Kitchen Chemistry goes Belgium

In September RSC Belgium embarked on its biggest ever school tour with Prof. Stephen Ashworth of the University of East Anglia, aka the Kitchen Chemist. Our Kitchen Chemistry tour saw Stephen give 15 individual demonstration lectures or talks at six venues over five days. In total over 1 800 individuals participated in at least one of the events. The tour was partially funded by the first ever RSC Outreach Grant awarded to a section based outside the UK or Republic of Ireland and saw the section working with some new venues and audiences. All in all the Kitchen Chemistry tour was a tremendous success!

The tour kicked off on the morning of Monday 16 September with a Kitchen Chemistry demonstration lecture for elementary pupils at St Johns International School in Waterloo. Students from the International School of Flanders also came to this show.

After lunch Prof Ashworth gave a talk on the Periodic Table that he has developed specially for the International Year of the Periodic Table (IYPT2019) to a group of older students.

A quick trip to the museum complex on the Waterloo battlefield was followed by an evening Kitchen Chemistry show for the Waterloo Scouts at St. Antony's Church Hall in Braine-l'Alleud. This was our first event organised for scouts in Belgium.

Tuesday saw the Kitchen Chemist with his chaperon and chauffeur for the week, RSC Belgium secretary Tim Reynolds, heading for the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Geel. At JRC Geel we were hosted by RSC member Dr Hendrik Emons and set up in the centre's auditorium to give a Kitchen Chemistry demo in the morning and the Periodic Table talk in the afternoon. The audience for these two shows were students from the neighbouring European School at Mol plus JRC staff. The JRC are looking to expand their outreach work to schools and hoped to learn from the Kitchen Chemist's experience.

If its Wednesday, then it must be the British School of Brussels in Tervuren. Here three Kitchen Chemistry demonstrations and one Periodic Table talk were given to students during the day. In addition, in the evening a public performance of the Kitchen Chemistry demonstration lecture was given. This evening event was also the prize giving for our 2019 Chemistry Challenge winners.

Woluwe European School was the venue on Thursday 19 September with one performance each of Kitchen Chemistry and the IYPT talk to appreciative student audiences.

The tour was completed on Friday 20 September with our first ever trip to Antwerp. The venue was Antwerp International School where two Kitchen Chemistry demonstrations were given and a final Periodic Table talk.

Our thanks to all the teachers, technicians and RSC Belgium volunteers involved in making this very successful tour a reality. Feedback from students and teachers was universally fantastic and we may well be inviting the Kitchen Chemist back to Belgium in the near future. Second helpings anyone?

The Antibiotics Crisis

On the evening of 20 April 2016 RSC Belgium members and friends welcomed Dr. Laura Bowater from the University of East Anglia's Medical School to the Universite Catholique de Louvain (UCL) campus in Woluwe Saint Lambert. Dr Bowater talked about a very hot topic: the growing resistance of bacteria to today’s antibiotics.

Laura's lecture looked at the latest research in this area and how this impending crisis in modern medical treatment may be averted. Laura took us through a potted history of antibiotics from the serendipitous discovery of Penicillin by Alexander Fleming (pictured below) in 1928. In 1941 the microbiologist Selman Waksman used the term ‘antibiotic’ for the first time to describe small molecules that inhibit the growth of microbes and can be used clinically to treat a plethora of bacterial and fungal infections. Between the 1940s and the 1960s was the so-called 'Golden Age of Drug Discovery' with many new and effective drugs being developed.

However as early as December 1945 Fleming had sounded a note of warning in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech saying: “It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them […]. The time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops. Then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant."

He was right. Over the last eighty years bacterial pathogens have developed resistance to almost all of the known antibiotics. Laura explained how bacteria carry the information required for antibiotic resistance in their DNA and some bacterial species are resistant to certain antibiotics as a direct result of their genetic make-up, metabolism and cellular structure, while other bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics through either spontaneous mutation in their DNA or directly acquiring resistance from DNA that is transferred from a resistant bacterium. 

Education is key

The more we use antibiotics the more resistant bacteria are becoming. It is less than a hundred years since Fleming ‘discovered’ Penicillin and our reliance on antibiotics to treat life-threatening infections and prevent post surgery infections is at grave risk if we continue to use them inappropriately and with such casual abandon. Antibiotic use in modern agricultural practice and animal husbandry has increased dramatically and an increase in antimicrobial resistance has followed. Antibiotics are not effective against viruses yet antibiotics continue to be prescribed for viral infections and in some countries it is easy to purchase antibiotics without a prescription.

And, unfortunately the Golden Age of antibiotic discovery is long gone; most commonly found antibiotics have been discovered and the discovery of a novel antimicrobial with a clinical impact is now rare. Pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to invest in a drug that is at best prescribed for a short period of time, and at worst kept on a shelf as a ‘reserve antibiotic’ to be used only when all other treatments have been exhausted and ineffective.

Laura believes that effective education, communication, and engagement lie at the heart of any solution to the antibiotics crisis. Thankfully this approach appears to be working on a global basis and resources are being invested to examine the challenges and present potential solutions to the crisis and financial and regulatory incentives are available to initiate research for new antibiotics.

Dr Laura Bowater (picture above right with RSC Belgium Chairman Tim Reynolds) is a Senior Lecturer at the Norwich Medical School in the University of East Anglia and is a Microbiologist with a research interest in the growing problem of Antibiotic Resistance and the role of education in addressing this global concern.