Melanoma cancer vaccines, black hole spin, alchemy history and contrail climate trials on BBC Inside Science

In this edition of Inside Science, Tom Whipple steers us through a set of big questions spanning medicine, astrophysics, science history and climate engineering. A centerpiece is a personalized cancer vaccine trial for melanoma, followed by updates on an extreme black hole test of gravity, a voyage through the age of alchemy in chemistry, a first‑of‑its‑kind contrail avoidance trial for aviation, and findings on how psychedelics may reshape brain activity and meaning.

• Personalized cancer vaccine shows significant improvements in recurrence and metastasis control in high‑risk melanoma.
• New star S301 near the Galactic center provides a potential path to measuring black hole spin and testing relativity.
• Royal Society Trivedi Book Prize spotlight on The Age of Alchemy reveals chemistry’s global and ancient roots.
• Operation Blue Skies trials use AI to reroute flights to reduce contrail climate impact, with net benefits expected to outweigh extra fuel burn.

Introduction and scope

The podcast opens with host Tom Whipple framing a theme of big questions in science, spanning medicine, astrophysics, the history of chemistry, climate engineering and cognitive science. The conversations weave expert insight with current research milestones, aiming to illuminate both practical advances and their broader implications.

Cancer vaccines in melanoma: a personalized immunotherapy advance

The central story centers on a personalized cancer vaccine trial announced by Merck (MSD) in Europe and Moderna. This work does not promise a universal vaccine that prevents cancer. Instead, it targets cancer cells that bear distinct mutations, using an mRNA platform to encode tumor‑specific neoantigens. The speakers explain that melanoma often harbors mutations making cancer cells distinct from healthy cells, enabling the immune system to be trained to recognize and attack them. The vaccine is personalized to the individual’s tumor, developed after surgically removing the cancer and sequencing its DNA to identify surface neoantigens. From roughly 30 candidate neoantigens, RNA is used to prime the immune system against the tumor’s distinctive features.

In this phase three trial, over 1,000 patients with high‑risk melanoma who had undergone tumor removal were given the cancer vaccine alongside standard treatment. The trial looked at recurrence‑free survival and distant metastasis‑free survival, two endpoints chosen because most cancer deaths stem from metastases rather than the primary lesion. The reported finding is a significant improvement in recurrence‑free survival and in the rate at which metastases appeared or grew elsewhere in the body. The discussion reframes these results as a proof of principle for the neoantigen RNA vaccine approach and a potential model for applying personalized vaccination to other tumor types. The interview also notes that while these endpoints are encouraging, the exact magnitude of long‑term survival benefits remains to be seen and will require further data. A parallel trial in high‑grade colon cancer is mentioned, signaling that the technology is moving toward broader applicability beyond melanoma. The host and expert emphasize that the vaccine is not simply a single drug but a reprogrammable platform that can be tailored to a patient, drawing on the rapid, programmable capabilities of mRNA technology and modern sequencing to adapt to each tumor’s unique antigenic landscape.

The scientists discuss why this progress has been slow historically: selecting which neoantigens will generate a robust immune response is challenging, and translating success from animal models to humans requires careful, individualized design. The conversation also covers practical implementation aspects, including how tumor sequencing informs RNA design and how the treatment would be delivered over multiple cycles, roughly every three weeks. While the technology is described as cheap to sequence and reconfigure, the clinical deployment requires careful patient selection and robust endpoints to determine its true impact on survival. Overall, the melanoma vaccine trial is portrayed as a landmark in cancer immunotherapy, offering a real‑world demonstration of how a personalized vaccine could complement existing therapies and potentially extend patient lives.

Black holes and the spin test: a new stellar probe near the Galactic center

Roland Pease reports on a remarkable development in astrophysics: the discovery and tracking of a second star, S301, that will pass extremely close to the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. The star’s close approach provides an opportunity to test general relativity in a regime of intense gravity and space‑time curvature. The conversation explains that during S2’s close pass in 2018, gravitational redshift and light bending were observed as a direct test of Einstein’s theory. S301 will approach even nearer next decade, with the star achieving speeds around 25,000 kilometers per second, or roughly 8% of the speed of light, near pericenter. The path will be highly relativistic, and the proximity to the black hole will allow precise measurements of how space and time are dragged by the rotating black hole, a phenomenon known as frame dragging or gravitomagnetism.

Tracking of S301 relies on high‑resolution imaging and interferometry from the Very Large Telescope in Chile, which is required to resolve the star in the crowded, bright region near the Galactic center. The analysis involves reconstructing the star’s orbit from a sequence of images and then comparing the observed orbital shifts with predictions that include the black hole’s mass and spin. If the data reveal the predicted kicks imparted by the spinning space‑time around a rotating black hole, they could yield a direct measurement of the black hole’s spin parameter. This measurement would complement mass determinations and provide a second, independent property to characterize the black hole, potentially earning Nobel Prize consideration for those who have pushed the field forward. The discussion emphasizes that this is a cumulative measurement, with the spin imprint accumulating over successive orbits, and that the 2031 pericenter passage could be pivotal for confirming the spin and testing relativity in a new regime.

The Age of Alchemy: chemistry’s global and historical arc

In the Royal Society Trivedi Book Prize segment, Kit Chapman discusses The Age of Alchemy, a work that traces chemistry across many civilizations and time periods. Penny Sashay (New Scientist) highlights how chemistry is not a European invention confined to the 18th century but a global, interconnected enterprise that includes ancient Alexandria, Islamicate alchemy, Chinese alchemy, and Tamil and other traditions. The conversation underscores the idea that chemistry is the science of stuff, intimately connected to everyday life—from cooking and cleaning to the materials that shape our homes. A striking anecdote concerns Hennig Brand, a 17th‑century figure who sought to turn urine into gold and ended up isolating phosphorus, a pivotal discovery that helped catalyze modern chemistry through Boyle’s eventual recognition of a new element. The author uses such episodes to argue for decolonizing the history of chemistry and to democratize who can be a chemist, highlighting Te‑Fiti Balakayam as the earliest named chemist in history, a Babylonian perfumer who belonged to a marginalized class. Chapman’s central message is that science belongs to everyone and is a global, collaborative human endeavour, not a privilege of a few professionals in a narrow historical window.

Contrail avoidance and climate engineering with AI

The podcast also features a discussion of Operation Blue Skies, the world’s first trial to deploy contrail avoidance measures across an entire airspace. The plan uses Google AI to optimize flight routings across the eastern North Atlantic Shanwick airspace to minimize contrail formation by steering aircraft into atmospherically favorable conditions. The rationale is that contrails influence climate by trapping heat and reflecting sunlight, and they account for roughly a third of aviation’s climate impact. The projected benefit of contrail avoidance is large enough to outweigh the extra fuel burn from rerouting that may be required to avoid contrail formation, making this a potentially climate‑positive policy in aviation. The segment conveys a sense of cautious optimism that AI‑assisted routing could meaningfully reduce aviation emissions while preserving safety and efficiency, at least for certain flight corridors and weather conditions.

Psychedelics and the brain: an entropic yet meaningful shift

The final science portion covers a Nature study on psychedelics and the brain, focusing on psilocybin. The entropic brain hypothesis has posited that psychedelics temporarily relax the brain’s organization, increasing neural entropy. The study tracked 62 adults before and after psilocybin administration and found that while brain activity becomes desynchronized, it does not simply devolve into chaos. Instead, the altered state appears to tune the brain to the surrounding environment, with stronger alignment correlating with reported shifts in mindset and a sense of life having meaning. The interview emphasizes that these results could point to a mechanism by which psychedelic experiences produce lasting psychological changes, suggesting that reshaping neural networks may underlie therapeutic benefits rather than mere global disintegration of brain function.

Closing reflections and themes

The episode closes with reflections on the cross‑disciplinary nature of modern science, how breakthroughs in one field can illuminate others, and the ongoing quest to translate laboratory progress into real‑world impact. The host and guests convey excitement for the possibilities ahead, while remaining mindful of the uncertainties and the need for rigorous validation as these advances move toward clinical or observational practice.