NHS themed quiz

Chris Smith with the questions, posing them to Tom Ireland, Liberty Denman, Philip Broadwith and Rosie Wilby.

Chris - It's quiz time. What happens here is that we divide our panel into two teams: Team 1 are Tom and Rosie. Team 2 are Philip and Liberty. And there are three rounds and these are multiple choice. You are urged to confer and the team who get the highest score wins the prize beyond price, which is the Naked Scientist big brain of the month award and the team who don't win all get laughed at. Did you win the last time or are you a sore loser, Phil?

Tom - I'm not sore. But we definitely didn't win.

Chris - You didn't win. Last time you did send me an email afterwards to complain about one of the questions, but you weren't sore or anything. It was all fine. So let's go to round one, which is 'The Rest is NHS History.' And Team 1, Tom and Rosie, here's your question. Europe's first ever liver transplant was performed here in Cambridge, would you believe, but what year did that take place? Was it A)1968 B)1974 or C)1980? What do you think, Tom And Rosie?

Tom - They're not that far apart from those options, are they? Well I know people were experimenting with transplants a long time ago, so I would go with the earliest one. What was the earliest one please?

Chris - 68.

Rosie - They probably didn't do a great job, to be fair. I reckon they had a disaster.

Tom - Yeah, they might have found out why they needed another 20 years of research to do it.

克里斯,令人惊讶的是,三年前在这个programme, we interviewed Angela, who is now living in France, she is the world record holder for longest surviving transplant, not of a liver, but for a kidney. Also done by Sir Roy Khan, who taught me when I was a medical student. She is at 53 years after her kidney transplant, and therefore the longest surviving transplant recipient.

Tom - I've lost faith in my original argument then, but should we just go in the middle?

Chris - They're going 1974. I'm afraid it's not the right answer. 1968, professor Sir Roy Khan at Addenbrooke's hospital did the first liver transplant in Cambridge in Europe in 1968. So that's 0 points for you from our jury. Team 2, Phillip and Liberty, which groundbreaking drug became widely available on the NHS in 1961? Was it A) paracetamol B) aspirin or C) the oral contraceptive pill. What do you think?

Philip - I feel like aspirin and paracetamol are a lot earlier than that. Aspirin, that's Bayer in the late 19th century.

Liberty - I'll take your word for it. While I'm wildly competitive and want to win, I've got absolutely none of the medical knowledge to back this up.

Philip - 1960s is like the start of the freedom of whatever. Basically, women's liberation, helping contraception and all of that concern.

Liberty - That would probably be the only educated guess I could have attempted.

Philip - That's contraception's kind of era.

Chris - So what do you think the answer is?

Philip - We're going to go contraceptive pill.

Chris - You're correct. Round 2: Between a Vaccine, a Rock and a Hard Place. Your question, Tom and Rosie: in 1958, the NHS introduced its first mass vaccination programmes. Were they for A) polio and diphtheria, B) Measles and mumps or C) yellow fever and typhoid. What do you think?

Tom - I think polio and diphtheria is always told as one of the great success stories of vaccination. I imagine yellow fever is something that may have been developed when people started travelling to more exotic places later in the century. I would say the first one.

Chris - You going polio? You're off the blocks. It is indeed polio and diphtheria. Off the back of Salk and Sabin's amazing vaccines that have gone on to save millions of lives and prevented enormous amounts of ill health from paralysis. In 1999, Philip and Liberty, the UK became the first country in the world to vaccinate against, what was it? Hepatitis B, meningococcal disease, which causes meningitis, or chicken pox? What do you think?

Liberty - This is a very rogue piece of information, but 1999 happened to be the year I was born, and I'm pretty positive I know the answer to this one purely because it felt like I needed a few random pieces of information so that when it came to a pub quiz, this is my moment. I hope I've got it right now I've said all this, but I am fairly convinced that it's meningitis

Chris - And it would be absolutely right. And your recollection of university is right as well because the way they did the study, this is meningococcal meningitis C, is they recruited a whole load of students going to freshers' week events and they followed them across the whole of freshers' week to see what the baseline rate of carriage with meningococcal infection is. Because a small minority of people in the population naturally carry this infection. And we think that close personal contact is how it spreads and that some people catch it who are also vulnerable to it and it then gets into a place it shouldn't and causes meningitis. So they then tracked the students through freshers' week and all these discos and they showed there was a paper in one of the medical journals showing a positive correlation. The more parties and the more discos they went to the higher risk of acquiring meningococcal infection. So the vaccine group did not acquire any infection and it was so obvious that there was a stark difference between the pickup rates. Something like two thirds of the students had it by the end of freshers' week in terms of carriage. Compared to the vaccine group, people weren't picking it up. So it was so obvious the difference that it was immediately just fast tracked through. But anyway, you were quite right. Well done. Team 1, round three. Round three is called 'anatomically speaking.' Tom and Rosie, your question is: the funny bone is no laughing matter. It isn't a bone either, but what's its proper name? Is it the whimsical nerve, the ulnar nerve, or the vagus nerve?

Rosie - I thought I knew this, but I'm not sure now.

Tom - I'm no anatomist, I've never cut anyone open you'll be pleased to hear, but I think the vagus nerve is central I think and it's to do with the nervous system. The first one, the whimsical nerve, sounds made up.

Chris - You're going for the ulnar nerve and you would be right. It is indeed the ulnar nerve. This supplies the lower half of your hand, including your index and little finger, and it runs down your arm winding its way around the elbow. And when you bash your elbow, you pinch the nerve against the bone and you then send all these volleys of nerve impulses up and down the nerve, which is why you get the funny symptoms and the weakness that you get. Hence it gets called the funny bone. Well done. You get a point for that. So you are on two and Phillip and Liberty over to you. Laparoscopy, we want to know, is more commonly known as what is it A) cataract surgery, B) vascular surgery or C) keyhole surgery.

Philip - As soon as you said keyhole, I was like, that's what I thought it was! And I think we both had the same reaction. So either we're both completely wrong or we're going to go with group confidence.

Chris - Yeah, you're absolutely right. It was keyhole surgery. This is also called minimally invasive surgery or sometimes bandaid surgery.

克里斯- 3从3。做得很好。你就是这个week's Naked Scientists Big Brains of the week. We'll give you a round. Well done.