There is widespread criticism in lebanon of the countrys politicians, who are being blamed for tuesdays massive explosion in beirut, which killed at least 135 people, injured 5,000, and made a huge number of others homeless. Teams are searching rubble for at least a hundred people still missing. A number of officials at the port are to be kept under house arrest while investigations go on. Lebanese Officials Say the storage of around 2700 tons of Ammonium Nitrate at a warehouse in the port caused the blast. Bell tolls thursday in japan marks 75 years since the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of hiroshima, killing thousands. Theres been a silent prayer at the exact time the Nuclear Weapon hit the city. The coronavirus pandemic has forced the scaling back of ceremonies to honour the victims. Aberdeen is back under lockdown restrictions tonight. Pu bs, cafes a nd restau ra nts were ordered to close this afternoon after a spike in coronavirus cases. 5a cases have been recorded in the cluster. Residents have been told they cant visit each others homes or travel more than 5 miles from where they live, unless for work or education. 0ur scotland correspondent lorna gordon reports. Aberdeen, back into a local lockdown, the streets this evening close to deserted. More than 200,000 People Living here, facing restrictions on what they can do and where they can go. This, a last pint forward in a granite city pub before, like other venues, at 5pm, it had to close. Instead of closing down aberdeen, maybe close down two or three bars, whatever, thats fair enough. Some people, this is their only enjoyment they get. It is fair enough but i think its absolutely terrible that they are having to go to all this again. What can you do . The first confirmed cases were traced back to this city centre bar. 5a people have now tested positive. More than 30 venues linked to the emerging cluster. Scotlands first minister warns there may now be some Community Transmission of the virus in the area. Im also mindful of the need to act quickly and decisively if we are to succeed in our aim of keeping transmission as close to elimination levels as possible, and also to protect our priority, and it is our priority, you have heard me say that before, of getting young people back to school. Shots of queues outside an aberdeen pub at the weekend shocked many, and more Police Officers are being sent to the city to enforce the new regulations if required. The majority of the public, who will continue to comply with instructions and guidance, because they know how important it is, but it is the dealing with a small minority who decide they dont want to do so and put Others Health at risk. We will clearly and undeniably enforce the law when it comes to that very small minority of people. Nicola sturgeon says the measures are scotlands biggest wake up call since the early days of the pandemic. There were few people out in Aberdeen City centre tonight and it will stay like this for at least a week, until the new measures are reviewed. Lorna gordon, bbc news. Now on bbc news, Philippa Thomas hears from people around the world about their extraordinary experiences during the pandemic and how covid 19 has changed their lives. Welcome to coronavirus your stories, a programme about how covid 19 is affecting the lives of people around the world. I am Philippa Thomas and this week we are hearing inside stories from scientists, some of them directly involved
in the fight against the virus, others using ingenious methods to carry out their research while working from home. Later, we will hear what it is like to be leading one of the global teams trying to develop a vaccine, we will find out how Students Learning online with the uks 0pen universities can remotely conduct experiments, program robots, even point a telescope to the stars from a spanish island. And we start with two Young Research scientists who answered the call for expert volunteers as the uk faced its own pandemic emergency. Abigail perrin and jessica 0lsen both work at the renowned Francis Crick institute, here in london. My normaljob is looking after malaria parasites and working out how they live and grow in human red blood cells. So, i think, in early march time, there were lots of e mails flying around various channels asking for people who had
experience working with Infectious Diseases and who had the necessary training to handle potentially infectious samples. And myself and my colleagues here at the crick, who had that experience, have been helping with the first step in virus testing, which isjust to make the samples we receive from patients and other people who are tested, safe to go upstairs to the fifth floor of the building, to actually have a coronavirus test. That sounds pretty crucial. Jessica 0lsen, you also answered the call for volunteers. Tell us what have you been doing to help with covid 19 and where your skills came from. So usually, at the crick, i work in a team where we produce genetically edited animals and cell lines to the rest of the laboratories to study human disease and Human Development and the functionality of genes. And so when the call came out in march, i put my hand up because prior to working at the crick,
i was a biomedical scientist at the royal marsden, and actually began my career in new zealand in a virology lab, which i loved, and so when the testing started, because the crick is a research facility, they needed people with the appropriate clinical accreditation to release those patient results to the patients and that is where i am steep in. Jessica, what did your family back in new zealand think about the fact that youre stepping up to the front as it where . I think they were very proud of me. My specific part of the pipeline is at the very end so often, im staying up in the evening till 10 30 at night, waiting for the last results to go out to the patients. It has been a time thats been a lot of late nights put in. But at the same time its been rewarding work to do. Both of you but ill askjessica first i suppose, this is work thats going to have to continue. I mean, only this week we have been hearing about the fact that the uks test and trace
system still needs to come up to scratch there is a lot more work to be done. Yes, yes, and since march we have not stopped. We are constantly improving the service that we give and kind of keeping the longevity of it going, in case there is that resurgence, which seems to be happening and thats something that we are planning to do for as long as it is needed. And abi, how has it made you feel, the fact that we are all now talking about science and theres perhaps a newfound respect for scientists as well . Well, i would love to see that continue. I think we have gone through a strange few years where there has been quite a lack of trust in science and evidence and i hope and in this time, and evidence and i hope that in this time, showing that scientists can come together, pull their skills and do
something valuable for local communities as well more globally, and might restore a bit of trust in science. We live in very Uncertain Times and the best way to combat these Uncertain Times is with evidence, and we can learn a lot from studying the world around us and i hope that, during this pandemic, thats become more obvious. Its actually been quite a nice wake up call from scientists that perhaps we are a little bit more adaptable than we sometimes give ourselves credit for because we usually focus on a really specific area of science and actually most of the people who worked on this testing pipeline at the crick have very little background in virology but, in just a few short weeks, we combined all our expertise to manage to put this together in a way thats been really effective and i hope that, we as scientist, learn from that. In this time, when were seeing scientists who usually work on completely different things, applying their skills to coronavirus, we can learn that we can expand our horizons
and use our skills and our training to apply ourselves to lots of different problems. And if i canjump in, i think it has been a time when science has been put in a positive light, and scientists have had the chance to communicate in a way that is digestible to the general public, and it is kind of, i think, for me specifically, you know, my friends have started talking about pcr as if its an everyday terminology and i think it is that awareness that was able to be given to the general public at a time like this has been quite positive. Just talking about dealing with the unexpected, i want to put to both of you the idea do you think, as experts, it was possible to see a pandemic coming . Do you think there should have been more done to listen to voices from science . I sort of reacted a bit when you described us as experts because most of us do not feel like an expert, most of the time. These are massive, complicated global problems, with lots of different types of science thats needed to solve them. Whilst we may be more expert in science than the average person, actually these are really complex problems, we all need to Work Together to solve them. Perhaps, abigail, we all need to learn to be more comfortable with uncertainty which involves a certain humility . I think that is what being a scientist has taught me more than anything is that there is so much we do not know. We just need to become a bit more comfortable questioning what we think we know, and using that uncertainty in a positive way. Jessica, on that matter of uncertainty, here i am as a member of the media and the media often deals in headlines, but as a scientist, you are especially aware of the complexity of things and the uncertainty of things. I wonder, what you think about that tension between headlines and complicated realities . Yeah, i mean, it is definitely there, and i think that is one thing that we can probably all collaborate a bit better on, having been through this pandemic, is going more for the facts and really working together as media and scientists to get Accurate Information out to the public so that they become aware of the situation without being scared of the situation. Scientific researchers, Jessica Olsen and Abigail Perrin of the Francis Crick institute here in london. Now, if we talk about remote ways of working or of learning, the uk based open university probably got there first. It has just celebrated its 50th year and now has about 168,000 students across europe and beyond. And part of what the ou does is called the open stem initiative. It allows Remote Access to all sorts of things, whether chemistry experiments, robotic engineering, even the ability to operate a telescope to look at the stars from a spanish island. I have been talking to the director of the open stem lab, helen lockett. In the early days, with the open university, we would have delivered Distance Learning through home experiment kits, so students would have been be sent kits through the post, they would use that kit to do engineering or chemistry experiments that way from home. But of course, technology has moved on and our courses have got much larger. So for the last 10 years or so we have developed these remote and virtual laboratories called 0pen stem labs. I remember those kids because that is how my father took his degree. So he used to have chemistry equipment and geology samples arriving through the letterbox, on a regular basis, but now of course you seem to have the kind of learning, the kind of techniques that are just right for lockdown. As soon as covid i9 came along, weve had a huge number
of inquiries from other universities who are unable to do their conventional way of using labs face to face, where usually students would go into a classroom and be in a larger group of students with a tutor, and thats just not been possible under lockdown, whereas oui remote laboratories, students sit at home, they use their laptop, and theyre connecting to real equipment from home, so that might be telescopes or microscopes, or electronics equipment. Really any kind of scientific or engineering experiment. Im going to have to pick up right away and you saying telescopes what do you mean . Well, the open university has an observatory on the island of tenerife, one of the canary islands, and we have fully autonomous robotic telescopes that are there and a student can sit from home and, as part of their astronomy course, they connect to those telescopes, choose where to observe in the sky and take imagery using the telescope. It is really amazing. I understand students are able to do experiments using microscopes
very specific and delicate equipment. Thats right. We have real remote microscopes. So the microscopes sit on our campus at milton keynes, and students can connect to those from home. So a student might be studying the eye of a fruit fly, sitting at home, controlling a real electron microscope sitting in a laboratory elsewhere, and looking at a real fly in tiny, tiny scale. And there are a lot of areas of innovation which draw a lot of interest now. Im thinking about robotics, for example. Are you able to actually programme robots from home . So we have done a little bit of that. We have some robots and thats something we are building up. We do something called lab class that works quite well, so a tutor will be sitting in a Central Laboratory and demonstrating a robot and students at home are interacting with that lab class from Home Learning about robotics that way. Now, you said at the beginning of our conversation something about the interest you have been getting. Where have the calls been coming from . What kind of countries . Well, all over the uk, lots of universities saying our labs are closed and could you tell us, what could we do to allow students to do practical work from home . We have had inquiries from as far as australia, from india, yeah, countries across the world, really. It has been quite hard for us to cope with the demand. I know from conversations ive had with other universities, notjust in the uk but internationally that funding, that finance is a big issue now for the future. For students and for lecturers, the universities themselves. Do you feel that Remote Learning is going to have to play a much bigger part from now on . Well, i think it is interesting. Initially we thought that universities would only be interested in the short term, in switching to a remote site model. I think, as you say, that theyve seen potentially it could be useful in the future, because students you could have smaller laboratories, you could use your equipment more efficiently. So actually, it might be that blended model, might work into the future, that it might give a better
experience for some students than they would get in the traditional model. And just a final thought. Have you felt that professionally youve been in the right place at the right time . Its certainly been an interesting time. I think we feel incredibly lucky that our Distance Learning model that the open university has really protected us from the covid crisis perhaps much more than other universities, weve still faced lots of challenges. But things like the remote labs, even when our campus was completely closed, the staff could login remotely, they could monitor the equipment, they could fix problems from home. And we managed to keep the vast majority of our remote experimentation running through this period. Helen lockett, a key early adopter of Research Methods now likely to be followed by many more scientists internationally. You are watching coronavirus your stories, a programme about how covid i9 is changing lives around the world. Im Philippa Thomas. And this week, were getting inside stories from scientists. Next, we look at the
search for a vaccine. The World Health Organization is warning there may never be a Silver Bullet to beat this coronavirus. But hopes for some level of vaccine protection are strong, with teams around the world working at unprecedented speed, with great intensity, to try to establish successful formulas. One of those teams is that the wistar Biomedical Institute in pennsylvania, working with the us company inovio and with groups from korea and china, to australia, to canada, to the british nhs. The wistar inovio vaccine is a synthetic dna based vaccine, a new type that isnt based on the live material that copies it, essentially fooling our immune system into believing covid i9 is present and needs to be repelled. The aim is to inject an artificially created version of covids viral protein into the body as genetic information. That, its hoped, will
stimulate our immune systems to create their own defences against the virus that can do so much harm. Leading this particular effort is doctor david weiner, hes the executive director of wistars vaccine and immunotherapies centre. Hes worked before in the fight against deadly viruses from sars and mers to zika. But hes been talking to me about how this one feels very different. He talks to us about how this one is different. Since its happened upon us so fast and were really learning on the fly, were essentially building the aeroplane to control this while were trying to take off and control it. And thats an enormous challenge. We didnt know much about its background, where it came from, and then how to protect against it. But we are learning a lot, weve made enormous progress. I want to talk about your family. Because i think you also have personal reasons to hope that this works, that mitigation and a vaccine is brought to the fore very quickly. Your daughters a doctor, yes . My daughter is a physicians assistant at the mayor clinic and shes in emergency medicine. And im very proud of her. And so shes of course been seeing patients with a significant amount of disease. And, yeah, so, thats a very important thing and a very big we think about a lot, of cour