NHS: Health Improvements

Lord Saatchi Excerpts

Wednesday 26th November 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Saatchi (Con)]

My Lords, every year my respect and affection for your Lordships’ House grows. That is largely because of occasions such as this, expertly secured for us tonight by the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, when your Lordships can hear the voices of great leaders and pioneers in medical science.

I should like to pay a tribute to my noble friend the Minister and his team at the Department of Health for the work that he has undertaken with the Chief Medical Officer and the NHS medical director to take forward an agenda of innovation and to try to advance in the NHS a culture of innovation, as the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, described it. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Wheeler, for the interest that she has taken in the innovation agenda and her scholarship, which I appreciate enormously.

Perhaps your Lordships share with me and many others in the medical world a sense of anticipation at the appointment of George Freeman as the Minister for Innovation in another place. It is often said of politicians that they will say anything to be elected. In the case of George Freeman, it really is the case that here is a man for whom the pursuit of genomics, the Cancer Drugs Fund, early access to medicine, more transparency and more disclosure have been his life’s work. It is rather a marvellous moment now that he has become a Minister, as I hope noble Lords agree.

I am a late arrival in the world of medical innovation. I will borrow the family credo of the former Leader of your Lordships’ House, Lord Salisbury—“late but in earnest”. I am certainly late and I am certainly in earnest. I will tell you why. Perhaps I am reflecting something that was said by my noble friend Lord Selsdon early in his remarks. To me, the medical innovators are true heroes. Isaiah Berlin addressed his considerable mind to the question of whether such persons as heroes can ever really be said to exist. He defined a hero as an individual who, acting alone or almost single-handed, makes what seems highly improbable in fact happen. It means a flat refusal to accept the status quo—a determined conviction that an individual can change the world by an act of will.

By Berlin’s definition, we have before us two examples of such people. The first is the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, himself, whose Thrombosis Research Institute is dedicated to the study of a disease which is responsible for 95% of fatal heart attacks and 92% of fatal strokes. His institute, of which Prince Philip is the royal patron, aims to develop novel therapies to prevent long-term disablement and early death. Secondly, we have the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg. The noble Lord recently brought together at his alma mater, the Royal College of Physicians, two of the great medical innovation institutions in the world. He hosted the launch, by the Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital in New York and the Weizmann Institute in Tel Aviv, of a visionary collaboration, combining the long-standing track records of both institutions for breakthrough science. This new partnership unites Weizmann’s basis scientists with MSK’s clinical practitioners—a combination long considered impossible between two completely opposite cultures—to try to speed up the process “from bench to bedside”.

These noble Lords inspired me, so here is a question: what inspired them? Perhaps it was the night of Saturday 25 May 1940 when something took place, at the Dunn School at Oxford, which the New York Times called,

“perhaps the most exciting tale of science since the apple dropped on Newton’s head”.

Until then, there had apparently been many ways to measure a human body in distress: pulse rate, blood pressure, blood sugar, body weight, white cell count, red cell count and so on. Then one man decided to concentrate on only one measure: body temperature. I have here the lab notes of Dr Florey that night, and I thank one of today’s other great innovators, Professor Alistair Buchan, the Dean of Medical Sciences at Oxford, for letting me see them.

At 11 am, Florey injected eight white mice with virulent streptococci, known to be fatal to a mouse of average weight. At noon, mice 1 and 2 were given an injection of 5 millilitres of penicillin solution. Mice 3 and 4 received injections of 10 millilitres. The other four were controls and received none. Further injections of penicillin followed through the day. As this great event unfolded, just before midnight Florey wrote in the lab notebook that all four mice with penicillin were apparently well, but the controls were certainly not. He wrote that one mouse got up and staggered about for a few seconds, then fell down, twitched once or twice and was dead. Others were “seedy”. His colleague, Heatley, made a cross sign in red ink to mark the death. By 1.30 am on 26 May, the four protected mice had napped and awoken, but two more controls had died, noted by two more red crosses. At 3.28 am, Heatley noticed that the last control moved about drunkenly. With each respiration it lifted its head and opened its mouth widely. Respiration became slower, the animal twitched and died.

One of the mice that received a single shot of penicillin lived two days, the other six. Of those that received five shots, one lived 13 days, the other indefinitely. What no one realised at the time is how little penicillin it actually took to save the mice that received it. However late the hour, the result was clear and its implications so breathtaking that Heatley was overcome with “relief, joy, happiness”. He got on his bicycle and began his ride home, the first light of day already in the sky. He had, as he later wrote,

“just witnessed the world change”.

At 11 am on Sunday 26 May, Florey, Chain and Heatley returned to the lab for a pre-arranged meeting. “It looks quite promising”, Florey said, although even he could not maintain that sober view for long. In the end he said, “It looks like a miracle”.

Here is a real miracle. At exactly the same time that morning—26 May 1940—a miracle of another sort took place, to rescue hundreds of thousands of British, French and Belgian soldiers, trapped in northern France along the coast by Dunkirk. Dr Florey became Sir Howard Florey and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine. We conclude from this that God works in mysterious ways.