Saturday 19 May 2012

Saturday 19 May 2012 12:05PM

Renewables investment eclipses fossil fuels, Retrofitting existing buildings key to reducing consumption, Copying plants’ ability to split water, Reducing aflatoxin in crops, Testing beneficial side effects of drugs, Lord Howe Island Museum highlights human impact

Supporting Information

Song - A Song for Alan Turing by Stephen J. Pride

In this episode



    This [series episode segment] has and transcript

  • The University of Wollongong in NSW is establishing a new centre to focus on research into the efficiency of buildings.

    While new 5 and 6-star buildings get the publicity, only 2% of our buildings are newly built each year. Obviously quicker results will be achieved in reducing the energy consumption of existing buildings.



  • Photosystem 2 is the first stage of photosynthesis. It’s where light breaks water molecules, providing oxygen and starting many reactions. The secret is a metal centre composed of manganese and calcium. This is the catalyst that drives the reaction. Understanding the chemical pathway is a great challenge. If the process can be reproduced, it will provide hydrogen which is a low pollution fuel source. 



  • Aflatoxin is a potent natural toxin and carcinogen produced by the Aspergillus fungus. It’s found in corn, dried chilli, and peanuts. Peanuts are carefully tested in western countries. But ground nuts from some African countries can’t be exported because of high levels of aflatoxins. Peter Cotty describes his lab’s work in combating the production of aflatoxin in crops.



  • At least half of all Americans take at least one prescription drug. There are unexpected benefits to taking some medications. People suffering from schizophrenia have a lower incidence of certain cancers than the general population. This was unexpected. People with schizophrenia smoke three times more than the general population but lung cancer, for example, is not three times as prevalent. Does genetic makeup play a role? Does regular use of anti-psychotic drugs lead to a reduction in cancer?

    To test the idea, Nirmani Wijenayake is testing anti-psychotic drugs on the cell lines of patients with a debilitating brain cancer. It has also been found the cholesterol lowering drugs statins also have beneficial side effects.

    Finding favourable side effects for drugs already approved for use saves the exhaustive, expensive and risky process of bringing new drugs onto the market.



  • Curator Ian Hutton takes Robyn Williams on a tour of the Lord Howe Museum. Exhibits include the fossilised bones of the horned turtle, now extinct. Plastic ingested by seabirds is a major concern around Australia and elsewhere. The museum features artworks highlighting this problem.

    The human history gallery shows the Supply, part of the first fleet, which marks the first human habitation of Lord Howe Island. Early paintings show birds known at that time. They were plump and good eating and were wiped out in just a few decades.











Robyn Williams: That's photovoltaic.















Robyn Williams: Anywhere else in Australia?





And another campus up to speed on this is Wollongong, both building state-of-the-art new structures and refitting old ones. This is Paul Cooper, director of the Sustainable Buildings Research Centre at the university.

Paul Cooper: The Sustainable Buildings Research Centre is a new building that's currently under construction, and it's a facility that I think will be unique to Australia. Our focus will be on retrofitting of existing buildings. We're targeting a net zero energy performance, and that is part of our aim to meet the requirements of the Living Building Challenge framework.

Robyn Williams: Okay, so how do you get to a point where there is a zero net emission?

Paul Cooper: There are two sides to it, of course there is demand and supply. So our supply will come from photovoltaic systems on the roof of the building, and our demand of course comes from all of the normal things that you have in an office and a laboratory. So the key to getting a net zero energy building at a reasonable economic cost is to push down the demand side as much as you can. So we've taken lots of different initiatives in the design of this building, from reducing our power bill for the IT systems, so our computing system will use less than a quarter of the normal energy that would be used in a normal university building. We're using extremely efficient heating and ventilation systems, in particular we're sourcing our energy from a ground source heat pump, so that will be used to cool the building in summer and heat the building in winter.

Robyn Williams: What's your own background?

Paul Cooper: Well, originally I went to Imperial College and studied some esoteric fluid mechanics, in fact electro-hydrodynamics, improving energy efficiency of heat exchanges. But my career really has always been focused around energy efficiency and sustainability. So I did work at what is now the University of Westminster in their researching building group for a number of years before coming to Australia.

Robyn Williams: When I did an interview at Imperial College actually a few years ago on the energy efficiency of buildings, I was told that most major cities could be four times more efficient. Or to put it another way, the amount of wastage of energy was four times what it should be. Would you agree?

Paul Cooper: In terms of improvement of the efficiency of heating and ventilation systems, reducing energy usage by computers and so on, one could probably get to that point. But I think the key complexity in all of these are people, us. We're the ones who are really going to determine how much energy we use by the way in which we live and the way in which we interact with technology. So one of the key issues that we're interested in is that human-technology interface, that's one of the key challenges.

Robyn Williams: Going back to these buildings, retrofitting ones that were put up 20, 30 years ago, how are you going about that?

Paul Cooper: That's one of the great challenges I think, and it's one of the big questions for our society at the moment. Retrofitting is important because only between 1% and 2% of our building stock is replaced by or added to by new build each year. So if we're going to reduce emissions, we obviously need to deal with the existing building stock. And some of those technologies that can be used to do this, so move buildings towards net zero energy, for example, while photovoltaics are available, insulation systems. So we are looking at a number of areas in that regard.

Robyn Williams: Tell me about the challenge and how you got on.

Paul Cooper: Well, the Solar Decathlon is actually a competition for university students to effectively build their own solar powered home, and that home has to be energy efficient and it has to look attractive. So our students at the University of Wollongong have been successful in winning a place in the finals of the Solar Decathlon competition in China, which will be held in July-August 2013. And we also won entry to the competition in the US as well, I might say. And we're the first Australian university to have won a place in any of the Solar Decathlon competitions.

So our students now are actually taking a rather different approach to almost every single team in the past in that they've chosen to take an existing building and, in many ways, to quote Carl Elefante, the greenest building is the building that is already built. So they're taking an existing classic Aussie icon, the fibro home, and retrofitting it and bringing it into the 21st century.

Robyn Williams: Yes, you've got a picture of it here. Can I see? Yes, it's absolutely standard, you can see this in almost any street in any part of Australia in a town. It's two storeys I suppose...well, underneath you've got a little car park, and then there's a deck. It is not too big. What, three or four rooms?

Paul Cooper: The Solar Decathlon has some constraints on how big the house is. So it's actually a small house that the students are going to build, so somewhere between 60 m² and 100 m².

Robyn Williams: And when they've done that, when they've fitted it out with various solar devices, do you have to take the house to China?

Paul Cooper: Yes, and that's another reason why this is so exciting. The Solar Decathlon project that the University of Wollongong students and their TAFE colleagues (because TAFE is involved as well), they, as you say, have got to take the house, disassemble it, put it into shipping containers, take it to China, take it on trucks to the display site where it will be on display for a couple of weeks. So there's all manner of disciplines involved in this, not just engineering and science, but logistics, financial management, marketing, you name it. So it has really inspired the student body at the university, and it's really shaping to be a really exciting program.

Robyn Williams: Paul Cooper with an exciting scheme at the University of Wollongong where he directs the Sustainable Buildings Research Centre.

And sorry about this stream of good news, I know it's unfashionable, but here's some more; adapting photosynthesis to provide power, hydrogen power. Professor Julian Eaton-Rye is a biochemist at the University of Otago in Dunedin in New Zealand and is working on Photosystem II.

Julian Eaton-Rye: Photosystem II is the start of photosynthesis, it's where light is initially absorbed and is used to break water molecules, and that provides the oxygen we breathe, and electrons from the water which are used to help change the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into sugars. So it is the starting step.

Robyn Williams: And it normally happens at normal temperatures.

Julian Eaton-Rye: It does and I guess that's the trick of Photosystem II, that it can break water molecules down at ambient temperatures, whereas if you wanted to break water you would have to heat it to about 2,000°C in order to break it down, so you're not boiling the water, it's not steam you want, you want to actually decompose the water.

Robyn Williams: So if you weren't using an electric current, if you just wanted to break it down into hydrogen and oxygen, 2,000°C is a hell of a hot temperature, isn't it.

Julian Eaton-Rye: Yes, it is. I guess perhaps that's good for us because it means water is very stable and we need a lot of it and we've got a lot of it.

Robyn Williams: And we don't blow up.

Julian Eaton-Rye: Right, exactly, yes.

Robyn Williams: And so the secret is presumably an enzyme or more than one enzyme or what?

Julian Eaton-Rye: The secret is a metal centre composed of manganese and calcium, four manganese and one calcium, and they are put together in an architecture and a protein environment that holds them in a certain configuration, which simply allows that to act as the catalyst to drive this reaction. And one of the great challenges is to understand that architecture so that it can be mimicked so that we can make machines that will split water, because we talked about the electrons and the oxygen but of course you also have those protons, and those protons can become hydrogen, and hydrogen is a fuel.

Robyn Williams: And hydrogen would be great to have, but the great thing about enzymes is that when you've had the reaction, they are still there at the end, which is nice, isn't it.

Julian Eaton-Rye: It is nice. In the case of Photosystem II, there's a slight twist because this is a machine that works at the edge and there's quite a bit of energy involved from the light that is absorbed, and while that's splitting water it also causes damage to the actual protein architecture that is essential to hold everything in place to make it work. And what has happened in evolution is that the organisms that house the enzyme have developed a system to constantly repair the photosystem to sustain this reaction, and therefore Photosystem II offers an interesting model to look at how you might design a machine that repairs itself in a chemical way that would sustain this reaction in a synthetic operation.

Robyn Williams: So instead you've got a very delicate machine here which can easily break down. In other words, the enzyme can go bust, and you're trying to see whether there is a way in which you can harness all this and maintain a vigour...the enzyme or something else, so that you don't have the whole thing break down in about two seconds.

Julian Eaton-Rye: The enzyme doesn't go bust, and I think that's its success, is that this machinery that repairs itself is so efficient that the enzyme continues to work seamlessly, and therefore the mechanism involved is a very intriguing one, and if we were able to reproduce it in biomimetic systems then we would be able to have sustained water oxidation panels on our roof that lights shines on that continue to make us hydrogen and electrons as a fuel source.

Robyn Williams: You imply you haven't done it yet.

Julian Eaton-Rye: That's perhaps a little bit out there in the future, but the understanding of the chemistry to split water has received a big boost in just the last 12 months with an important X-ray crystal structure of the photosystem from a group in Japan, and there are many people around the world working on the manganese operation. Our own lab works on the protein environment that surrounds that manganese system, and the polypeptides that are necessary to continually turn over the photosystem. I think that the future is promising and the biochemistry is very interesting, and we hope that in the next five to ten years...perhaps just five actually, the real chemistry of the reaction will be understood, and to therefore reproduce it in a sustained way becomes a reasonable goal.

Robyn Williams: What would the payoff be then if you were successful?

Julian Eaton-Rye: The payoff is clearly that if you can actually make hydrogen from water, you would have solved many, many issues surrounding pollution and sustained energy production. There is no pollution from using water as a source of fuel. So in that sense it's a very wonderful opportunity that we might be able to pursue.

Robyn Williams: Why pursue that route instead of using solar panels and putting an electric current through water? Isn't that simpler?

Julian Eaton-Rye: I don't know if it's necessarily simpler. It is obviously done. The technology requires the use of a number of metals that are in limiting supply in nature, and so it's less clear that that is going to be, with the current technology, the single answer to our energy needs because there just aren't enough components out there to be mined to make enough of them for us to do that. So we need more than one answer.

Robyn Williams: So yours could be augmenting the other one.

Julian Eaton-Rye: Yes, and I think that there will be many modern technologies that we use to sustain our growing population. Another one in our lab that we're interested in is diverting the electrons that come from water. Normally they would be on their way to carbon dioxide to make sugars, but you can also divert the electrons into other compounds, and we've been working on putting them into butanol, and for that we use an organism called cyanobacteria...

Robyn Williams: Blue green algae.              

Julian Eaton-Rye: The blue green algae. And they are then able to divert electrons to butanol. We can then simply shine light on these organisms and extract butanol. Butanol can go into petrol engines that we have now, you don't actually have to do anything to them, you can run cars on butanol. So it's a direct fuel substitute.

Robyn Williams: It's a form of alcohol, is it?

Julian Eaton-Rye: It is. That has also tremendous potential. You have to be able to grow the organisms and collect the butanol in an efficient way that makes it economical, so there are scale-up issues. But the proof of concept is there, it works, and it's simply a trick of bringing in some genes from an organism that makes butanol and putting them into the cyanobacteria. So it's molecular biology and that's not everybody's cup of tea, but in the laboratory it works.

Robyn Williams: Well, you're not going to be eating the bacteria, are you, the GM bugs?

Julian Eaton-Rye: No, not at all, they would be contained, they just grow them in large vats and then you would just collect the butanol. The non-photosynthetic version of that is used in other parts of the world, in South Africa for example they use butanol from an organism called Clostridium. But there you've got to feed the organisms some input. The advantage to having put that chemistry into cyanobacteria is that you just have to shine the sun.

Robyn Williams: The inexhaustible sun. Julian Eaton-Rye is an associate professor of biochemistry at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.

And before we hear from another plant scientist, a song. Next month may signify for you the transit of Venus on June 6, World Environment Day, or even the Queen's Birthday, but it also marks the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the mathematical genius who helped invent computers and win World War II. Plenty of songs about him, and here's one:

[Music: 'A Song for Alan Turing', Stephen J Pride]

Reminds me of the Eurovision Song Contest. And yes, he was gay, and he killed himself after a mindless persecution by the authorities. We shall have a Science Show special on Alan Turing on June 16, presented by Sharon Carlton.

Aflatoxin is a pest and is costing African farmers a fortune and killing their families. But now more good news, there is an answer. This is Peter Cotty from the University of Arizona.

Peter Cotty: Aflatoxin is a very potent natural toxin that is produced by a fungus. It is one of the most potent carcinogens known to man. It occurs in many foods. It occurs in corn, peanuts, it is transferred to the milk of cows when they eat feed. So if it's in corn it's going to end up in cow milk, and in other milks. It's also very common in spices. Any place where they're producing chillies, particularly dried chillies, there is a great risk of aflatoxin contamination.

Robyn Williams: And the peanuts we get generally, not just the packeted ones, but the ones you get at the market, do they have a trace?

Peter Cotty: It's likely they have a trace, it is likely you could find some in it, but really peanuts in the developed world are very carefully screened, they're very safe in general and you can trust that they are being looked at carefully.

Robyn Williams: And in other parts of the world it's abundant, almost universally, is it?

Peter Cotty: We don't find it in wheat, but in the warm producing areas it's found at some level almost everywhere. In some places though there are many hotspots where you get very high levels of aflatoxins, and often you may have aflatoxins at even lethal levels in certain hotspots in different areas. And in peanuts, in many of the producing nations for groundnuts in Africa, they are totally unable to export groundnuts because of the presence of aflatoxins. Sometimes we have traders that come in and they can set up systems where they sort adequately, that they can get some product to market in the developed world, but it's very difficult.

Robyn Williams: So they send part of their crops to the developed world and the other stuff they keep for themselves.

Peter Cotty: Yes, the stuff with higher contamination levels would end up in the population where of course they eat a much greater proportion of the calories from groundnuts because groundnuts can be a staple, and children and developing humans can be exposed to very high levels.

Robyn Williams: And there is evidence that the health effects are dire?

Peter Cotty: Yes, there is significant evidence that child development and human stunting occurs from aflatoxins, that aflatoxins inhibit the immune system, cause you to be more susceptible to disease, and of course the International Agency for Research on Cancer considers aflatoxins to be a potent human carcinogen. It's the only fungal product that they consider to be a human carcinogen.

Robyn Williams: And the good news is you have found a way to combat it. What is it?

Peter Cotty: We have. We actually find natural individuals of the strain that produces aflatoxins that do not produce aflatoxins. These natural individuals compete with aflatoxin producers and displace them from the crop environment, and as they displace the toxin producers, the quantity of aflatoxins in the crop goes down proportionately. We find that we can displace the aflatoxin producers very inexpensively, and this displacement lasts for even several years. We find if we go back into these areas and we treat every year, we can reduce aflatoxins to a safe level.

Robyn Williams: That's good news. How is it going in the field trials?

Peter Cotty: The field trials have looked very good. We find that we can reduce aflatoxins by over 80% by a single application of 10 kilograms per hectare.

Robyn Williams: Where have you been doing this?

Peter Cotty: Of course it's used commercially in the United States on peanuts, on maize and on cotton, and soon we'll get a full registration for applications to pistachios as well, because aflatoxins actually are the single most important factor determining whether or not you can get into a market for pistachios. We also have trials in commercial farmers' fields in Nigeria, Senegal, we're going into our second year, Burkina Faso, we just finished our first year. We're on government agricultural stations in Kenya, and we just completed our first year there.

Robyn Williams: And the results are good?

Peter Cotty: The results have looked very good so far. Again, we expect to see over 80% reductions in aflatoxin content. With very small field trials sometimes you don't get as good displacement over a large area because toxin producers come in from neighbouring plots, but even in these field trials we see a 75% to 95% reduction in contamination.

Robyn Williams: Is it cheap to apply?

Peter Cotty: It is inexpensive, it's very inexpensive. We find to get the product into your hands in the US, there is one farmer organisation that supplies it to their farmers for $5 an acre. We hope to get to $5 a hectare, but right now we are pretty sure we can do it for $10 a hectare, and we hope to get that down to $5 a hectare. Also what is really nice in Africa where not only do you have a pre-harvest problem where toxin forms while the crop is being developed but you also have a post-harvest problem, is that this biocontrol stays with the crop when it goes into storage, and when we deliberately expose a crop to unsafe storage conditions, we wet the crop down, the biocontrols still provide over 80% reduction in contamination. Very often actually in storage the fungus staying with the crop in storage we see over 90%, 95% reduction in contamination, sometimes even greater.

Robyn Williams: None of the farmers are leery about the fact that you're treating a fungus with another fungus?

Peter Cotty: No, it's amazing, our colleague researchers often say that and other people often say that, but the farmers really like it. They really like the idea that we're taking a beneficial organism that is natural in the environment and helping it to be more successful at being beneficial. We find throughout the US that farmers accept and help us optimise the biocontrol, having insights that I wouldn't have very readily, and very readily accepting the concept and really liking the idea, especially not liking having some big corporation necessarily control everything. Of course Africa also, very often the farmers very readily accept it, they very much like, again, having a native African fungus that is already in their fields, is beneficial and safe, is going to help get rid of something that's not good for their children.

Robyn Williams: I suppose if this comes off and it is applied every year to maintain the effect, you could have a dramatic positive effect on the productivity of Africa and other continents.

Peter Cotty: Yes, not only will you cause a great improvement of the health and well-being of the people who use these crops as staples, but also you open up export markets. And all of a sudden you're going to be able to have probably...much of the groundnuts around the world will end up coming in from Africa, which may not be favoured by the Australian peanut producers. But that may well happen, you'll have a lot of these poorer production regions suddenly have markets open up to them and be able to export. And that's also true for other markets like for pistachios, you'll have different people being able to supply in pistachios, which also the US pistachio growers may not appreciate. And also chilli peppers and chillies and dried spices.

Robyn Williams: Thank you very much.

Peter Cotty: My pleasure.

Robyn Williams: Peter Cottee is a research plant pathologist with the Agricultural Research Service based at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

And so to further good news, this time from our PhD student, who this week is Nirmani Wijenayake from the University of New South Wales.

Nirmani Wijenayake: Let me start with a simple question; how many of you take drugs? No, not the kind that makes you dance but the medicinal kind. It is actually far more of the population then we expect. At least half of all Americans take one prescription drug, with one in six taking three or more medications. While it may seem like a curse to those people, it might actually be a blessing in disguise. As it happens, there are some unexpected benefits to taking certain medication.

Our story started some years ago with a dinner conversation between a schizophrenia researcher and an aspiring honours student looking for a cancer project. As young scientists do, she poured over numerous articles until she stumbled across some interesting statistics. Much to her surprise, and to that of many others, she discovered that people who are suffering from schizophrenia have a lower incidence of certain cancers compared to the general population. This was highly unexpected, as schizophrenia patients were expected to have more cancers due to their lifestyle.

For example, addiction to nicotine is the most common form of substance abuse for people with schizophrenia. The incidence is three times higher in these patients compared to the general population. We'd expect them to suffer from diseases such as lung cancer more frequently than the rest of the population. But this is not the case. So what was causing this effect?

As with most medical research, you can't forget the person's genetics. Maybe it is something to do with their genetic make-up that sets them apart from the rest, or maybe it is an external factor common to schizophrenic patients. Does the regular use of antipsychotic drugs lead to a reduction in cancer in these patients? This is a very exciting possibility. After all, curing cancer is every cancer researcher's dream.

So with this idea we needed to focus on a type of cancer that has very poor outcomes. Glioblastoma multiforme is a type of brain cancer with a devastating prognosis. Patient survival is less than one year. There are very few approved drugs in the market for the treatment of this disease, and one of the most commonly used drugs is not very effective. A challenge in treating this cancer is that the brain has a special protective barrier. This prevents many drugs from getting inside and reaching the tumour. It makes it much harder to treat. The good thing about antipsychotics is that they can cross the blood-brain barrier. We know this as they are effective in treating schizophrenia.

To test this theory, our lab at the University of New South Wales obtained brain cancer cell lines. We then selected a number of antipsychotic drugs and tested them on these cell lines. We picked the most appropriate antipsychotics based on their side-effect profiles. We wondered whether these drugs would kill the brain cancer cells. And it turned out that they did.

With further studies are we discovered that the commonly used cholesterol lowering drugs, statins, also have effects similar to antipsychotics. Not all antipsychotics are ideal because some have quite severe side-effects. But statins have a much more favourable side-effect profile. They are amongst the top 10 most commonly prescribed drugs in both Australia and the United States.

What makes these findings all the more significant is the exhausting amount of time and money it takes to get a new drug onto the market. It can take up to 20 years, and in the end there is no guarantee that a drug will be approved. But here we have identified new potential uses for drugs that are already approved for the market. This gives us a favourable position in getting these drugs to clinical trials.

So what does this all mean? We have identified antipsychotic drugs and statins that have the ability to act against brain cancer, along with a number of other cancers. We now have enough evidence to take this drug into animal trials, which are about to begin. If successful, it won't be too long before these drugs are used for the treatment of brain cancer. So now there is new hope that we might be able to extend the lives of patients who currently have no choice when it comes to treatment. What's more, our research suggests that unbeknownst to them, people who regularly take these medications might be protected against brain cancer as well as a number of other cancers.

So do you complain about having to take your medicine every day, for cholesterol, for blood pressure, or some other ailment? Think again. You might be receiving added protection against some other terrible disease.

Robyn Williams: There seems no limit to the bright ideas being probed by our young scientists. Nirmani Wijenayake is doing her PhD at the University of New South Wales, having come from Sri Lanka, via Auckland.

And it is time for us to go east as well, but not as far as New Zealand.

And you're listening to The Science Show on RN, and I'm in a very unusual part of Australia, quite a long way off the east coast of Australia, but still Australia, Lord Howe Island, and a museum which celebrates its natural history. With me is Ian Hutton. What's your position here, Ian?

Ian Hutton: I'm the curator here at the Lord Howe Island Museum, part-time curator.

Robyn Williams: Part-time curator, of course it's a community venture, is it not? When was there first ever a museum here on the island?

Ian Hutton: Well, the first museum was established in 1978, but for many years before that a chap on the island by the name of Jim Dorman had a vision for a museum, and probably for a decade, maybe two, he would scavenge any historical items that were thrown at the tip or around the place and store them under people's houses and in rooms, and he had this vision to establish a museum. And eventually in 1978 that happened when the RSL organisation on the island agreed that the building that they had wasn't being used to its full extent, so they allowed a museum to go in that RSL building, but they still held it as their RSL hall, so it had a combined function.

Robyn Williams: I don't know how many times that's occurred in history, but it was a very sweet little cottage really. But you now have a pretty magnificent building that's been around for about 11 years.

Ian Hutton: Yes, about 11 years now. So I think it was 1998 that the previous museum was bulldozed, and some years prior to that the museum curator Jim Dorman managed to get Ian Kiernan on side, and Ian Kiernan has a very long association with Lord Howe Island, and he agreed to set up a trust and try and raise the money and get a world-class-standard museum built. And we are indebted to Ian to have this magnificent architect-designed museum on Lord Howe Island.

Robyn Williams: Ian Kiernan, the Australian of the Year, the cleanup man and the one who almost saved Prince Charles' life, a man of many parts, but he loves this place, as you said. I've got someone who looks a bit like Ian Kiernan in front of me at the moment, although he's been extinct for 40,000 years. This is the horned turtle. How did you come to get it?

Ian Hutton: The first fossils of this creature were found probably as early as the 1840s by settlers growing their vegetables here on the island, digging up the soil, they found these fossil bones and they ended up at various museums around the world. Originally it was thought to be a lizard because they only had some of the bones, but by 1890, bones had been sent to the UK, and it was the famous British palaeontologist Richard Owen who actually correctly identified this as the horned turtle.

Robyn Williams: Richard Owen, who's the enemy of Darwin in many ways, but the person who identified the platypus as not a hoax.

Ian Hutton: That's right, that very Richard Owen, yes. So he's got a link with Lord Howe Island, even though he never came here. But that wasn't a complete skeleton, they are just fragments of skulls and legs and tails. It was 1972 when one of the lodgers here, Ocean View Apartments, decided to put a swimming pool in, so they excavated some of the rock and they did see a number of fossil bones. They contacted the Australian Museum who sent Alex Ritchie over to supervise the excavation and pack all of the rock up and take this to Sydney.

In Sydney in the 1970s, not a lot of funding for science, so a paper was published about this find, and Eugene Gaffney from the American Museum of Natural History read the paper and got some funding for all of the rock to be shipped to New York. And two technicians spent one year getting the bones out of that rock, making rubber moulds and four plastic casts. So the one we have here is a plastic cast, but it has that magnificent history, the rock actually sent all the way across to America, and that's where it was prepared.

Robyn Williams: It's splendid, it looks like the size of a pretty big turtle, and a marvellously enamelled head. It really looks terribly robust, and those horns pointing backwards. There was a rumour, I think it came from you actually, Ian, that those horns were supposed to be for digging up some sort of pit in which to lay the eggs.

Ian Hutton: Well, there are a few stories that we do put out there just to break up the monotony, the seriousness of some of the tours, but no, that is a false rumour.

Robyn Williams: I want to come over here to see something which is rather moving, it's a great big framed display of a bird, and it is made of all sorts of coloured plastic bits.

Ian Hutton: Well, for about 10 or 12 years here on the island we have been aware of the issue of floating plastic debris on our seabirds, and we have now for about three years had an awareness campaign trying to educate the tourist community as well as the local schoolchildren about this threat to our seabirds. And one way we thought...well, it would be nice to have the children involved making an art piece out of plastic. So we did have the children out on the beaches collecting plastic that is not from Lord Howe Island but floating around in the ocean, perhaps from Australia, maybe New Zealand, maybe further afield like the Philippines, Asia. And we collected buckets and boxes of this plastic.

And we have a local artist here, Margaret Murray, and she drew the outline of one of our shearwaters in flight and we had the children over a number of workshop sessions put the plastic on here with very strict supervision from Margaret of course, and made this magnificent mosaic of a flesh-footed shearwater entirely out of plastic. And when you stand back from it you don't realise it's made from plastic, and when you get close you realise what is there. We have bottle tops, we have toys, we have balloon ties, we have the tops off milk cartons, we have shards of plastic, bits of plastic rope...

Robyn Williams: Something over there, it's almost beyond belief, it' identify it.

Ian Hutton: Well, it's a corner off a $10 note. So yes, our money in Australia is plastic and of course that's floating around the ocean as well. Only the corner of it, so we couldn't cash that in. But you'll see other things there; disposable cigarette lighters, forks, clothes pegs, golf tees. And the body of the bird is actually made out of what we call glow sticks, and these insidious things are used by the longline fishing industry. The plastic sticks contain a glass vial of chemicals, and if you bend the plastic it snaps the glass and mixes chemicals to glow green in the dark. So these glow sticks are put on longline fishing hooks to attract broad-bill swordfish, and of course some of them do end up floating around in the ocean, up onto our beaches, and some seabirds, like the Laysan albatross, actually ingest these. So yes, this is the idea of this magnificent mural, just to show a bit more awareness about the issue of plastic debris on our birds.

Robyn Williams: Yes, in fact Jennifer Lavers and some people who have been working in Hobart and other parts of the world are doing studies. She's a person, we've mentioned this before, who had taken 267 pieces of plastic out of one mutton bird's stomach.

Ian Hutton: Flesh-footed shearwater, that's right. We've got two shearwaters here. In 2006 we did the first studies on both species, and the flesh-footed shearwater is one that is mainly impacted. And yes, last year when Jennifer and I were working, we did come across that unfortunate bird with 274 pieces of plastic, 15% of the bodyweight, potentially a world record of plastic in a seabird.

Robyn Williams: God, isn't it incredible! The displays here are celebrating the natural history of the island, and we go through to...oh look, there's fish made out of bottles. What is this?

Ian Hutton: Well, each year the school here celebrates Sea Week, and this year the theme was plastic debris. So again the children have cleverly got plastic water bottles and glued bits of plastic on as fins and decorated them and made a nice little display here. But when you do look close you realise, yes, it is plastic bottles, and not a good thing.

Robyn Williams: You'd expect that here…two hours in a plane away from the east coast of New South Wales and indeed Queensland, you'd expect that there would be some protection from this, but even though you've got Ned's Beach, which is boasting to be one of the cleanest in the continent, nonetheless you get this plastic turning up all the time.

Ian Hutton: That's right, there is that much plastic in the ocean because we must remember that plastic was probably put into mass production in the 1960s, and unfortunately any plastic that found its way into the ocean in the 1960s is still there, it just doesn't go away.

Robyn Williams: Three big halls here. You've got the main entrance, you got the office, and we're in one that celebrates the early life, the shipping, the yachting and so on.

Ian Hutton: We've got two display galleries in the museum. So we just had a look in the natural history gallery, and this one is the human history gallery. And we have it set out beginning with the discovery of the island by the Supply, one of the First Fleet ships. In fact on the wall here we have a magnificent oil colour painting by Jack Earl, one of Australia's famous maritime artists. So there we have the Supply off Lord Howe Island, and Jack actually went out in a yacht and took a photograph of where the Supply was when it discovered the island so he could depict exactly what the sailors would have seen.

Robyn Williams: And first impressions of birds…inevitably the wood hen, the wood hen are everywhere these days, the white throated pigeon which is pretty damn big, and...what else?

Ian Hutton: Well, we have the white gallinule, and unfortunately the white gallinule and the white throated pigeon are no longer with us because they were plump and good eating, as the sailors used to record, they were very easily caught, and they disappeared, perhaps within 20 years of discovery of Lord Howe Island, just through sailors coming ashore hunting them. But we do have these magnificent watercolour drawings that were done by some of the early sailors that visited Lord Howe Island shortly after discovery.

Robyn Williams: Do you have anything on the enterprise, how people earned their living here with the crops and the agriculture and so on?

Ian Hutton: We do. Around the floor here you can see various bits of implements that were used, as recently as the 1960s would you believe. So we have a large corn grinder there, and some of the residents alive that are in their 60s today said when they were children, for breakfast they would get the corn grinder and grind up some corn and add milk to it. There were no boxes of cornflakes for them, they would grind up their own corn. We also have a number of cream separators and butter churns as well. So these hand implements were actually used on the island up until the 1960s by a few families.

Robyn Williams: Was it hard to live here then without supplies coming in constantly?

Ian Hutton: It would have been extremely difficult. The early whalers put goats and pigs onto the island, so that was available for a food resource, the early settlers could shoot those and eat them. They were growing vegetable crops here, they were getting mutton bird chicks in April and smoking those and they could preserve those for a few months by smoking. They were getting mutton bird eggs in December, sooty tern eggs in October. So they were living quite a lot off the land and fairly opportunistic as well; if a seal came into the beach, which one does every few years, they would have knocked that on the head and eaten a seal. There is a bit of evidence of that from an archaeological dig that was done here in 2004.

Robyn Williams: I just wonder what life was like for them after they'd survived, after they'd subsisted. Was it an adventure? Did they appreciate their surroundings? Were they here for aesthetic reasons?

Ian Hutton: I think people must appreciated what it was like here because it was very, very isolated, and they would have had the opportunity to go back and live in Sydney with a more civilised way of life, but I think the people that did come here must have had that sense of adventure and a real appreciation for the place. And that appreciation has been handed down through the generations, and people that live here today still have a very strong feeling about the beauty of the island and their wonderful way of life.

Robyn Williams: Of course we're talking about an island with a population of something like 350, which is about a tenth of the average suburb anywhere.

Ian Hutton: That's right. I know when I go to a shopping centre on the mainland I think, well, there could be 5,000 people here, and back on Lord Howe Island we have just 350 living. So yes, a very small population. And people here still have to be resourceful because there's not the workshop or factory that you can just take something to and get done, you do need to be fairly resourceful to live on a little island like Lord Howe Island.

Robyn Williams: And you're open seven days a week?

Ian Hutton: We are open seven days a week, and we may be one of the very few museums open seven days a week with no entry fee in Australia. I can remember perhaps about 15 years ago the director of the Australian Museum writing 'over my dead body will there be an entry fee into the Australian Museum', well, it has come. But fortunately here at Lord Howe Island we still have free entry, and that means people can come and enjoy the exhibits many times in their visit. If we did have an entry fee they might just visit once, so we're trying to keep that up, a free entry museum.

Robyn Williams: Good on you, thank you.

Ian Hutton: Good, thank you Robyn.

Robyn Williams: Ian Hutton, curator at the Lord Howe Island Museum.

Next week on The Science Show, saving the elephants in Sri Lanka, and the villagers too, by playing angry elephant noises from loudspeakers.


Robyn Williams
David Fisher