: So what can you tell me about the water that's seeping into the tunnel that leads in to the vault?

HEGE ASCHIM: Well this autumn or before 2016, we had a very special fall because it was high temperatures and a lot of rain Svalbard. And that's very unusual. And I think it's the first time I've experienced it. And the rain made a water intrusion into the entrance of the tunnel. Which leads to the seed vault. The seed vault is deep deep inside a mountain but if it's a tunnel, about a hundred meters that leads to the vault. And in that tunnel we had a lot of water when it came into the tunnel. It froze to ice because it's cold there. So we had a lot of ice in the hole about 15 to 20 meters with ice [unintelligible]. I have to say the seeds and the seed vault itself, was never at risk.

DM: So the seeds are safe?

HEGE ASCHIM: The seeds are safe and are still safe and the seed vault itself are safe. But, the entrance is a problem. So you're doing some measures to provide both additional security and to protect the seed vault, but also to improve the tunnel.

HEGE ASCHIM: Now what kind of measures are you taking to try to deal with that water?

HEGE ASCHIM: Well we are building a waterproof wall inside a tunnel between the entrance and the seed vaults. So, if we are experiencing something like this again a lot of the stuff we will be sure to get stopped before it comes too far. We are also making a constructive drainage ditches in the mountainside to prevent melt water from the mountain and also rainwater to accumulate around the access channel and to protect against possible water intrusion.

DM: You mention the rain. I'm wondering about the permafrost. A press release by the crop trust one of the partners in the vault says the reason for the intrusion of the water was because quote the permafrost has not established itself as projected. Why did the planner of the vault not take climate change global warming into consideration when it was built?

HEGE ASCHIM: There were nothing in the plans that indicated that something should go wrong with both whether or not permafrost. So it's plan because it was permafrost there and it was expected to re-establish after all the building this construction. But we have experienced that the permafrost has not re- established. So, yes, we have seen small amounts of water in the entrance before but nothing like we experience this fall, with the rain. That was very extreme.

DM: But are there expected to be more problems now as a result of the global warming?

HEGE ASCHIM: Well it's a good question but we don't know if this is something which is happening every 200 years maybe, is this for once or if is this something that we have to expect in the future. We plan now that we can expect things like this again. So, we are doing measures that should secure the seed vault, that tunnel, in a long perspective.

DM: Were you surprised, I mean this made news around the world, how surprised were you about the concern over the seed vault?

HEGE ASCHIM: Well, the weather also was a surprise. But the interest in a seed vault is not surprising. This is like the world’s heritage. So, yes, I understand the interest, of course. It's a very, very important place for us for the human race.

DM: And it is so important, so, what is your message to the countries who are concerned about the seeds that they have stored there?

HEGE ASCHIM: The message is that we are doing everything we can to protect the seeds and the seeds are safe and the seed vault itself are safe. So we have to do what we can to minimize any risk that maybe climate change will lead to or extreme weather will lead to. But let’s be sure that cities are safe.

DM: Well thank you very much for giving us this update.

HEGE ASCHIM: Thank you.

DM: Hege Aschim is the communications director for Stars Big this Norwegian organization responsible for the administration and technical operation of The Vault. She was in Oslo, Norway. My next guest is sometimes referred to as the father of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, because he played such a big role in planting its initial seeds. Cary Fowler is an American agriculturist who also served as the executive director of the Crop Trust which helps run it. His book about The Vault is called Seeds on Ice. And Cary Fowler is in Memphis, Tennessee. Hello.

CARY FOWLER: Hi. Good morning.

DM: When you and others were designing the vault did you think that warming temperatures could ever pose a threat to it?

CARY FOWLER: Well, I think I would word the question a little bit differently. And the reason is that I don't think that the warming temperatures do pose a threat to it, even now. You know, if you're going to have a seed vault what you really want to do is, what you need to do is to have temperatures that are about minus 18 Celsius in the room where the seats are stored and of course there's no place on the planet that would provide that naturally. So you're going to have to cool the temperature of the room with the seeds. And the question is what temperature do you cool it down from. I would rather be doing it in Svalbard than where I am today in Memphis Tennessee.

DM: Why was Norway chosen as a home for The Vault?

CARY FOWLER: Oh a lot of reasons. Certainly Norway is a very trusted country worldwide and particularly around this issue. And also Svalbard provided naturally cold temperatures so we deepened to the mountains where you do have permafrost. I might say. You have temperatures that are very steady at about minus 5.5 Celsius. So it becomes relatively easy to cool that temperature down to the minus 18 that you want. And of course the other factors where it was very remote and safe from a lot of the normal kind of dangers that you would have in the world.

DM: You know The Vault better than anyone. What does it mean to you?

CARY FOWLER: Well, it's just a fantastic gift of Norway to the world. We have a backup duplicate sample now something like 930000 different crops varieties. And these varieties, this diversity is going to be very important, critical in the future for helping agriculture advance, to helping it adapt to climate change.

DM: You said there are some 930000 types of seeds there. What are some of the rarest species that you can find in the seed bank?

CARY FOWLER: Oh gosh. You know every time I look at a list of the species that we have there I see things that I've never heard of before. Love Lies Bleeding. Can you imagine something like that. I don't even know what it is?

DM: That sounds very exotic.

CARY FOWLER: Yes. So we have of course the crops that everyone knows they're something like 150000 different varieties of wheat and 150000 different types of rice. The Canadian program has sent I think about twenty eight thousand samples. Canada has a major collection of barley for example. So these are the seeds that we have in the seed vault are, in all cases, a backup to other seed banks around the world. Well, for example the largest rice collection that we have in the seed vault comes from the Philippines and the largest collection of wheat comes from Mexico. And obviously, you know, climate change is affecting those countries as well. So, you know, the impact of climate change is global and we'll deal with it in Svalbard as we would have done anywhere else.

DM: So, it's there as a protection for us all. How do you go about making a withdrawal from the seed bank? What's the process?

CARY FOWLER: Well, the process is we operate the seed vault much like safety posit that box would be operated, you know, at your local bank. The depositors own their samples and they, and only they can withdraw. So we they had the first withdrawal about a year and a half ago when an international institution that was based in Syria needed to withdraw the seeds. Obviously, during the fighting in Syria that institution had to relocate. They did so in Lebanon and Morocco and at a certain point they realized boy we're not getting back to Aleppo Syria to our seed bank there. So, they withdrew a portion of their seeds to re-establish their seed bank and re-establish their plant breeding programs.

DM: So if they were to try to beef up the seed bank in Aleppo there was a withdrawal do you think war and climate change is going to result in more withdrawals in the future.

CARY FOWLER: Oh, sure. I mean, you know, this is an insurance policy for the other seed banks around the world and it’s just like any other insurance policy like your health insurance or car insurance you really never want to use it. But when you need it, it's really good to have. So, I suspect that for the most part what we'll see is withdrawals that are based on the kind of problems that we've seen in the past in seed banks. And at the worst end of that spectrum would be war or civil strife. But many seed banks are affected by budget cuts and mechanical failures and sometimes just human mistakes. So, they're not the kind of catastrophe that maybe makes the news. But even if a seed bank loses a couple of samples, well, they can they can retrieve them the duplicate Svalbard.

DM: Thanks for telling us about The Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

CARY FOWLER: Sure thank you.

DM: Cary Fowler helped found The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, and is the former executive director of the Crop Trust which helped oversee the site. We reached him in Memphis, Tennessee. My next guest has a few seeds of doubt when it comes to The Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Maria Zytaruk is associate professor in English literature at the University of Calgary who also studies the historical roots of seed banks. She's in our Calgary studio. Hello.

MARIA ZYTARUK: Good morning.

DM: What's your own view of The Global Seed Vault in Norway?

MARIA ZYTARUK: Well, I guess when I heard about it flooding, I sort of thought, yeah permafrost is not permanent anymore and this obviously it's an important initiative. Gates Foundation helps fund it. It's this brutalist architecture, a hole in the rock where you think things are going to be safe. But I think you know everything is unpredictable now, to some extent. And so, I can't say that I was hugely surprised. What interested me is it sort of press that came out from The Crop Trust and other organizations saying don't worry, breathe easy, the seats are ok. But of course, how do we really know, you know that this vault is going to last for, you know this extended period of time. We hope that seeds will be in there for hundreds or thousands of years when we might need them. But, yes I guess it's a precarious enterprise.

DM: Let's take a step back. There's quite a history of seed banks, how far back do they go?

MARIA ZYTARUK: Yeah. I became interested in really the first large scale accumulations of seeds which I see happening already in the 18th century. So somebody like Hans Sloane, whose collections are the founding collections of the British Museum he assembles what we could think of as this kind of seed arch of 12000 boxes of seeds in the first part of the 18th century. And this is a collection that was meant to remain sealed. These boxes are our glass boxes so you can see the seeds but they're papered over. So it was a kind of collection for the future. He distributed seeds among his gardening friends and so they cultivated them in their gardens. But this was the kind of building up of an archive for the future. So that's just one example of a kind of large scale seed collection in the 18th century. Then somebody like Princess Augusta and 1750s and 60s had her own initiative to try and cultivate all plants in this Botanic Garden. So this sense of global collections to preserve species that might already be becoming rare was already there in the 18th century.

DM: So if it goes back to the 18th century, how has it changed? How seed cultivation change throughout the years?

MARIA ZYTARUK: Well, I think clearly the urgency to seed saving, I mean that's what's changed are the threats to biodiversity because of development changing, land use, global warming, all these things have contributed to plants being so very threatened. So, I think the urgency of these enterprises and then the technology available to preserve seeds you know which is used in Svalbard that's what's different but the sense that nature is in or was in decline because of human intervention. I mean that's already actually in the 17th century. It's in 1661 that you get the first anti-pollution tract written by John Evelyn who argues that because London has already become so polluted by sea coal that they needed to plant these fragrant shrubs to sort of mitigate the effects on the air of pollution. So, planting fragrant shrubs that's an example of techno gardening and seed banks. They didn't call it techno gardening then but that's the term that we have now for these strategies to mitigate our effects on the environment.

DM: And you talk about the desire to try to mitigate the effects of climate change. How is a seed bank and cultivation of seeds, how is that going to help us preserve certain types of plant species?

MARIA ZYTARUK: I guess the thrust of a place like the Millennium Seed Bank outside of London is towards the preservation of crop wild relatives. These are the species that are thought to be better adapted and maybe more useful when growing conditions change. They might be more drought resistant and so forth. So I think that's part of the thrust of these initiatives. But what I've become quite interested in are the smaller scale examples of what we might call micro seed banks. And these are seed collections accumulated by individuals or we have a seed sanctuary in London Ontario that's operated by some Catholic nuns. There's a woman in Edmonton, Kelly Gilliam who operates a seed bank out of her home. Then there's this proliferation of seed libraries really across Canada in North America. So those are micro seed banks and the thrust of those is you can sort of checkout a seed like you would have book, borrow one, cultivate a species and then return seed after that. So, I'm quite interested in those micro seed banking initiatives because to me they seem perhaps more sustainable actually, and they're sort of more grass roots than some of these larger initiatives that again I would never underestimate the importance of these large scale initiatives. But, I think the micro seed banking projects are also quite interested and they're quite community focused.

DM: And unlike the one in Svalbard, I mean just normal folks I guess can take a seed out of the micro seed bank, why are people doing that?

MARIA ZYTARUK: I think it because it represents a way for ordinary individuals to feel like they are participating in the Conservation of nature sometimes it seems so hopeless. You know, what can we do? that you know permafrost is melting, the ice caps are melting. But there's that sort of reconnection to nature to your own garden even just growing you know tomatoes and in pots on the balcony in an apartment. There's a sense right there that by broiling a seed you or you are making some kind of contribution to conservation projects and I think it's also just very pleasant and very enjoyable and I think it seems more hopeful maybe than some of these doomsday vaults.

DM: And a last question for you. You're an English Lit Prof. How did you get interested in this topic?

MARIA ZYTARUK: Well you know I would say I specialize in the history of science and the history of collecting so it began to get quite interested in the presence of these seeds in 17th and 18th century museum collections, and to think about them as these living objects among other kind of dead specimens like coins. That made me think of the museum as a potentially living space. So I really came to see it that way and then also just in reading people's wills and seeing that often if someone had a seed collection they would bequeath it to their relatives so that the seed collections were considered valuables just like household property. So that was another way that I thought seeds had this kind of currency in the 18th century.

DM: Well, thanks for telling us about seeds.

MARIA ZYTARUK: You're welcome.

DM: Maria Zytaruk is an associate professor in English literature at the University of Calgary. She was in our Calgary studio. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio 1 for cue. Ryan Adams explores love loss and a very public divorce on his new album prisoner. He joins Tom Power to talk about the journey from loss to gratitude and plays a couple of special acoustic versions of songs from the album. Will end today in Manchester, England where we began yesterday. Local poet Tony Walsh performed a tribute to the city in a public vigil attended by thousands. Two years ago, Mr. Walsh penned a poem to mark Manchester Arena's 20th anniversary, the site of Monday's violence. He gets our last word today. I'm Duncan McCue sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti. Jimmy Gwitch. Thanks for listening to the current.

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Cities need arenas. Arenas need a crowd. The crowd’s in here. The atmosphere can make the city proud. By road and rail, by plane and train we flock to take our seats. From bars, hotels, and restaurants we throng through city streets. There is music if you choose it, yes, but so much so much more. So many days, so many ways to make the city roar. So families bring their children here and travel here for miles. This room can baby boom with 20000 children smiles. Because feelings what we deal in here astonishment and joys kids excited moms delight dads like little boys. Wow, how the, what the, why the, did you see that blew our minds. We've seen the so ingenious Oh ingenious of all kinds. And they're on Daddy’s shoulders dancing Daddy's little girl. Tonight she knows that when she grows that she can rock the world. Because when it comes to music all the greatest names of stars at Manchester it's a party and the monks can party hard. With rappers, rockers, body poppers, orchestras and choirs. Lasers blazing so amazing from the flame and fire. From boy bands, pop bands, girl bands, rock bands, biggest names on earth. It's here they dream of playing and it's here they proved their worth. Yes, artists often say that was the best night of arts. We came we conquered played the uncle still they shout for more. And it's not just bricks and mortar. This place not just iron and steel is where we come to loudly laugh, to live, to love, to feel, to share a room with greatness and to reach across the hall, and touch the living legend from the poster on our wall.

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