When this blog was set up in 2012, we recognised the ambitious nature of the tuberculomucin project. Over the next five years, nearly all of Friedrich Weleminsky's German papers and archive from the Charles University, Prague, were sourced and translated. The translators were Rita Drobner, Stephanie Eichberg and Krystin Unverzagt. Professor Paul Weindling offered further information about medical refugees from Czechoslovakia to the UK; and UCL donors, John and Ann-Margaret Walton, generously funded the early laboratory and historical research. Jennifer Willis, a Human Sciences student at UCL, wrote her BSc dissertation on Tuberculomucin (2013), and Carole Reeves published the first paper in Transactions of the Medical Society of London (2015).
Then, in 2017, Judy Weleminsky, working in Professor Tim McHugh's Centre for Clinical Microbiology at UCL, became the project's first 'citizen scientist'.
Can people without a specialist background do 'serious science'? Citizen science, according to a report in Nature (2018) 'is growing bigger, more ambitious and more networked.' Many citizen science projects involve data collection by large groups of volunteers - over 100,000 in the case of Galaxy Zoo - which analyses images of distant galaxies. Individual citizen scientists like Judy are a rarity. She has shown remarkable tenacity and ingenuity in pursuing her goal of recreating tuberculomucin as it was first made by her grandfather over a hundred years ago. Judy's blog postings give a good indication of the difficulties posed by this work in a twenty-first century laboratory but it might be argued that only a citizen scientist, unfettered by the rigid protocols of modern biomedical research, could attempt such a project.
Historical research has determined the context in which tuberculomucin was successfully produced and tested. The increasing prevalence of multi-drug and extremely drug resistant tuberculosis has established an imperative to explore all routes to new treatments for this major global health problem.
