 Helo. Well, thanks for coming. It's lovely to be at EMF. Just waiting for the slides to appear. While they're coming, I can't see the slides. Oh, they're over there! I'm just waiting for them to come over here. Very technical, yes. So, this is a story I wanted to share about a certain life. It's about a life of a person who was active about 50, 60 years ago, but I think would have been very at home at EMF. And I'd like you to start by picturing a scene. October 1950, far away from the cares of the atomic research establishment, a pantomime cow is eating a radioactive lunch, and this cow stands up on its hind legs and rubs its belly and smiles. As something runs across the stage, it's somebody in parachute silk called Atom Man, and Atom Man kneels before another character, also in parachute silk, knowledge, and knowledge rubs the cow's head, who's had the radioactive meal and says he will soon be a very healthy animal. And as soon as this happens, 12 women in ball gowns dance, or pirouette behind them both, in the manner of neutrinos. Now, this did actually happen in October 1950 in the Waldorf Hotel in London, right in the middle of London's theatre district. And we don't know whether this ballet, isotopia, an exhibition in atomic structure, exposition in atomic structure ever saw the light of day again. After it was seen that particular day by a rapt audience of 250 women from the Ladies' Atomic Society, and a totally dumbfounded journalist from Time Magazine. In fact, there's very, very little we know about this ballet at all, set for a few fragments of it that are left in the British Library. In the same way, there's very little we know about its creator, Ariel Howarth. But she's somebody that I've been trying to sort of piece together the life of from the fragments. What we need to know about Howarth was that she was a choreographer and a composer. I mean, she put this whole thing together. She did the stage note, she did the libretto, she did the music. She was also a science fiction novelist who was published. And crucially, she was also an amateur atomic physicist for the atomic age. And as I've been trying to piece Howarth's extraordinary story together, I've been thinking about the isotope and the half-life of the isotope. And I've also been thinking about the half-life of stories of people like Muriel. So these are amazing people that were explorers of some kind or another who weren't properly recorded in the history books. And what's her half-life? How quickly is her story fading? And what can we do about it? So we've only got tantalising little glimpses of what she was up to. Here she is in 1949 presenting a lithium atom to an astounded and thrilled Mayor of Eastbourne. And she was very fond of curiosities and had a great eye for the theatrical. And the other thing she did for the mayor is she produced a baked potato from her handbag. It's all on record. A baked potato from a handbag that was six weeks old and proceeded to eat it. And the reason she did this was that the baked potato had been irradiated. It had been battered with gamma rays to sterilise it so she could eat it. And that was an extraordinary thing at the time. And she loved stuff like that. So we've got all these little tantalising tidbits about her. And the one I find most interesting of all and I have many theories about what she was entirely about was that she actually worked in the war in the Ministry of Supply and she got quite a sort of for her intellect quite a demeaning job. She was asked to look after the supply of hosary for women. But they soon clicked that she was a really smart cookie. So much so that although she had no formal training in physics they told her to swiftly gen up on atomic physics and explain it to the masses. And then she did with a plump right through into peacetime. And this brings us straight away to one of her most ambitious stunts of all. And this became public when she when she was reported in the Sunday Dispatch by somebody called Beverly Nicholls who was the sort of Alan Titchmarsh of his age. And he basically said that yesterday I held in my hand something extraordinary. It was a thing from outer space. There's been nothing like it before. And it is the world's first atomic peanut. And this is what she did. She actually grew her own atomic peanuts and here she is sort of tickling them on her balcony in Eastbourne. And these weren't just any old peanuts. As you can see they were very very large and this is what it was all about. These were grown from a seed called Nc4x. These were atom blasted peanuts. So what happened was she wrote to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, home of the atom bomb in America where they were experimenting with atom blasting. And they were taking seeds of ordinary things. And then they were giving them a complete battering with radiation hoping that something extraordinary would happen to their DNA. And it was like a sort of pig in a poke. You didn't know what you were going to get. You'd get some atom blasted seeds and there'd be a lot of mutants in there. Some would just be twisted. Some would be wrecked. Some would smell awful. Some would grow in weird colours. But if you grew millions and millions of these seeds you might get lucky. You might find the golden mutant. The mutant with the property that you really really want. Now I spoke to Paige Johnson who's another historian of howarth about this. And she put it like this. If today's genome editing is snipping the genome with scissors, atom smashing was more like bashing the genome with a hammer. And in fact it's called in modern circles spray and pray. And I have so many theories about the true nature of what howarth was up to with the government. But we only got little tantalising snippets. But we do know that she's for some reason ended up at a UN event in America where she got to eat something made from atom blasted seeds and this is how she got into it and this is how she got them. So yes, so these were her wonderful these were her wonderful atom blasted seeds, her giant mutant peanuts. And she had an eye operation in 1920 and this caused a bit of a problem for her and she didn't want by about 1950 she didn't want her she didn't want her plants to sort of wither and die while she wasn't able to look after them. So she had a bit of a plan. She remembered that a little bit down the road from Eastbourne was this place in Polegate called the Wonder Village and it was a place where you'd go and have strawberries and you'd see sort of rabbits running about and there'd be a maze and there was also Fred Slaymaker's Wonder Village which was a little miniature town sort of playing with scale and so basically she sort of said to them you know I've got my weird peanut you've seen it in the papers can you look after it while I'm in hospital and they said yes so they put it in the cactus house and not surprisingly it drew one hell of a crowd so much so that they decided to forget about the rabbit warren and give it to Muriel and she opened in this little this little sort of day out place in Eastbourne the world's first atomic garden and the public would go along and they would see oak ridges atom blasted seeds and they'd see you know stuff like this one which you know as you can see is an atom energised dwarf tomatoes and if you read it says note early fruit and sturdy plant needs no support and you know people just sort of went to see this is a curiosity in the way they went to see other curiosities so I mean this was pretty good going for somebody who had no keys to the lab no formal training but she wasn't happy with that she wasn't happy with just growing other people's gear because Muriel had a plan Muriel had lived through the second world war she'd lived through rationing she understood the privations of hunger and rationing and she decided that she needed to find the golden mutant and that golden mutant was the giant mutant vegetable that would cure world hunger but she didn't have a lab so this is how she went about it from her home in Eastbourne she commissioned oak ridge to send her lots and lots of atom blasted seeds and she set up a mass experiment all the way around the UK sort of citizen science atomic physics experiment that anybody could join for the price of a few first class stamps and you'd send off to Muriel and her husband the major and he would send you back some seeds and you would grow them and you would report on them and every month there'd be a competition a peanut prize for the person that was growing the biggest mutant and she thought that if she got enough people doing this eventually between them citizen scientists could solve world hunger and so I find this fascinating because you know there are so many resonances with the kind of stuff we're seeing here today I mean this was amateur scientists just getting on with the job that they saw was a techno fix for one of the biggest problems of the age and it was open source for a few shillings she'd send you all the details you needed to know she'd tell you what atomic physics was about, what the radiation could do how to grow your plants where they came from everything you needed to know she told you and she even wrote a book atomic gardening for the layman where she explained how all of this could be done so I mean I find this wonderful because I think this was a really pioneering example of citizen science and I also find it quite interesting and perhaps in some ways troubling and I think that's because for me Haworth was a absolute classic techno utopian somebody who saw a massive problem in society and thought that a technical fix was a solution and I'm fascinated by techno utopia because I'm the subject of a techno utopian experiment myself so I was born in the late 60s and I was born in a test town for fluoride now the fluoride story for those of you who don't know fluoride is when the government put fluoride into your water supply to strengthen your teeth and this was totally new thing in the 60s in the UK, nobody was doing it at all and as far as we were concerned at school we were the very first generation to have fluoride in the water and we thought we were like the chosen ones because you have the dentist come to school every six months to check your teeth and all of that and lots and lots of measurements were done but it's a bit of a murky story the fluoride story and it kind of points to the murkiness of some sort of techno utopianism because what was going on there well first of all you would like to think they thought really really hard before they put a known toxin into the water supply I trust that they did but I went and had a little look in the National Archive because you know it was a story that interests me personally and it was interesting that there was a lot of resistance to this fluoride going in for obvious reasons and the government were also quite worried because a lot of tea drinkers in Watford and they were worried that we would overdose but anyway they did it anyway and there was a lot of resistance so how they handled it was they didn't say anything and then one day they said oh you've all been drinking it for three weeks and then lots of people phoned in to the local radio to say their budges had fallen off their perches and all of that but anyway we survived and you know I've got really good teeth who knows what else is coming down the line but I've got really good teeth but this is where the techno utopianism doesn't really work for me because what was going on with that fluoride in 1960 the average five year old they had five rotten teeth now why was that it was because we were all eating junk sugar, processed food those of us who weren't healthy weren't wealthy enough weren't getting enough fruit and veggie now diet and the government weren't ready to stand up to the sugar barons they weren't ready to tackle inequality that was leading to food poverty and time poverty they just weren't ready to be assertive about the cause of the problem and they let the time bomb tick and what do we have now we have an obesity and a heart disease epidemic in this country what do they do instead they went for the techno fix they shored up people's teeth and it worked really really well we've all got fantastic teeth but they didn't do the hard yards they didn't solve the problem so this is why sometimes quick technical fixes like murals and like the fluid story can be problematic now here's another but does anybody have any personal recollection of this one okay well did anybody have a guess what language this is English yeah this is actually to be precise it's called Saxon Spanglish and around the time of the teeth problem there was also a problem with literacy in this country very high numbers of literacy among sort of under tens so Pitman came along a man who invented shorthand and his company they came along and said well rather than go for sort of evidence based teaching and try and teach more you know put the work in to teach more children to read traditional problematic English which you know is all phonetic and tricky let's change what they call orthography let's change the way English is written out to make it easier so they invented a whole load of new letters which they sort of borrowed from phonetics and they made out I can't remember how many it was like 47 word alphabet which they called Saxon Spanglish and if anybody wants to meet me outside I've got some Saxon Spanglish books with me and yes these were easier to read because they were phonetic but obviously there was a very very big catch because what happened was if you were a Saxon Spanglish school and there was a mass experiment with Saxon Spanglish in the mid 60s if you were a Saxon Spanglish school you got to year three and that was the terrible year your teacher came in and said all that stuff you've done really well with all that stuff you've learnt it's not really like that and then they sort of pulled the board round and then you'd have to sort of adjust to traditional orthography you know to traditional problematic messy English and it put a lot a lot of children of course and completely killed their confidence I met a professor a very accomplished professor who to this day has problems with reading and writing and he was I'm going to use the word victim of Saxon Spanglish and he the day that the board got spun round and he was told that Saxon Spanglish wasn't a real language was also left him anxious for the whole of the rest of his school time that there was going to be the day when the teacher came in and told him that maths wasn't really like that so it was a very sort of destabilising thing and here's the other catch with this techno utopianism you know follow the money what was going on with here well Pittman was selling these books and he had got all these schools locked into his system if you wanted to learn Saxon Spanglish which was the solution to the illiteracy problem you had to buy his books so he had a lot of money to make from it so the whole thing was very murky and not surprisingly it got parked quite swiftly so just going back to Muriel well how did she do it well not great because the odds were stacked against her because if you think about it she had to have millions of seeds to find that golden mutant and so she really had to marshal an awful lot of people which she didn't she didn't get like thousands and thousands she got a few hundred sort of volunteers and this sort of again reminds me of the sort of tech community about the gatekeepers the lurkers and the gatekeepers if you imagine these people were her sort of acolytes and she was the gatekeeper of her community she was a very snippy gatekeeper and she used to make people when they came to her meetings wear a badge at all times that showed their level of expertise so they weren't allowed to talk out of line and she sent very very testy notes to everybody to see her correspondence so not surprisingly she didn't exactly sort of win hearts and minds and slowly slowly the sort of experiment quietly fizzled out meanwhile she was writing very testy notes very angry notes to the people that were dabbling in chemical splicing of the genome which she thought was a complete waste of space but of course history went out there and that is ultimately what we did so it's an example of somebody who was brilliant thinker, brilliant scientist but perhaps was lacking in some of the sort of social now so about how to run an experiment like that and sort of win over a community to actually make it happen and I contrast her interestingly with other groups that were sort of pioneering like the EAW I'm very fond of the EAW Electrical Association for Women who were around in the 30s who were pioneering electricity in the home and made beautiful badges and they were evangelising about electricity in the same way that Haworth was evangelising about the atom and the peaceful uses of it and they did very well so first of all they educated themselves and others as you can see and they did wonderful things like again this would be very home at EMF you don't own a product unless you can fix it so if anybody wants to come out later I've got one of these tea towels which was kindly given to me by Andrew Bach who runs The Wuthering Bites they used to make things like tea towels that told you how to mend your equipment at home and they understood how to sort of work the system and get people to see what they were doing so in 1930 they put all their money into actually building this wonderful Corbusian show home in Bristol and in it it was full of all these electrical wonders like the Thor Electric Servant which was a food mixer which could double as a washing machine and and it was a very sort of on the one hand it was a very middle class venture because they were talking about the electric servant because of course they were working in the 30s just after the first world war when there was the servants crisis when lots of men and women particularly the women came back from the front and didn't want to go back into service they thought you know stuff that for a game of soldiers and so there weren't enough public there weren't enough people in service and so there was a sort of a sort of technical again it was seen as a techno fix let's give people electrical servants instead but actually they went further than that they did wonderful things like this pioneering kitchen in the in the 20s which was based on sort of Frankfurt designs of sort of rational kitchen design it might not look that rational but compared to a Victorian kitchen believe me this is a really rational kitchen and they were trying to sort of borrow ideas from people like Gilbrith who were involved in the sort of scientific study of movement and trying to I mean it was weird it was sort of like trying to sciencyfy the domestic zone as though you needed to sort of sciencyfyat to sort of justify it so again it's a double edge thing but what they were doing is they were they were looking for ways to in this case literally eliminate wasted motion like movement around the kitchen to give people what they call more happiness minutes so that they had a better life and you know it might sort of seem sort of toy and daft but actually if you ever have lived in one of the sort of post war council houses in the UK they had wonderful wonderful kitchens that were like head and shoulders above what was in the private homes and that's because the EAW infiltrated the government and worked on those kitchen designs and got them really really good and they did give people more happiness minutes but again this was interesting because they were campaigning they had a big thing in the same way that Muriel had this world hunger thing this was a big thing they had lived through suffrage they had got the vote but it hadn't given them enough and they had this idea that if they could electrify the home and give women more minutes in the day that the women could leave the home more often and join the club or more importantly go into parliament and they kind of saw electricity as a sort of means of liberation was actually of course the sort of the science of scientific management of labour of course is a double edged sword because what it actually ended up with for a lot of men and women was a atomisation of labour into sort of boring repetitive tasks so again it's never sort of clear cut that injecting some tech into something is going to give you the solution when actually you want a larger societal tackling of something and I think about that now by the way when I listened to what's going on with the Paris Accord I mean I was frightened when I spoke to my very good friend James Dyke who's a a professor of climate change, planetary dynamics and this might be obvious to you but it was like gobsmacking for me to hear this is that this target that we've got whether it's one and a half degrees or two degrees reaching that is contingent on a techno fix it's contingent on us inventing carbon capture tech that isn't here yet so we're not doing the hard yards and thinking how do we change society to bring down our carbon footprint no we're all pretending Father Christmas or Mother Christmas is going to arrive with this techno fix and it ain't here yet anyway little addendum about Muriel he has some irradiated tomatoes and of course we can have we do have irradiated food now it's used really just to sort of sterilize things and increase their shelf life and here's somebody being playful with some cobalt 60 source and what I find very interesting is when I look at a photo like this because of course we can genome sequence so fast now that you can do spray and pray so here's a field and in the middle of the field is a cobalt 60 very very toxic source which they can sort of lower into a sarcophagus when they venture into the field and around it they've got all their mutants all their mutants their atom smashed seeds and they're just growing and hoping within that they're going to find something of interest and they can genome sequence really really fast to help with that process so spray and pray has now become viable again and here's the most wonderful thing about this I think Muriel would have been delighted to have seen this photo because this is what was a plate in one of her books this was Muriel's plan for a cobalt 60 garden and it did precisely that so the idea was there's that cobalt 60 source a radioactive source bathing all her plants all the time in radiation to try and mutate them in an interesting way and then when she wanted to venture into her garden it would plunge into some sort of lid sarcophagus so she could go in so there's a story of Muriel what an amazing woman so amateur scientist, pioneer of citizen science pioneer of open source science and how much more would she have achieved if in the first place given her the keys to the lab thank you