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Elizabeth Koebele:

Hi, everybody. My name is Elizabeth Koebele, and I'm a professor of political science and the associate director of the Graduate Program of Hydrologic Sciences at the ÍƼöÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´. I know that sounds like a strange combination, but my research lies at the nexus of politics and water, which happens to be the topic of this episode of the Discover Science Podcast, a spinoff of the Discover Science Lecture series.

The series is founded by the College of Science in 2010, with the goal of bringing the country's top scientists to UNR to share their knowledge, research and wisdom with the community. I'm thrilled to be joined today by our guest, Colby Pellegrino, an expert on the allocation and management of the Colorado River. Welcome, Colby.

Colby Pellegrino:

Hi. Thank you for having me, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Koebele:

Yeah, our circles have overlapped quite a bit over the years, and I'm really excited to meet you in person. So we're grateful that you're on the podcast today. So to start off, I was wondering if you can state your full title for our listeners.

Colby Pellegrino:

So I am the Deputy General Manager of Resources for the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

Elizabeth Koebele:

Great. And can you tell us a little bit more about what that entails?

Colby Pellegrino:

So as deputy general manager of resource, simplest put, my job is to make sure our community of 2.2 million people has water, now and into the future. So I'm responsible for all of our water supply planning, all of our water conservation programs, our scientists that support both of those efforts, our environmental permitting, doing adaptive management on the Colorado River, as well as all of our public information staff that helps get the word about water conservation out into the community and the Las Vegas Springs Preserve, which is a little bit of a museum and cultural center, surrounding the original Springs and Las Vegas that were a stop on the old Spanish trail.

Elizabeth Koebele:

Wow, you have a lot going on across all of those roles. Thinking about water policy in southern Nevada seems hard enough, but understanding how it fits into the big picture of Colorado River management is a whole other animal. For our listeners, the Colorado River provides water to over 40 million people across seven U.S. states and two states in Mexico. It also supports over 5 million acres of productive agriculture, numerous other industries and so many of the environmental and recreational assets many of us Westerners love. Colby, can you tell me a little bit about how much water Nevada gets from the Colorado River and how it's used in southern Nevada?

Colby Pellegrino:

Sure. So the allocations of Colorado River water occurred, really, in the early 1920s. The compact was originally splitting water between the Upper Colorado River Basin and the Lower Colorado River Basin, where there’s seven and a half million acre feet to each basin. And for those not familiar, an acre foot of water is somewhat of an arcane way that we measure large quantities of water. One acre foot is about 325,000 gallons of water. If we want to think of it in terms of use, it's about what three average Las Vegas households would use for a year.

Within the lower basin, that seven and a half million acre feet is split where California gets 4.4 million acre feet, Arizona gets 2.8 million acre feet and Nevada gets 300,000 acre feet. Then on top of the allocations in the lower basin, there's another million and a half acre feet allocated to the country of Mexico. For Nevada's part, almost all of that water is used in the urban areas of Clark County, serving the cities of Las Vegas, Henderson, North Las Vegas, unincorporated Clark County, Boulder City and Laughlin. We also do have the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe, which has access to Colorado River water, and they primarily use for farming at the very southern tip of the state.

Elizabeth Koebele:

So one of the things that we hear a lot about in the state of Nevada is how the Southern Nevada Water Authority needs to really use their water efficiently in order to make that small amount, that 300,000 acre foot, acre feet that you talked about stretch far enough to meet all the needs of these communities. So I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about the conservation efforts that your agency engages in.

Colby Pellegrino:

Sure. We have a very holistic water conservation program, one of the most comprehensive in the nation. Our water conservation is different than some other cities, and I'll describe that first. Lake Mead is right adjacent to our community, and we're a fairly young community, so we have centralized sewer on nearly all of our homes and businesses, and water that's used indoors is treated and returned back to Lake Mead. And that doesn't count against that 300,000 acre foot allocation. Only what we deplete from the river counts, and that is primarily outdoor water use within Southern Nevada. Our second largest use that we really target is probably evaporative cooling, and together those are the two biggest uses of water and we call them consumptive use. That's what, where we're permanently consuming the resource. There's nothing left for us to reuse or return. So when we talk about our water conservation journey, it's primarily focused on those consumptive uses. We've been incentivizing all sorts of different water conservation activities, from removing unused grass, to upgrading your sprinkler irrigation clock to something that uses better technology. We also provide rebates for leak detection devices. We're the first agency in the nation to do that, as well as some more restrictive measures. So we have advanced building code throughout the years to ensure that new people using to, moving to southern Nevada are using water as wisely as possible. So starting in 2004, we changed the amount of grass that people were having to have in their property and going to no grass in the front yard and only 50% grass in the backyard. Now, why is that important? Because grass uses about 300% percent more water than desert friendly landscaping. Our grass uses about 73 gallons per square foot, whereas desert friendly landscaping uses about 18. We've taken that one step further, and now turf is only allowed in schools, parks, and cemeteries. There's lots of beautiful options, including artificial turf, that save a lot of water for our community, and that’s going to be the standard of the future in Southern Nevada.

Elizabeth Koebele:

It's amazing to hear that Southern Nevada is such a leader in water conservation in the Colorado River Basin, especially given the fact that this region has faced historical droughts, and now climate change is putting new pressures on our water supply. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how these kinds of changes are affecting Southern Nevada and what this means for the Southern Nevada Water Authority and the citizens of Nevada in the long term?

Colby Pellegrino:

That's a great question and it's very comprehensive to address. Climate change is impacting our water resources in two ways, both our water supply and our water demand. One of the hardest things that we have in educating the public is that the amount of rainfall and the temperatures locally affect our water demand, the amount of water that people in our community use, but they don’t really impact our water supply, because the water supply in Lake Mead is coming from the Colorado River, of which over 80% of the runoff comes upstream of Lake Powell on the other side of the Grand Canyon from us.

And when you look upstream in the upper basin, you're really talking about how the Rocky Mountains are being impacted by climate change. So what we see on the Colorado River front is multiple things. As the atmosphere warms, it has a greater carrying capacity for water. So we have increased evaporation from the natural system. We also see that because of that warming, the snow is melting sooner. That means the growing season starts sooner. That means there’s more evaporation, that means farmers start farming sooner, and so there’s a lot more water being used, both in the natural environment and in the built environment as a result of climate change. Together, the increased temperatures and the impacts that it have are reducing our overall water supply. And we talk about this last 23 years being one of the worst droughts in recorded history. And for a long time we kind of have done ourself a disservice by calling it a drought because it sounds really temporary. It sounds like something that's come, and if we wait long enough, it's going to go away. And what we're really experiencing on the Colorado River Basin is a phenomenon called aridification. That means that our climate is permanently changing, that these increased temperatures are going to fundamentally change the amount of runoff that we're seeing. And what we're calling a drought now, this driest 23 years that we've seen may very well be the wettest 23 years of the next 100 years, so we need to be prepared that this dryness might not be temporary and it might not be the worst that we see.

Then if you shift over to our water demand, we have a whole host of different things that are impacted by the local climate, local weather. So the biggest thing that we tried to get our citizens to do to be a part of the solution for water conservation is to follow their seasonal watering restrictions. We need to recognize that any of our landscapes, regardless of whether it's trees, desert plants, cacti or grass, need significantly less water in the winter than they do in the summer, and that that water demand changes throughout the year. So what we know is that air temperature in the Las Vegas Valley is getting hotter, too. We anticipate that we're going to see much more above-100 degree days. And what happens when it's above 100 degrees? People water their landscape more.

And so we have to be continuing to message the community about the right amount of landscape watering, about not overwatering our plants, really remembering to change your watering clock to go along with the seasons, but also adapting the community to the drier future. So one of the things that we started to do is look at our plant and tree community and say there are things that have gone really well here in the past that as we get hotter, are not an example of that is like Afghan pines. They're one of the most popular shade trees within the valley, but they are going to be severely impacted by climate change because we're kind of right on the border of the temperatures zone they like. And what happens when a tree dies? People water it more, but that tree's not dying because it doesn't have enough water. It’s dying because it’s too hot. So we're trying this multi-pronged approach to really message the community about the right way to use water.

Elizabeth Koebele:

Great. So you talked a little bit about this complicated allocation system on the Colorado River, and that leads to all of these competing demands both within Nevada and across all of the states and across even countries in the Colorado River Basin. And to me, it's no surprise that we hear the phrase, “The Colorado River is one of the most litigated rivers in the world.” But I wanted to ask you, my research has shown that a lot of the entities in the Colorado River Basin have collaborated on policies over the years. They've been able to come together, find common ground, reached consensus on solutions that could potentially lead to better outcomes with the idea that if we all work together, we might come out better in the end than we would if we were all continuing with this really litigious path. And so I was wondering if you could talk about how the Southern Nevada Water Authority is collaborating with other entities in the Colorado River Basin, whether that be the federal government or states or tribes or NGOs to reshape some water policies in order to get Southern Nevada to be more sustainable in the future.

Colby Pellegrino:

So I think the most important thing, when we talk about river policy, to recognize is how small of a water user southern Nevada is. We have 1.8% of the allocated water on the Colorado River. So we cannot solve this problem alone. You could wipe southern Nevada off the map and we would not change the trajectory of our reservoirs. We might slow it down a little, but we have to have partnerships, we have to work together. And we are often monikered the most litigated river in the world. And that really relates to some of the early years on the river, that there was 60 years of Supreme Court battles between Arizona and California over essentially how shortages would be borne. And so we've generally moved away from that in recent years. In particular this century, there's been sort of this hallmark of state cooperation. And what it's really founded on is that we do have this really complicated web of laws, decrees, federal actions, records of decision that define how water is used, who gets cut when and the only way as a water manager that we have certainty on what we get to use and when, is to stay out of court. If we go into the courtroom fighting state to state, there's one thing that’s for certain. Everybody’s going to get something less and everybody is going to get something that they're probably unhappy with. I don't think there's any clean winners or losers. So we have this sort of compelling reason for all of us to come together and cooperate. And that’s certainty. When you're managing the water supply for 2.2 million people, what we want to know is how much water we have available to us, when, that's what allows us to plan. That's what allows us to ensure that our community has a sustainable water supply. If we know when our reductions are coming and what volume they are, we can make sure we have the contingencies in place or that our water use is low enough to deal with the shortages that may be coming. So it's incumbent upon all of us, if we want that certainty, to come together and be part of the solution in crafting policy that works for a broad range of interests.

Elizabeth Koebele:

I feel like right now, almost every day when I look at the news, there's a new story about Colorado River policymaking, and it can be a little hard to keep track of things. And so I was wondering for our audience, if you could just kind of give us an overview of a couple specific processes that you're working in or things that you're looking forward to on the Colorado River as far as management?

Colby Pellegrino:

Sure. So I think most people would find it ironic that at the turn of the century in 2000, there still had not been a shortage in water supply in the lower basin states California, Arizona and Nevada. The upper basin states are a lot different than the lower basin states. So when we look to water users in Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming, the upper basin states, most of the large reservoir storage sits below them. So somebody taking water directly off a tributary experiences a lot more volatility in their water supply. All of the lower basin states and Mexico get their water from Lake Mead, and Lake Mead is immediately downstream of Lake Powell. So it wasn't until 2007 that we finalized guidelines for how we share in shortages. And then this drought really challenged that policy, and we had to supplement it several times with different actions, such as the Drought Contingency Plan or the 500 Plus Plan, different things that were taken to try and proactively or voluntarily put more water in Lake Mead so we could avoid this critical reservoir elevations that really challenge our ability to reliably deliver water. All of that policy is set to expire in 2026. So we've already begun the process as states and as the federal government to start renegotiating the policy that governs shortages on the river. When we look back at this time last year, we had a really good, wet winter, as did most everyone around the state. It was very helpful up here in the Sierras and it was very helpful for Colorado River supply. But prior to that winter, we were looking at having to take really drastic reductions in a really short period of time in order to adapt to how low reservoir conditions had gotten and how inadequate the policy that we had drafted was at those extreme occurrences because the policy that we crafted was resilient for over 90% of the hydrology that it was designed around, and we ended up in that bottom end that really drove Lake Mead down very quickly. So this last year gave us a bit of reprieve, but there is a smaller policy effort going on that really aims at making sure we have enough water in our reservoirs while we renegotiate. Let’s avoid the catastrophe in the short term while we figure it out in the long term. That plan right now is out for public review and has a proposal in there that was put forward by the lower basin states to keep 3 million acre feet of extra water in Lake Mead to help ensure that we don’t hit those really critical reservoir elevations. There's all sorts of other little things that are always happening, but our system is generally being challenged right now by these reservoir levels that we've never experienced and by climate change and drought. One example that I'll give is that within the Glen and Grand Canyon ecosystem, we have smallmouth bass for the first time. And so the Bureau of Reclamation, together with the Park Service, right now is beginning a process to say, how do we deal with smallmouth bass in that area? Because they're eating endangered fish. So we need to look at really all the different ways that climate change is impacting the system and find ways to work together.

In the interim, I would say that there's federal funding in a magnitude that this basin has never seen, available right now. The Bureau of Reclamation has done solicitations on ways to bring in both short term water supplies, as well as longer term water savings programs. And they're evaluating those proposals right now. And we're excited to see, with such a big infusion of federal money, what we can really do to fundamentally change the way water is used in the basin, which leads to more collaboration, leads to more water users working together, comparing notes. ‘Oh, wow. I didn't realize you could save water by using that technology. Maybe we should try that technology.’ So there's a lot of information sharing going on right now, and it's a really exciting time to be a water manager.

Elizabeth Koebele:

I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about some of the recent water conservation programs that you've helped implement in Southern Nevada.

Colby Pellegrino:

So if we give a little bit of background, Southern Nevada has done a great job conserving water. But what we saw about the 2018-2019 timeframe was that our water use conservation was kind of becoming stagnant. And then we got really scared during the COVID year, which is ironic because you would think with our economy shut down and you know, having The Strip closed, that our water use would be lower, and it wasn’t. It was higher. And so we realized that we really needed to get back into our community and figure out the right ways to conserve water. So we've implemented a whole host of new conservation programs sort of over the last 2 to 3 years.

The first one that was really major was the passage of AB 356 in the 2021 legislative session. And what that bill did was said, we need to remove nonfunctional turf from our community by 2026. So what’s nonfunctional turf? It's grass that doesn't have a recreational purpose associated with it. It's all over our community. There's thousands of acres of it. And let me give you an example. A traffic circle. If you’re riding through a roundabout, the middle is landscaped in grass. There is no one riding their bike, making a picnic, playing football in the traffic circle. Or similarly turf on the islands in a parking lot. But it's a little more nuanced too, like at a park. Generally you think all of the turf at a park is recreational. Well, what about the turf that goes right up to a four-lane road? Nobody's using that part of the park for recreation. Or turf that’s just in the moniker area where there’s a big sign out front, but it's totally separate from the rest of the park. So that's what AB 356 said needed to come out. And then we had a citizens’ committee that helped us define what that turf is and we’re on the road to taking it out.

Another one on the legislative path was AB 220 that passed the legislative session that ended in 2023, and what that focused primarily on was septic systems. So we do have most of our community connected to centralized sewer, and we're getting that water back into Lake Mead. But as the valley grew, the water system advanced quicker than the sewer system. So there are septic systems in pockets throughout the valley, where the water that they receive may be Colorado River water, but all of their wastewater generated in their home or business is just going into the ground. So that bill was aimed at stopping the proliferation of septics and creating a way to ease the financial burden of folks that want to participate, to connect to the central sewer system. Similarly, within our own backyard, we've taken on a whole host of additional efforts surrounding water conservation. The first is probably reducing golf course water budgets. So our golf courses were allowed to use six acre feet per acre and we cut that down to four acre feet per acre. ÍƼöÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ 70% of our golf courses were already compliant with that, and another 10% were a stone's throw away from it, so some small modifications to get them there. You're no longer allowed to build a new golf course in southern Nevada. Now that's codified across all of our jurisdictions.

We have taken the step of saying there can be no new turf except in schools, parks and cemeteries. So even in new single-family homes, you cannot have live grass. If you want a grass playing area, it's going to have to be artificial turf. And plant some beautiful shade trees around it and save that 73 gallons a square foot that grass would use. We've also put a limitation on pool sizes. You cannot have a pool over 600 square feet. And finally, we took an evaporative cooling moratorium. So many of our large buildings are cooled with technology that uses water to make the building cooler. And this one was a little bit hard for us to work through, because a lot of our big properties like strip resorts have all of these different guidelines that they use to rank their environmental sustainability and governance, we call them ESG, metrics. And so those are all based on carbon footprint. They're not based on your local water resource or water supply. And they're these big international metrics for what they’re doing.

So there's a couple of different sort of international organizations that brought about this idea that for corporate governance, we need to start benchmarking how well we are at being a corporate citizen as it relates to climate change and sort of evolving social justice issues and being good corporate citizens. And so there these metrics that are made that are trying to be sort of one size fits all on the international scale for tracking our progress. And one of those things that's consistently tracked is the carbon footprint, and that tends to be the major driver. What we found is that there's a lot of these different ranking agencies that would like to bring in water. But water is not a one size fits all from community to community. So what makes sense in southern Nevada with no evaporative cooling may not be what makes sense somewhere else, but they have significantly more water available to them. We have plentiful sunshine. We can create great solar electricity and that's one way that we can deal with, in a sustainable way, some of the increased needs that may be there from changing cooling technology, but water has been very hard to make an entry into these metrics because it's very hard to establish something that really makes sense across a wide range of communities.

Nobody wants to take out water-based cooling and put in something that's going to use marginally more electricity because it would hurt that metric. So we had to work to really educate the community about it and then we were able to implement a moratorium. So there is no new evaporative cooling technology going into our valley right now, and that’s going to allow us some time to figure out what other technology works well. And that lead time is really important for new development because mechanical cooling takes up significantly more space than evaporative cooling, so our architects and our engineers need to have some notice so that they can appropriately plan their property to fit in that cooling technology that does not use water. So that's a sampling. I hope I didn't leave anything major off that we've done.

Elizabeth Koebele:

Just to follow up on that, you mentioned that during COVID when The Strip was closed, you actually didn't see a huge reduction in water use. And I think that might surprise some people. I think we hear the perception that all these hotel rooms and fountains and things like that that might be around The Strip are so thirsty and use all of these water resources. But it sounds like that's not really the case. And so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about kind of that misperception.

Colby Pellegrino:

That's great. And it's a, it's a huge misconception within our community and and more broadly as well from people that look at our water resource picture from outside. So again, because we have centralized sewer, every shower, every faucet, every restaurant that’s dumping, you know, the water in your glasses down the drain, that's all coming back to Lake Mead. So our consumptive use of water did not decrease in the COVID year.

What was really wonderful about that from a educational standpoint was it actually helped us figure out how much water the cooling systems were using at the hotels, which is really hard for us to get at. But having the hotels unoccupied, then that was the first time that we could really look a property and say, okay, how much is the cooling system used? And we were really surprised at the amount of water reduction. It was significantly less than we thought it would be. And some of that is because they still have to flush their water systems and not get stagnant water. But a significant portion of the water use that was there was their cooling systems. And so it gave us an interesting way to find out some data about how people used water.

Just because we’re talking about COVID, there was another phenomenon that we think happened but don't have a lot of great data, and that was people were at home in close quarters for a very long time and they started using their outdoor spaces in different ways and we saw our single family residential water use jump up significantly and we had people say, it's because of new homes. And we actually did some, some data analysis and, on a per account basis, our water use was up. So what we think was happening was that as people were home, they were deciding to be in their backyard to take a meeting in the spring of 2020 or going outside more to maybe get away or maybe just experience something different than their four walls. And that resulted in people adding more water to their landscapes or relandscaping during that time. So we had to use that time to focus on the message about how to use water wisely.

Elizabeth Koebele:

So you mentioned before that so many of the policies that govern how water is allocated to states expire in the end of 2026 and that you're embarking on a process along with folks across the federal government, other states, to try to think about how to revise these rules for the future, knowing that many places in the basin are likely to experience that aridification that you talked about, to experience less water availability. So what are some of the things that you think are going to be the hot button issues in these negotiations post-2026 that might either cause conflicts between different groups or might be places where stakeholders can actually come together and find some common ground?

Colby Pellegrino:

The hot button issues, I think, are everywhere. Because what these guidelines are really about is how everyone uses less water. And so you can cherry pick the piece of law or the piece of policy that you think is the most important that has the least impact on you as an individual water user. And so in order for us to craft policy that everyone agrees to, we kind of have to find something that makes everybody a little unhappy and everybody happy at the same time. We need to be able to craft solutions that our elected leaders, our appointed leaders our agency heads, the people responsible for both agriculture and urban can take to their elected boards and say, this is sound policy. It may not be everything we want, but it's a good deal for us. That's what keeps us out of litigation. But again, the crux of this issue is everyone having to use less water. And so I think that there will be conflict between different water user groups if we allow it. I think there will be conflict between the upper basin and lower basin if we allow it. I think there could be conflict between different water use sectors. And I think the only way we get around that is to try and craft policy that looks a little bit equitable to everyone. We have to pay our respects to the law and the things that people have agreed to or agreed not to or have given up. But we also need to recognize that the magnitude is so large that everyone has a little bit of responsibility in dealing with this. So I think that there's the ability for a ton of conflict, but I also think there's a lot of reason for us to work together, because ultimately the only way that we find common ground is for the river to be sustainable for everyone.

And if I could just give a note, like an ode to the short-term policymaking, I mentioned that the plan for review by the federal government right now has 3 million acre feet of conservation occurring in it. So 400,000 acre feet of that is coming from California, some of it from the most senior water users on the river. So when you sit down and you ask them, ‘Why did you come to the table voluntarily to do this?’ The answer is, ‘Because we go out of business if Lake Mead goes dry, too.’ So we have to find a balance between what our water users and stakeholders are willing to tolerate and the recognition that if things get really bad, we're out of business too. So we have to come together and be a part of the solution, or else letting Lake Mead go dry is bad for everyone.

So I hope that there's enough work by our scientists, by our Colorado River modelers, to show that those threats are real, that if we continue with the level of reductions we’ve had before, we cannot be sustainable. And I hope that that's enough to compel people to the table. I think the other place that will have conflict if we're not careful, is with our tribal communities. The way that tribes have been included in the past is probably not the way the policy and governance of the river would be crafted if it was done today, but we need to find a way for tribes to have a voice in river management that's meaningful, that's not just consulting with them. The tribes control a significant amount of water on the river, and they have some real heartstrings, for lack of a better word, to the river itself and the life that it brings to the desert southwest. And we could all learn from some of the tribal values on the river. So I think it really is incumbent upon everyone to figure out a way to love thy neighbor and to work with them going forward.

Elizabeth Koebele:

Yeah, I think what you're saying really hits the nail on the head as far as the conversations I've experienced about the river, this recognition that we all lose in the end if we can't work together, whether that's letting Lake Powell and Lake Mead go dry and losing those assets that we, we love and enjoy and need for water supply on the river, or whether that's our inability to produce hydropower. Everyone loses if we don't all give a little. And so I think it's really important the, the examples you've pointed out, of places where people have come together, because they recognize that the Colorado River, as divided up as it is, it's really one big system. And what one person does in the upper basin does affect what happens to someone else in the lower basin and sometimes vice versa, so I think that that's a really important message to take away and to also just keep in mind for these future negotiations.

Colby Pellegrino:

Absolutely.

Elizabeth Koebele:

Great. Well, there's so much that you are doing in relation to the Colorado River Basin, it's hard to get it all in these conversations. But we really appreciate you taking the time to walk us through so many of these different processes. Just to close out, I was wondering if there's anything else I didn't ask about that you'd like to tell our listeners about the Colorado River before we end?

Colby Pellegrino:

You know, I think that the Colorado River sometimes gets a bad rap, that we haven't done enough, that we haven't been bold enough. I would say, to look at it from a different light. I think we have a really strong history of cooperation and the issues that we're facing challenge every sector, they challenge every water user, they challenge every water use type, because everyone is going to have to use less. And our ability to take that on through the massive political network that we have is challenging sometimes. But there's a lot of people aware of the situation. There's a lot of eyes on the river right now, and I think that there is a lot of room for us to be successful if we can work together and be creative. I'll just do a little, I know you asked about the Colorado River, but I’ll just do a plug for Southern Nevada. We've implemented, as we talked about, one of the most comprehensive water conservation programs in the nation, and we've shown that it can happen. Our peak water use year was 2002. We pulled 325,000 acre feet of water off the river. This year, we're expected to pull less than 200,000 acre feet of water off the river, and during that time we've added 750,000 more people to our valley. So not only is our overall use decreased by a third, but we've done it while we've continued to grow our economy. And while we like to toot our horn about conservation, the fact of the matter is we're seeing this across Colorado River communities, that our friends in California and Arizona are seeing the same thing, that we've been able to use conservation and decouple the growth of our economies from increases in water use. So I think that if we can do it at the municipal sector, there is a path forward for everyone on the river to figure out how to make it happen.

Elizabeth Koebele:

It's so nice to have met you in person, Colby. Thanks for taking the time to join me on this episode of the Discover Science Podcast.

Colby Pellegrino:

And thank you for having me.

Brian Frost:

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us. My name is Brian Frost and I'm a chemistry professor here at the ÍƼöÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´.

Jesus Diaz Sanchez:

And my name is Jesus Diaz Sanchez. I'm a chemistry student, and we're your hosts for this episode of Discover Science, a podcast spun off the Discover Science Lecture Series hosted by the College of Science. Thank you for coming in today. Welcome to the Discover Science Podcast. As a host of your own show, you must feel right at home.

Joe Schwarcz:

Thanks very much. Yeah. I've sat in front of a mic before, although this one seems to be maybe higher quality than the one I’m used to.

Brian Frost:

So you're director of the Office of Science and Society at McGill University. That's certainly an uncommon, if not unique office. So I wonder, how did how did the office at McGill come about and how did you get involved?

Joe Schwarcz:

You're quite right. It is, it is unique. I don't know of anything quite like it at any other university. And it came about, it evolved, actually, it wasn't one day to the next. I'd always been interested in describing science and particularly chemistry to the public ever since, you know, I was very young, and when I finally got the chance to be in academia, I also started to get asked to give some public talks on science.

And I was, you know, I guess pretty good at it and started to get more and more questions asked and with a couple of colleagues going back to the 1980s, we organized some public lectures at the university and very much like the Discover series here, and the people would come and we did about ten of those a year and it kind of grew.

And there were more and more requests for stuff, and the university said, ‘You know, maybe we have something here. Let's try to formalize it.’ And this was in the late 1990s when already there was a lot of concern about misinformation and disinformation and the public being misled by pseudo experts. And that's when the office started. That was actually, it was in ’99, so we're getting close to 25 years. And then we were lucky enough to eventually get a benefactor, Lorne Trottier, who was an electronics expert and has an electronics company. And one day I was I was giving a public talk and he happened to be in the audience and he came up to me after the talk and he asked me a question that, that you don't normally get asked. He said, ‘Do you guys need any money?’

Brian Frost:

It's a good question to get.

Joe Schwarcz:

It’s a good question to get asked, you know, so I guess I hemmed and hawed a little bit, and said, ‘Well, you know, you can always use some, some money.’ And so I said, ‘Well, you know, I would like to fund public activities,’ and really, without much question at all, he gave us a very substantial donation. And so that enabled me to hire people, which, you know, we have a staff now about 6, 6 people, and essentially we try to separate sense from nonsense. Very challenging these days, you know.

Brian Frost:

Absolutely. But important. That's a great, that's great office to have. So in addition to being a chemist, you're also a magician. And so I wonder, sir, how you got into magic and sort of how you balance magic, which appears to divide the natural world with your work as a scientist.

Joe Schwarcz:

It's an interesting story and it goes back a long ways. It goes back to when I was in grade six, which was a few years ago, and I was invited to a birthday party where my friend's parents had hired a magician to entertain us as one does a birthday parties. And he was a teenager, not particularly good. But then he did a trick where he had a rope, which, obviously flexible, he had rolled up in his hand, and he said he was going to perform a miracle for us. He was going to make that rope defy gravity. And he reached into his pocket and, for what he said was a magic chemical, which he pretended to sprinkle on this rope. And sure enough, the rope then defied gravity. It was parallel to the ground.

It intrigued me. I mean, I knew even at that tender age, I knew this wasn't done with any magic chemical. You know, I knew that whichever way this defied gravity was done by some sort of mechanical trick, I wasn't aware of that. But I wondered why he had chosen those words, ‘magic chemical,’ you know, not hocus pocus or alakazam, you know, the traditional magic words.

And that intrigued me. And that actually turned out to be life-changing because I went to the school library, I took out a book on chemistry and took out a book on magic to see what all this was about and recognized that there was a parallel here, which at first sounds confusing because chemistry, of course, is a hard science firmly rooted in the laws of nature. Magic is the opposite. What do magicians do? You know, they levitate people, they cut women in half and put them back together again, right? Totally against the laws of nature. And I realized that that some of the scientific experiments that that are performed, you know, where you pour two liquids together and you get a change in color look magical to the uninitiated.

If you don't know anything about indicators and acids and bases, I mean, looks absolutely magical. But of course, in, in science, we try to take out the magic and provide the explanation, whereas a magician wants to hide what the explanation is, but it's always a scientific explanation. If someone is being levitated, you can rest assured they're being pulled from the top, pushed from the bottom or held from the back, right? But the audience, of course, isn't privy to how that is, is done. So that's how really I, I got interested and then I followed both of those. And, you know, sometimes I infused a little bit magic into presentations, first of all, because it's entertaining, but I never do it just for entertainment. I do it to make a point. And the point, you know, that you can obviously use with magic is that things aren't always the way they appear to be and that you can explain how something works scientifically and take out the, the magic. Of course, I don't go overboard in trying to reveal the magic, but there are some, some time when I think it's full value for doing it because it makes a point. So I followed both of those ever since.

Jesus Diaz Sanchez:

How does your interest in both chemistry and magic help with your role in debunking pseudosciences?

Joe Schwarcz:

Oh, I think magic is a great, great key because it teaches you skepticism, it teaches you trickery, you know, and how easy it is to trick people. So it certainly helps with, you know, unraveling all the, the quackery out there because you learn the, the methods that are used in magic, which are also some of the same methods that are used in the world of pseudoscience.

And it's, it's very irritating. Of course, you know, as, as a magician to see magic tricks used to defraud people. And this, of course, is something that has a long history. I mean, Houdini was adamant about fighting the Spiritualists in those days, who would do seances, have hands levitate and, you know, tables move about, all done with mechanical tricks. And, you know, he was one of the first to really have a campaign against this because fraud is fraud, and it cheats people. So, you know, learning what magic really allows you to look into trickery.

Jesus Diaz Sanchez:

Could you share with us how you got interested in chemistry?

Joe Schwarcz:

When I went to the library and, you know, took out a book on chemistry and started to read, you know, I realized that that chemistry was not just an intellectual exercise, that it was something that, that opened a door into understanding how the world works. Because everything works on the basis of molecules interacting. And if you have a feel for molecules, and molecular structure and chemical reactions, you have a pretty good feel for what can happen and what, what cannot. So to me, that was very revelatory. You know, it just provided a view into the workings of the world. And of course, the deeper you go into chemistry, the more you see how fascinating this is, and all of the things that you can control with chemical reactions and the subtlety, you know, that, that makes things possible, that, that, you know, when you learn that molecules that are mirror images of each other and may behave in different ways and, and how important that concept is. And, you know, you the more you read about chemistry, you see the beauty of it and you see the everyday connections. That's when I kind of realized that the real key to teaching chemistry was to show students why they should be learning chemistry, how it's relevant.

And, you know, I found early on when I first started teaching freshman chemistry and saw what some of my colleagues are doing is that they were teaching it as if all of the students were going to become professional chemists and that they had to be tortured to learn all of the excruciating details. And, you know, that's when I started to take a different approach because I realized that those who are really going to be interested in science are going to learn the nitty gritty details all the time anyway. But what is really important when you're talking to introductory students is to get them to appreciate what chemistry is and what it can do and what it cannot do to teach them chemical logic, to teach them how to think, you know, with chemical terminology so that they can interpret the chemistry in their daily life so that when they look at a list of ingredients in the shampoo bottle, they're not totally, you know, fear-stricken by that.

And they see that, yes, I mean, there may be some multi-syllabic names in there, but that doesn't mean that they're poisonous. You know, you, you don't judge a substance by the number of letters in its chemical name. So, you know, when I started to get into that and students, I think, liked it, they appreciated the modality and I think they started to go home and discuss some of these things around the dinner table at home. So then I started to get invitations to speak to parents groups and it kind of took off like that. But I would say that the real key from early on was to, to show the relevance of whatever they were studying in class, certainly not to trivialize the science, but show them the light at the end of the tunnel. So that there was a reason to struggle through that tunnel. And there might be a lot of curves in there, but there is a light at the, at the end, why they should be doing this. You know, I just, when I was talking to some of the students here, I just gave one of those, you know, examples that I remember, when I was doing some organic, I think it was in a general chem course, when I was an undergraduate, we had a third of the gen chem course that was organic. And one of the things I remember is the prof saying, ‘Well, now we're going to learn about amides, and we've got to learn how carboxylic acids react with amines to form amide.’ And he started to write the formulas and we learned it, of course. And then I decided, you know, when of course, after I knew a fair bit of chemistry, that when I was teaching organic, that's not how I would start electron amides.

I would start off by saying, ‘You've all heard of nylon, you've all known, you know something about it. You're probably wearing fibers now that were made of nylon. It helped turn the tide of the Second World War because of parachutes being made from nylon, etc. Well, what is a nylon molecule? How do we make it? Of course, it's made from carboxylic acids,’ and that's how you get into it. And then all of sudden, of course, they will learn the same thing. They will learn all of the details, they'll learn the mechanism of the reaction, but it becomes much more meaningful because they know where they are, are going. And also I remember being disenchanted by my second year, phys-chem course when I was an undergraduate, although I did reasonably well in it, because you learned how to plug numbers into the Earth equation and you know, all of this, and I remember that roughly about three quarters of the way through the course, the prof said something about, ‘Well, now you know how a battery works.’

He had, he had never mentioned the word battery before. We had no idea that all of this stuff that we were doing was essentially the chemistry of the battery and all that would have been necessary at the beginning is to say, you know, batteries are really important in our life. They have a fascinating history. You know, we can go back to the Volta and start this discussion and see how this has evolved and what we know today. It would have made all the world of difference. I would have still learned how to plug the numbers into the equation, but I would have known why I'm doing that. Right. So that's why I went, whenever I, whatever concept I teach, you know, in chemistry, I always think about that. You know what? Look, let me think about why it is that, why it is that they want to know this.

Brian Frost:

And try to turn it into a story.

Joe Schwarcz:

Absolutely. Absolutely. And if I can't think of a reason why they should know this, then they don't need to know it. So then I don't teach it.

Brian Frost:

Fair enough. So in your radio show, you've been doing a radio show for, for quite some time, are there questions that seem to come up all the time? Are there myths that you feel like you're constantly debunking?

Joe Schwarcz:

Oh, absolutely. I mean, over the years, of course, the type of questions have, have changed, you know. The, the questions about, you know, how to clean this, you know, how do you get the rust stain out of the bathtub and all of that, those have kind of withered away. Today questions tend to be more along the lines of, you know, is the vaccine safe or not?

I mean, people are concerned with health, with their, you know, everyday life. They're concerned with, you know, what is processed food doing to us? What, what, what does that mean? What is processed food? You know, why did California just ban red dye number three? You know, this this kind of stuff. So they the questions tend to be reasonable. And but of course, that also is because I'm speaking to, to an audience who's already interested in science. You know, it's, it's not the, the pseudo-science worshipers who are listening to my show. And also one thing that has changed is that now we have the ability to take text-in questions. And so that that now actually is more, more than people calling in online, because people have just gotten so used to texting. I mean, this is the way to communicate, you know, I mean, I see my students in the hallways sitting beside each other, texting each other, you know? So, so texting is, is the mode of communication now, which, of course, is also good in the sense that, that, you know, I have a screen in front of me and I see the text-in questions so I can pick and choose the ones I think are most interesting to, to talk about.

Brian Frost:

Versus which phone call you have to pick up.

Joe Schwarcz:

Absolutely. So, you know, the technology certainly has made an improvement. You know, and I mean, obviously sometimes there there are questions that that you don't have the answer to, although, you know, after doing this for 43 years, you've basically heard, you know, everything. But then you say, okay, well, you know, I'll talk about this next week. And I mean, these days, of course, there's almost nothing that you can't learn about in a week, you know, so you can dig out the, the information.

I also try to start each show with a couple of questions that they can then text in their answers or call in their answers. People like trivia, although it isn't exactly trivia. I mean, it's interesting chemistry-kind of questions that I try to come up with. It's not easy to come up with questions these days that you can't immediately Google, you know, But, you know, hopefully, I mean, they know that that really is not part of the game. I mean, the whole idea is to see, you know, do you know the answer to this?

So but but certainly as you as you were wondering, the the type of questions over the years have have changed. And whereas very early on, there was a lot of, you know, how things work, you know, how does lipstick work? How do antiperspirants work? Today, it's much more, ‘Is it risky? Should I be worried about it?’ Chemophobia has got you know, it's certainly become much more apparent than, than it used to be.

Jesus Diaz Sanchez:

For me personally, when people ask about my research, I sometimes have a difficult time. I feel like I'm at a disadvantage slightly, just because the field of research I do in is computational work. So it requires a a bit of chemical theory knowledge. Sometimes it's hard to break it down to lots of individuals that may not have that background. But Dr. Frost, how would you explain that, your work to someone that perhaps hasn't studied that?

Brian Frost:

Well, I think, you know, it's, it's, the answer when someone asks me what I work on, it sort of, the answer I might give varies a little bit on who I'm talking to. Certainly some of the stuff we do is complicated. And if I'm talking to people who aren't, aren't chemists, I think it's important to have sort of a elevator speech that you can kind of give, right? To talk about, you know, that we're trying to develop, say, water soluble complexes, to, to try to make more industrial processes with more benign solvents, for example, and that some, some things maybe they could understand. And so, you know, Dr. Joe would what do you recommend to scientists who want to show, that share their work with the public but maybe don't know how to start?

Joe Schwarcz:

You really have to think your terminology through. And I've learned this over the years because I have sometimes guests, researchers, as guests. And, you know, we try to talk about their research and before they come on, you know, I preach to them about, ‘Make this simple. Remember that your language is very specific to you and that the terms that you use, which are innate to you, everyday language may be totally unfamiliar to the public.’ So if you're going to introduce some terms like that, make sure that you you describe it. I tell you honestly, it often falls on deaf ears, or maybe not on deaf ears, but they just don't realize how second nature that that language is. And you know that when you talk about transcription and translation, you know, I mean, to the average person, translation means translating from one language to another, you know. So you my advice always to, to scientists who are trying to communicate to the public, watch your language, define every, every term, assume that they know very little or essentially nothing, which is usually a correct assumption. Describe what you do in simple, simple, simple language and always tell them what is the end goal that you're trying to do. But it doesn't always work to give them that advice. You know, it's they can't get away from the complicated because they're just not used to talking, you know, everyday kind of language. And in some areas that's a bigger problem than in others because the language is, you know, much more specific and much more technical.

But, but everyone should be able to describe what they do in in a simple way. And in fact, if you can't do it, you probably shouldn't be doing your research because that means that you, you can't let people know what the, the end result of this is, that you're expecting.

Jesus Diaz Sanchez:

I recently just heard a quote from Professor Sir Mark Walport. He said that science is not finished until it's communicated. Dr. Schwartz, how do you interpret this statement in the context of your own scientific work?

Joe Schwarcz:

Oh, this is, you know, absolutely true. I mean, if you're working in a laboratory and you make some cosmic discovery, it is meaningless unless someone else finds out about it and usually builds upon it. Science is, is a series of very small steps. It's very rare that there is, you know, a single giant leap. I mean, that, you know, that's a romanticized version of science. It plods along with simple steps. Sometimes you have to take a step back and then you take another step forward. Well, those steps are the scientific publications, right? The way that you let your colleagues know what you've done is by writing it up and submitting it to a journal. Let the journals send it out to the referees, a lot of back and forth and eventually decided to merit publication or not. If it merits publication, then it becomes just one point in all the evidence that you try to gather and someone who's doing work in that particular field will look at it and usually criticize it or see what they can do with it and how to, to build upon it. And eventually you you get somewhere, you know, and, you know, one one quote that I really like of Isaac Newton's, who apparently was not a very nice guy, but when he was once asked how he had made so many discoveries and became so enlightened, he said, ‘It's because I stood on the shoulder of giants.’

And that really is is how science works. You're always building on what has gone on before. You're always adding to, to the knowledge. So that's why communication is, is so important. And I mean, sometimes, you know, people get, get credit, the Nobel Prize being a prime example, which is, you know, absolutely, absolutely the top prize in science. But you have to realize that behind that Nobel Prize there are hundreds of others without whose knowledge that would not have happened.

But you can’t give it to everyone at large, so you have to pick and select and, you know, sometimes it's controversial and sometimes, you know, it's, it's for making sort of one pivotal step. And that's what we had this year with the Medicine Nobel Prize for the COVID-19 vaccine to Katalin Karikó and Andrew Weissman. They didn't invent the vaccine. They didn't discover the vaccine, but they did make a very important contribution, probably a step without which it wouldn't have happened. But a step that someone else would have eventually come to, you know. But you got to select someone. So they looked at all the dozens and dozens of people who had been doing work on mRNA, and they decided that, you know, this was probably the most important contribution.

But even that is controversial, you know, because you can look at other steps and say, ‘Without that it wouldn’t have allowed us to actually do this.’ I was surprised that they didn't give it to a third person because there were many worthy candidates. But I think the problem was there were too many worthy candidates and they couldn't decide who the third person would be. Because these two had worked together and everyone agreed that this was really a pivotal step. And this wasn't very controversial, but there certainly could have been many who could have included, been included in that prize. So absolutely, communication is, is the key to the progress of science.

Jesus Diaz Sanchez:

Fantastic. As a young scientist, do you have any advice for other also young scientists who struggle with effectively communicating their work to broad audiences given the complexity of their scientific work?

Joe Schwarcz:

You have to work at it. Science communication is a specialty, just like anything else. You have to think about it. You know, you have to think about the words you're going to use. You have to think about the message that you're going to get across. Practice with your friends. If you're going to explain to them what it is that you're doing. There's no magic here. It, it comes with a can tell you it comes with years of experience. Because, you know, when, when I try to explain some things now, I certainly don't do it the way that I would have done a decade ago. You learn what works and what doesn't work. What doesn't work is to, to call people ignorant, even if they are. Nobody likes to be called ignorant. You have to kind of give them the rope to try to hang themselves. You know, if there's some controversial issue by, kind of, you know, emphasizing that maybe the information that they got, where did they get it from? And maybe it's not the best source. So it takes planning, you know, and it takes an interest in communicating. You know, you have to decide that you want to become a good communicator, that you're going to have to work at it.

Jesus Diaz Sanchez:

So, Dr. Schwarcz, you're also a chemistry professor, a radio show host and a director of entire program, a bestselling author, and more. Recently on the Office of Science and Society's YouTube channel, you talked about doping in sports, quantum mechanics and, of course, tattoos. How do you find the time to explain complicated topics in just a few minutes?

Joe Schwarcz:

Well, this is just what we were chatting before is that, you know, though, those few minutes come out of an hour of thinking, you know? And I mean, the same way that, you know, when you think about a research project, there's a lot the thinking behind it. So with the question of, of doping because we recently organized a whole symposium on doping. So of course, you, you look at the scientific literature, you explore it and you try to funnel it into understandable little bits. But I would say that that it takes a lot of reading, a lot of research in order to encapsulate it into short. You know, I remember that at one time I did some writing for The Washington Post and I was talking to the editor of the science page, which is where, you know, I was writing and he told me a story, said, ‘You know, once I didn't have time. So I wrote long.’ That's the thing, if you want to, to do it well and do it in a short, it takes a lot more time than to write a long piece.

Brian Frost:

Interesting. You know, we've talked a lot about, you know, sort of pseudoscience and we've talked about your work in the Office of Science and Society. So what would you tell our listeners about why it's important for the public to understand science?

Joe Schwarcz:

Whether they realize it or not, they're, they’re as scientists every day of their life. Because when you're making a decision about what to eat, whether you're going to eat a cook at home or eat some processed food, what cosmetics you're going to use, which medication you're going to take, is there a difference between Advil and Tylenol? You're making scientific decisions and you're making these every single day of your life without realizing that. And you're making decisions based on risk every day of your life without realizing that. You get into a car, you know that there's a risk. This is not a theoretical risk. This is a real risk. People die in cars. Nevertheless, you judge that the benefits outweigh the risks. So every day you're making scientific decisions. You're making decisions based upon risk. The only way that you can make sure that you're making the best possible decision is to have a background upon which you can base that decision. So you're not making a decision out of the blue. You're not listening to someone who has no business giving you advice. You are making the decision based upon your knowledge. And that knowledge doesn't come easily. That knowledge comes with, with education. You have to sometimes you have to sweat it. That's it. You know, it's anything that is worth having in life means that you've got to work for it.

Brian Frost:

Excellent.

Jesus Diaz Sanchez:

Given there's a distrust rapidly growing in the scientific community, whether, through a variety of topics, how can we help change the tide and help the public understand the importance of science and the difference between science and pseudoscience?

Joe Schwarcz:

Well, I think by having programs by by, you know, creating needs for, for radio programs or television documentaries, for running courses for the public, for having public symposiums, I mean, the more exposure the, the better. And I mean, you're quite right in that that there is a, a certain distrust of science, especially of the pharmaceutical industry, which is, I think, totally misguided. But, you know, I mean, I hear all the time that, ‘You know, they really could cure cancer, but they don't want to cure cancer because they're making all of this profit from selling their ineffective cancer treatments.’ And I mean, this is such nonsense. And especially, you know, when you have some insight into pharmacy industry and, you know, the researchers, I mean, you know, this is such absurd. You know, let me tell you, there would be a lot of money to be made with a cancer cure, you know. But, you know, what is interesting is, on the one hand, you see all of this criticism of, you know, of scientists and the distrust. And on the other hand, they expect science to be able to do more than what it can actually do. They expect that science can come up with that cancer cure if only they chose to, to, to do it. You know, So it's this interesting view of, of, of the world. On the one hand, dissing science, and on the other hand blaming it for not putting its knowledge to the proper use.

Jesus Diaz Sanchez:

Thank you for joining us today. Would you like to close this out the way you close out the Dr. Joe Show?

Joe Schwarcz:

You know, this is sort of a conclusion that I arrived at over the years, and my signoff goes like this: I hope all the chemistry in your life comes out just right.

Brian Frost:

Awesome. Thank you.

Jesus Diaz Sanchez:

Thank you.

[Laughing]

Sarah Hörst:

This is going to going to go well. I can already tell.

Donna dePolo:

So close your eyes if you can, and imagine a landscape thick with haze drifting over vast rolling hills of sand, a river of liquid methane cuts through surrounding mountains made of ice and flows in and out of lakes and into a vast sea. Saturn and its rings are obscured behind an orange-brown haze. The sun is a nondescript glow in the twilight sky. 

The landscape is alien in many ways, but feels strangely familiar. Glancing around at the Highlands, blanketed in water, ice, the glistening lakes and the organic sand dunes, you can't help but be reminded of our home planet Earth. Now imagine what might life look like on this extraterrestrial moonscape. Welcome to the Discover Science podcast, where we speak to leading researchers about the exciting discoveries of our time.

I'm Donna dePolo, a recent physics and astronomy alum of the ÍƼöÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, interested in planetary science and other astrophysical phenomena. I'm here with my friend and co-host Dr. Carlos Mariscal, associate professor of philosophy, interested in understanding the origin of life, the nature of extreme organisms, and what we can know about life in the universe.

Carlos Mariscal:

Thank you, Donna. The landscape we just asked you to imagine is that of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, and the subject of distinguished atmosphere chemist Dr. Sarah Hörst's research. Dr. Hörst is an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and an adjunct astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute. Dr. Hurst is a leading researcher of the complex organic chemistry occurring in the atmosphere of Titan.

With her research, she contemplates life as we do not know it. What could it be like on this lunar landscape? Welcome, Dr. Hörst. It's a pleasure to meet you.

Sarah Hörst:

It's nice to meet you. Thanks for having me. 

Donna dePolo:

All right. So before we jump into the big questions of life, I want to set a little bit of framework for where in the solar system we're looking at. Titan is the largest moon of Saturn and it's the second largest moon in our solar system. And it's unique in our solar system as it's the only moon to possess a dense atmosphere composed of 95% nitrogen and 5% methane.

Additionally, it is the only known object in our solar system beyond Earth with clear evidence of stable liquid on the surface. That brings us over to you, Dr. Hörst. Can you tell us a little bit about your research into Titan's atmosphere, like what makes it unique? What's complex about it?

Sarah Hörst:

Yeah, definitely. I think you hit on a couple of the things already, so Titan is really unique in the solar system and there are a couple of reasons for that, which you already mentioned. It has a dense atmosphere that makes it really weird. It's the only moon in our solar system that has an atmosphere really at all. And so immediately we're like, okay, that's weird. We should figure this place out. The other thing that makes it really unique, which you also mentioned, is the only other substantial atmosphere in our solar system whose primary gas is nitrogen besides Earth. And so just those two things alone. If nothing else was happening in Titan's atmosphere, it would still be incredibly interesting to us. But that's not the only part of the story.

That methane that you mentioned gets broken down by light from the sun, and that starts chemical processes that result in the formation of really complicated organic compounds in the atmosphere. And so that's what we're so interested in. What are those compounds? What happens to them when they're on the surface? Is there the possibility that life exists on the surface that has figured out how to take advantage of these compounds?

And even if there isn't even if there's no life on Titan today, never was, never will be sorry. A lot of these processes happen in the atmosphere of the early Earth. We don't have good records of the time when life originated on Earth, and so instead of building a time machine, what we do instead is build spacecraft and travel to Titan and study those conditions to try to help us understand the origin of life on our own planet.

Carlos Mariscal:

So it's analogous with respect to the atmosphere of early Earth. It's much smaller than Earth, much farther further away, much colder, much darker. So it's not going to be analogous in other respects. Is that the…

Sarah Hörst:

Yeah. So, the main analogy that we draw basically is that the current Earth's atmosphere is about 78% molecular nitrogen, and the rest basically is oxygen. But the oxygen is only present because there's life on earth. Before there was life on Earth, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. And instead, we had a nitrogen-dominated atmosphere that probably had a fair amount of methane in addition to some other compounds.

And so, it's the chemical analogy that we're drawing. But you're right, the temperature of early Earth would have been much warmer. We're closer to the sun, so we have more sunlight coming. Gravity is different. All these things play a role on the chemistry, but it's kind of one of these situations where beggars can't be choosers. We have something that has at least some of the same conditions happening. 

And so, you know, we'd be really remiss to not study it. And as with all analogies, it's never going to be perfect. That's why it's an analogy and not the exact thing, but there's still a lot that we can learn from doing that and really help us understand more about our own planet.

Carlos Mariscal:

Thank you. 

Donna dePolo:

That's really awesome. In what ways does Titan's atmosphere … I know there's a pretty thick haze also surrounding the planet. My goodness. Pretty thick haze also surrounding the moon. How does this serve to protect the potential of early life-like phenomena from hazards. We’ve got different radiation going on, cosmic rays, we’ve got UV or maybe a little bit of UV. What is it, a buffer? What's going on there?

Sarah Hörst:

Yeah, that's a great question. First, though, because you just called Titan a planet and I promise you I'm going to do it a billion … I've already done it a billion times today. We tend to, as planetary scientists, if a planet, if a world does planet things, we tend to call it a planet, even if it's not a planet. Excellent. So this isn’t really a political statement on the whole Pluto thing or anything. It's just like I'm going to call Titan a planet about a billion, zillion times, so it's fine. So there's that.

But back to your question about, you know, the role that the haze layer might play. So one thing that's really interesting about particles in the atmosphere is they interact with light differently than gases do. And one of the potential consequences of that is that they can absorb light that otherwise would get through the atmosphere. And so, as an example, UV light does not really reach the surface of time at all because it gets absorbed much higher in the atmosphere, some by haze particles, some by some of the other molecules in the atmosphere. 

So we think that early Earth may have had something similar. And the reason why that's important is that before life really dramatically change the composition of Earth's atmosphere, there wasn't any oxygen, which meant there wasn't any ozone because the ozone layer forms from sunlight impacting or radiating the oxygen in the atmosphere. And so there wasn't anything in early Earth's atmosphere to protect nascent life on the surface unless there was a haze layer.

And there are a lot of reasons why we think that early Earth did have a haze layer. And if so, it would have played the role that the ozone layer plays. Now, it would have been able to absorb a lot of those dangerous photons and prevent them from getting to the surface. And the reason why that's important is the same reason that the ozone layer is important to us today. Right? Those energetic, you know, the energetic light from the sun is very dangerous to us. It's why we have skin cancer, right? Those energetic photons can actually destroy our DNA, the molecules that are really important for life. And so, you can think, especially when we had brand new, just trying to figure out how life goes creatures on the surface, they haven't necessarily figured out self-repair mechanisms yet, all of those kinds of things. If they get hit by a lot of that UV light, that might be lights out for them. And so that's one thing that we think could be really important, both for the potential for life on Titan, but also early Earth.

And then just thinking about what are the conditions that are required for life. Is an atmosphere really important? Is it one of those like, you know, it's like the walk-in closet in the house, like you'd love to have it, but, you know, maybe you're not going to be able to buy that house, and so you're just going to have to get along without one.

Carlos Mariscal:

So I realized we are triangulating here from a physics and astronomy perspective, with which we've been asking you questions about now and now we're going to switch to a more philosophical and biological perspective. So we're coming at it from both sides.

Sarah Hörst:

Lovely. I didn’t know what I was getting into when I signed up for this.

Carlos Mariscal:

But it's great. Hopefully, this will be nice. Interesting questions for an interesting I'm excited.

Sarah Hörst:

Let's go.

Carlos Mariscal:

I spent some time a couple of years ago at the Earth Life Sciences Institute in Tokyo, and one of the things that people were advocating there was this slow chemistry. I also heard people talking about messy chemistry, but slow chemistry. And it was this observation that most of the research that we do, and it's not just in chemistry, it's across academia.

Most of the research that we do are the kinds of projects that can be done within a graduate career or within a postdoc or within the tenure track. So we're looking at 4 to 6 years, more or less, and that leaves entire processes that would be longer and perhaps equally interesting as things that we never study – think processes that could take it ten, 100 a million years. 

So, here's a very hypothetical question for you. Let's say a time where no object and you could spend an infinite amount of time or as long as you want to study Titan, what would you want to study there?

Sarah Hörst:

Yeah, it's funny that you ask this question because it's like a joke that I make a lot of times when I have kind of academic seminars when people ask some questions. So in my lab at Hopkins, we run experiments where we simulate the chemistry that happens in Titan's atmosphere to try to understand it better and figure out what molecules are made, you know, would that be a tasty treat for and is it life like you know, all those things.

Um, one of the problems is that the chemistry that happens in the top of Titan's atmosphere happens on a timescale scale of many hundreds of years. Um, and so the joke that I wasn't, which is exactly what you brought up, the framing this question is that of course we have to find a way to speed that up because none of my grad students want to be in graduate, right?

So, we do things to make the processes happen faster in the lab that are artificial and we don't necessarily know what impact doing that has on the answers that we get. And so if I could, I would much prefer to run my experiment for many hundreds of years than for like a week. But of course, as you mentioned, like my grad students, I want to do it. Funding agencies don't want to do it. And honestly, I plan to retire at some point. And so I'm not particularly excited about running 100 years, but there are some I think it's incredible. Like there are some experiments that have been very, very like long-lived for people who are trying to measure the viscosity of the pitch, which is like, you know, it's had six results or seven results. 

And so the entire history that this experiment has been running and I mean, I appreciate the commitment to it cause I'm not sure that I have that much strength of character to be able to like, decide to do something like that. But I think it's a really interesting problem and I'm not surprised that it came up in that context when you were at LC, but it definitely, I think especially in a lot of origin of life research.

And actually, it's funny because it came up when I was talking to some high school students earlier today. We try to do things very quickly in the lab and then if the result we want in terms of origin of life, if stuff doesn't happen, then it's just kind of like, oh, it can't happen that way.

But what if we left that thing sitting there for like 500 years? You know what I mean? Like, we didn't, we left it sitting there for two weeks and a creature didn't crawl out of it. So now people want to eliminate it as an option. And it's like, I don't think the origin of life took the timescales that any of our laboratory experiments are operated on.

And so it's very, very possible that we're missing out on what would be a relatively straightforward answer if we ran the experiments on the right timescales. But at some point, you just have to accept that this is how the cookie crumbles. You know, do the best you can with what you have. And at the end of the day, and we say this all the time, we were kind of pitching Titan as like, you know, the cool place that we should go to. The universe has been running this experiment for four and a half billion years on Titan.

So fine, let's go collect the answer. Like we don't need to run the experiment ourselves. It's already been run. Someone else did all the work. There were no grad students harmed. So let's. Let's go figure it out.

Carlos Mariscal:

That's brilliant. And I really should leave that there. But I'm very curious, you know, you sometimes should exit on the right things, but. But I'm interested. You said you could speed up some reactions. I assume that, you know, you don't have the dial for time, but you know that some things can catalyze reactions, make things go faster. That also has got to be the things that you focus on.

Right? Like you would maybe make methane produced faster and it would have some effect that you might be able to quantify and might not.

Sarah Hörst:

Yeah. So, the main thing that we change, there are two things that we change that make what we're doing happen faster than what happens on Titan. The one thing we change is pressure. So we run our experiments at a higher pressure than where this chemistry happens on Titan. And the reason that speeds up the experiment is that when there's higher pressure, the gases collide with each other more often.

You can imagine if you are at a party and you have been instructed to go find someone who has a great cocktail recipe, right? You're going to like go around the room talking to people, trying to find this person who has this great recipe right? If the room is, you know, ten square miles and there are five people in it, it's going to take you a long time to find the cocktail recipe person because you're just spending a bunch of time trying to meet the person, right?

If the room for the party instead was, you know, like 50 square foot room, it's going to be much faster to find your cocktail recipe person because you just interact with everybody faster. So this is the same thing. We've increased the pressure, our molecules are meeting each other faster. And so that speeds up the chemistry. Unfortunately, if you go to high enough pressure, it actually changes the chemistry that's possible.

So you've not only sped it up, but you've changed it. We have to be really careful about kind of trying to toe the line between making it happen faster or making it happen differently. That's one thing. The other thing that we change is the amount of energy that we put into these experiments, the way in which we simulate the sun, is at a much higher energy density than what is actually happening on Titan.

And that also just speeds the chemistry up because the molecules aren't sitting there waiting for a photon to help them go off on their new chemistry adventures. They don't have to wait as long again. There's the possibility that we're only speeding it up. Sure, but there's also the possibility that we're changing it. And it's not super straightforward to actually mess around with both of those variables and see whether or not we're changing things. Because in the lab, other things change too when you change them. So sure. But that's how we speed it up. And it you know, it just is what it is.

Carlos Mariscal:

I mean, but it's interesting either way, right? Like it might turn out not to be an analog for Titan, but it would be an analog for a hypothetical situation.

Sarah Hörst:

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's not that we're not we are doing these experiments. We learn things, we may not learn the thing that we are trying to learn, but we will learn a thing that will help us understand. At the end of the day, you know, how all these processes are working and in atmospheres.

Carlos Mariscal:

One of the reasons people are interested in Titan is because of its potential for life. And so a lot of astrobiologists are interested in the question about drawing the line between interesting life-like phenomenon and uninteresting abiotic chemistry. I kind of want to flip this question on its head and ask you what would be the most interesting thing you think we could find on Titan that you would still not wish to call life and on the other hand, let's say we did discover life on Titan.

What would be the least interesting thing we could discover about it? So in other words, is there interesting chemistry and boring biology?

Sarah Hörst:

Yes. Cool. Okay. Well, first of all, all chemistry is interesting. So that's all I’ve got to say about that. I might come back to that in a second.

Carlos Mariscal:

Propaganda! 

Sarah Hörst:

Taking a step back, and thinking about your question, Titan is interesting for astrobiology reasons, for a couple of reasons. And I think you can kind of boil it down to two things. So we have two really big-picture questions about life in the universe. And this is not new information from my brain because I'm brilliant.

I have stored a lot of this thought process from Jonathan Lunine, who's a very famous astrobiologist. But there are two big questions, and one of them is, is life ubiquitous? Which is to say that it's probably relatively easy for it to originate. If you give it all the red stuff, it goes off and has a party and you have life.

There's no, you know, low probability event that causes it. It's just like the stuff here in life. And that would mean that it's everywhere the ingredients exist. Great. If it's easy, if it's ubiquitous, then anywhere that has liquid water and energy source and organic material has life. If that is the case, then we should be able to find life in all of the subsurface oceans in the solar system. 

So, Europa should have life and Enceladus should have life, Triton should have life. Pluto might have a subsurface ocean, it should have life. Maybe did I mention Enceladus? I don't remember. That's one question. Titan helps us answer that question because Titan also has a subsurface ocean. So that's one thing. The other big picture question we have about life in the universe, assuming that it exists elsewhere than Earth, although actually this will still answer the question, but is life diverse?

Which is to say, are there lots of different chemistries? Right. Is it possible that life exists that does not use liquid water as a solvent or transport medium? Is there life that is not based on carbon the way life on earth is? Titan also helps us answer that question because on the surface we have huge lakes and seas made out of methane and ethane. If life could figure out how to use methane and ethane, we have one place here in the solar system where we have a non-liquid-water liquid sitting there that life could potentially take advantage of. I think those are the two, you know, kind of big-picture things that we're interested in. Both of them can be answered by looking for life on Titan.

None of that is related to the question that you asked me, but I'm getting there I promise. If we found life on Titan like that would be – I desperately want to curse right now – It should be the wrong answer, but that would be really cool. Insert whatever curse word came to mind when I said that just now.

But I would be slightly disappointed if it was water based to be completely honest. I mean, you have this thing sitting right here where you can be like really, really weird. And instead, Titan’s like, no, I'm cool with the water. That's fine. I think that's relatively unlikely for a number of reasons. Titan's subsurface ocean is pretty deep, and so of all of the ocean places I just mentioned, Titan is probably one of the less likely subsurface liquid water oceans to harbor life. 

That would be a bummer. I want there to be weird little Titan fish that are living in the methane lakes because that would be really cool. I mean, first of all, that would tell us immediately… I mean, that would be groundbreaking. That would be a pain because it would tell us that we can look for life in more places than we have been looking because we have mostly focused on places where there can be liquid water.

I would be a little bummed out if Titan didn't serve us up like the weirdest option that it could. But again, I would I'm not going to like say no. Like if there's fish in the subsurface ocean, like, that's fine. Like, awesome. Thank you. In terms of like weird chemistry, I mean, I think we already know that Titan's chemistry is really weird.

The chemistry in the atmosphere is so much more complex than we believed it could be. We still don't understand exactly why it works the way that it does. I really expect when we get to the surface with Dragonfly that we are going to find some like substantially weird chemistry. And it's going to be very frustrating because I mean, I predict right now we're going to have to spend a lot, a lot of time trying to prove that the weird chemistry is not life.

And maybe it will turn out that the weird chemistry is life. But I am very nearly positive that we are going to find some really seriously weird chemistry and then have to spend a lot of time trying to figure it out. But that would be exciting. I would be a little bit disappointed if Titan was like, Nope, you guys figure this out years ago.

I mean, the good news for history, planetary exploration already tells us that that is not what's going to happen. Like places are always so much weirder than we imagined. They could be. And that's one of the fun things about going somewhere again, right?

Carlos Mariscal:

I mean, the Viking missions and Mars detected lots of things. I mean, famously, Gil Levin still … actually he passed away recently. Yeah. He, until his death, he still argued that he had discovered life on Mars.

Sarah Hörst:

Yeah, he was very sure that Viking showed evidence of life on Mars. He was probably the only one like it.

Carlos Mariscal:

It was his experiment, I mean.

Sarah Hörst:

I mean, he knew it better than anybody else. And so on the one hand, you're kind of like, okay. And on the other hand, you're like, wow.

Carlos Mariscal :

But so, so life detection. I mean, we had the problem with the Viking landers in the seventies where we had four separate, depending on how you measure it, experiments to detect life. And it seemed fairly difficult to try to like thread the needle so that all of them were successful in detecting life. So people decided it was inconclusive, which meant no detection.

And so I guess the first part of the question is, are we sure we could even detect life as we know it on Titan? But then the second part of the question is directly related to Dragonfly, which you just mentioned. So I know you're a part of it. I know. And I guess I just want to give you space and time to tell us about it, what your role is, what you're interested in, and some more about that.

Sarah Hörst:

Yeah, that's a that's sort of … I’ve never thought about that question before. My brain hurts a little bit right now. [laugher]

Carlos Mariscal

I'm sorry.

Sarah Hörst:

So first of all, I mean, I think it's one thing that's interesting, you know, talking about all this life stuff is that in terms of solar system missions, the only mission that has ever flown, that had life detection as one of its goals was Viking.

After that, everyone got kind of freaked out and just stopped proposing to do those kinds of experiments, in part because I think that people take Viking as a cautionary tale. And I really appreciate the perspective of Kevin Hand on this issue. He's at JPL. You know, a lot of times people think of the Viking experiments as failures because they didn't detect life.

And one of the things Kevin always says is, you know, the Viking experiments would have been failures if they didn't detect life. And then the next mission we sent to Mars found life. And that's not been the case. And we haven't sent life detection missions since Viking to Mars, but we have sent a lot of missions to Mars and none of them have found, you know, little Martian grasshoppers hopping around or creepy crawly whatevers.

There're no elephants stomping around. You know, we haven't found those kinds of things. Now, that doesn't mean that Mars doesn't have life, because, again, we have not sent things that could detect microbial life necessarily. But they tried to do something really hard with Viking and it's not clear to me that it actually failed. It may turn out that it gave us absolutely the correct answer. It just wasn't the answer that people wanted.

Yeah, right. In terms of trying to find life with Dragonfly on Titan, Dragonfly is not a life detection mission. I'm contractually obligated to say that as often as possible. Only mostly kidding. So it's not a life detection mission, and that is not one of our goals. We are going there to characterize the surface and near-surface environments.

We're going to look at the composition of the surface. We're going to look at the composition of the subsurface. We're trying to understand the geological processes, the way in which the atmosphere interacts with the surface, and things of that nature. If there is life on Titan that is doing life things enough that it has modified the chemistry substantially enough that it is detectable with the kinds of instruments we can fly on spacecraft, we will detect it, and we might sit and stare at it and go, What's that?

And not actually figure out that it's life, but we should be able to detect large-scale changes like that. So, for instance, if you somehow flew an instrument to Earth that could detect Earth's atmospheric composition, it had no way to measure anything else, which would be a silly thing to do if you were sending a spacecraft to Earth.

But, you know, you would find out that the atmospheric composition is really weird on Earth, and if you were clever, you could eventually figure out that it's because there's life. You have to rule out a lot of other things, first. That said, I haven't really thought through what would happen if there was life that was relatively similar to Earth on Titan. What would that look like in terms of detectability? I will say it's wildly unlikely. So although we can make a lot of the molecules that life on earth is based on in Titan's atmosphere, things like amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins, nuclear basis, which are the building blocks of DNA and RNA, those molecules are really unlikely to be used on life, at least on the surface, because the temperature so cold and so molecules really behave differently at those temperatures.

So things like membranes would need to be made out of different material to still be flexible at 94 Kelvin and stuff like that. Um, so, I don't know, I'm trying to think about the life detection thing too hard with Dragonfly. We're going to get data that are going to be really hard to understand and life will be the last resort explanation unless we have little creepy, creepy crawlies running in front of our cameras, which would be lovely. If life could be like nice to us and just like do something like that, that would be really helpful. But it's a little bit, a little bit challenging.

In terms of Dragonfly. So Dragonfly is amazing. Dragonfly is a dual quadcopter, so it's basically like a relocated blue lander. We’ll behave in some ways, a lot like the Mars rovers that everyone is very familiar with. But instead of driving between the places that we study in detail, we fly. And that's just because it's much easier to fly on Titan than it is to drive. And so we'll be going to Titan and we're supposed to launch in 2027. 

If we do that, that gets us to Titan around 2034. So patience is a virtue and we will be primarily focusing on characterizing the composition of the surface, in particular trying to understand the composition of the really complicated organics I mentioned before, and also understand how they've been modified by processes that happen on the surface. But we'll also be studying the geology a lot, using images from cameras. 

We have a seismometer, so we'll look for Titan quakes and try to understand the subsurface properties based on the way that the surface moves as can be recorded with a seismometer. And so those are the kinds of things we're going to be doing.

I am a member of the science team and what that basically means is that I was one of, you know, a couple handfuls of people who wrote the Science Justification when we originally wrote the proposal to NASA for the mission, and then, you know, helped kind of shepherd the science part along as we were in competition. 

And then once we got selected, the role of the science team is really just to sit in total your thumbs while the engineers build the spacecraft and occasionally just ask questions that are probably a little bit ridiculous just to make sure everybody is on the same page. And then we go to the launch and cross our fingers and close our eyes and scream and do whatever else you do.

And like 20 years of your life is put on a giant rocket and lit, and then we will spend a bunch of time again, kind of just twiddling our thumbs while we wait for it to get to Titan. I joke about that. I mean, there's a lot of work to be done with calibration and making sure that our models are right. 

We want to be at the point that when we land on Titan, we … I would say hit the ground running, but that's a really weird thing to say for a quadcopter. Hit the ground flying? Do you want to hit the ground? But we're you know, that we're ready. We don't want to get to Titan and be like, oh, if I had just run that model for a year, then I would know the answer to this question.

So, the science team, we spend a lot of time thinking about hypotheticals like, okay, so if this happened, what would that look like in the data? What would this look like? Do we need to run more experiments? Do we need to calibrate this thing more? But then once we get there, then we're kind of the stewards of the data, not just for the team, but for the for the whole well, I mean, for all of humankind, actually.

And so, you know, it's kind of our job. Yeah. To figure out some of the first science results and you know, we're the ones that have really put in a lot of work to think about these instruments and what they can do, but also to make sure that the data that are generated are, you know, as clean as possible. 

They've been well-calibrated. They you know, they have had integrity checks and all of these things so that when they do become publicly available, the rest of the players, the planetary science community, and the interested public has the best possible data that they can go off and figure out what you know, what kinds of interesting things they can find from the data, too.

So that's kind of one of our other jobs is to be the stewards of the data that we collect and really make sure that for for all of human history subsequent, that these data are as good as possible.

Donna dePolo:

Excellent.

Carlos Mariscal

That's really cool.

Donna dePolo:

I've got to follow up on that really fast. So it's kind of in the context of Cassini and Galileo, but like since Titan does have this possibility, this potential for life, what are some of the safety measures that Dragonfly has to take then? 

Sarah Hörst:

Yeah.

Donna dePolo:

Entering the atmosphere.

Sarah Hörst:

Every NASA's mission. Well, actually, every mission. But I'm going to just focus on NASA's for the moment, has to work with NASA's Office of Planetary Protection. So everybody in the solar system has a planetary protection classification and that determines what kind of precautions have to be taken for the spacecraft. So, for example, if you're sending a spacecraft to the sun, you're fine. Like, we don't think that life exists on the sun. We don't think that earth life could exist on the sun. So it's fine. The missions that tend to have the most stringent planetary protection are missions that go somewhere that we think could have life or could harbor earth life, but then bring things back to Earth. So that's what we have to be the most careful about because we have two directions going. We have to worry about contaminating that place, but we also have to worry about … I feel like if anybody’s seen Andromeda Strain … we don't go down that road. And so that's just to say that every mission has to work with the Planetary Protection Office and come up with a plan. And so it's an iterative process. It's something that is an ongoing conversation between the mission and Planetary Protection throughout the process.

But it will involve a lot of things like making sure the instruments are very clean and there are different ways that you can do that. A lot of times you can hit the instrument very hot to kill anything that might be on it. Or you can do like has like superheated hydrogen peroxide valves and all these awful things that sound exactly as awful as they are.

And then one of the things that happen in between these steps is that there are people who go in and they swab the spacecraft and they culture it and they see like, are there creatures on this spacecraft walls being built?

And again, you know, that is obviously an iterative process, too, because humans interact with the spacecraft so much in the process of it being built, that because you have to be really careful to make sure that you know, Oh, this thing got messed up and we noticed it in a test and now we have to go back in. Okay, if we go back in and do this, do we have to go back through this process again? And so that's, you know, part of all these ongoing conversations, but it's something that the community takes really seriously. And we're really lucky that we have an office at NASA that has all the necessary expertise to really like just tell us what to do we'll do it. Like, I'm not a biologist. I don't know how to solve things on the spacecraft. Just tell me I will go do it. Like, I mean, I won't personally, but somehow. And so it is something that we really have to worry about.

Carlos Mariscal:

And it's a hard thing that keeps changing too, right? We used to keep things 120 degrees centigrade and then we discovered Strange 121, which could survive at this.

Sarah Hörst:

Yeah. I mean, I was, I was when I was talking to some of our high school students earlier this morning, I mentioned to them, you know, Mars is contaminated. What we knew about microbes when we sent Viking to Mars was basically nothing compared to what we know now and the kind of minimal protections that were put in place for Viking for sure did not kill all the microbes that were on Viking.

I always kind of want to send another mission to the Viking landing site and just be like, so what did you guys do? Was the surface of Mars inhospitable enough that eventually you surrendered? Or like, did you figure out, like, how to survive here and you just have this, like, thriving colony that's just hanging out on Mars, doing its thing?

And it's, you know, it's kind of interesting philosophical question, if that turned out to be the case, what should we do? Do we go like drop a bubble on it and like, well, you can have like this? Do we, you know, is the ethical thing to do to kill all of it? You know, what do you … I don't know what the right answer is there, but you're right.

I mean, it's definitely a moving target, as we understand more of what we call extremophiles, you know, creatures that can live in extreme conditions. It pushes the envelope further and further in terms of what we need to do to spacecraft to make sure that we're not carrying those things with us. 

Carlos Mariscal:

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, there are a lot of people that are actually wrestling with that particular question, right? I'm thinking about Jim Schwartz and Eric Pers and others. But it's interesting to think that it might be possible to evolve like an earth creature that was on Viking to survive on the surface of Mars. But you wouldn't be able to imagine the same sort of thing on Titan, presumably.

Sarah Hörst:

I mean, one would hope not. It is the case that because there is water on the surface of Titan, although it's solid that we do have to be careful. So Cassini, Cassini's end of mission was to crash into Saturn. Really cool. Part of that was for scientific reasons which we love our science reasons, but part of it was because the Cassini carried a radioisotope power as its power source.

It, you know, landed crash-landed on an icy moon and there long enough it would heat itself a nice little pool of liquid water. And then the creatures that, you know, were potentially on Cassini might have a little party in their pool of water. And so we do have to be careful because of the fact that there is water even though it's very, very frozen. And so we have to make sure we don't get ourselves in a situation where we've created a of liquid. But it is definitely something that we have to be careful about, even though it's definitely less likely that I think, you know, Earth creatures would survive at 94 Kelvin than Martian surface temperatures. 

But I mean, you never know. Earth life – some of these things are tough cookies.

Donna dePolo:

The water bears at Titan …

Sarah Hörst:

Right, Tardigrades.

Donna dePolo:

So beyond Titan what's exciting an up and coming planetary research and futuristic missions? I know we've talked about Dragonfly a lot.

Sarah Hörst:

Yeah, that's a great question. So I think there are a couple of things that folks are really excited about right now. So, you know, we have this big new space telescope, JWST, that is pretty exciting. And I think especially for think about extrasolar planets where we're really just starting to move into a period of time in which we can really start to think about extrasolar planets in the same way that we think about planets in the solar system. And so exoplanets are kind of moving from what has traditionally been the realm of astronomy more into the realm of planetary science. And so I think that's really going to be really interesting. There are a lot of flavors of planets that exist that we do not have in our solar system. And so it will be fun to figure out what those weird planets are doing.

So that's one thing.

I think one thing that I'm kind of personally excited about because I'm involved in it as well. But I think the community is just really excited. NASA hasn't sent a mission to Venus in a long time, in many of our lifetimes, in fact. And we have two that have been selected now that should be launching in the late 2020s and early 2030s. One is called Veritas, which will be doing remote sensing from orbit. The other one is called Da Vinci, which is an atmospheric probe. That's the one that I'm involved in. It's going to be really fun to get the public excited about Venus again, because Venus is really interesting and just hasn't gotten the attention that it really deserves for a long time.

So I think that is one of the other things that I'm really excited about. And we also have this mission to Europa that should be launching not next year, 2024. I don't know. It's sometime soon. It's getting assembled, so that means like sometime soon it goes to the Cape and they send it into space. But that'll be really fun because Europa's awesome and so that'll be really exciting.

And we've got asteroid missions coming up. And so we have a lot of, you know, very different places that we're going in the solar system that I think will be really exciting. So, you know, stay tuned for all of those things in a decade or so.

Carlos Mariscal:

So it's interesting. Okay, we're on missions. You talked a little bit about exoplanets and I guess I wanted to ask to what extent you take some of the planets that we have here, in particular, Titan, to be good analogs for exoplanets. I mean, one of the things that you said was that there's we've discovered some hot Jupiter or some things that we don't have here.

So, the question is, is Titan a particularly good candidate as an analog for exoplanets?

Sarah Hörst:

I mean, there would definitely be Titan-flavored things. One of the challenges at least for now, is, you know, being able to study an object like Titan around another star is not really a thing yet. Because it's so small, because it's so cold, it doesn't give off a lot of energy that we can detect from a telescope. We pull it off in our solar system because we're close by. And so we've been able to study Titan with telescopes since the early 1900s. But you know, for that type of object around another star, it would be really hard. We're definitely going that way. And it'll be I mean, it's going to be interesting for some of the colder planets, especially around some of the less energetic stars, I think you would expect to see some objects where I think Titan might be a pretty decent analog. And so it is going to be interesting to see how all of these things play out. I mean, this, you know, having this very cool object that has this big puffy atmosphere is weird in our solar system, but there's not necessarily a reason why it's inherently weird. And so I think that's something that, you know, we're going to learn more about as time goes on.

Carlos Mariscal:

So, Dr. Hörst, it looks like we're really coming to the end of our time. Is there anything that we should have asked you but didn't, or just anything that you'd like to share with us?

Sarah Hörst:

Should have asked me, but didn't ... Well, that's such a hard question. [laughter]

I feel like I've been dropping some, like, fun facts on people today that I'm realizing a lot of people don't know. So I’ll just share a couple of fun things. One of my favorite fun exoplanet facts that I feel like a lot of people should know, and it's not a super recent discovery at this point, but I don't think it's really made itself into the public consciousness is that we know from this mission called Kepler that at least in our galaxy, in the Milky Way galaxy, there are more planets than stars.

So if you go to a site at night and you look up at a star, there is a very, very, very good chance that it has a planet and a pretty decent chance that it has more than one planet. So I think that's pretty cool. Now, when you look at the sky, you can think, Oh, that's not just a star, that's a star and planets.

I think that's awesome. And the other fun fact that I like to share that is Dragonfly related is that part of the reason why we're flying is because Dragonfly is probably the easiest place to fly in the solar system. Its gravity is about one seventh out of earth, but the atmosphere is about four times denser. And so you have a lot of atmospheric density to support you and you're not feeding as much gravity. If you were on Titan – and if you find yourself on Titan, holler, because I’m going to have some questions – so if you had some kind of rudimentary wings that you could attach to your arms somehow, you could flap your wings and fly under your own power on Titan, because it's that easy to fly. And so that's one of the reasons why we are flying instead of driving, because it seems kind of silly to not use this huge thing that you have to your advantage.

So those are two fun facts. You know, go home, share them with your friends. I don't know. Might come up in trivia someday.

Donna dePolo:

Those are some facts, and I just realized your dress was covered in Dragonflies and it's a very lovely. And that just clicked for me.

Sarah Hörst:

I'm always on brand and I'm very much like, it's subtle enough that I feel like it takes people a little while to like, Oh, that's what's happening.

Carlos Mariscal:

It's funny you were talking about flapping and Titan. Donna and I, when we were prepping were like, Oh, so Titan has nitrogen. Well, Earth has nitrogen. So, if you take off your helmet, you might breathe in until you suffocate. And then we realized how cold it was. So, you probably like freeze to death, but you'd be flapping your wings and flying, while being frozen and breathing and slowly suffocating to.

Sarah Hörst:

It’s so funny that you mentioned that because we had this – and this is like this is a little morbid and I’m sorry to the people who are going to find is a little bit morbid – but we got into this amazing conversation on Twitter one time about what would kill you first on Titan, because you have the cool temperature, which – not great. You have a lack of oxygen – also not great. But you also have a bunch of carcinogens in the atmosphere. So there's like carbon monoxide, there's hydrogen cyanide, there's like a bunch of molecules that are very toxic to humans. And so we were like, okay, well, but if your lungs freeze over first, like, things can’t be suffocated, or is that considered suffocation? And like, if it happens slowly enough, does the carbon offset it? None of us involved in this conversation had any expertise to know the answer to this.

But then we started thinking about all the ways that you would die on different planets. And suffice it to say that you and this might be a good note to end on, but, you know, you hear a lot of, you know, we need to go to Mars or wherever to protect humans and all of these things. And let me tell you, as a planetary scientist, Earth is really our only good option. All of the other planets are like really desperately want to kill you a whole bunch of different ways. This is the only one that is even remotely hospitable to us. And so, you know, it's incumbent on us to actually keep it hospitable and habitable because the other options are just it's not a good idea.

Donna dePolo:

They leave a little bit to be desired.

Sarah Hörst:

A lot a bit, as it turns out.

Donna dePolo:

Well, that's an excellent note to leave off on. Thank you so much for joining us here today, Dr. Hurst, this was a really fascinating conversation. Thank you. This was really good time. So signing off, I'm Donna dePolo.

Carlos Mariscal:

And I'm still Carlos Mariscal. Thank you for joining us today and keep discovering science.

Andrew Revkin:

Okay. Yeah. (Singing).

It took a thousand generations for our species to rise. He opened up the ground…

Shelby Herbert:

An aware society is one of the best weapons against climate change. Sustainable solutions can only advance if voters and policy makers understand what's at stake. From vanishing biodiversity to the widespread intensification of destructive weather patterns, that's where environmental journalists play a decisive role acting as the bridge between scientists and the general public.

This is the Discover Science Podcast, a forum in which we speak with some of the world's leading scientists and researchers about the big issues impacting our lives. I'm Shelby Herbert, a graduate student at the Reynolds School of Journalism. I report for the Hitchcock Project for Visualizing Science and KUNR Public Radio. And I'm interested in engaging popular audiences with environmental topics.

Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge a recent statistic from Climate Central. Where could this conversation better take place than in Reno, Nevada, which was recently identified by the organization as the fastest warming city in the United States. We are all here today in the Reynolds School Radio studio to speak with Andrew Revkin. That's who you heard on the guitar just a moment ago.

Andrew Revkin:

(Singing).

Shelby Herbert:

He's a renowned science journalist, author, and educator. He's covered a variety of environmental topics, including the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and the changing climate of the North Pole. Andrew is also the founding director of the Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at the Columbia Climate School. Welcome to our show, Andrew.

Andrew Revkin:

It's awesome to be here.

Shelby Herbert:

I'd like to welcome my two co-hosts, Professors Zeb Hogan and Sudeep Chandra. Dr. Chandra is a professor of limnology here at the ÍƼöÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, director of the Osman Institute for Global Studies, and director of the Global Water Center.

Dr. Hogan is a professor of biology and a director of the Wonders of the Mekong Project. You may know Zeb from the popular National Geographic television show, Monster Fish with Sudeep Chandra. Together, Doctors Chandra and Hogan are leading cutting-edge research in an effort to protect our planet's aquatic ecosystems. Thanks for being with us here today.

Sudeep Chandra:

Hey, thanks for having us.

Andrew Revkin:

Thank you.

Shelby Herbert:

All right. So Andrew, what topics are on your radar right now?

Andrew Revkin:

I focus on the general question of how we navigate this century with the fewest regrets. That's basically my daily question. So it depends. Right now, I've just been writing about Brazil's upcoming election and the prospect that the president could steal the election if he loses, which to me is a sustainability issue because of the Amazon rainforest and the people who live there already in deep peril under the last four years. And another term or whatever he would choose to be in office for would be really bad.

But at the same time, I'm tracking the Horn of Africa drought, where hunger has been explosively growing. Not just because of the drought, but because of the war in Ukraine. Driven again by politics, which disrupted one of the great bread baskets of the world. Ukraine's farmers supply a huge chunk of the calories consumed in North Africa. I did one recently on how the first half of this Atlantic hurricane season has been ridiculously sleepy. It was supposed to be an active season and basically, it's like crickets. Which is good, but it also reinforces how science is always a work in progress.

Zeb Hogan:

Andy, I'm curious. How do you find your stories typically? Do you seek out the stories or do they find you? What's the typical process?

Andrew Revkin:

It's really a whittling process. There's an overabundance of stories. Sometimes it's random-ish, but all I'm just trying as hard as I can amid this flood to back off each time and say, "Well, is what I'm writing going to measurably or at least possibly change some trajectory? Is there some utility to what I'm writing?" To get beyond the gee whiz factor. To get beyond... I try to just be rigorous about does this matter?

Sudeep Chandra:

And yet, thematically, it sounds like a lot of the topics you just mentioned and others that you've written about always revolve around some idea of sustainability, whether it's sustainability of society, the environment, activities, and you have a podcast on that topic as well.

Andrew Revkin:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was at a meeting in New York City, some conservation biologists were there. I think it was someone at the Wildlife Conservation Society who had organized it and the name of was Sustain What? And I thought that is such a great question and I wrote a piece about that at the time because words like sustainability or even phrases like climate emergency have no meaning until you start to ask questions. Who is emergency? Sustain what? As opposed to we need sustainability. So that's partially journalistic, but partially just a function of my eagerness to get to the root of things. It's all about building some sense of a trajectory through this complexity.

Shelby Herbert:

On that note of emergency and alarmism, do you have any critiques of just the ecosystem of journalism right now?

Andrew Revkin:

Yeah. Yeah. It's not just because I've had 35 years on the beat. It'd be very easy to say, I'm the great beard going, you idiot, all your youngsters that you don't know. There's some basic fundamental principles that are being forgotten in journalism right now, which are to back off from the thing that's happening, whether it's a chunk carving off of an iceberg or horrible drought emerging in North Africa and saying, okay, what do we know about what's driving the problem? And the problem really isn't in the atmosphere. The problem is on the ground where people are. So asking the most basic questions, who, what, where and why? How has gotten forgotten too often. A recent paper came out, two different papers in the last few weeks on one on Greenland went on Antarctica, weights glacier, both of which are losing ice and sea levels are rising for centuries to come.

These are facts as durably and hard as this table. The big question is how soon how much the sea levels of the world on average rows about 10 to 12 inches in the last a hundred years and New York City wasn't going to go, oh my god, because the cities grow and they change their coastlines. So the rate is what matters. But a lot of these stories and a lot of the headlines are 10 inches from Greenland now inevitable. New news from the Dubin, say glacier in Antarctica, without asking the key question in this case, which is when or how soon, and I would like to just see some of those basic principles get back into journalism, and if it's just about click bait, to me, it's the difference between popularity and utility and it's actually counterproductive in the end because if you're constantly pummeling your audience with overly simplified visions of these environmental problems, they disengage.

Sudeep Chandra:

I think those same lessons can be applied not just in journalism but in science. When we're scientists who are trying to study the environment, there's often discourse that we can have within the science community, but what gets lost is the discussion of variability or uncertainties that we might see and rather than being alarmist in our abstracts or scientific findings of this could be the big issue, but here's the doom and gloom, there could also be a signature of hope or of some uncertainty of what needs to be done to refine our understanding of things. Then I think there's that nice lesson learned between both what you just described in journalism, but also how we might practice science and present our information at public meetings and have discourse around the topics, but do it in a way that's efficient so we're not dragging science out to have these conversations for long periods of time.

Andrew Revkin:

One of the key things that I think I missed also, largely because some environmentalists, there's an eagerness to get attention. Obviously, the things we know are bad enough, right? The sea level change for hundreds of years to come is locked in big changes in heat waves. As anyone here knows, the hotter you get the easier it is to get into a new record terrain and there's no stopping. One of my long time sources on heat. She hates the no new normal thing because she says it's not like we're going to a new normal. The new normal is relentless change. If you just focus on how much of this heat wave is from human driven pollution and you have big debates about that, you're missing the other key factor which is put vulnerability in the foreground. Who's vulnerable to heat? We're not all vulnerable to heat. Farm workers are way more vulnerable so that at the end of your food chain leading to your plate is some deep injustice and danger when it comes to heat, and that leads to many actionable steps, both policy and individual actions that can make a difference.

Who down the block from you is an old person whose income is so low that they can't afford to run their air conditioner? There was a recent study, a young researcher, Destiny [inaudible 00:08:52], she has studied what happens in households related to your income and your decisions about energy, and she's found in urban areas in the United States, poor families let the inside temperature rise four to seven degrees hotter than rich families before they turn on the air conditioner and that leads to health outcomes, asthma, all kinds of things. So that's a really important thing to know and it gets you away from this idea, well, how much of global warming is our fault? We could talk about that forever because there are significant uncertainties in some of these aspects.

Zeb Hogan:

Andy, have you been able to do the type of stories that you're talking about because obviously one reason that the Greenland ice sheets in the news, hurricanes are in the news, fires, heat waves, those are the news that we expect. Are you able to do those deeper stories that look at it from a different angle or?

Andrew Revkin:

Well, if I was still at the New York Times, it would be a lot harder to do them. I was in a newsroom for well virtually all of my professional career and selling a story within the newsroom. It requires a heat factor. Literally. There was a journalism professor at Columbia when I was there, way back in the early eighties, a male mentor who talked about what you called the Mego factor, M-E-G-O. My eyes glaze over and to me it's as if you're staring at your editor in a Star Wars movie and the blast shield comes down over their helmet. It's literally an eye glazing thing. Oh, didn't we write about Greenland last year. We write about the stock market every fricking day. Can we get normal about writing about the climate every day?

Zeb Hogan:

Quick follow up question. You've worked for a number of different media organizations. What's in your toolkit that served you well throughout your career?

Andrew Revkin:

So the toolkit to me along with that thing I do now about utility is look more clearly at what is the story. That's what leads me to a formulation. That's really how disaster risk scientists look at the world as Diana Lieman, a wonderful scientist just retired from the University of Arizona geographer, but a climate scientist also. She said too often we think of risk as a change in the hazard that's like, as I said earlier, how hot is the heat wave when risk is really the change in vulnerability or exposure. The risk is how vulnerable you are. So I just use risk and risk is basically the hazard, fire, flood, heat, times exposure, meaning how many people or how many things that matter are in the way factoring vulnerability because you could have 10 million people in a rich city that's designed to resists flood and it's so a storm is a no big deal, but if you have 10 million people in a poor city living in flood plains, the exposure and vulnerability are what determine if it's a disaster or not.

So that's just a formula I try to use when I'm looking at a heat wave. To me it's about who's vulnerable, not always this global warming or the other thing of course, how do we relate to the climate system mostly, as you all know here through water, what's the least clear thing in climate models in terms of what's going to happen on a hotter planet? The way the water cycle responds. In general, we still don't have a lot of clarity on what happens with water in the Africa along the equator. This band from Ghana across through the Horn of Africa, the models are divided on whether it gets wetter or drier by 2050 in a heating world.

Sudeep Chandra:

What's interesting to me and the way you phrase that, but also in terms of how we might think about science and the word conservation science or societal resilience or something, is also thinking deeply about those risks and vulnerabilities and just planning for them. That's the exciting part I think the science can bring even despite those uncertainties that we might have, at least in conservation biology, if we're thinking about species, sometimes unfortunately legally we might be thinking about single species or things like that, but if we're thinking about systems, just knowing that there's some vulnerability or risk to human population or the attacks that we love the species is an opportunity to then guide us to the future. And I think having science is the knowledge backing the guidance is just key to understanding our future and how we'd respond. So yeah, assessing vulnerability can happen in multiple ways, whether it's through society and people to the systems and their services to just planning for uncertainty in order to guide us into the future. It's okay to do that.

Andrew Revkin:

Yeah. And looking for win, wins to its credit, the federal government rolls out a new website pete.gov, and it has a daily estimate of how many tons of millions of people in America or today will experience dangerous heat. I think it was 60 million. That's great. When I wrote about it though, I said, we should also have cold.gov. I literally said, let, and I looked, no one's using that URL because cold kills people around the world and in the United States.

There's all these debates about whether it's more or less, but it's clear to me that excessive heat and excessive cold are not what you want to deal with. There's a really interesting study that showed here are all the things you could do that can bolster community resilience to both extreme heat and extreme cold at the same time. They're all the same insulation of houses in poor neighborhoods helps you resist both extremes. But heat is in the headlines because it's global warming and heat, heat, and again, if you use a risk approach you go, oh wow, that's cool. We can do all these things with all that money from the infrastructure bill that can benefit both. But you have to talk about both too.

Zeb Hogan:

You mentioned something earlier about stories that make a difference. Do different stories make differences in different ways? Does it depend on who a story might reach telling a different story at a critical time? How do you assess that?

Andrew Revkin:

Well, this gets to something I was saying on campus earlier about what is the product of journalism? Is it a story? Is it the sausage factory that produces stories and are those the things we use? Presuming that is the instrument of change. There are times when that's true, but for complex issues like resilience to extreme heat and cold, the story is just the starting point to what would have to happen to have a community shift to having more resilient approach to those things. Journalism isn't really well set up to play a role as the convener of the subsequent conversations. When I was at the times, I was tired of having to fit the knowledge I was absorbing about climate change and solutions into a story. I learned about the merits of interacting with your audience when I was at the North Pole in 2003 and an editor Passingly said, "Hey, let's do a Q and A with readers," they put up a note saying, Andy Redkins loading on the sea ice at the North Pole with some scientists, you have some questions.

And she called me on the sat phone and read me the questions and I recited to her the answers and she typed them in the computer and they got on the website and I thought, this is really cool. I'm here to write a story, but I'm engaging with people. And when I went to Greenland in 2004, I did a bloggish thing and when I went to the climate talks in 2005 in Montreal, I did a podcast 2005, it was a long time ago for a podcast. And what the podcast was, I was going around talking to climate youth who were there the day without social media to amplify them. I was amplifying them by giving them the microphone and as they were discussing their emotional impact of seeing all these gray suited diplomats not doing anything. And that built in me the importance of not just the story but the conversation, shaping it. Who's not in the conversation, who can't afford the paywall, the New York Times? I

Sudeep Chandra:

I think what's really exciting about being with both the two of you, professor Hogan, who's studying monster fish on the planet and try to conserve these rivers and you as an environmental journalist is the passions clearly come out too behind these topics. So you just mentioned, oh, I did a Q and A on the New York Times via a sat phone, but in today's time period, it's something I'm not adept at doing. But the two of you are just amazing this way it's like you take a story from the field, you do a short video and then you upload it into social media. And I think to me that's an expression of the science, but it's also an interaction in informing a public that might get interested about river conservation or about sustainability on different topics. I just want to give you kudos for being so amazing both of you for doing that.

Andrew Revkin:

Well it's really cool about what you guys are doing and the Mekong project particularly is the attuning it to the audiences that matter regionally along the Mekong is so much part of what we want to have happen.

Shelby Herbert:

Real quick, Zeb could you introduce the wonders of the Mekong Project?

Sudeep Chandra:

Yeah. Sudeep and I are co-PIs on a project that's funded by the US Agency for National Development implemented by the University of Nevada Reno. It's now an eight year project and it focuses on the many values of a healthy, connected Mekong river biodiversity, fisheries, cultural importance, and then what makes it probably most unique is a communication component. I think that's unusual for a university project, unusual for a USA funded project to have such a large communication component.

Andrew Revkin:

Yeah. Well, and that's all I'm scouring the world for examples like that. There is a longstanding project called Digital Green that started in India and it's basically building a YouTube network, a way for farmers to tell their stories about their production innovations to other farmers in local languages with local contexts that build trust and are way more likely to, and get that knowledge of a different seed or different approach to farming to their peers than if some white suited scientist came out in the field and said, this is what you should do.

Shelby Herbert:

You mentioned earlier that audiences are a little bit allergic to that complexity just doesn't really work well in the pitching process. And I was wondering, when you're approaching solution oriented topics, how do you talk about this stuff, sustainability, renewables, things like that in a way that upholds their virtues without overwriting the drawbacks? So for instance, you're researching lithium in Nevada right now. That's the stuff we're going to put in our EVs someday, hopefully. But it's very controversial here for a lot of interesting reasons I'm sure our biologists could speak to.

Andrew Revkin:

Yeah, and the justice community is really focused on how this relates to the needs and rights of communities around there, around the mine and along the supply chains. And this is an area that's hugely important to grapple with and really tough, and it's the area where stories I think are least useful as the tool and where engagement is useful. There is this project called Rural Climate Dialogues, rural Energy Dialogues. It was in Minnesota and the upper Midwest, but the idea was to spur community discussions around topics like the future of energy, the future of climate impacts, and doing that facilitating it is a skill set that's not really abundant yet. There are scientists I know are working to professionalize this to make it a thing, to be a facilitator of resilience dialogue.

And I think that model is really promising, but it's not story, it's sharing stories. It's examining storylines and narratives with different motivations, different senses of precaution, same thing over nuclear power. And I've got good friends who are totally pro-nuclear. I'm all for expanded safe nuclear power and my wife is not. So we love each other for the rest of our life, but we can have that difference. So finding ways to look for the cooperative opportunities. Journalism can do it if it doesn't, it will fade in utility and become a form of entertainment more than journalism.

Zeb Hogan:

You bring up a good point. How do you involve people that are an important part of this story but don't want to be part of a story? We deal with this in winners in the Mekong where a lot of local communities, they're critically important to what we're doing, but they might not necessarily want to be the focus.

Sudeep Chandra:

There are numbers of things going on, right? So there's communities that want to be involved in the sustainability of a resource because of the reliance on it, yet the social and societal construct and the type of democracy that might be within a country or a system doesn't allow them to be as active. Brazil could be an excellent

Andrew Revkin:

Oh, for sure.

Sudeep Chandra:

Activity in this, so how do you involve people without involving them but making sure they have a voice or do you?

Andrew Revkin:

Well, I think that's where data come into play. It's anonymized. The autonomous sensors you use on the rivers are really interesting that way because you have the community support for the process. And I think if I remember correctly, they can track certain fish, these giant fish get a name and they become a source of pride and that doesn't involve direct contact that could imperil somebody, which I know is certainly in Brazil. Bruno Perera and Dom Phillips were murdered by Fish Mafia and they were only in the news because they're outsiders. I wrote the book about murder of Chico Mendes in 1990 and there's a lot of that. So you don't want to be in public quite often. Technology can play a big role and journalists do that too with anonymous sources and stuff. There's ways to go forward. There's one other model for complexity.

Amanda Ripley, I'm a big fan of her, she's a writer who maybe three or four years ago was commissioned by the Solutions Journalism Network to write about how do you report complexity in ways that can engage people not cause them to fuzz out. And it was fascinating. She reported out this question and talked to mediators who deal with disputes and there's these interview techniques that are the antithesis of what journalists do, especially radio journalists, you want the sound bite, right? Too often as reporters, we're interviewing people waiting for the thing we want them to say.

In fact, there's a great YouTube video. It's like a compounding of many things in 60 Minutes where the reporter says, that must have been shocking. It was shocking, right? Where you're literally setting the set ball, set it up. So she's reported on these techniques where you're basically asking the person to go deeper. You say, tell me more, or what did that make you feel? So even the way we interview can be changed in a way that can give the story more depth and more emotional content and more humanity. And people do engage on those stories ultimately.

Shelby Herbert:

Do you think we underestimate our audiences at all?

Andrew Revkin:

To a certain extent, I think yes. Although our audiences unfortunately are captured, hijacked by these platforms, Facebook and Twitter and the like that are really designed to distract and divide them or confuse them.

Shelby Herbert:

Some span of just evaporated.

Andrew Revkin:

So just your capacity to find reliable contents is limited unless you're looking for it. What I'm hoping is there's some way for the platforms to become more responsible. I don't know, that's a tough one.

Sudeep Chandra:

But there's also a part of society that tunes out to that. I mean, some of us go seek knowledge and others are looking for it. And so the nice thing about the mediums of the technologies we have today is they're somewhat timeless. People can go back and look at your stories, for example, or see wonderful videos of Zeb trying to conserve these rivers in large fishes. It's almost like we've taken a technological leap and jump for if people are willing to go search for information and there's some of that that does go on, we have to trust in that.

Andrew Revkin:

And I do think Stony Brook University, other schools have whole curriculum now in media literacy. Maybe having news literacy, your relationship with your phone is something you can start to learn at an earlier day.

Shelby Herbert:

Zeb and Sudeep, are there any trends in science communications that jump out at you is particularly frustrating?

Sudeep Chandra:

From my angle, we work projects that are international in scope, but also local, trying to conserve Lake Tahoe as an ecosystem and societal benefit for the recreational economy. That's $5000,000,000 for the region while trying to preserve its clarity and natural resources. And what's tough for me is exactly what Andy described at the top of the podcast, which was this gotcha moments whenever we're talking with people and it's almost exhaustive because then the scientists who are trying to communicate information, some of us almost fall into that waiting for the short sound bites. And I am dreaming of a time that we talk about the variability and perhaps vulnerability, but more importantly to do it because there's limited resources to protect things now than there used to be.

There's so many issues going on. I guess what I end up seeing now is scientists are starting to play into what journalists want and then that really hurts my side because it then plays into directing resources towards things that only benefit the science community or the institution that the scientists are backing. And that's a very dangerous road. So I want to encourage my fellow scientists to start thinking about science communication and journalism classes and some philosophy and morality around the type of science that we do related to conservation biology.

Andrew Revkin:

Remember whenever, when was the water summit?

Sudeep Chandra:

So we had to summit up at Lake Tahoe where we had Andy and a bunch of premier international scientists around mountain ecosystem change in 2015.

Andrew Revkin:

Right at the end of the Obama administration. And we're standing by the water there and the scientists were taking a break and putting their feet in the clear waters of Lake Tahoe and I was videotaping and he said, the science ends up being twerked, including the funding by how the media are creating this landscape around the downside of things. And as you said, I think we're not looking at where the sky is not falling, where is the sky not falling? Where are the resilient communities? Where are the resilient ecological communities? What can we learn from those? And that's something that both the media and science community and funders of science, it's worth them thinking about that because the spotlight of the news, it favors the dire, it favors conflict and dispute. It doesn't favor things that are more subtle. And if we bias everything we're doing toward that light, then we're missing huge opportunities.

Sudeep Chandra:

Yeah. And the nice thing about thinking about, let's loosely use the term resilience for mountain community is an example. Finding out where there are the opportunities to conserve taxa or conserve societies or maybe where people have to migrate and move because of big variability and changes that also gives opportunities. It's much like what we have today and thinking about our space adventures. Maybe we can go to Mars, maybe we can go back to the moon or maybe we can just find places on the planet that science informed on where we have resilient places for biology, for society and for services. And I think there's a lot of that's still new to be discovered for a young scientist. For sure.

Shelby Herbert:

To flip something so deep said a minute ago about scientists becoming communicators, taking these journalism and philosophy classes. Andrew, do you believe that it's important for journalists to become more scientifically literate? You yourself have a background in biology. To cover this issue, what proximity do you think a journalist needs to have to hard sciences?

Andrew Revkin:

It's a really important question. And some of the best science writers I know had no training in science. John Nobel Wilford, the famed journalist at the Times who wrote Man Walked on the moon today, he had no background in science, but he had background in asking good questions and not being taken for a ride and not being beholden necessarily to a narrative. Just again, those basic principles of journalism. What am I seeing? What am I not seeing? Who's accountable if anyone, and not catching hold of some particular agenda. At the same time, I think we would have a better time in this century if people had a better understanding of how science works. I don't really care that the people know the structure of DNA. I'd like them to know how that insight emerged and how it's a push me pull you process and how it's ugly and it's normal for dispute to be part of science.

And that uncertainty in science is a form of knowledge that one thing that it's not, oh, we don't know anything. There's a difference between an ignorance and uncertainty. If we could somehow build that a little bit more into our educational flow, I think we'd be a little better off. It's still a tough go because when push comes to shove, we still fall back on more of our reflexes. And as someone here said, loyalty is a substitute for knowledge that you're more loyal to a leader and dictatorships particularly and knowledge goes out the door. And we've seen so many examples of bad things happening. Unfortunately, the behavioral science is pretty dark.

I once wrote a piece where I said the scariest science is not when I was on the North Pole sea ice with the cracks forming underneath me. And it wasn't when I was in the middle of the Amazon talking to murderous cattle ranchers. It was when I stumbled into the behavioral sciences and learned among other things that more science literacy doesn't shift people's understanding of global warming toward the end of the spectrum of belief. And I use the word belief consciously that the people who have the most basic science literacy are at both ends of the spectrum of views on global warming, dismissive and alarmed. So as a journalist, that's a really tough medicine to absorb because it says, oh, writing more explanatory, bullet surprise, winning articles doesn't change people.

Sudeep Chandra:

Andy haven't said, I as a young scientist, I like to think I'm young. I'll start that again. I'm a scientist and-

Andrew Revkin:

You're a young scientist

Sudeep Chandra:

And I'm just wondering how do we approach things so we can inform through science and the variability and uncertainties, but we inform a public so we're not reaching the same audiences. And this is something that I struggle with because I want to reach audiences of different backgrounds because science to me is a way to guide our future. How do we do this? Is it through social media and alternative forms of communication?

Andrew Revkin:

No. No. No. It's through looking at the landscape of the issue. And I'll give you an example from the wonderful reporting done in 2015 by John Sutter who was at CNN. He found the single most skeptical county in America on global warming. It was Woodward County, Oklahoma, your home state.

Sudeep Chandra:

My home state.

Andrew Revkin:

Yup. Yup. Yup. So Woodward County, Oklahoma is ground zero for climate disbelief. And he went there just in an open way and started interviewing people on the street. And there's this one guy who at the beginning he says he works for an oil company, he thinks God controls the environment. So at this point you're listening going, okay, so here's the punchline that he had half of his roof covered with solar panels and he was going to do the rest of the roof. He wanted to get off the grid entirely. He said, so if you go into that community with your climate crisis placard, you're turning him off right away. But if you say, wow, that's pretty cool. You got solar panels in your roof, or wouldn't it be great if everyone could do that? And then you start talk about the impediments and well, what would we do locally? And where he is now, I'd love to circle back and see.

Sudeep Chandra:

And you're meeting someone with similar commonality obviously.

Andrew Revkin:

Yeah. So you can find true gentle exchange through an open inquiry can make progress.

Zeb Hogan:

You just reminded me of something that happened to me. It seems hard to believe now, at least to me, but one of the journalists that I really enjoyed working with, his name is Seth Middens. He works for the New York Times. And this seems unbelievable, but he got in touch with me. He went into the Cambodian Department of Fisheries one day and just went up to someone and asked them what's going on that's interesting with fisheries in Cambodia. And through his connecting with the Cambodia apartment of Fisheries, he got connected with me and he ended up doing three wonderful stories, one on large fish, one on the importance of fish migrations and one on the importance of the to Sap Lake and it's ecological uniqueness. He's not a scientist. And I mean, to me that feels like good journalism. And I don't know if very many people do that anymore.

Andrew Revkin:

It doesn't have to be the end of those days. The Earth Journalism Network is a young global network of environmental writers and dozens of developing countries, and they're learning some interesting techniques for geo journalism, data driven journalism. And they're out there eager to tell stories that matter. And so I work with the Global press, which is a network of female journalists in developing countries. And what I did for them was an exercise and how to think about climate risk as opposed to climate change. And it illuminates countless stories that you wouldn't think about otherwise. Why does our village keep flooding as opposed to, oh cop 27, the next climate tree is coming up. What is my country's position on that? Which too many stories are driven by those things.

And that's not how the world works. It's not going to determine success or failure. The success or failure at these climate meetings is determined by things that happen on the ground. It's not because some politician is being pressured to have greater ambition. I love those terms they use. So you need to have greater booster ambition that it doesn't, ambition can be boosted by lowering the cost of change. And it's not boosted by some diplomat saying you need to boost your ambition.

Sudeep Chandra:

Do you mind if we switch gears for a second?

Shelby Herbert:

Sure.

Sudeep Chandra:

What I love about Andy is this very thoughtful conversation we're having around journalism, the importance of science, the utility of science, complexities around reporting the science. But you're also a noted artist and you're a musician. And what's fun about just experiencing some music with you last evening is the idea you've played music with all people and including Pete Seger, and then you have your own songs that are originals and you played with a band. What's it like having this journalism side of you, but working your artistic side? Is there a complexity around that?

Andrew Revkin:

Well, it was a conflict of when I was the New York Times, they had all these ethics rules about stating your opinion on stuff when you're in the newsroom. I literally joke sometimes when I have this song Liberated Carbon. It's a history of our relationship with fossil fuels. But I used to joke, I need to put a paper bag over my head now as it was on stage. So I'm not singing this as a New York Times reporter. It didn't align well. But for me it fills in a niche in my existence that seems natural despite what I said about stories, having their limitations. I love stories, obviously we all do. And songs are just another way to approach information that doesn't necessarily fit into a story. Liberated Carbon could be a story. It took a thousand generations for our species to rise, period. It's true. But gathering and hunting was no way to get by. Yes. Right.

Sudeep Chandra:

So it's storytelling based on facts with great musical envelopes around.

Andrew Revkin:

Yeah. Anyway, it's really fun. And then being around people like Pete Seger, for those who don't recall, he was one of the great figures in 20th century music who wrote wonderful songs and drove environmental cleanup of the Hudson River and just an incredible human being. Got to spend roughly 20 years playing frequently with him, mostly in an informal way.

Shelby Herbert:

How'd you guys meet?

Andrew Revkin:

We were neighbors in the Hudson Valley and there was a monthly potluck supper at the Beacon Sloop Club, little Shack on the waterfront. And they talk about local politics, about environment and then how come the instruments.

Shelby Herbert:

That's amazing.

Sudeep Chandra:

That's pretty exciting,

Shelby Herbert:

Sudeep, does your science inform any of your creative pursuits?

Zeb Hogan:

I've spent a lot of my life with the television shows and so that was a very natural connection. So I work with National Geographic on these television shows about Big Fish and those shows were informed by my work as a scientist. So that was a very natural connection.

Sudeep Chandra:

To Zeb's credit. He is also an excellent photographer and shoots video and just really pulls things out when we're in the field in a way that most people, most scientists I don't think are able to do.

Andrew Revkin:

And that work is so valuable. When I was a kid, well, Jacque Cuo was this French explorer. He wasn't a scientist actually. He was an explorer and an engineer, and he had this crew. Then they went around the world on this little boat, the Calypso, and he ended up writing a book that I loved and had this popular TV show, I think it was Sundays, every Sunday. And that popular content, just him putting a camera underwater and going, pulled me completely into a love of the ocean along with living with proximity to the ocean. And I think you have to have it all. You have to have that direct experience as well. But this work, what you did with Monster Fish is just great.

Sudeep Chandra:

Hey, and so for the record, you had some amazing time on the ocean when you were younger.

Andrew Revkin:

Yeah. Getting out of college. Well, I grew up on Rhode Island. We always had a boat in the family sailboat, not nothing big or fancy, one of the most home built. And I loved skin diving. The bar mitzvah present I still own is a divers mask from Christo's company, US divers. And getting out of college, I got a fellowship that allowed me to study in the South Pacific. My project was to look at man's relationship to the sea in different island communities. This is that as a 22 year old, I'm in the South Pacific and seeing the world. And that's actually what led me to be want to be a journalist, taking photographs and keeping an inadequate journal.

I got to New Zealand and I was going to go back to do some of the other parts of the project, go to Newfoundland and the Caribbean. But there was a boat at the dock that needed crew and they were sailing around the world. And I raised my hand. This came aboard and they interviewed me. And so I played guitar. The skipper, he was a harmonica player and he said, you're hired.

Sudeep Chandra:

Yeah. That's awesome. That's how I hire people too, if they play music.

Andrew Revkin:

So I joined the crew, this punky boat, the wander less, no less. And we sailed 15,000 miles, 17 months from New Zealand to what used to be Yugoslavia with lots of adventures in the middle.

Shelby Herbert:

I caught part of this story last night, but you played a song at the North Pole?

Andrew Revkin:

Oh yeah. There's an old ballad from the 18 hundreds about a British explorer, John Franklin, who as they say, he went to the Arctic three times and only came back twice, which is not how things, you don't want things to go that way. And his whole crew, they all vanished. And at any rate, the song was about his disappearance and the search for him. And I was camped on the sea ice. This was a temporary way station maintained by the Russians for tourists. And it was a camped, barely heated. It was probably 10 degrees inside with a little heater. And we were there for eight hours. And so I started singing and I sang that song Floating on the sea ice near the North Pole, 30 miles from the North Pole.

Shelby Herbert:

No one with you was superstitious, I hope.

Andrew Revkin:

No, this video, it's on, it's YouTube.

Shelby Herbert:

That's awesome.

Andrew Revkin:

It was homeward bound. As we cross the deep while swinging in my hammock, I fell asleep, dreamed a dream. And I thought it drew concerning Franklin and his sailing crew.

Shelby Herbert:

Love it. Bravo.

Zeb Hogan:

You said that your sailing trip inspired you to become a journalist?

Shelby Herbert:

Yeah.

Zeb Hogan:

In what sense?

Andrew Revkin:

I'm just seeing things that I grew up as a kid being the sort of, did you see that or did you hear that? And 21 days at Sea crossing the Indian Ocean, we got into Djibouti and scattered and I rounded a corner and there was shop that had a big pile of leopard skins next to it. I took a photograph of that and I wanted to share that with the world, sustainability, the word in 1980 was still the kind of newish, but I'm looking at this going, this is not sustainable. Why is there a pile of leopard skins in this desert place? And so that's what drove me forward.

Shelby Herbert:

So speaking to sources of inspiration, and I'm not saying this to flatter you, I promise, but one of the most impactful pieces of journalism for me actually came from the Columbia Climate School. I think in 2015 y'all broke this story about internal communications at Exxon. There was just this discrepancy between what was happening inside the company, acknowledging climate change and their communication strategy, disrupting public understanding of the reality of climate change, knowing that this massive corporate influence is something we're up against as journalists. I mean, how do you think we approached this Goliath?

Andrew Revkin:

I think that that was the project of the journalism school. It was some media partners and it was really good work. Relying on some external environmentalists who had been probing with freedom of Information Act for a long time, and they found a mother load. Imposing transparency where transparency doesn't want to exist is a fundamental part of journalism. I think that and earlier work, dating back to 1998, Jack Kushman at the New York Times broke a key story about a meeting with consultants around distorting the climate picture. So it's been a long process of revealing this work. And Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway wrote the book, Merchants of Doubt, all building forward to that additional detail that came out in that project. I think it is what you have to do. It's an essential part of shifting the public understanding of what these companies do and don't do.

And hopefully it's nudging them toward better practices in the future. They're not going to close up shop. We're not going to have a world without Exxon Mobil or Shell or BP anytime soon. But having more than nudging, keeping those processes up is crucial. It isn't the solution to the climate problem though. It's one facet of a enormous challenge. And the sooner journalism and the rest of it convey that dimension gives you a sense of where to focus your energy and not just run up against the wall all the time. Yelling and screaming and getting your head and not understanding why the wall's not changing.

Shelby Herbert:

Absolutely. Thank you so much, Andrew. Any parting thoughts?

Sudeep Chandra:

Andy, you're amazing human. I just want to say it. Thank you for taking the time to come visit the University of Nevada, engage with our staff and students and just share stories and experiences. So thank you. It takes energy.

Andrew Revkin:

It does. Thanks for the opportunity though. It was worth, this is my first flight in 930 days coming here.

Shelby Herbert:

Wow.

Andrew Revkin:

And I chose this. So I'm here because I care about what's going on here too.

Shelby Herbert:

It's an honor and it's an honor to be in this room with you all. Thank you all so much.

Zeb Hogan:

Thank you.

Shelby Herbert:

And a big thank you to our Discover Science Podcast listeners. We hope you'll join us again next time.

Andrew Revkin:

(Singing).

Melanie Duckworth (00:02):

Okay. In March 2020, the spread of a new virus, SARS-CoV-2 was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization. While many of us were only beginning to learn about a virus that we now know would change the course of history, a team of scientists at NIH led by Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett had already begun work on a solution. Dr. Corbett's team developed a vaccine that would not only prove to be the greatest tool in battling one of the worst pandemics since the 1918 Spanish flu, but would change vaccine science forever.

Melanie Duckworth (00:47):

This is the Discover Science Podcast, a forum in which we speak with some of the world's leading scientist and researchers about the big issues impacting our lives. My name is Melanie Duckworth. I'm an associate Dean in the college of science, an associate professor in the department of psychology, director of the Women in Science and Engineering program and co-director of Nevada Teach.

Christopher Sanchez (01:11):

And my name is Christopher Sanchez, but I usually just go by Coco. I am a senior sitting, molecular microbiology and immunology at the ÍƼöÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´. I am honored to be co-hosting this episode of Discover Science with Dr. Duckworth today. We are thrilled that the opportunity to speak with Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, who was the scientific lead of the National Institutes of Health Coronavirus Vaccines and Immunopathogenesis Team at the Vaccine Research Center. Dr. Corbett and her team designed the COVID 19 mRNA vaccine marking a turning point in the global pandemic, since developing the vaccine that has saved countless lives around the world. Dr. Corbett has continued to make an impact as a public figure in the conversation around vaccine hesitancy and misinformation. And currently is an assistant professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Thank you for being here with us today, Dr. Corbett.

Kizzmekia Corbett (01:56):

Thank you so much for having me.

Christopher Sanchez (01:58):

Awesome. So, I think we'll start off this conversation with talking about the development of the mRNA vaccine. We know that the vaccine concept was designed by our team from viral sequence data released on January 10th, 2020, and rapidly deployed to Moderna for phase 1 clinical trials, just 66 days later. Can you tell us a little bit about those days?

Kizzmekia Corbett (02:18):

Those early days, man. You're making me pull into my history. I got an email from my boss actually on December 31st, 2019. And it was a report that showed that there was some virus, some illness that was happening in China and that it was probably a respiratory virus, it's very clear that the symptoms were respiratory. And he said, "Get ready for 2020." And I got back from my holiday break around January 6th. And we just started to plan from that point on, we didn't know if it was going to be a coronavirus, there were inklings that maybe it would be, but if it were, we knew that we had the knowledge and the tools to make vaccine development happen.

Kizzmekia Corbett (03:11):

And so on January the 10th, it was basically an operation to just go. Operation go. I don't remember much of those first initial days because we were just so busy. We were just all so busy. I think everyone was probably running on adrenaline. The key highlighted moments were moments where we started to realize even before that 66 days were over, at the point at which it went into the clinic that the vaccine was working well in mice. I do remember those moments, but otherwise, it feels like a blur.

Christopher Sanchez (03:57):

Just a bunch of different events coming at you?

Kizzmekia Corbett (04:02):

Sometimes I regret not having taken a journal, but there were just so many things that were going on.

Christopher Sanchez (04:09):

Big moments are so often like that, right?

Kizzmekia Corbett (04:10):

Yeah. So, many things were going on. I mean, it's a global pandemic. And at that point, the science was so premature. We didn't even really know how it spread. And so things were just moving really, really rapidly, so quickly. And I don't think we had the time, I tend to be an empath, so I shut out surroundings when it's time to focus because I can soak up the wrong energy and derail my entire plans, derail my emotions. I think what I did was I kind of just focused on what the goal was and I shut out all of the surroundings and that may have crippled what my memory is of the minor things that happened in that time.

Christopher Sanchez (05:08):

Right. But that big revealing moment of the results coming in with the efficacy, how was that?

Kizzmekia Corbett (05:15):

Gosh.

Christopher Sanchez (05:15):

Right. Just a bunch of emotions. I'm sure.

Kizzmekia Corbett (05:17):

Well, so I don't think anyone expected what? 94.1% is what the efficacy results revealed and the phase 3 trial, the preliminary phase 3 trial results and, I cried. I don't even know what the emotion was. The feeling is that there was light at the end of the tunnel

Kizzmekia Corbett (05:51):

And we'd worked so hard that if we had to double back and do it again, I actually don't know if I would even still be a scientist. I don't wish that much work on anyone, ever. And then it was a very stressful time. I just remember being so relieved that I burst into tears and I still was probably shedding tears for all the times prior to that I could not, because I could not cry because people were dying, as I said, I would've soaked up that energy.

Melanie Duckworth (06:27):

How did you, or when did you have a chance to really experience all of it?

Kizzmekia Corbett (06:38):

I don't think I have yet.

Christopher Sanchez (06:40):

It's been go, go, go, since that moment?

Kizzmekia Corbett (06:42):

I don't think I have yet. I may have, should have taken a break, still a little bit too late now. My lab’s already going to be starting. I have not sat with what happened, because how do you reflect on that? I don't know. How do you reflect on this career shifting moment? It's like history shifting moment, even too. The thing about reflecting on science is that you just continue to realize that there's so much more. If there is a downside to being a scientist, that might be it, that your brain is always like, "Well, what can we answer next?" Everyone's always like, "What are you doing next?" And it's like, dude.

Christopher Sanchez (07:21):

Just look at what I just did.

Kizzmekia Corbett (07:23):

Just go take the vaccine and give a break.

Christopher Sanchez (07:33):

Nice. Thanks for being here with us today on the Discover Science Podcast. Today, we're talking to virologists and professor Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett.

Melanie Duckworth (07:39):

Something that I've appreciated is that you are quick to tell people, although this vaccines seem to be developed overnight, actually it's predicated upon years of research. So that's, a message that I think you wanted to get out there. Would you mind telling us a bit about those years of research? And if there were these milestones that let you know that you were at least moving the technology of the vaccine in the desired direction.

Kizzmekia Corbett (08:13):

The first thing that I should say about me being adamant about telling the history of the work, is because we got to this moment, in what was it? It's really around the first time I was on national TV, maybe CNN, April 2020. Where we were faced with a vaccine that we knew would probably come out in some form, right? General public didn't even know the basic, how does mRNA technology work? How long has mRNA technology been in development? What is a spike protein? People didn't even know that coronaviruses existed before this moment. And so it felt like I had it to step out of my role as a scientist and become the world's vaccine teacher and part of that, and one of the, I think I was telling someone earlier that how I'm interested in like, designing like a history of vaccinology course.

Kizzmekia Corbett (09:25):

And part of that is because I don't necessarily think that the general public understands how these technologies come about. And we as scientists, we sit in this bubble of privilege where we're publishing and in great journals and like cell, nature, science whoop-de-doo. But like no one is digesting that information and no one even knows that information is out there. And so it was a rude awakening for myself. And so the story is that I got to the NIH in 2014, at the time of which the MERS epidemic was still pretty much going on, I think in Saudi Arabia and there was an outbreak in Korea and et cetera.

Kizzmekia Corbett (10:22):

And it was very clear that coronavirus has had the potential to cause a pandemic. And so what do you do in that case? You do pandemic preparedness. It's a overarching term that basically says you study something so much that if a pandemic happens, you're good to go. And that's what we did, not just our team at the NIH, but so many other teams, right. And us in collaboration with other people as well. We just learned how to make a coronavirus vaccine, and what kinds of responses to look for that suggested that the vaccine would was good. And we took that knowledge and applied it to this new coronavirus that came up

Christopher Sanchez (11:08):

In talking about the MERS-CoV, and like the SARS-CoV-1, you refer to them as cousins or the same family member, right. This type of comparison can really show people that, because you had knowledge on these family members, that it was so much easier to develop a vaccine targeted towards another family member, right? SARS-CoV-2.

Kizzmekia Corbett (11:31):

Yeah. I like to use the analogy of a family tree because viruses are like that, right. Viruses have cousins, they have siblings, Omicron and then Omicron had a baby and it's BA.2.

Christopher Sanchez (11:46):

Pumping out.

Kizzmekia Corbett (11:49):

And so the analogy works because if I know that something about your cousin, that is in your genetic code, if I say, everyone in that family has brown eyes. I can go to you without knowing anything else about you, but only that you're from that family that has brown eyes. And if the one thing that I need to understand in order to unlock the door is about your eyes, then I'm good to go. And so the one thing that we needed to understand for coronaviruses was about a spike protein. And they're fairly similar across the family, cousins, brothers, sisters, moms, dads of the coronaviruses. And so, because we learned a lot about the cousin virus MERS, we were able to apply that knowledge without knowing really much of anything else about the new virus, SARS-CoV-2.

Christopher Sanchez (12:58):

You're listening to the Discover Science Podcast. We're here today with healthcare activist, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett.

Melanie Duckworth (13:04):

In discussing infectious disease. You have talked about vaccines as a healthcare equalizer, but you've also been quick to say that there are other factors that still contribute to health disparities, even when effective vaccines are present. Could you speak both to vaccines as the equalizer and to those other factors that still translate into health disparities?

Kizzmekia Corbett (13:34):

So, the reason why I say that vaccines, particularly for infectious diseases have the potential to be a great equalizer with health disparities is because they are cost effective. When done right the access is unlimited, everyone should have access to them and they're preventative, right? So, generally speaking the things that are barriers to healthcare, don't matter in the case of a vaccine, Black, White, Hispanic, et cetera, go get your vaccine and you'll be prevented against having this disease. So, that's why I say that. Now, of course, there are so many systems that have to be in place for that to be a reality. And also with that being said, not only do certain systems have to be in place, but the knowledge of the thing that makes for the uptake of the vaccine have to be in place too.

Kizzmekia Corbett (14:37):

And so you are oftentimes, at least what I'm finding with this COVID 19 pandemic met with the reality that there must be some like structural change, a top of the technology. And so that is access to getting the vaccine, equal knowledge about the vaccine, even on a very like neighborhood, to neighborhood basis, just even the type of vaccines that were available at some point were a little bit different. And so we have to do better to fix those structural underpinnings of a system that has basically fed health disparities for so long, in order for technologies that have the potential to help alleviate some of those health disparities to really flourish.

Christopher Sanchez (15:33):

My family is Latinx came from Mexico. And I feel like when I hear and talk to people in my community, there's a sense of pushback from getting the vaccine. And I believe it comes more from the idea that they fear the government because of what the government has done through immigration cycles and ICE and all these things, right. So, how is it possible to educate or better inform these minority groups that were affected by the government in such harsh ways to get access to these vaccines? And to really let them know that the vaccine is safe really is supported by scientists, it's not something that the government wants to push on them for any mal-intent.

Kizzmekia Corbett (16:17):

You know, I think that… I love my old job at the NIH, but it was in government. And so having the government as the central location, if you will, of the technologies, and then also the knowledge, and the access and all of these things is a little convoluted and that's outside looking in, right. So, I could always understand that view. And also, obviously the African American community is plagued with centuries of authoritative mistrust in systems working against them. So, I completely understand that point of view, the only way that we will move forward, is first of all the government's just going to have to, at some point, just apologize to people. At some point, someone has to just stand on the throne and say, we are so sorry. And it has to be genuine obviously, but because there's the trauma is there, but then also like the emotions, when someone hurts you or your family, there is so many emotions attached to it that can lead to you blocking blessings from that direction.

Kizzmekia Corbett (17:35):

I think that some of the ways that we've tried to start to regain some of the trust is by ensuring people that they are included throughout the process. So that, is like from the making of the vaccine. So, making sure that the teams are diverse, making sure that the testing of the vaccines and other therapeutics are tested in diverse populations, and then making sure that the outreach is not a one size fits all. I think that's probably one of the pieces that still takes a lot more work. Needing to basically meet people where they are, consistency too. You know, that's one of the things that I fear about us coming from under the pandemic phase of this virus, is that now we are maybe going to be smooth sailing for a bit and people might lose, we might lose touch with the populations that we were just starting to break through with. And it's going to be important to stay in contact and communication, even around, flu seasons in September, we need to be reminding those populations that don't necessarily trust vaccines to get vaccinated from the flu.

Christopher Sanchez (18:56):

Right. And it is so important to vaccinate as much as you can, because you have to reach that thresholds, herd immunity value. And if you're not hitting that, then the vaccine not individually loses its efficacy, but almost at like in a population scale, right?

Kizzmekia Corbett (19:11):

Absolutely, herd immunity is convoluted because generally speaking, we think about it as like broad population level, but really it is about your herd, within like your community, like the people that you're at the grocery store with and the people who you're at the nail salon and the bakery or whatever with, inside of your home even. And when you start to have whole communities of people who don't trust something, then you have these blank spots, really, makes them more vulnerable to the virus and the disease. And so that's what we saw, especially in the beginning, when the vaccine was starting to roll out, we saw the amount of the disease in one community over the other were starting to even be more exasperated. So, where it was 5X, more likely if you were Black to get in laying in the hospital, it became 10X and I'm making these numbers up.

Kizzmekia Corbett (20:05):

But you started to see that early on as the vaccine rolled out and that's goes back to the structural stuff, right? How imagine had all things been equal. And at that moment then you would've basically been able to like squash the pandemic in all different directions and many different communities. So, there is some work to be done as much as I can, I try to be working with as many community organizations as possible to lend a voice. So, sometimes it's not even about lending the voice, it's really about lending an ear to the community to see what the hot take are. And I know that right now, one of the things that is a hot take is that, if there is to be a widespread fourth dose, most people won't even think about it.

Kizzmekia Corbett (21:02):

And I'm not here to say whether or not that's right or wrong, but that's something that, although we are in this very happy place, unmasked and living our best life right now, if we do have another outbreak, how do we think about that? How do we break through those barriers of misunderstanding, I guess, of the speak or mistrust?

Melanie Duckworth (21:26):

I have to tell you that in listening to you, what I appreciate is that you keep honing in on the moment of complexity. So, I think sometimes we like to argue, "Well, everybody should be convinced by the data." These many people have had the vaccine, this is the level of hospitalizations now, it is dramatically lessened. These are the numbers of death, dramatically lessened, but there is the emotion of historical harm that comes into play.

Kizzmekia Corbett (21:54):

Listen, I say it all the time, everybody has their own data. So that's what anecdotes are. And I know that as scientists, we can't really necessarily publish anecdotes in nature or science, but every one person has their own data. So, a vaccine that's 90% effective or whatever the number will be. If 100% of your community is poor and has never seen anything good come from the government, then your 100 beats the 90, every single time. And that is your reality.

Melanie Duckworth (22:30):

And with different authorities too.

Kizzmekia Corbett (22:30):

Right. And so I think that I am reminded that scientific data is one thing, but personal anecdote is another. And I know that like on a debate stage, the scientific data will win every single time, but we are not on a debate stage and we're not in nature or science publications on a day to day basis. We are in the community and these are people's views, so.

Christopher Sanchez (23:02):

And I really feel like scientists have a really hard time communicating these ideas. I know you mentioned earlier, all this science literature is so hard to understand and read that it's really only approachable for other scientists, right. And the field of science communication is so important because if you are good at portraying, what the data really means in a way that the general public can understand, that's really where you get this 100% that you're talking about to lower that level down, right?

Kizzmekia Corbett (23:33):

Yeah. I think the one thing, science communication, it's a ever changing I think field even. What I once thought was science communication is not, maybe the most effective science communication. I don't feel like every scientist should be a science communicator, not to the general public like, that's fine. Like there are some scientists and it's not your thing, and I think that is okay. But in the places and the spaces and for the science also that, for which it matters, like if you are a COVID scientist, I almost feel like it's your duty and we have to be more intentional about it. And I don't even know what that intention looks like. I have people say, my gosh, I'm so grateful for your science communication. And I'm thinking I felt, I did a terrible job.

Melanie Duckworth (24:30):

Well, I can tell you, it's the fact that you hone in on complexity. You don't present things as simple.

Kizzmekia Corbett (24:39):

I hope so. I hope whatever it is that people got, they got it and it helped. But I know that even for me, that there's like a very long way to go with science communication. Hopefully, we continue to get better but.

Christopher Sanchez (24:54):

During the start of the pandemic, we had that really polarizing presidential election occurring. And it's so unfortunate to see what's happened, but it's voices like you that really work really hard and try to bring these two communities together. And the end with the end goal of vaccinating as many people as you can. It was awesome.

Kizzmekia Corbett (25:16):

And I'm not, I'm actually so, one thing that is like little known about me is that I'm not like super competitive. People might consider me a go getter, as far as like my career and all of those things are concerned. And so for me that allows me to remove, have a more of a worldview on where I should be taking my science. Because it's bigger than like my little cohort, and like my field and my publication, it's so much bigger than that. And I think that with finding a middle ground, I started to develop that in the early days when people were like, pinning the vaccines against each other. It's like, I honestly don't care. Take one. Like I had had J&J been offered to me first. That's what I would've taken as well.

Kizzmekia Corbett (26:18):

It's very hard for me to understand, forgetting about other people. I don't know. I have definitely been in rooms where it's like, "Well, the people who are going to get vaccinated are vaccinated already or infected." And okay, that's fine. But this moment is probably one of the more visible moment, like I don't think anyone will really see vaccine development happen this close up again in our lifetime, right. Think about all the medicines that you take. It's not like you watched the news at night and saw it be developed. You woke up and you're like, "A new allergy medication, man. Allegra look at that."

Christopher Sanchez (27:01):

The state of the art.

Melanie Duckworth (27:03):

I oppose that question. I'm like, "Well, did you know all about the development at some [inaudible 00:27:07] vaccine?"

Kizzmekia Corbett (27:07):

Yeah. And it's like...

Melanie Duckworth (27:07):

My goodness.

Kizzmekia Corbett (27:11):

I think that if we missed this moment to highlight the gaps in like how we aren't getting that extra 30 or 40% of people vaccinated, then it's really a lost moment. It's just a missed opportunity to me.

Melanie Duckworth (27:27):

Coco, I think you'd agree that one concern has to do with the global impact. We're talking about rates within our country, but we know in other countries the rates are so much lower and the access is so much less. How do we approach that at a governmental level?

Kizzmekia Corbett (27:52):

I don't know. That's why I'm not president.

Christopher Sanchez (27:53):

Yeah.

Kizzmekia Corbett (27:55):

I honestly have absolutely no idea, because the problems that we have with mistrust and miscommunication and people not trusting the government, all these things are times 10 in other places.

Melanie Duckworth (28:09):

Right.

Kizzmekia Corbett (28:10):

That's hard to break through when you can't even fix the problem in your own country, quite frankly. And so I don't know. I think we thought the answer was access. So, meaning we send them vaccine and they should just take it. I think one of the solutions will be actually having vaccines come from within, so let's just say, the US was not at the forefront of making vaccine for COVID. And we had to take the Chinese vaccine, how would we have trusted that?

Kizzmekia Corbett (28:55):

Like it's not from us, it didn't go through our regulatory agencies. I think that building up the capacity to manufacture, develop and manufacture vaccines in other places is going to really change how local populations, view vaccines. I feel like in the conversations around what we should do, we miss the fact that we may not have even done enough here. And so it could be belittling even I feel, like if you're elsewhere and you're looking at the US, while the US is sending you, boatloads of vaccine. What was it like two people were dying a minute or something ridiculous here at some point in like the world's richest country, we have to start at your own front door, a little bit more. And once we have a system here that is, I mean, this doesn't have to be squeaky clean, but you know, better, then we can say, "Okay, now we can teach."

Melanie Duckworth (29:56):

Yeah. And I love the idea of facilitating that development, that production of it within in a country.

Kizzmekia Corbett (30:00):

Absolutely.

Melanie Duckworth (30:01):

Instead of just sending these, we could actually help them develop what they need to.

Kizzmekia Corbett (30:07):

And that goes beyond vaccine, that's like infrastructure, that's job creation. That's goes far beyond vaccine technology.

Melanie Duckworth (30:18):

Preach. Yes.

Christopher Sanchez (30:23):

Thanks for being here with us today on the Discovery Science Podcast, where we're discussing how to find your place in science with Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett.

Melanie Duckworth (30:30):

You've spoken often about the importance of good mentorship. What moments in your life have been most key, not only to who you are as a scientist, but to who you are as an example of the benefits of diversity and science, both science as a field of study and science as something that leads to clinical practice?

Kizzmekia Corbett (31:01):

I think the biggest example I'll just have one, was just my first interaction with science. I don't know if I would be a scientist if my first mentor was not Black. And I can't say that obviously, because like he was and here I am, but I do feel like the biggest motivation for my career was, people tell the stories of me saying I wanted this person's job or I wanted to be like this person, and that is true. But more over than that, those people actually believe that I could be, which is a whole different level of motivational. And so I think that's the most revolutionary part of my career is having been surrounded by people that, not only resemble me or are like me, but also who have really like believed in me. And because of that, they've kind of taken up a space for me. Which is really important. So, important.

Melanie Duckworth (32:20):

Could I follow that up with a question about what form did that take? So you say they believed in me. So, there was something that they're communicating.

Kizzmekia Corbett (32:30):

There are microaggressions, right? Which are negative. And then there are micro pleasantries which are positive and you don't necessarily recognize just like with microaggressions, you don't necessarily recognize how they might be tearing down your spirit until one day, you wake up and you're like, "My spirit is broken." But for micro pleasantries, you don't recognize it either until one day you wake up and you are now a Harvard professor. And you're like, these people really like gave me that, on a consistent basis, even if it was small and I can have so many examples, I serve on a board, that's a pretty famous board and I was going to my first board meeting.

Kizzmekia Corbett (33:11):

But I also was in a Bohemian themed wedding when I got back. And so I had to get my hair done before I went to the board meeting because I got off a plane and went straight to the wedding. And I said to my then boss, I said, do you think I can go to this board meeting with Bohemian box braids, which you're like very messy think Lisa Bonet style hair, which is beautiful but some people don't get it. If you get it, you get it.

Melanie Duckworth (33:41):

I get it.

Kizzmekia Corbett (33:43):

But yeah. And he said, I think you should go to that board meeting with whatever hairstyle you want, as long as you have the brain that you have. And it was like, "Okay." And it was fine, it worked out well. I'm still representing on the board. So, I think I worked out well, but I think those little small things, have been very motivational throughout my career. I don't know if you've ever seen the Smithsonian Exhibit, but there's a Smithsonian Exhibit and I have a picture on the top and then Dr. Graham's pictures below mine. And when we were making that, I was like, "No, I think Dr. Graham should be on top. He was the principal investigator." And he's like, "No." He's like I already... He's basically had a way about him that he just recognized that he already took up space, and so it was fine to give up a little bit of it.

Kizzmekia Corbett (34:47):

And I've come across a lot of people like that along my career, not even necessarily scientists either, but I've stumbled so to speak across mentors who have been very intentional about their direction, for me. And that's been very helpful.

Christopher Sanchez (35:05):

So, you really are following your motto of, "Go where you are and will be loved."

Kizzmekia Corbett (35:07):

Absolutely.

Christopher Sanchez (35:08):

Right.

Kizzmekia Corbett (35:09):

All the time, every day.

Christopher Sanchez (35:11):

Amazing. I mean, it really does resonate with me, because I feel like for you to really feel comfortable in a space, you really do have to feel loved. For me it was a little different, difficult to find these places. I really had to find my identity and find who I was to really determine what kind of love I wanted to receive for me. How was that journey for you? Was it immediate? Did you know who you were? Did you know what spaces you wanted to be in? Did you naturally follow the places that gave love to you or?

Kizzmekia Corbett (35:47):

Yeah, I am a Black woman before I'm a scientist. And my being is that of a Black woman. And so I take up space as a Black woman more than I take up space as a scientist. And I think the turning point for me in the way that I approached my career, was that at first I wanted people to see the scientist. I wanted people to, I don't know, there's like this, I'm smart, I'm a scientist, and I want people to recognize me as like the scientist at the table, but I got to a point where I was okay with being recognized as the Black woman at the table, who is a scientist. Because that's how I was brought into the world, like that is actually the space that I take up at the table. Once I shifted the way that I cared for people to see me, I became a lot more clear about which spaces were loving versus which ones were not.

Kizzmekia Corbett (37:09):

And I realized that all the spaces that I needed to show up as a scientist first were just like, did not care for me. It didn't matter how good my science was, because I was the Black woman. And I think that once you have that recognition, ingrained in your spirit, it becomes a lot easier much more clarifying.

Christopher Sanchez (37:39):

Yeah. And I can definitely attest to that as well. When I first came to university, I have already come out as gay, like in high school, I'm proud of my Latin hood, but I think it took me a while for me to find a space on campus where I really felt a connection and felt like I belonged. Right. I started expressing more of my feminine side, I started doing the things that really made me happy. And within those spaces, I realized I'm so much happier here, I can really express how I feel in these spaces and it really has been awesome. And actually crazy story going into my research lab, my junior year, I had emailed this professor like every single semester since I started at UNR, his name is Dr. Bell. And I emailed him I'm super interested in your lab.

Christopher Sanchez (38:30):

He does HIV therapeutics. He makes a molecule called CADA and the molecule has biological activity towards a bunch of different proteins. And one of the initial ones that he targeted was CD4 for HIV. And I was like, "That is right up my alley." I came to the university to do HIV research, I want to really add to my community. And I emailed him for four semesters. Finally, junior year, I had taken enough classes where I was knowledgeable enough to actually apply my knowledge to the research lab. And on my first day, there was a little note on my fume hood. And it was left from the person before me, no idea who it was, but it said, I actually have it here, "Where you invest your love, you invest your life." And that has been my motto since my junior year. And it really has been so powerful for me.

Christopher Sanchez (39:21):

And when I was reading up about you and hearing your story and hearing about you, I saw that your motto to students now is, "Go where you are and will be loved." And it was just such a full circle for me. I came into research with this random note from this random person, and now I get a talk here with you who also gives us amazing advice of really, you need to go where you are and will be loved. And it's just such an awesome piece of advice. And I really have found myself so much happier in places that I do feel loved.

Kizzmekia Corbett (39:55):

It's so true. And what I heard from that was that basically, you realize that probably the reason why you were unhappy in certain spaces is because you were presenting as not your full self. It's so important. We talk a lot about diversity and inclusion and community and belonging, but I think that the solution is just that everybody has to love everybody.

Christopher Sanchez (40:24):

Yeah.

Kizzmekia Corbett (40:24):

I like, I kind of like, just, I don't know. I know it's a very simple concept. And obviously we know the history of this country, like we're not there, right. But it's like, I don't know. I think that is, every time I'm in one of these like DEI workshops or navigating the space and it's like, why can't, the space should be navigating me.

Melanie Duckworth (40:52):

To go, be nice. You know, be nice.

Kizzmekia Corbett (40:57):

But yeah. So yeah, that is what I try to lean into. And I'm going to try very hard to make sure my lab is a very inclusive and like loving space. I want it to feel like family, you know like family, well everybody's family dynamics are different, I understand that. But the ideal picture of a family is that people are different, you don't have the same career, everybody doesn't bring the same thing to the table. But when you get to the table-

Melanie Duckworth (41:34):

There is a place for you.

Kizzmekia Corbett (41:37):

There's a place for you. And there is like as a unit and doesn't matter how the dynamics shift, but when something goes wrong with one person in the family, everybody feels it. I want my lab environment to have that same kind of love, because that's what it is it's like love, right.

Melanie Duckworth (41:56):

I like what you said initially, so if I am in a space and we have to admit that a lot of students didn't receive, what I think is critical advice in terms of go where you are loved. You know, a lot of students find themselves in spaces where they don't feel like they belong much less, that they are loved. And it's about establishing the part of your identity, right? What you said, I'm going to run with that. I could do all these other things, but establish your identity in how you're walking into any space. And then you can negotiate that space based on what it gives you and how it recognizes that identity. So, what do we do? What do we do as educators? What do we do as researchers to ensure that sense of belonging and that sense of connectedness in students who hold diverse identities of various type, and sometimes intersecting diverse identities, what do we do?

Kizzmekia Corbett (43:02):

Belonging is one that is a little bit trickier because I think that belonging shifts. Like I belong in this room, but like when I walk out into the library, my like my sense of being changes. So, that's very hard to building comfort around all spaces as a professor, or as a PI, or teacher, whatever is very difficult. And so I have not necessarily figured out ways of which is helpful there other than to use my space down, because really belonging has to change top down, as an inclusion can come bottom up. The vaccine research center where I was, I think they're building a new tower now, that's going to have lactation lounges. But the postdocs who were having babies were having to pump their breast milk in like the utility closet, it was like, what? You're the world's leading vaccine center. And so I was like, if I get pregnant, I'm just going to whip it out. I'm just going to have to take a stand.

Melanie Duckworth (44:18):

Figure it out. What do you want to do?

Kizzmekia Corbett (44:19):

Or like inclusive bathrooms is like everyone makes it to be like such a huge deal where really all you have to do is change the sign. Like you literally just have to change the sign. It's like-

Christopher Sanchez (44:32):

We are in both of those moments right now, right this minute.

Kizzmekia Corbett (44:36):

What is the big deal?

Christopher Sanchez (44:36):

And all these strong emotions opposing it for what? They don't really involve you, it's crazy.

Kizzmekia Corbett (44:41):

It's so weird. Just change the sign, and here we are. Maybe add a couple more like little small things inside to make sure that all things inside to make sure that all genders, have their necessities, but other than that change the sign.

Christopher Sanchez (44:56):

Absolutely. Yeah.

Kizzmekia Corbett (44:57):

And those kinds of things are leaned towards belonging and those kinds of things are more institutional. So, I did get warnings about, being the Black woman and pulled into all these kinds of committees. And so I tend to speak to the people on the committees about the thing, rather than sit on the committees, I actually feel like maybe that might have a little bit more power to it because I strongly say you will not use me for the committee, but then also using the very strong, powerful, oftentimes White voices to get the point across. So, smart.

Christopher Sanchez (45:43):

Thank you so much for talking with us today, Dr. Corbett. It was an absolute pleasure getting to know you and hearing more about your work and life. And thank you to all of you for listening to this episode of the Discovery Science Podcast. We hope to see you all again, next time.

[recording of Apollo 17 mission]

Paul McFarlane:

On December 11th, 1972, Apollo 17 crew members landed on our Moon surface. Commander Gene Cernan and Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt stepped out of the lunar Lander challenger in the Taurus-Littrow Valley, near Camelot Crater. What you just heard were these two astronauts singing together as they explored the lunar surface. 49 years later, no other person has eclipsed their accomplishments and no one else has set foot on the Moon since then.

Paul McFarlane:

However, Schmitt and all of us excited by the idea of space travel and exploration are looking forward to that fact changing very soon. With NASA preparing to return astronauts to the Moon as soon as 2025, commercial space travel becoming a reality and plans to study exoplanets across the galaxy. An era of space exploration we can hardly even comprehend is just over the horizon. I'm Paul McFarlane, Director of the Fleischmann Planetarium and Science Center. Here with my wonderful co-host Wendy Calvin, the O'Keefe Professor for the Mackay School, Foundation Professor and Chair of the Department of Geological Sciences and Engineering. Wendy is a member of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover science team and has studied planets and Moons for much of her illustrious career.

Wendy Calvin:

Thank you Paul. On this episode of Discover Science, we are thrilled to be speaking with astronaut Harrison Schmitt about his three days on the lunar surface, the exciting geological discoveries that he made as the only true scientist to have set foot on the Moon and his thoughts about the future of space exploration. Welcome, Dr. Schmitt.

 Harrison Schmitt:

Thank you very much. It's great to be here.

Paul McFarlane:

Well, I know many of our students are curious about what it would be like to actually be on the Moon. Only 12 people have ever visited. If you were going to describe that experience, could you share that?

 Harrison Schmitt:

Well first, just understand what your constraints are, whether you start with the constraint of time. Time is relentless as my backup commander on 15 used to say Dick Gordon. And secondly, that is made more relentless by the space suit. The Apollo space suit that we had, the last three missions had what was called A7LB space suit, much more capable than what Neil Armstrong had, but never nevertheless, it was constraining you couldn't act normally in it. We also had on the positive side, a Block II Lunar Module. You had to in order to use that suit because you needed more oxygen. It had a really an eight-hour capability rather than a four, which the original suits had. And one of the big things you needed was cooling water. If you didn't have water-cooled underwear, you wouldn't be able to work very long on the Moon.

 Harrison Schmitt:

If you relied on gas cooling, it would not have worked very much, but the A7LB space suit was really very capable but still constraining. And the other thing you have to remember, you're working in one-sixth gravity, one-sixth of earth's gravity, and that can be a blessing and a constraint as well. It means that you don't get as physically tired as you would here on earth and would in that suit, but it also means that you have to be very careful about where your center of gravity is.

 Harrison Schmitt:

The backpack we had moved the center of gravity of the combined body and backpack about two inches to the rear. And if you look at films, you'll see astronauts Buzz Alden, or almost anybody leaning forward. Well, that's to get the center of gravity over your feet. But then if you get into a dynamic situation, such as I did in trying in helping Gene Cernan extract the core, you can forget that you will rotate around that center of gravity if you get too vigorous. I found that moving across the surface at any distance, was best accomplished by applying what I call a cross-country skiing technique. And as a Fulbright student in Norway, I had taken up cross-country skiing and it just is a very efficient way to move across the snow. Well, on the Moon, you glide above the surface and use your toe to just accelerate a little bit. And without any atmosphere or any friction on the surface, you can keep accelerating as long as you can coordinate that toe push.

 Harrison Schmitt:

And some of the pictures that you see, you see me using that technique particularly laid in the EVA, coming from station nine through a Boulder field is really a good illustration of how cross-country skiing works on the Moon. I never could convince my colleagues that this was a more efficient way to do it. But I hope in the future that people realize that rather than hopping or just trying to run, there are more efficient ways-

Wendy Calvin:

Ski technique. Well, you probably didn't anticipate that a ski technique you learned in grad school was going to be useful on the move.

 Harrison Schmitt:

No, I really didn't anticipate doing it until I was there and realized that it was the best way to move. We worked on three EVAs for about, extra vehicular activities, we worked for about seven and a half hours full speed before we got into the, actually started to repressurize the Lunar Module. There was a reserve as you might expect in case, say, there were any problems. But we ended up with a total of over 22 hours of expiration time. Doesn't sound like much, maybe, but I'll tell you in lunar terms, I was able to get an awful lot done. We brought back 250 pounds of soil and rocks. Every time I sit down and start to work on the synthesis project that I have, I come across something new that I could tie together. And it's just really, really this amazing sample collection, amazing sample collection.

Paul McFarlane:

Before I forget, I was going to ask because we were talking about coming in from the EVA and all those things. We've heard that when you were taking off the space suits, you could smell the Moon. Is that correct? Was there a distinct smell of the-

 Harrison Schmitt:

Yes, the fine particles of the lunar regolith, and they are very fine. I have an aroma very much like spent gun powder. Everybody had the same impression. And I think it's because they're not fully deactivated yet. It's like activated carbon. And it hasn't absorbed enough of the moisture and the oxygen in the cabin to cease to activate all factory senses. And so it has that same kind of smell like spent gun power.

Paul McFarlane:

Wow.

 Harrison Schmitt:

Freshly spent gun power.

Paul McFarlane:

And there's all kinds of different questions, but I guess I'm curious, what were you most excited about during this adventure that you participated in?

 Harrison Schmitt:

Well, of course I had been involved in the preparation of the other crews for all emissions. In fact, after my pilot training in 1966 was complete and I was in residence then at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, I was able to really take a hard look at their training program for lunar exploration. And I already was pretty much aware of what was being done. And it was basically show and tell Ge1 field trips. And that wasn't in my mind going to be sufficient for the true exploration of the Moon and for getting a very broad spectrum of samples back.

 Harrison Schmitt:

And so I put together a proposal and took it to Alan Shepard who was my boss at the time and said, "Let's do a simulation based training. Let's go out on real geological problems once a month." Spend four or five days with the equipment that they would have on their mission and have each crew then begin to absorb real geology and the techniques for actual exploration. And he said, "Well, if you can convince Jim Lovell" ... Who was up next for Apollo 13, "... to be the Guinea pig for this program, then fine." I went to Jim and Jim was very enthusiastic.

 Harrison Schmitt:

As you know Apollo 13 did not land on the Moon, but he was very enthusiastic about the training. And he and Fred Hayes joined professor Lee Silver as their mentor, which I asked Lee to join in to this program. Part of the program was to have each crew have an outside mentor and who was an outstanding field geologist. And we went out for a full week in the Orocopia Mountains of California without phones, without any contact and just had these guys absorb what geology was all about and how to observe, what to observe, how to make decisions on what might be important and what wouldn't be important. That was the whole objective of it.

 Harrison Schmitt:

And Jim Lovell and Fred Hayes became very enthusiastic and it turns out their backup crew was John Young and Charlie Duke who eventually flew on Apollo 16. And so four of the people who were going to land on the Moon were part of that initial program. It worked out very well. And when you look at the 850 pounds of lunar rocks that were brought back by the astronauts, we have a gift that just keeps on giving. And as you are probably aware, NASA just released some of the samples that had been frozen for 50 years-

Wendy Calvin:

Yep.

 Harrison Schmitt:

... for analysis. I'm involved in that with the University of New Mexico and the leader of that whole effort is at the University of Mexico, Charles Shearer. We are in the process of not only looking at all the frozen samples but in particular, a drive tube core of 70 centimeters length. That half of which was frozen, that I took in an avalanche deposit, a dust avalanche deposit at near the base of one of the highest mountains in the valley area. ÍƼöÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ 2000 meters high. Really, we were in a valley deeper than the Grand Canyon and really a magnificent place to be. But the sample collection continues to be remarkable.

Wendy Calvin:

And what new things are you seeing? I know that there's just been a huge revolution in the technology and the instrumentation and the high-resolution stuff we can do now. Are you seeing new and interesting things in these-

 Harrison Schmitt:

Yes. Very much so far. The effort's been going on now for a couple of years. We just opened up the drive-tube core. People assume that the core was one unit and with some variability in it. Well, it turns out it's probably 14 units that can be identified specifically on the basis of their different maturities, different petrographic characteristics-

Wendy Calvin:

So it's not just-

 Harrison Schmitt:

... their chemical composition.

Wendy Calvin:

... the a brecciation of the surface, it's actually-

 Harrison Schmitt:

No, it's not just brecciation of the surface, that's minor.

Wendy Calvin:

Huh.

 Harrison Schmitt:

What has happened is that impacts elsewhere have sent ejecta over that is overlayed. And so you've got-

Wendy Calvin:

So you see multiple ejector layers?

 Harrison Schmitt:

... a library of lunar history that turns out it's probably about 2 billion years long.

Wendy Calvin:

Interesting. Did your approach or understanding to field geology change once you were on the Moon or did you feel that the field training programs that you had provided for the astronauts were good or good enough for them to actually do decent field geology without being geologists?

 Harrison Schmitt:

The main thing we were trying to get instilled in the cruise was how to recognize diversity and important diversity. And I think in that it worked because the sample collection is really a remarkable collection. It depended somewhat on individual talents. Neil Armstrong was absolutely fantastic as an observer. In 20 minutes, he probably brought back the best collection of samples per unit time of anybody, including myself. And one of his samples, which was soil he collected because he thought, as he said that the rock box looked a little empty after he put rocks in it. And he just filled it up with-

Wendy Calvin:

He just filled it up with lunar soil.

 Harrison Schmitt:

... lunar soil. And that particular sample 10084, a lot of us know, is what is the foundation for understanding the resource potential of the Moon? The analysis of that sample has given us an understanding of how the solo wind volatiles are contained in the lunar surface hydrogen, from which then you can extract water from the silicates. But also it is told us about this remarkable light isotope of helium called helium-3, that is potentially an answer to the long term, clean electrical power needs of the earth.

 Harrison Schmitt:

Energy is what's going to drive civilization one way or the other. Either you have it and you're going to progress, you don't have it you're going to go backward. And the Moon does offer us now a way of having clean energy, what we call aneutronic energy, that is fusion energy that doesn't produce neutrons. The neutrons are the bad actors, they create the radioactive waves.

Wendy Calvin:

Is that what you see as the primary resource for the Moon?

 Harrison Schmitt:

Well, it's-

Wendy Calvin:

These days it's a lot about the water, so how do we sustain crews and astronauts as we think about sending people there?

 Harrison Schmitt:

I think water is important, no question about it. You can derive oxygen from water. You can make water anywhere on the Moon. You don't have to go to the poles to make water, to get water. If you heat the regular if you're going to get water, hydrogen will react with the silicates and you'll get water. Water is going to be very important for long-term sustainability on the Moon. And if you're going to have actually transfer civilization to the Moon, you're going to have to make water.

 Harrison Schmitt:

The helium-3 is probably the only resource we've identified so far that will pay to bring back to earth. There's very little helium-three on earth, certainly, almost none left over from the formation of the earth. It was rare to begin with and then it's not practically even think about that. But the heating through we have for research today, and for neutron detectors at our borders is derived from the decay of tritium, which is a product of nuclear fission and is used in nuclear weapons.

 Harrison Schmitt:

Tritium decays over a period of about a little less than 13 years and after a while, you got to clean up your weapon or it's not going to be effective. And by cleaning it up, you get some helium-3. There's some also produced in Canadian reactors. They have a particularly heavy water reactor technology that produces some helium-3, but the amount is really nowhere near what you need in order to have power. It's nowhere near what you would need in order to use helium-3 as a way of getting very high-resolution lung images. You can polarize helium-3 and inhale it and then when it depolarizes, you get a very fine image of the lungs.

 Harrison Schmitt:

Most people don't realize that only 19% or so of people who are diagnosed with lung cancer survive. If you can get early detection that jumps up into the 90s, and that's what helium-3 would allow you to do is get early detection of lung cancer. Now, there is a companion element called xenon-129 that you also can polarize. And that's being used instead of helium today because helium-3 just isn't available. But it does a different thing. It gets into the bloodstream into the capillaries. And so you see a different aspect of lung characteristics with xenon-129. The combination would just be remarkable in terms of detecting lung cancer.

Paul McFarlane:

Well certainly in your book Return to the Moon, you explained a lot of benefits that would drive from returning to the Moon and tapping into the helium-3, the energy generation or that solar power or the fusion or all the different possibilities. I'm curious with that film that maybe some of our listeners have seen Duncan Jones film, Moon, they talk about mining helium-3 and using that, sending it back with the rail gun. Are there real benefits for the earth that is described in that film or what you're describing here?

 Harrison Schmitt:

Well, conceptually, the film is right on the mark. Technically the miners are a little too big. But the film really is a psychological film more than it is a technical film. And I highly recommend it. I think it's a great film. Another film that most people may not be aware of that's centered in Australia is the film Dish. Have you ever seen that?

Paul McFarlane:

Yes.

 Harrison Schmitt:

It's about one of the communication antennas. It's really quite good. No, I'm a great fan of the Moon is a good film, but it also has an interesting psychological message with it and we won't give it away.

Paul McFarlane:

That's right. Keep the secret on that one. Well, there's such a range of things I know with the benefits in returning to the Moon are immense. We had a teacher at our school that wanted to know, why do we want to go back to the Moon? And I know some Americans wonder that too, and you begin to unfold some of the reasons here, and you've certainly done a very thorough job in your book. Why is that important in a variety of different ways, perhaps, maybe energy, maybe other ways?

 Harrison Schmitt:

Well, the primary reason for the United States to be active on the Moon is geopolitical. And I wish it were otherwise, but that's a real fact of life. China is on the way, and there's no question they're going to try and probably will succeed in establishing themselves on the Moon. They're interested in helium-3, they've said they were as an energy source. But it's a geopolitical issue. Space is part of Apollo. It was for Apollo and it still is. The Apollo program was a creature of the cold war. And I hope everybody recognizes that. It's just also, you should recognize that there was leadership in and out of NASA that knew that if you had the capability to land on the Moon and to get outside of spacecraft, you had the capability of exploring and developing great scientific insight, not only about the Moon but about the early history of the earth.

 Harrison Schmitt:

We now really do I think understand the environment in which life began on earth. And that's only because we now see what happened on the Moon. And we also may well be on the way to doing something Gene Shoemaker always said we were going to do, and that is decipher the history of the sun. And particularly now that I think I can demonstrate that the deep drill core is made up of individual regular projector units, which give you a book so to speak, several pages, 14 pages of a book of solar history.

 Harrison Schmitt:

The only thing that is showing up so far in the synthesis that may indicate the history of the sun is in the nitrogen isotope ratios. And there's some indication that the sun went through a significant energy increase in the solar wind at any rate about 500 million years ago. And that is important to Earth's geologists because about a little over 500 million years ago, we had what's called a Cambrian explosion. And that's almost certainly due to a warming of the Earth's ocean to the point of where the diversity and the quantity of life really exploded-

Wendy Calvin:

Could really take off several.

 Harrison Schmitt:

... over several tens of millions of years. But still we may now be able to see independent evidence of that happening because the sun increased its energy up.

Wendy Calvin:

I was going to come back to the geopolitics of the Moon because at the same time we're seeing a ton of new commercial interest and the Commercial Lunar Payloads Services Program, and so it's becoming not just countries anymore that are going to the Moon and wanting to go to the Moon. And so I wonder if you see a real lunar economy developing and if so, what would drive that what's going to make it profitable for commercial entities that also are now playing in the lunar game?

 Harrison Schmitt:

That's an excellent question. The real difference between now and 50 years ago, is exactly what you say. There are entities you can may or may not want to call them commercial depends on how much government money is supporting them, but there's a lot of private money being invested in these companies and they see that the resources primarily to, I think their customer base is still being thought of as government space stations, spacecraft going to Mars that need oxygen, need water and that kind of thing. I think that's still driving it primarily.

 Harrison Schmitt:

But nevertheless, that exists today where it didn't exist 50 years ago. There are rocket companies again with the government as their primary customer, but nevertheless, they have developed their capabilities by themselves. The SpaceX, Blue Origin and a few others that have not gone quite as far as those two. It is different, it's a challenge for NASA, is to figure out how do I integrate this explosion of commercial technology that has developed in a capitalistic marketplace? How do I integrate that with the geopolitical requirements that I have as a government agency and with responsibilities?

Paul McFarlane:

Well, I know as we were talking about the return to the Moon, many of us wondered we were getting excited about the Artemis program. What do you think about the prospects of NASA's upcoming return and what are your thoughts about Artemis or the next generation of explorers?

 Harrison Schmitt:

Well, I think it's great that the Trump administration kicked that off and that it's continuing. Budgetary issues are still there. And I understand that some of the glowstone are slipping as they so often do. But still it's critically important from a geopolitical point of view that the United States participate in this space activity. The one thing that is missing in my opinion, and I talk about this in the book is a Saturn V class booster. The SpaceX booster, the Blue Origin boosters are fine, they're nice, but they are not Saturn class boosters.

 Harrison Schmitt:

You cannot with one booster put a 37,000-pound payload called the Lunar Module on the surface of the Moon. We just don't have that capability. The Chinese have announced whether I don't know the details at all. There may not be any, but have announced that they're going for a Saturn class booster.

Wendy Calvin:

I guess I thought the Starship is-

 Harrison Schmitt:

I think they read my chapter in the book.

Wendy Calvin:

I guess I thought the Starship was in that class, but maybe, I don't know SpacesX's launch of rockets.

 Harrison Schmitt:

I would talk to Elon Musk about that, and he would probably claim that it is, but it only is if you refuel it in earth orbit 14 or more times. That's the difference. And which means that the risk management of a program that depends on Starship is much greater than it was even for the Saturn V and 50 years ago.

Wendy Calvin:

Because you're counting on those orbital assets to do the refueling and-

 Harrison Schmitt:

You have to launch the fuel.

Paul McFarlane:

Well, certainly with an enterprise as big as going to the Moon, we need to involve the community. And it's an opportunity for all of us to learn more about our place and space. Why would you say community engagement is important and what are good ways for us to try to do more community engagement?

 Harrison Schmitt:

Planetariums such as this are filling a gap that is huge or trying to fill a gap that is absolutely huge. And that gap has been produced by the deterioration of the public education system. The education of young people today with exceptions, there are some outstanding private schools, a few outstanding public schools, but the education today is horribly deficient in mathematics, in science, in history, language, you name it. And that is something that did not exist 50 years ago because we had a reservoir of young men and women, mostly young men at the time who had received obviously an education sufficient to do the job that President Kennedy put before us.

 Harrison Schmitt:

There were over 400,000 Americans involved in Nepal, only 50,000 of them worked for NASA. And they were part in part what we call the Sputnik generation. There were young people who decided that they were excited to buy rockets and by engineering and making those rockets and launching them. One of the better books is the October, Scott. It describes some high school boys that decided to make rockets and the original title of that book by the way, was Rocket Boys.

Paul McFarlane:

And Anagram, they switched the letters around. Same letters, but different title.

 Harrison Schmitt:

And an excellent movie, by the way. We're talking about movies. But you know, the level of preparedness of young people today is just abysmal compared to what is going to be required of them in the future. And the public education system just can't handle it right now.

Wendy Calvin:

I was going to ask, what do you see as opportunities and what could we put forward to those young students that might inspire them and get them to be interested in STEM careers? What opportunities are that you could say, "Hey, look, you could do this, but you're going to need some math and some science."

 Harrison Schmitt:

I think hands on exciting projects is absolutely essential. That's really what we did with the astronaut training program. We gave them hands on things that exciting. Were much more exciting than just show and tell, a lecture. A long time ago, I proposed to the Boy Scouts with no effect that they have a part of their Explorer scout program be space scouts. And I tried to get NASA then to offer the opportunity through some kind of a selection process for some scouts to fly to the space station. And this was before there was a space station when we still thought we were going to have sky lab like stations. But the main thing, I think, young people, you have to develop things that they can't avoid being excited about.

Paul McFarlane:

Well, you're a crew member, a Commander Cernan and apparently would often say that he thought it would be wonderful see a teenager fly into space as a way to engage people. Well, that's not always financially possible or carries a number of risks, but what you're describing sounds like involving students in training like an astronaut or doing simulations or engaging them in real science like Dr. Calvin does with spectrometers. Are those the kinds of activities that you would recommend?

 Harrison Schmitt:

You never know what's going to excite a young person. I know the space camp down at Huntsville does I think a good job from what I understand in that in getting people excited. But at the same time, they need to begin to understand why it's important to know more than they know right now, and particularly in math, but also in other areas.

Wendy Calvin:

And do you see that as part of your legacy is to have been a human example of somebody on the Moon to be inspiring in that way? Here's a person as opposed to just a Lunokhod robot driving around. Do you think that's an important piece of that inspiration?

 Harrison Schmitt:

Well, I think it's important. I think it's what we astronauts can do and do, do. We have done through the last 50 years is to try to have outreach to the public and it works fairly well, reasonably well publicized event with an astronaut usually oversells like tonight-

Wendy Calvin:

Like tonight.

 Harrison Schmitt:

But it's may unfortunately be a drop in the bucket of what has to be done. You just can't reach everyone and certainly can't reach all the students that need help.

Paul McFarlane:

Thank you Dr. Smith for coming here to the ÍƼöÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, for coming to the planetarium and for helping us all learn more about the Moon and our place and space. We really appreciate the honor of having you here.

 Harrison Schmitt:

Well, thank you. It was great to get the invitation and I'm looking forward to more interaction.

[recording of Apollo 17 mission]

Gene Cernan:

And as we leave the Moon and Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came and God willing as we still return with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed to the crew of Apollo 17.

Speaker 2:

All Roger Gene. Thank you very much.

Shelby Herbert:

Where does scientific inspiration come from? If given the opportunity to pursue it unhindered, where might it lead us? In a world where the scientific method and empirical data dominate the field, the idea that a complex mathematical equation could be delivered divinely in a dream feels at odds, yet it is in this space between science and the creative realm that the prodigy mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan, existed.

Michael Blane:

Born in 1887, Ramanujan was a self-trained two-time college dropout from south India. When he died at just 32 years old, he left behind at least three notebooks filled with mathematical equations, he described as divinely inspired. Mathematicians have been trying to figure out these equations ever since. The pursuit has led to solutions of ancient mathematical mysteries, breakthroughs in modern physics, and ideas that help power the internet. Ramanujan's story has been the source of inspiration for countless mathematicians and scientists, including world-renowned number theorist and our guest today, Dr. Ken Ono.

This is the Discover Science podcast, an offshoot of a public lecture series by the same name, where we speak with the world's leading scientists, researchers, and educators about important subjects that influence our world. I'm Michael Blane, a Ph.D. student in pure math here at the ÍƼöÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´.

Shelby Herbert:

And I'm Shelby Herbert, a graduate student of journalism. I report for the Hitchcock Project for Visualizing Science, and I'm interested in making science accessible and exciting to people outside STEM fields. We are thrilled to be speaking today with Dr. Ono, who is an expert on the life and work of Srinivasa Ramanujan. He's written a book, given several public lectures, and produced and served as the mathematical consultant for the film, The Man Who Knew Infinity, which is about Ramanujan's life and work. Welcome to our show, Dr. Ono.

Dr. Ken Ono:

I'm glad to be here, Shelby.

Michael Blane:

You talked about how Ramanujan has influenced you, not only in your personal life but also in your career. Can you speak to what that influence has looked like, and how important he's been to you personally?

Dr. Ken Ono:

Yeah. There are so many layers to that question. Ramanujan mattered to me first when I was in high school, when I learned that he was a two-time college dropout. And as a high school student, I was told by my parents that it was all about the pursuit of high test scores and straight As. Let's make no mistake, good grades and good test scores are important. But as a high school kid, I really needed to understand that in the long run, the quality of your achievements and the quality of your character matter more. That's the first time Ramanujan mattered to me. Of course, in terms of his mathematics, I've been studying his mathematics my entire life. He left behind three notebooks that I am one of dozens of mathematicians around the world, trying to make sense of, even 100 years after his death.

Shelby Herbert:

Walking this back a little bit. Can you introduce us to Ramanujan and just his general impact on the field of mathematics and science?

Dr. Ken Ono:

Sure. Ramanujan, he was an actual living human being. He was born in the 19th century in India at a time when India was part of the British empire. It was just a colony. He was born a Brahman, which means that he came from a very devout religious family. And as a young boy, he believed that his family goddess would give him visions of mathematical formulas that he would record in notebooks. Fast forward 100 years into the future, we're still trying to figure out the meaning of those formulas. There are many dozens of mathematical structures that bear his name, and so, quite amazing that that's a true story.

Shelby Herbert:

You mentioned Ramanujan famously believed that his knowledge was revealed to him by his family goddess. What's the strangest way a proof has come to you?

Dr. Ken Ono:

Okay. I have an answer for this question. In my first tenure track job, I was a professor at Penn State, and as a young professor, I had perhaps the worst office in the building. This office was on the top floor of McAllister Hall. It was so awful that I was unable to open the window, because it had decades and many layers of paint keeping the window shut. But to answer your question, I had this yellow couch that I bought for $20 that I would sit on when I would do my work on mathematics. But this office was so terrible that it sat below the angled roof line of the building. So, you couldn't stand up unless you were less than five feet tall. I would have to duck to sit on this couch properly.

            Perhaps the best theorem I've ever proven in my career, the idea came to me as a flash insight when I was sitting on this chair, and I was so excited by what I'd realized that I stood up straight away and I banged my head on the ceiling and I knocked myself out. I came to maybe 10 minutes later, I was bleeding from the head. I had to run into the bathroom. To make a long story short, people came in to look after me, thinking that something terrible had happened without recognizing it was perhaps the most awesome experience of my life.

Shelby Herbert:

So, it was literally like a flash of light, and it was revealed to you.

Dr. Ken Ono:

Yeah, and together with a major bump. In fact, this might sound weird to you, but if you were to put your finger right here in my forehead and follow the line of my skull... You might even see it. You see that? Yeah. That's one of my best theorems. Do you see it? Yeah.

Michael Blane:

You see it?

Dr. Ken Ono:

Yeah. It hurts so much

Michael Blane:

In your writings about Ramanujan and how he's inspired your work, you talk about the individual problems that he left behind trying to solve those, but also trying to have an idea of the theory that he had in his mind maybe that he didn't share. Where are we now with that? What do you think the philosophy behind Ramanujan's work that you've been working on?

Dr. Ken Ono:

I get this question a lot and usually stutter, like I am now, trying to answer that question. I'm like you. I would love to know what was going on in Ramanujan's mind as he was scribbling down his formulas. Maybe he didn't himself know what he had in mind. Maybe there really is something to this Hindu goddess. But what I can tell you is, this happens many times a year and I've been studying Ramanujan since the late 1980s, I've gone back over his notebooks, gone over the same pages that I've looked at many, many, many, many times. I've often realized that, from a different perspective, I misunderstood what Ramanujan had in mind. This happened so often that I wish, like you, I had an answer to that question, because it'd be so much more efficient than having to spend decades literally confused, thinking you understood a formula only to recognize you only saw a small glimpse of what Ramanujan probably had in mind.

Shelby Herbert:

How many others, like Ramanujan, do you think exist out there today?

Dr. Ken Ono:

That's an excellent question. First of all, let's make something very clear. Ramanujan is not the product of an ordinary school system. He is one of those unusual minds. Those names that we all know about, think Einstein, think Newton. I want you to now think Ramanujan, he's one of those very few minds that come along, one of those very creative, brilliant minds that power generations of scientists after they have done their work. How many of them are out there? I don't know. It would be sort of asking how many Michael Jordans are there on planet Earth. We think they're out there, but they're so rare. What extraordinary confluence of events has to happen before they're revealed.

So to answer your question, I think they're out there, and we're searching for them. I run a program called the Spirit of Ramanujan, where we give fellowships, scholarships to people who wouldn't otherwise have opportunities. Based on what we've done in our little program for the last few years, I do know that there are extraordinary people out there that we need to discover and lift up and help them see the light.

Michael Blane:

We were speaking about other people out there. I wonder, as a professor, someone who advises young mathematicians, what advice do you have for being flexible and being a good advisor for different styles, or maybe people who didn't have the rigorous training in their youth?

Dr. Ken Ono:

That's a very profound question. One of the things that we learned from Ramanujan is the importance and the responsibility that mentors have for training their students. No two students are the same. I can tell you, in my many years as a teacher, going back to the early 1990s, the students that you remember the most are the ones that you felt like you didn't connect with. That loss. And what we have in Ramanujan is someone who could have so easily been lost to society.

And so, you are right. As a university professor, as a parent, as a colleague, you have to recognize that there is no one single path that leads to success. Certainly, there are some broad brushstrokes that seem to be common, but the true outliers are often so singular in their characteristics that a good mentor really has to ignore what has been done before.

Michael Blane:

A lot of modern math is a bit inaccessible, and maybe that's not so true for number theory, which oftentimes starts in simple questions or things that are easier to understand. I'm thinking about your recent talk about jellyfish swarms.

Dr. Ken Ono:

Did you see that?

Michael Blane:

I did.

Dr. Ken Ono:

Okay. Well, I love that. Thank you.

Michael Blane:

Yeah. It was an awesome problem that started with something so simple that we could teach to second graders, and then, leads to really modern math.

Dr. Ken Ono:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that. Thank you. I'm glad you saw that. If my work has a trademark, or least, if I were to describe what I seek in the problems that I work on, it is that kind of coolness factor. For me, to really love a problem, really focus on it, it's important to me that the problem matter to someone. It doesn't have to matter to every mathematician. That's asking too much. But I won't work on a problem just because everyone says it's hard, hoping for some glory and solving a problem just because it's hard. If I can't explain why it matters, then it's not a problem that I think I want to work on. And so, you are right, in number theory, we deal with numbers. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, you get it, but we don't have to seek or ask questions. We don't have to stray very hard from elementary to state problems to get to the point where we get questions that nobody knows the answer to. Yeah.

Shelby Herbert:

When you're working on a problem, do you see shapes? Do you see colors? Do you hear music?

Dr. Ken Ono:

That's really interesting. Yes. Yes. I don't know that I've ever really spoken about this. I'm not a professional musician, but I do understand that some tones represent colors to some musicians. And in mathematics, I think the same is true. The prime numbers certainly have a different feeling for me than some other numbers. At the end of the day, the intuition that I think we all work with benefits in this way. Yeah. So, as strange that may sound, I think I'm not unique in this, but I think most mathematicians will say, "Yeah, my favorite number is such and such, and this is why," and it might sound funny. Why is 24 better than 25, right? But depending on the questions that you think about, that could have a real meaning.

This is actually interesting, the elementary school joke. Why is... What is that joke?

Shelby Herbert:

Six afraid of seven.

Dr. Ken Ono:

Why is six mad at seven? Because seven ate nine, ha ha ha. But you don't have to venture very far from statements like that, where seven, eight, nine is actually replaced by a real mathematical statement. 24 is my favorite number.

Shelby Herbert:

I was going to ask.

Dr. Ken Ono:

Yeah, 24. Right. Maybe we don't want to get into why that is, but 24 seems to come up over and over and over again for many different reasons.

Shelby Herbert:

Including when you hit your head?

Dr. Ken Ono:

Oh my God. Yeah. Even when I... Including in my head. In that famous theorem, there's a formula where it has a denominator of 24, and that's actually really important. I'll give you one hint to why 24 is important. So, there's infinitely many prime numbers. The first two primes are two and three. Let's throw them out. They're just too small. But the primes after that 5, 7, 11, there's infinitely many of them. Square every prime number is starting at five and subtract one. If you square five, you get 25 subtract one. There you go, you got 24.

But check it out. What's the next prime? Seven. Square it, subtract one. 49 minus 1 is 48, that's a multiple of 24. Let's do it again. 11. 11 squared, 121. Subtract 1, 120. That's five copies of 24. 5 times 24. So if you take any prime, starting at five, any prime starting at five, multiply it with itself, subtract one, and you will have a multiple of 24. It's actually very easy to prove that, but the significance of that statement throughout mathematics is rather deep.

Shelby Herbert:

I got to ask, Michael, do you have a favorite number?

Michael Blane:

I've always said 19. I can't really give an answer why. I just like the feeling of that number.

Shelby Herbert:

I'm curious about Michael's question about the jellyfish swarm. You were saying that you only wanted to explore something if it held some kind of meaning. Could you talk a little bit about what you look for when you're trying to find meaning in an equation?

Dr. Ken Ono:

This paper that I wrote recently that Michael has seen, it's called jellyfish swarms. It has nothing to do with jellyfish. So don't think of jellyfish in an aquarium. It actually starts with a very elementary game that you could teach in elementary school that deals with averages. So if you take two numbers, add them together and divide by two, you get their average. It's called the arithmetic average. But that's not the only kind of average you could calculate in mathematics. You could multiply two numbers together and take their square root, and that would be a different kind of average. You might be asked, these averages are very different. The additive average and the multiplicative averages, they're generally very different numbers, but is there a way in which these types of averages intertwine or begin to know each other? And at first glance, it looks like they don't have the right to do that.

In this paper I wrote with some of my students shows how, in a certain perspective, there is repetitive structure, where these seemingly unrelated averages form structure when you looked at them through the right lens. We explain how the structures that they present look exactly like jellyfish, these bell heads with tentacles sticking out of them. It turns out that if you compile all the possible structures, it looks like a sea of jellyfish. And then, what we did in this paper is we explain the taxonomy, to borrow from biology, the taxonomy of all different kinds of jellyfish, including the kinds of spots that they're allowed to have. It's a beautiful mathematical picture.

Another thing I'd like to say, building on this, what makes a problem interesting? I think many professional mathematicians place a little bit too much emphasis on how hard the proof was. If you do an Ironman Triathlon, we get it. It was really, really hard, and we celebrate that. But let's make no mistake. Out of all the pursuits that one can do in athletics, in human performance, it doesn't have to be as hard as the Ironman Triathlon. And so, the same applies in mathematics. We were talking about how mathematics could be beautiful. And so for me, I think, the reputation I have is that I like to think about problems that are beautiful, that matter. And honestly, maybe I'm a little bit allergic to the super difficult hard problems, because there's so many problems out there that, maybe I'm a bit too afraid to try to tackle those that take years of work to solve. That's that's not who I am.

Shelby Herbert:

We were just talking about these jellyfish structures. You described that so poetically. Are there any other theories you've worked on that also kind of have some sort of call forward to a visual representation?

Dr. Ken Ono:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I proved something called the umbral moonshine conjecture with collaborators a number of years ago. It appeared in the popular press, and the magazines actually paid a professional artist to render a visualization. You can probably find it online somewhere, but what it looks like is a planet that has these sources of light beaming away from it, where the beams of light reveal these little planets living below them. Without these beams of light, you wouldn't be able to see this. So yeah, the word umbral... If you don't know what the word umbral is, I didn't know it either before we did this work. But it's supposed to conjure visions of moonlight, and how out of the darkness, you can have moonlight lighting up whole regions of the universe.

So, this umbral moonshine... So, moonshine is supposed to be a nonsense. You speak moonshine, if what you're talking about is crazy. And the umbral part is where stuff like moonlight reveals structure that nobody would believe was actually true. So, umbral moonshine is this problem at the interface of mathematical physics and algebra, where we've learned a lot about certain groups using tools that really shouldn't be allowed.

Shelby Herbert:

So, we're kind of getting into the cosmos here. I read that some of Ramanujan's later theories are being used to explain the behavior of black holes.

Dr. Ken Ono:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what this umbral moonshine is all about.

Shelby Herbert:

How is that possible?

Dr. Ken Ono:

Yeah. Well, how is it possible is the question that you would probably ask about almost any one of Ramanujan's formulas. Keeping in mind that he was an autodidact, coming up with formulas for objects that often wouldn't be defined until decades after his death. How is any of that possible? And in the case of studying multi-centered black holes, the formulas that we use, he wrote from his deathbed just weeks before he died. And when he died in 1920, nobody was talking about a black hole. Here we are in 2022, we've taken photographs of black holes. And we find that we need his formulas to do this string theory. How is any of that possible? So I can only answer your question by just repeating back to that same question.

Shelby Herbert:

Absolutely. If he had a longer life, I mean, what do you think? I mean, I've heard the dogma that like, "The best math you do is before 30." He died at 32, but how do you think the world would've changed if he had more time?

Dr. Ken Ono:

Wow. I get that question a lot. I honestly don't know how to answer it, because what Ramanujan was very good at was offering the scientists of his future, glimpses of the possible. But he died at 32, and I can't tell you what a glimpse of a possible would be when it took someone with his creative powers to discover them. So, whatever we've missed out on, we still don't know today.

Let me put it another way. To be a famous scientist, you either define your own theories and the scientists of your future realize the possibility of your theory, or you solve major open problems that stump people for decades, sometimes centuries. Ramanujan is a counter example. He was neither of those. He left behind notebooks. Just like many people study religious texts, as if all the answers are there. Except in the case of Ramanujan, the answers and the questions haven't even yet been written down. They're just parts of solutions to questions that maybe we haven't even asked yet.

And so, what have we missed to out on because Ramon died at such an early age? I don't know, because we haven't had many people with his powers that would be able to fill in what we've lost out on.

Shelby Herbert:

Absolutely. Other than the two theories we discussed earlier, are there any other ways his work still affects the body of mathematical research today?

Dr. Ken Ono:

Yeah. It turns out that many of the most important newsworthy theorems in my lifetime have revolved around Ramanujan's work. There is the proof for Fermat's last theorem, which made the front page of the New York Times. A math problem, the solution to a math problem, the day after its solution was announced, appeared on the front page of the New York Times. That would've never happened had Ramanujan not scribbled down some things called congruences for a function called tau. Major breakthroughs in black hole physics, as we've described. You can just Google it. It's shocking how often Ramanujan's name appears.

So, at the end of the day, had Ramanujan never lived, some of these major breakthroughs would still be open questions today. You can win the Nobel prize for conducting an experiment that confirms a prediction that Einstein already made 100 years ago. That is example of great science. Of course, you win the Nobel prize. But make no mistake. Some of the fundamental questions still to this day are, can you confirm a prediction of Einstein. So, I want you to think Ramanujan is, for us, something like that.

Michael Blane:

Although Ramanujan has a special place in your life story, I wonder if there are other mathematicians who inspire you, and maybe particular life stories you'd like to see portrayed.

Dr. Ken Ono:

In film?

Michael Blane:

Uh-huh (affirmative).

Shelby Herbert:

Very good question. So, two part question. Are there others who have inspired me? Of course. I think you can make a film about every human being. But in terms of an iconic scientific figure, absolutely. The first person that comes to mind is very recent. Her name is Vera Rubin. Vera Rubin is actually mother of one of my friends, Karl Rubin, who is a number theorist.

Vera Rubin discovered dark matter. She became a scientist at a time when women didn't go into physics. They weren't even admitted to graduate programs in physics. But she was a very strong woman, and she discovered most of what makes up the universe, dark matter. Someone should make a film of about her.

Emmy Noether was a famous mathematician, who lived in the early 20th century, whose ideas helped Einstein in her early work. You could definitely make a very interesting film about Emmy Noether. She lived at a very troubling time in our world's history, and her story should be told.

When you were producing this film and when you were the math consultant, did you encounter any challenges? I saw the movie. I thought you guys did such a great job at making these subjects engaging, making it look cool. What are some challenges you encountered trying to make that come across?

Dr. Ken Ono:

Yeah. I want to start by saying that I didn't originally start out as a producer on that project. This is, I consider, one of the most amazing things that ever happened to me in my life. I was brought on to the project to be a consultant for the art department, what formulas should be put on the blackboards, and so on and so forth. So, they invited me out to Pinewood studios to be part of that project.

It was actually really fascinating. That was the year that Harrison Ford broke his knee, when he fell out of the golf cart. We were there. And remember, I'm a math professor. And like Judi Dench, Harrison Ford, then Jeremy Irons, don't wake me up. I don't know how, honestly, any of that happened. But after about a week working on set, working with the art department, I got to know a lot of the people who were part of the film, and I think they found me interesting. They discovered that I knew a whole lot more about the story than maybe anybody else. Within a week, I was sitting in with the director and the actors, just the five of us, going over scenes. That's when I was elevated to the level of a producer.

So, you ask, what was challenging about that? So many things. The first thing that was challenging was... I'll never forget it was a Friday and I was working with Liz Colbert, who was our artist. She was fascinating. Her job was to master Ramanujan's handwriting. And she made Ramanujan's notebooks, copies of them, by hand. If you've seen the film, that notebook, she made the whole notebook, not just the pages that were open to. It was crazy what they do in Hollywood. But in the middle of one of our meetings, the director says, "We need to start rehearsals. Can you come in and help us?"

I walked into a room, and there's Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel and an Indian accent coach. We started reading the script, huddled around the table. I got to tell you, for the first 30 minutes, I sat 10 feet behind the table thinking I have no business here. I have no business here. And after that half hour, Jeremy Irons looks at me, "You're the mathematician, right? You are the most important person here today, because you have to teach us to know how to pretend to be mathematicians. Without you, we can't do this right."

Shelby Herbert:

He's just method, trying to embody that.

Dr. Ken Ono:

Oh my God. He even pulled the chair up. You got to pull the chair up. I even had to practice some of the line lines. "Now, you read this line. How am I supposed..." It was crazy. And then, where did we go from there? We're on set. I would give practice talks about what the lines would look like. I have to tell you, that was awesome. That they really cared what a mathematician sounds like. I can't tell you. Nobody can prepare a math professor for, "We're going on stage now." It's the Zurich International Film Festival. We are the opening film. After the standing ovation, I'm on stage with the actors. It was crazy. So, everything about that was frightening. I mean, even knowing how to get dressed for an event like that was frightening.

Getting back to this film, I want to emphasize that Hollywood made a film about mathematics. I know they've done that before. Think Good Will Hunting, or think The Theory of Everything, or A Beautiful Mind. But those were really Hollywood films. This was a small, independent film. This was really a film about mathematics. It was a film about two very different people who were, in their own right, extraordinary individuals. The last thought I want to leave you with is, what impact this film had on the actors? Jeremy Irons has played so many different kinds of characters.

So, what I want to leave you with is that this film was important to them. Jeremy had never played a Cambridge Don before, and he really wanted to do it. He was so excited by this film that he even offered the use of his own boat for the scenes at Cambridge. It was that important to him. Shortly after the conclusion of our theatrical run, he was invited to be a Chancellor of the University of Bath. And he said, "I can now honestly, genuinely take this, because I can say I've portrayed a Cambridge Don." So, it mattered to the actors.

For Dev, Dev was a 24-year-old boy. He's now quite the Hollywood star. But remember at that time, he was the boy from Slumdog Millionaire. And it was very important for him to take on a meaty role, one that mattered. It was really exciting for me to see how having the opportunity to work with someone like Jeremy Irons, who elevated every aspect of this film. It was really interesting to get to know Dev and see him do everything he can to learn from Jeremy, and I think it shows. So, I think this film meant a lot to both of these actors. I think it really meant a lot.

Michael Blane:

I think that the film contributed a lot to the popular perception of math and Ramanujan's memory. I think it's a beautiful thing. Like how your father contributed to the statue of Ramanujan, you're contributing to his memory in history as well.

Dr. Ken Ono:

Thank you. Yeah. Thank you very much.

Michael Blane:

Thank you for talking to us today.

Shelby Herbert:

One last question before we go, Dr. Ono, and I hope I say this right. What is your Erdős number?

Dr. Ken Ono:

My Erdős number? I think it's two.

Shelby Herbert:

Wow. Wow. That's incredible. What is my Erdős number now that I've spoken, now that I've collaborated with you?

Dr. Ken Ono:

We would have to write a paper together.

Shelby Herbert:

A podcast isn't a collaboration? I am devastated. Well, thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Yeah.

Dr. Ken Ono:

Great. All right. Thank you.

Shelby Herbert:

Thank you.

 

[music]

Christopher Sanchez:

This podcast was recorded on July 14th, 2021. A lot has changed since then. The Delta variant of COVID-19 threatens much of the progress we've made towards the return to normal life. This conversation, we had in July about the importance of getting vaccinated, overcoming vaccine hesitancy and vaccine distribution feels more important than ever. Learn more about the COVID vaccine and find out how to get vaccinated, if you haven't already, at unr.edu/vax. That's unr.edu/V-A-X. Thanks for listening.

Cyprian Rossetto:

It's the summer of 2021. The COVID-19 global pandemic has been central to life around the world for almost a year and a half. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel. The vaccine is here, and since it's become available, cases has plummeted in our community. Businesses are open, summer barbecues are happening, and there's an overwhelming communal sense of relief and resilience. While we look forward with hope, we must acknowledge the experiences, both good and bad that got us here, as well as the challenges we still face in our community and around the world due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. For myself and the students I have with me here today, all of these experiences are filtered through the lens of science. Welcome to the Discover Science podcast, an offshoot of the public lecture series by the same name. Where we discuss the important subjects in science that influence our world.

Cyprian Rossetto:

My name is Cyprian Rossetto. I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology here at the ÍƼöÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´. I'm here today with Vanessa Gutierrez, an alumni of the college of science, microbiology and immunology undergraduate program, and a recent graduate of the cell and molecular biology doctoral program at UNR Med. Also here is Christopher Sanchez, a fourth year undergraduate student in the microbiology and immunology program. We're here to discuss all that we've been through this past year and a half and all that we have ahead of us framed by our collective experiences as scientists and researchers. Thanks for being here today, Vanessa and Christopher.

Christopher Sanchez:

Awesome. Thanks for having us. Super excited to be here.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

Rally excited to be here.

Cyprian Rossetto:

All right. Let's start off with a little bit about what it was like to study virology and immunology while experiencing a global pandemic.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

Yeah. I think for me personally, it felt like a really rewarding experience. I feel proud to be a virologist. There's also been a lot of pressure as well. As a scientist, people expect us to know everything. We also make mistakes. We are just people. Then, however, that kind of makes people not trust us anymore. But science is always changing and that's one of the most exciting parts about being a scientist. We evolve with the change and we can be part of that change. Directly for my work, actually, it didn't affect too much. As a scientist and as a virologist, we were one of the first people that kind of needed to jump in and help with the global pandemic that was going on.

Christopher Sanchez:

Yeah. Definitely from the undergraduate perspective, all my classes shifted more towards focusing on the pandemic and focusing more on the virus that has been affecting the planet for the past year and a half now. It's been really cool seeing the shift in content to that. For myself, I'm in a research lab where we focus on making medication for different types of diseases. We recently started one for SARS-CoV-2, the protein that is used by SARS-CoV-2 to get into the cells. It's been really cool working on that project. We tried publishing our paper through PubMed. Unfortunately we didn't get it, but it was still really cool to work on that project. Myself, I'm working in HIV therapy.

Cyprian Rossetto:

How about a little bit more about how the pandemic affected the academic side as far as having to do your classes online, also having to interact with your instructors and fellow students online. How did that change and are there things that are going to be helpful in the future or things that you're looking forward to as we go into the fall semester and get to be back in person?

Christopher Sanchez:

Right. Definitely that shift towards online was very hard at first, I think, for professors and students. Professors had to adapt a whole new platform to teach students in a very short notice. Especially during that spring semester, it was kind of rough. Then on the student side, it was hard to not get all the same resources that we were accustomed to for the past few years that we've been in college. That was hard. But it also did have some benefits, for sure. For example, I loved re-watching lectures and being able to pause the lectures and write my notes down and follow along with the professor versus in-person where I can't really pause a professor. I personally am very excited to go back to in-person because I feel like I learn at a deeper level in-person than I do online. I feel like a lot of students can resonate with that. I think as a collective whole, we are all excited to jump back to in-person classes.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

Yeah. As a graduate student, I was at a point during my doctorate degree where I didn't actually have to take any classes. For me, it was more of an impact for research. I know sometimes we would want to attend seminars, so the nice thing about having more of a Zoom virtual platform was that I could kind of multitask. We were still able to access all the seminars and talks that we wanted to while also still being able to be in the lab. But one of the things that I was able to also jump in and kind of had an impact with the pandemic was that, our department in microbiology and immunology we got together and the hospitals needed help for making viral transport media. That was one of the things that we jumped in and we needed all hands on.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

We all got together in the middle of the pandemic, tried to keep our distance from each other, masks on and everything. But all together, we were able to make some of that VTM media and provide that to all the hospitals that were needed to provide that testing that was needed at the time that was really crucial.

Cyprian Rossetto:

From an instructor's perspective, there are things, like Christopher mentioned, being able to go back and watch the recorded lectures and integrate that into our in-person classes is going to be incredibly important. I think another benefit going forward is how we're going to deal with if people get sick. Having the ability of students to still join and participate even if they can't physically be on campus for a number of different reasons. But to still have them be able to attend a lecture in that capacity would be a huge benefit going forward.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

Yeah. Definitely if somebody is sick, you definitely don't want them to be in your-

Christopher Sanchez:

Especially now.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

... lecture spreading their germs.

Christopher Sanchez:

Yeah.

Cyprian Rossetto:

Well, and that's definitely going forward, one of the things that is going to be a huge consideration that I don't think people had thought about before. A lot of times the mentality was, "Okay. I'm sick, I have a cold, but I can still show up." But now there's going to be a lot more consideration about, "I should probably stay home if I'm sick. Not only for myself, but not to expose other people that I come in contact with to potentially any other kind of infection that could spread." Let's talk a little bit more about now the vaccine that's available. Can you talk a little bit about when you first learned about the vaccines that were under development and then when they got the emergency use? What did you think about that?

Vanessa Gutierrez:

Yeah. It was really exciting at the time because it was a new technology using mRNA as a vaccine. That was super exciting. But along with that, came a lot of hesitation, a lot of fear. When the Emergency Use Authorization came by, everybody was kind of like, "This is happening too fast. Are we sure about this?" I personally was really excited about it. Things got really, really bad and I understood why that UA was approved. I was excited. I was ready to get my vaccine. It was really exciting times when that happened, just considering and hearing about all the stories all around the world about people suffering and not having access. The vaccine was really a big, big turn for the pandemic.

Christopher Sanchez:

I feel like it's really important for us to trust the people who made these vaccines. Because when I have an issue with my car, I go to a car mechanic and I trust them to fix my car because I know nothing about cars. Or if I go to my dentist, they know everything about teeth, for example. I don't know anything about cleaning my teeth or pulling out my teeth or any of that stuff. But I think it's just interesting how people have such a pushback on the people who have studied this for so long.

Cyprian Rossetto:

Yeah. I think you bring up a good point, is that even though for a lot of people the mRNA technology was new, this had been researched for years and they had everything in place. The only reason we were able to get the mRNAs to the point where they could be studied and go through the clinical trials as quickly as they did, was because of the years of basic research that had been put into them. If you look back at the start of the pandemic, there were almost every single type of vaccine platform that we know they were all under investigation. Going forward, the mRNAs kept being very successful at preventing severe disease, preventing hospitalization. Those were ultimately the ones that got the Emergency Use Authorization. But I think that's one of the things that some of the people who are vaccine hesitant, they maybe don't know all the research that went into them even before this pandemic.

Cyprian Rossetto:

All the research that had been done to show that these are completely safe vaccines. I feel like if they knew that information, that maybe it would help some people have a little bit less hesitancy to get the vaccine.

Christopher Sanchez:

It's also important to recognize that this is an ancient process. mRNA is not a mocha that we made. Living things have been using the system to make proteins and other functional stuff in the cell. I think if people would not only understand the research that there was for making the vaccine with the mRNA, but also the process of transcription and just simple surface level biology as to where mRNA comes from in the cell and what it's used for in the cell, I think that will also make it less scary as well.

Cyprian Rossetto:

Yeah. Even that some people are hesitant because they don't want a vaccine that was grown in a certain cell type. If that's the case, actually this is the perfect answer to that because it's not. It's just RNA that's made through the process of using enzymes. There's no cells that are actually involved in making this vaccine. Actually, the process of making this vaccine, it's really interesting.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

Yeah. It was interesting because a lot of people, I mean that I've talked to, they've always mentioned, "Well, okay, there's an mRNA. Then how did they know exactly where to target? What mRNA to what protein." Well, there's just been so many years of research. There's been so many coronaviruses that have been around that have been the basis to understand how these viruses work. With a lot of research, it was determined that spike was the best target for inducing an immune response. That's how we know that that was the target for making an mRNA vaccine. This is not something that we came up with in a few days. This has been a work in progress and we're still trying to improve and get more information out of the things that we don't know.

Cyprian Rossetto:

Yeah. Exactly. There had been years of work done on Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, another coronavirus. Also, the first SARS outbreak had a very similar coronavirus. All of that information, especially the information and research that had been done on the major glycoprotein, the spike glycoprotein that's used for entry, that was all information, and actually also how to stabilize spike in the pre-fusion confirmation so that it is in a specific antigenic form when it enters and is used as a vaccine, all of that information had been done before this pandemic even started. To utilize that information, that was the reason why we were able to get a jumpstart on these mRNA vaccines and get us to the point where we were then able to have a successful vaccine that we can give to people to prevent severe disease.

Christopher Sanchez:

Exactly. I mean, the first SARS was back in 2003, 18 years ago. We've had 18 years to focus on that. In 2012 for the Middle Eastern one, that's nine years. We've had so much time, and then now you've used that research and then the funding we have now, and the prior knowledge behind that to build this beautiful piece of technology that can be used to save so many lives.

Cyprian Rossetto:

You talk about funding, a lot of the funding was for starting production of the vaccines before we knew whether or not they were going to be successful. That's another reason why when they did show to be protective, that we did have some that were already manufactured that could be immediately rolled out and given to those people that are on the front lines. The healthcare workers, people who are elderly in nursing homes, where we saw that there was a higher proportion of cases in those specific areas. We were able to protect those populations first. Then as more vaccines got manufactured, then it could be given to other people. I know for myself, it was knowing that my parents who are older could get the vaccine, and also for students who are working in my lab. I was still working from home primarily, but the students were the ones who were going in lab. Of course they were masked and social distancing, but it's not without risk to be out in a public area. When they could get vaccinated, that's when I was really happy.

Christopher Sanchez:

Yeah, definitely. I mean, looking at the elderly and people who are more heavily effected, those demographics that are more heavily affected, we have to keep them in consideration. To say that, "I might not get a severe disease from this, so I shouldn't have to get the vaccine or I shouldn't care about it as much. I shouldn't have to wear a mask because I won't be affected by it as much." Is insane to me. Because how can you just not think of other people who would get a horrible outcome of disease with this new disease? There has been cases of young people getting horrible disease and dying. I mean, it's not old people, but just really insane to me that people have the lack of sympathy for people who would get horrible disease from COVID-19.

Cyprian Rossetto:

Yeah. That brings up a good question. Have you personally had to deal with anybody who's been hesitant to receive the vaccine, and how have you interacted with that person and what have you said?

Vanessa Gutierrez:

Yeah. I was just going to, say so many times I've heard that same response that you've mentioned. Just people being hesitant, people just being selfish, really. Just caring about, it's not going to affect me, so why do I care? But really it does affect everybody in one way or another. Personally, within my family, they've either not had access to the vaccine or they have been hesitant. One of the really nice things about some of the vaccines that are available is that, yes, the mRNA is available and it's two shots, but there's also a Johnson & Johnson, which is just a DNA vaccine. One shot and you're good to go. That was one of the concerns of my brother actually. He does not like shots. He does not like vaccines. He was very hesitant. Thankfully though, he reached out to me and he was like, "You're a scientist. You kind of know about this stuff. Can you kind of talk to me and explain to me what am I missing? What are the best options for me?"

Vanessa Gutierrez:

Thankfully, you could just go to Costco for example. He was able to get the vaccine that he wanted. He just wanted one shot to be done. Still have protection. I mean, he really just wanted to take his mask off. To be able to live his life freely, and that's totally fine. I think we all want that. But to get to that point, you do need a vaccine. He was able to get his Johnson & Johnson vaccine, his one shot, his DNA vaccine. He was all good to go, and he was really happy. Two weeks later, he took his mask off and he said that it was the best decision he made. That's just one of the examples of, that we have all these varieties of vaccines that can be applied to anybody who maybe doesn't want an mRNA vaccine because for whatever reason. There are other options, and that's what's nice about-

Christopher Sanchez:

Right. I think it's reasonable for people to be afraid of shots in general. To have a piece of metal probe inside of your skin is probably not the most pleasurable thing for anyone. But I think the science community and the medical community overall has a great transparency behind it, which is what I think people need to realize. Myself personally, my aunt didn't want to get vaccinated and she worked at St. Mary's. She was pregnant and she got COVID. Brought it back to her house, and she got everyone in the house sick and she refused to seek care. She's like, "I'm going to be fine." Then her heart failed. They had to save her baby through an emergency C-section. She almost died. Then they were fine.

Christopher Sanchez:

Then my godmother, which is her mom who lived in the house with her, she was heavily ventilated or ventilated for eight months. She just got out of her ventilation three, four months ago. She's doing okay. Not the best obviously having eight months of ventilation on you. But it's just weird to me how my aunt was so hesitant to get the vaccine and she's a nurse. It's not just people who are outside of the medical community who are hesitant, there's so many people who are hesitant and it's just very interesting to me.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

Yeah. I think that people are afraid of what they don't understand or don't fully understand. I think that's maybe where some of the vaccine hesitancy kind of comes in. I feel like that's definitely a big issue and it's something that as scientists, we should probably try to figure out. I mean, just provide as much information as we can and try to explain to people we're not hiding anything and this is just how it is. Sometimes we make mistakes because we're just people, but we learn a lot from those mistakes that we make. We are always trying to improve and we care about people. While these bugs are incredibly fascinating, we don't want them in us and killing people and causing disease. Yeah.

Christopher Sanchez:

Yeah. It's definitely so important for us to be transparent about everything. Like you said, we're only humans. We really rely on what we say through facts and research. It's hard to be a scientist and to find exact answers because there's really never an exact answer to anything, and it's always going to be changing. We can't have all the answers and we're trying our best. We are using the best technology we have, the best minds to get the answers that we think are going to be the thing that gets us through this pandemic, for example.

Cyprian Rossetto:

Yeah. One last question about the vaccine, a little bit more about your personal experience. How did that go? Where did you get the vaccine at, and what did you feel after you got your first shot?

Christopher Sanchez:

Yeah. For me, I got it in the Reno Rodeo arena four months ago. I was definitely one of the last people just because since I'm an undergrad researcher, I wasn't qualified for the [inaudible 00:20:48] qualifications to get the vaccine. I had to wait for the state rules to be changed. That's when I got mine. I got Moderna. I was super, super excited after my first shot. I was psyched. I couldn't wait to get my second one. Then I got my second one, and then I went home to Vegas and I visited my family. It was so nice to see everyone and know that I am much safer vaccinated than I would be unvaccinated. I just felt good visiting them at that point, because I was vaccinated.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

Yeah. My story was a little bit different. I did not go to the Reno Rodeo arena. At the time that we got vaccinated, I believe it was back in February, something like that maybe. Yeah, around that time. They had been vaccinating all the healthcare workers, all the priority people and some people opted not to get the vaccine. This vaccine already been thawed and obviously it would be unstable within a few hours. They didn't want it to go to waste, and so they reached out to the microbiology and immunology department and they thought, "Hey, do you guys want to get vaccinated?" Of course, we were all like, "Absolutely. Let's ..." Everybody was lining up, emailing back and like, "Yeah, just tell me when. I'll be there." Our entire department jumped in, which was awesome.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

We were able to get our first shot. This was vaccine that would have been wasted and thrown away if our department hadn't jumped in and gotten the vaccine. We got our first shot. I didn't feel a single thing. I just got a sore arm, so that was pretty nice. Then the second shot, that was interesting because some of the co-workers got some pretty intense symptoms where they were bedridden for a day or two. Some people had fevers and things like that. For me, I got Moderna actually, and I had what's called a COVID rash. There was a rash around the site of injection. I was a little sore and hot. I was a little worried. I was like, "This looks a little different. I wasn't expecting this.' But it went away within a few days. No serious symptoms. It was pretty great. I was super, super excited to get both my shots. I felt relief. I felt, okay, I don't have to worry about potentially dying or ending up in the hospital, or passing it on to people unknowingly if I was to not show symptoms or things like that.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

It was definitely a big relief. I was so proud at that moment too. It was just like, "Wow, us scientists, we're getting our vaccine. This is so cool. Look at this. This is so novel." It was really, really exciting, but also a big relief. After that, I felt safer going onto airplanes and being in a little bit more densely populated areas. It was really, really nice to just not be super paranoid and concerned all the time.

Second speaker (female) : Cyprian Rossetto:

Yeah. I completely felt the same way. I ended up having mine down at the Livestock Event Center where you're in your car and you go through these stops where eventually it leads to somebody giving you the vaccine. I just also remember too being so grateful to the nurses and the volunteers who were not only giving the shot, but then you needed to wait 15 minutes afterwards and they had volunteers there to making sure that you were okay. I remember this relief and then being so grateful for everybody who's given their time and their effort to be there and making sure that our community is safe and that we're protecting each other. That's one of the things too, we live in a society where we interact with so many other people during the day knowingly or unknowingly. The thought of transmitting it to somebody who maybe that person doesn't get sick, but then they take it home and transmit it to somebody else who does get sick.

Cyprian Rossetto:

And that person ends up in the hospital or ends up with severe disease. To be able to not only to protect myself, but protect my friends and family and protect my community, it was just this kind of overwhelming feeling of relief and just being incredibly grateful.

Christopher Sanchez:

Yeah. It's so cool that we have such easy access. Or maybe not all of us, but in the US at least, there's a much higher vaccine rate because of the access we have for vaccines. It's interesting to see around the world, how not many countries have such high vaccination rates as us. If all these first world countries are being vaccinated and traveling everywhere and their population is not vaccinated, then that just leads to more chance for mutations and their population to get sick. Then that's not good. I wonder how the global or how different countries around the world who have little access to the vaccines are going to approach the issue of vaccinating their population. Because in my family, in Mexico, my uncle died in February and he left his wife and his kids without the moneymaker of the house. There was no way for him to get a vaccine because the medical infrastructure in Mexico was not ready for the waves of COVID that would hit them. I can imagine other countries and their struggles with their population for vaccinating them.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

I'm so sorry about your uncle. It's absolutely terrible.

Christopher Sanchez:

Thank you.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

But I think that we all have a connection of somebody related within our family that has lost somebody due to COVID. I have a few stories. One of the ones that I really want to emphasize is, one of my good friends from high school who lives in Nicaragua, and that's where I lived for about 10 years, they don't have a vaccine plan. Their healthcare system is poorly funded and underprepared. There's not enough ICU beds. There's a very, very slow vaccine rollout. They're still at the point where they're only vaccinating people 50 and above. One of my good friends, Alma, she unfortunately got COVID and she contracted it from her work. Thankfully she's okay. She didn't get it super severe. She's around my age, so she's around 27 years old. But what was really interesting is that, while here in the US you're able to just get tested and it's for free, you just show up and you're good to go.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

You get your test and your results within a few days now. For her, she actually had to pay out of pocket. Not just for one test, for multiple tests. It's about $150 to get tested, which is insane. On top of that, she needed medication and things like that. Somewhere around $300 is how much it would cost her. A lot of people, the medium income is about $300 a month. Obviously a lot of these people can afford it. I remember talking to her and she told me, she's like, "Well I don't know if I can really get tested because I can't afford it. I feel like I have it. I'm just going to wait it out and hope that I don't die and don't have to go to the hospital and don't have to ramp up all these bills and things like that." It was just really sad to hear how these people don't have either access to the vaccine, or they don't have access to basic healthcare testing and things like that.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

It's just really frustrating, I think, because there's people here in the US that have access to everything they need and they're choosing not to get the vaccine for whatever reason. It's kind of frustrating. But thankfully, due to her job, they were able to cover a lot of her testing and things like that. She was able to confirm that she was positive and took the necessary measures that she needed. She was able to get her medication and was able to fully recover. That's one of the stories. I think about maybe a month ago or so, my family finally got access to the vaccine too. What's interesting is that, they got different types of vaccines. The ones that they sent to Nicaragua are not Moderna or Pfizer, and those are the ones that need to be kept at minus 80. Nicaragua does not have the capabilities for those types of storage. Instead, they sent out AstraZeneca, which was the one manufactured in India. They also sent the Sputnik Russian vaccine. They were able to have access to those.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

I remember talking to some of my family and they were telling me that there's just these massive lines of people who wanted to get vaccinated and they didn't have enough vaccine to vaccinate everybody. It was just so sad because it's like, okay, there's these people who actually want the vaccine and then they don't have access to it. It's just a very frustrating situation. I'm sure that this happens all over the world. I know people from India too, India they're in a very tough situation right now. It was interesting too because the vaccine that was made in India was sent to Nicaragua, but then yet their own population didn't have access to their own vaccine that was manufactured in their own country. That was just really interesting. I think that other countries are definitely jump in, help with this vaccine rollout because due to this is why we're seeing so many variants and why COVID is still around. If you were able to vaccinate everybody at a faster rate, we would see a much, much faster improvement for sure.

Christopher Sanchez:

Right. Then looking at health systems of countries, for India, for example, I know it's mostly privatized. It's like 10% is public. I don't know how the government would possibly make connections to the privatized places where people seek medical attention. It's also, for a lower income country to make vaccines, you would want to make profit and not disperse off ... This sounds obviously bad, but it's better to sell it to another country for a higher price. You know what I mean? So that the country's income can increase. I don't know if there has to be some sort of intervention for higher income countries to come into the lower income countries to provide the vaccine.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

It's basically, for example, India, if they were to say, "Okay, let's make our vaccine. But instead of vaccine our own population, let's sell it so that we actually make money."

Christopher Sanchez:

Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's ...

Cyprian Rossetto:

Yeah. I think that'll be in the future, we're going to have to come up with a better plan because we are a global society. It's obvious that viruses and other microorganisms, they don't see those boundaries between countries. They don't see ... If one country has a virus, it's most likely going to spread to other countries. We have to think of it on a global scale. We can't think of it just country by country because we're only as good as the worst country as far as the cases and hospitalizations. We really have to look at it on a global perspective and have vaccine rollouts that not include just the countries like the United States or Europe, but countries around the world. How do we get the technology to those countries as well? We have intellectual property that maybe prevents some vaccine manufacturers from being able to create vaccines in other countries.

Cyprian Rossetto:

We should maybe come up with a plan where we don't have intellectual property for vaccines. Where we give that information and any country that can manufacture the vaccines, then have the capabilities of manufacturing the vaccines. Because you can't have something where one country has vaccines and another country doesn't. When people are at a point where we can look back and think about how we handled this pandemic ... Because in the future, there will be another one. I mean, unfortunately, as much as we try, there will be another one. Right now, we just have to decide how can we be better at the response to the next pandemic? Part of that is going to be the vaccines and how they were rolled out, not only in countries like the United States, but the global rollout to protect everybody. Whether we're having manufacturing facilities in place in different parts of the world that can ramp up if there is a pandemic, or having technology or intellectual property that can be distributed to other countries around the world, these are all considerations that have to be thought about.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

I think this gives us a lot of opportunity too, to improve our technology. There are still limitations to the mRNA vaccine. It's not perfect. If we can improve the storage capabilities of an mRNA vaccine, maybe ... I know that there's some work where they want to introduce two different targets too, and how we can improve that in the vaccine. I think obviously having the basic research that we need that will lead to the improvement of the mRNA vaccines is absolutely crucial. Ideally, if we could improve it and reduce the cost, then maybe that could help solve some of the issues that we currently have.

Cyprian Rossetto:

Yeah. You're absolutely right about having to take into consideration things like storage in areas. Some places are going to have availability of the minus 80 freezers. Other places are not going to have that as an available storage. In some places, will it be that the mRNA is appropriate? Other places, is it going to be maybe a protein based with an agiment that's going to be easier for them to distribute? It doesn't have to be a one size fits all, but we need to understand the differences in locations and then try to figure out strategies. Even thinking back to how can we predict vaccine success, this is something that is incredibly difficult. Because if you look at all the vaccines that we have, some are really successful. Some of them are attenuated vaccines. Some of them are strictly protein based vaccines. Some of them are inactivated vaccines. Now we have the mRNA.

Cyprian Rossetto:

But to have all of those different platforms and to be able to, if there is the next pandemic, look and see what the virus is, and then stick those into the platform, see which one works best and then be able to distribute them based on the differences in locations, all of that we can plan and do better for the next one.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

Yeah, I totally agree.

Christopher Sanchez:

Yeah. Do you think that the next pandemics will come from the corona variant family or ...

Cyprian Rossetto:

Well, for years, people assumed it was going to be influenza. That was what all of the pandemic scenarios really were geared towards, was pandemic influenza. Mainly because of the 1918 and how that spread globally and the number of deaths associated with that. Coronaviruses because of the first SARS and MERS, they were kind of on the radar, but there wasn't a whole lot of effort being done mainly for surveillance. We know that there are reservoirs, whether it's bats or other animals that we have coronaviruses in these animals. There hadn't been as much surveillance as I think probably now we recognize needs to be. It really wasn't what people were assuming was going to cause you the pandemic. It really was influenza.

Christopher Sanchez:

Yeah. I mean, the flu has the perfect genome. It's segmented and then perfect way to mutate like that, or to accumulate a new genome.

Cyprian Rossetto:

Well, yeah. With influenza, the issue is potentially reassortment. Because of the different strains that circulate not only in our population, but also we have avian influenza and then within pigs as well, you can have an animal or a human get coinfected with different strains. The virus will reassort because of the segments of the genome, and then now you have a new strain that hadn't been seen in the human population. That's where influenza, that was one of the reasons why people were [crosstalk 00:37:41]-

Christopher Sanchez:

It's more of a spotlight that could be the next pandemic. But now we see obviously that-

Vanessa Gutierrez:

Influenza mutates enough that we need a vaccine every single year.

Cyprian Rossetto:

Yeah. That's another thing too. Is, I like to remind people, "Yeah, don't forget about influenza because that is ..."

Vanessa Gutierrez:

It's still around.

Cyprian Rossetto:

It's still around. Everybody, get your coronavirus vaccine, but also make sure that you keep up on your yearly influenza vaccine.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

It was super interesting seeing the trend of influenza this past year too, because of lockdown and because of the COVID vaccine and stuff like influenza rates were down.

Cyprian Rossetto:

Yeah. I mean, they were almost non-existent, which was great. It just shows the power of masking and social distancing. I mean, it really cuts down on respiratory infections in general.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

Yeah. Lesson learned, don't be around people.

Cyprian Rossetto:

But I think when we look at coronaviruses and influenza, then that kind of reminds me that as far as research, people are very interested in coming up with antivirals that aren't necessarily for one specific virus, but can be given for all RNA viruses. Both influenza and corona are RNA viruses. That's one piece of the puzzle that we're still missing a little bit with this current pandemic. If we had an antiviral that was in a pill form that people could have at their house, and if they knew immediately when they were infected, could take that, that could also be another way to stop the spread. There's a lot of research going on right now with antivirals and trying to figure out not only for SARS-CoV-2, but again, for other viruses that come along. Can we have something that's already been approved that we can just immediately roll out?

Christopher Sanchez:

Yeah. Of course.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

Yeah. Low resistance too.

Christopher Sanchez:

People would be more willing to take a pill than a vaccine.

Cyprian Rossetto:

Than a vaccine. Yeah.

Christopher Sanchez:

I think vaccine is obviously the best form of prevention, obviously. But if the medication is there that's a pill and people are willing to take that, then that's definitely way better than not getting a vaccine at the end of it.

Cyprian Rossetto:

Yeah. I mean, you're absolutely right. Some people, while they may be hesitant to get a vaccine, they're perfectly fine taking an antiviral drug. If we had both available, I mean, that would be a wonderful way then to have different things for the population.

Christopher Sanchez:

Right.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

I'm sure my brother would agree with you.

Cyprian Rossetto:

But as far as from a researcher and a scientist perspective, that's one of the things that I'm really interested in looking at, even though my lab doesn't study antivirals.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

Or RNA viruses.

Cyprian Rossetto:

My lab also doesn't study RNA viruses. I think there's so much potential for antivirals right now. I think going forward, that's going to be a big, huge area of research. It could be incredibly powerful, both for SARS-CoV-2, but for any other pandemic that comes along.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

I mean, something similar with what was done with HIV and antivirals, where they're just putting multiple drugs into one pill that could target multiple viruses, that would be a really, really nice technique to use.

Christopher Sanchez:

A little cocktail medication?

Cyprian Rossetto:

Yeah.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Christopher Sanchez:

I mean, for HIV, when they first came out with some antivirals for that, it was a one type of thing. Then that was obviously not effective because of it's high mutation rates. But having the three, it was statistically impossible for HIV, these all mutations to block all three of them.

Cyprian Rossetto:

Yeah. I think that's probably what a lot of researchers are looking at now. Is that there are studies going on individually, but is there a way to create this cocktail that targets multiple steps that the virus needs in order to replicate? Then would that be a drug that is really able to knock it down?

Christopher Sanchez:

Yeah. I mean, you said, if I remember correctly from last year, the RNA viruses are the most present types of viruses in the human population verses DNA.

Cyprian Rossetto:

Yes. For you eukaryotic organisms, at least as far as we know, which again is limited by our technology, but as far as we know, there are more known RNA viruses than DNA viruses for mammals.

Christopher Sanchez:

Right. By having that blanket antiviral to effect all RNA viruses or at least some, most, that would be huge because you would affect a lot of those viruses that affect a lot of people.

Cyprian Rossetto:

Yeah. If we do look at the approved antiviral that we have, remdesivir is approved to treat SARS-CoV-2, that targets the replication of the RNA itself and it targets the RNA dependent RNA preliminaries. The nice thing about that is, that is an enzyme that's found in all RNA viruses and it's not an enzyme that's found in the cell. That's a perfect target because whenever you develop an antiviral, you're always concerned about off target effects. If you're specifically targeting a enzyme that only found in a viral infected cell, you limit the potential off target effects. A lot of research is going into trying to see if we can take what we know about remdesivir and maybe modify it so that it either is something that can be taken orally rather than, right now remdesivir needs to be given IV. Or can we look a little bit closer at the molecular modeling between where remdesivir is binding and slightly change it so that it is more effective?

Christopher Sanchez:

Dang, that's so interesting. Wow. That's so cool.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

That could be the next thing.

Cyprian Rossetto:

Yeah. I mean, that's why it's interesting because again, it's not something that I study in my lab, but I'm super interested because I do think there's so much potential for antivirals.

Christopher Sanchez:

Right. Dang. That's really, really cool.

Cyprian Rossetto:

Yeah. But I mean, going forward, antivirals are just going to be one piece of it. We're going to need vaccines. We're going to need antivirals. We're going to need more PPE. I think that was another thing that in the beginning was an issue, was not having adequate PPE. Then to have a plan.

Christopher Sanchez:

Yeah. Also, I feel like it's the responsibility of leaders of countries or local leaders of communities to give out proper information, because that can obviously spread not only fear, but they can spread misinformation that's just not good for the population or for the pandemic in genera or for anything. That's also really important, but ...

Cyprian Rossetto:

Yeah. No, and I think, for scientists, for politicians to acknowledge the limitations that we have and to be honest and say sometimes we don't know. This is what we know right now, and we're going to do things based on what we know right now. But that might change in the future because we'll get new data or technology will change and we'll have a better understanding of the pandemic. I think that's one of the things that we can learn going forward.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

Yeah. I mean, because of the improvement in technology, we're able to pick up all these different variants of coronaviruses because we have the technology now. Otherwise we would just think that we're treating the same thing.

Cyprian Rossetto:

Yeah. Really.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

Yeah. They're just slightly different.

Cyprian Rossetto:

Yeah. I think one last question before we wrap up is, what was the thing that you were most excited to do after lockdown stopped and you were able to go out again? What were you most excited to go do?

Christopher Sanchez:

That's such a crazy question. I was so excited to do so many things. But to point out something in particular-

Vanessa Gutierrez:

I was excited to get on a plane again. Even if it's still with mask, I'm definitely looking forward to flying without a mask. But just getting on an airplane again, that was kind of exciting.

Christopher Sanchez:

Right. Yeah. I would say traveling, actually. I love traveling. I love personally road car tripping. I love driving so much. I drove to Colorado, which is a 14 hour drive from here right after. I stayed with my friends for a month and it was so much fun. We went to the lakes, we went hiking, went bar hopping. It was so great. It was so much fun. To go back to school in-person this coming ... I mean, I started my summer session, which is in-person. But to have make my full schedule in-person, I'm really excited for that. To see new people, meet new people. I think everyone will be more willing to meet new people and branch out from what they were used to before the pandemic, because they saw how fast things can change. Maybe people will be more outgoing and more social, and I'm really excited to meet new people.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

Yeah. I'm definitely looking forward to going back to a concert. I haven't done that in a very long time and I haven't been in a crowd of people. That's going to be very interesting. But I was traveling last week too. I was in North Carolina and we did so many things too. We went to museums and seeing all these people out and about, and I was just like, "Oh my God, there's so many people here." But it's so exciting because it feels so normal. It was really great to have that feeling of normalcy back.

Christopher Sanchez:

Yeah. It feels so taboo to see people without masks. [crosstalk 00:47:14]-

Vanessa Gutierrez:

Yes. Oh my God, the first time-

Christopher Sanchez:

Because waking into a place without a mask, crazy. Insane. I felt not good. [crosstalk 00:47:20]-

Vanessa Gutierrez:

Yeah. I remember the first time going to the grocery store and they're like, "Okay, vaccinated, people can take their mask off." I'm like, "I am vaccinated." I'm scoping people to see what else they're doing. I'm like, "Okay, they do have their mask on." It felt really relieving, but it was also a strange feeling because we spent so much time wearing masks everywhere we went. I remember there was an announcement on campus that you didn't have to wear your mask anymore, and I was like, "Okay." Some people were like, "I think I might keep my mask on." I was like, "No, I am taking that thing off." I remember taking it off and seeing people's faces, which I hadn't seen in a year, and I was just like, "Oh my God, I can see you smiling now." Which is so exciting.

Christopher Sanchez:

How about you, Dr. Rossetto?

Cyprian Rossetto:

Yeah. I just appreciate being around people again. My family, my parents, to be around them and not be worried that I was going to potentially transmit something to them that would make them sick. But I think, or I hope that that appreciation stays a while and that we don't take for granted being able just to be with each other. I mean, even being able to go into the lab without having to wear a mask to be able to sit next to somebody while we go over data and not have to go over data through Zoom.

Christopher Sanchez:

Right here, we're all sitting in a room and it's talking, seeing each other's faces is awesome.

Cyprian Rossetto:

Yeah. I'm probably a little bit hesitant. I still will wear my mask when I go into a grocery store just because ... I don't know. I still worry a little bit about unvaccinated people, but that's just my own concerns. We're doing good.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

Better to be safe too. I mean, it doesn't hurt anybody?

Cyprian Rossetto:

Yeah.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

Yeah. That's good.

Cyprian Rossetto:

I'm glad we can all see each other again.

Christopher Sanchez:

Nice big smiles.

Cyprian Rossetto:

All right. Well thank you both for being here and sharing your experiences. Thank you to the Reynolds School of Journalism for letting us record in their studio and for their dedication to training the next generation of science communicators. Finally, thank you for listening. We hope you'll join us for the next episode of Discover Science.

Christopher Sanchez:

Thank you guys for having us.

Vanessa Gutierrez:

This was really fun. Thank you so much.

Blane Harding: As professors, researchers and educators, we believe having a quality education is a human right that should be available to all. However, barriers pursuing education, particularly in science, technology, engineering and math with the STEM programs in education exist in our country that are based not on an interest or a lack of drive, but on characteristics like a person's zip code.

I'm Blane Harding, the Director of Advising, Recruitment and Retention for the College of Science at the ÍƼöÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´.

Ohidul Mojumder: I'm Ohidul Mojumder, a physics student in the College of Science. Welcome to our Discover Science podcast, an offshoot of our public lecture series of the same name, where we speak with the world's leading scientists, researchers and educators about important subjects that influence our world.

In this episode, we are joined by Dr. William F. Tate IV, the Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Tate serves as a Vice Provost for Graduate Education and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

For over a decade, Dr. Tate's research has explored the complex relationship between where and how a person grows up and their ability to pursue a STEM education. He has published two books on the subject, and has received numerous amounts of accolades for his research, including the Early Career Award and the Presidential Citation from the American Educational Research Association. He was also elected to the National Assembly of Education in 2017 and served as a member of For The Sake of All research team, a multidisciplinary group that is studying the health, development, and well-being of African-Americans in the St. Louis region.

His Discover Science lecturer asks the question, is space plus race greater than STEM attainment? Here we are with him today to talk through the answer. Welcome to the show, Dr. Tate.

Dr. William F. Tate IV: Thank you for the introduction and the invitation to participate.

Mojumder: It's an honor to have you here today. The first question that I have for you is the idea of comparing someone's geospatial location and academic achievement, it sounds somewhat abstract when you first hear it. Can you give us a big picture of your research, and give us a little bit of insight?

Dr. Tate: Let's take a state university anywhere in the United States. We have 50 flagship state universities. Most of them have an Honors program. If you were to back map those individuals who are residents of the state in the Honors program, you will find a pattern in a zip code. You could predict which students were in the Honors program based upon the zip code. The zip code would be predictive. We could predict who might be entering the very best private schools in the United States based upon where they live, what high school they attended. High schools are geospatial locations. They're embedded in communities. Those communities have certain attributes. The students who matriculate in those communities have certain attributes. Usually what I say is they have certain investments in them that have positioned them to be, for example, in an Honors program. Well, you could take that same type of thinking and say who might perform very well in a science course or physics or chemistry or statistics. Largely, we can predict because there's social determinants around them that actually cluster in space.

Let's just take a straight forward one. We know that the biggest predictor of whether someone does well in science or math is their teacher. Teacher effects are quite powerful. We also know that teacher effects cluster: that highly qualified teachers who have a great STEM background tend to be in the same places. Those students who matriculate in a geospace with very good STEM teachers, who are highly qualified, are more likely to perform well on the ACT or the SAT, to enter your Honors program or to be part of an engineering major. All these things are clustering. The big question is, why do some schools have outstanding STEM teachers in the high school levels and others don't? Why is it that some students have a great k-8 education in STEM areas? In fact, why is it that some kids actually get science in elementary school and some don't?

The reality is that it's geospatially determined. There are some schools that where clustering happens that they actually take science, or they actually have a very good math teacher. Many young people are clustered in school districts that don't even have certified teachers in math and science. They're being held accountable by State standards and other things that they really don't have a true shot at, and unfortunately it does end up being geospatially located.

Mojumder: From your initial remarks, it seems like this geospatial location has some relation to a socioeconomic status or a socioeconomic background. Can you further go on about this?

Dr. Tate: Right. You're absolutely correct. We have historically organized ourselves with boundaries that delineate our socio-economic background. They're very well articulated in our communities and housing policy that started way back in the 1930s and '40s in the United States, organized our neighborhoods in certain types of ways. We subsidize the suburbanization of many communities, and then used redlining and other strategies to keep people out of these communities based upon their race or class. The artifact of that is that it's an archaeological dig of discrimination. You end up looking around the totality of the United States and you have a very affluent highly, just, rich suburbs on every metric, not just financially, but they have everything at scale. You have some urban communities that now have been gentrified, they have the same attributes. Then you have in urban communities those that have been underdeveloped over time, they lack the kind of health care and education that you normally would need in order to protect the brain, because how do you do STEM? It's in your mind, it's your brain. If you don't have food, dentists, insurance, all the things that are necessary so that your brain can fully mature and be successful at doing things that are cognitively demanding like STEM, then you're at a definite loss as compared to colleagues who might be in a suburban area where they have all of that at scale.

This is the reality of the American divide. It used to be an urban/suburban/rural divide, but with the big changes in our urban communities, you're experiencing really right here in Reno. As I came into town they said Google was here and other places. I guarantee you that over time, your achievement in STEM is going to go up 100% because there will be new geospatial communities created that will benefit those folks who are working in those environments. The parents there will insist upon it, and those students will grow. Then there'll be another set of people indigenous who might not actually have access to the same resources, and you will see the disparities unfold, and it will be geospatially oriented.

There are ways to intervene on that, and we can chat about it, but most certainly it’s something that I would be concerned about if I were living in this community.

Mojumder: Actually, I was born and raised in Reno. Throughout the years, I've seen changes occurring, expansion of the city itself, but one thing that's very characteristic to Reno is that there's a mix of urban, suburban, and rural populations in one city. How would this differ with any of the other research that you've looked at previously?

Dr. Tate: If I were mimicking what I did in St. Louis, we want to be a biotech hub. We put a map out and we laid out where all the biotech companies were. In our community, they line up on the highway of 64-- 4064 is our main thoroughfare. The biotech companies, in a non-random fashion, organized around the highway. That's not surprising because people need to get their workers in and out. Medical facilities tend to cluster around highways too. We know that these are the communities where there's going to be work that's high-tech.

The big question then is, what does achievement look like in those communities where the workers are actually going to have access? Parents are going to be there, and they're going to want good schools around there, and they're going to want to have housing next to where they work. They don't want a long commute. You're going to see patterns emerge here. Wherever the companies go, and it's probably going to be on your highways, they will begin to have clusters of excellence. You'll see certain type of food establishments, you'll see certain types of schools, whether they be public, private or charter, will emerge, and there will be an investment in having a very high-quality STEM environment in those places. It's a zero-sum game because it's a finite number of people who are actually of quality who can teach these classes so we don't produce them fast enough. These disparities become inherent unless you can, at the same time, rapidly increase the number of people who are really great STEM teachers and have them be aligned in places where those companies don't line up.

Fragmentation of our neighborhoods and the like is a form of segregation. That leads to disparity of all sort. A big question is, can you be an elastic community that's more inclusive and it actually takes seriously having talent dispersed around the geospatial realm of this environment, giving everybody an opportunity to contribute?

The communities that do that well are the ones that have produced a genius that you never would have found because they didn't have the opportunity structure.

Harding: I think that's very interesting, Dr. Tate. When we talk about, and you take a look at a variety of different universities and institutions and they're all concerned about culture. Whether it's the chief diversity officer, it's an inclusion officer, they're talking about how culture is getting in the way of the success of Black and Brown kids and so forth and so on. My question is involving this debate over the impact of culture to me is not necessarily culture, it's their lived experiences. They can go hand in hand, but I think they're separate. You seem to focus on those lived experiences. What role do you think culture plays in the lack of attainment in the STEM degrees?

Dr. Tate: The lived experience that I was talking about in terms of these big structures, these are deeply influential and a life course, but also, in a similar fashion, it would be naive not to acknowledge that culture influences choice. A big question is, which one is more impactful? I like to tell people they're both impactful. That the structural issues are impactful, but the culture and choices that we make, depending on what our culture values, is also impactful.

Rarely have I met a parent who didn't aspire for their child to have a true opportunity. I think there is the issue of being educated, even parental education, making sure that our parents understand that there are opportunities in STEM. I wouldn't just limit it to the STEM, I would say in the art and in creative work is more broadly, there are a lot of opportunities in the extent to which parents understand how to navigate the systems we have in place is important.

One other thing, we're supposed to be the experts, those of us at the university, in terms of creating educational infrastructure. We need to be the loudest about when it's underdeveloped prior to the collegiate experience. I want to have the very best students in my classes. By that, I mean the ones who really want to be there, and have had some opportunities to develop their minds. If I can see that their pre-K through 12 experience is underdeveloped, we should be shouting from the rooftops to fix it.

Harding: Yes, I agree with that completely, but we tend to focus on them once they get here.

Dr. Tate: Then we spend billions of dollars on remediation, which, generally, you're remediating on 12 years of experience, and it's extremely challenging to pull off.

Harding: Very true.

Mojumder: Actual changes in the school district itself are very difficult to attain. Is there any way that students themselves can try and go for these changes or push themselves forward to be more successful in the future?

Dr. Tate: It assumes that the student would actually know what they don't know. The dilemma is that we know what the pathways are for a successful matriculation at a place like the ÍƼöÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´. As you know now, you're in physics, you understand the background. You could be an advocate, of course, but it would be hard for a ninth grader to fully understand that I don't really have access to AP Chemistry, and that's going to be impactful for my life, or I don't have access to a teacher who actually understands calculus, and so I'm not going to be able to learn it in such a way that I can apply it and use it when I get to Reno or whatever school they want to matriculate in.

It's important for us as citizens, and I count anyone over the age of 18, in adult life who's voting, should be really invested in making sure that all the young people have these structural things that we know are there so that if they do make the right choice, as you've articulated, that the choice mirrors the opportunity. That's what we really have to work on, the choice that they make mirroring what the new opportunity structure is. In too many places, it's underdeveloped in our rural communities, as well in some of the underdeveloped parts of our urban communities, is geospatially located.

The beautiful part about that is, based upon your question, is we could put a map up and say where we need to go get help. We can see it. That's why I use maps. I could use regression analysis or hierarchical linear models or all kinds of sophisticated statistical techniques, but I put everything on a map so you can see where you live relative to where other people live and what's happening in terms of the differential opportunity color coded with statistics undergirding it, and then you too could intervene and be a citizen scholar trying to make a difference for the life of a young person.

Harding: You talked a little earlier about the zip codes and identification of zip codes being predictors. Do you know of any strategies that low-income communities have used to actually bring in quality teachers? Because if they're quality teachers, they have options. They're going to go the better school district as opposed to go to the poorest school district.

Dr. Tate: You just nailed it. Therein lies the dilemma. Once the cycle of the community is started, that cycle is extremely difficult to intervene on. Part of that cycle is what are the benefit structures for a teacher in a community? If the suburban community where I live is redshirting teachers, giving them a full salary to trail after another teacher versus the other community that doesn't have that, I would rather be in this place that's going to support me as a professional. If one of the districts has a better retirement program, that's the case where our urban district in St. Louis has its own individual retirement program. Everybody worries that it might not be sustainable, versus the state takes over this retirement program for every other district in Missouri. If I have a choice in terms of long term where I'm going to invest my time, I'm going to go to the place that's going to ensure that my retirement is stable. These are the differential things that begin to happen in a cluster again in geospace. All these policies and benefit structures begin to accrue in the functioning communities that are doing very well. Some people will say money doesn't matter. The only people who say that are people with money. Everyone else knows that having a financial infrastructure, the incentives and the like makes a huge difference.

I haven't even dealt with one other piece about the geospatial infrastructure. We've been just talking about the public facing part of it. What also happens in geospace when there's a very affluent or middle-class family, they invest their family resources into the children over and above what can happen in a distressed financial community. Those students then accrue better public resources along with better family resources, doubling and tripling the investment in their education and health development. It makes it very, very hard for the student who doesn't have the family resources and the public resources, all again geospatially located, to compete.

STEM is extremely competitive. Anyone who's ever thought about being a scientist or an engineer or a technologist knows that those courses are cognitively demanding, correct?

Mojumder: Yes, of course.

Dr. Tate: The students, they are competitive. They want to do well. Imagine if you have deficiency of some sort, not because of your own making, because you just haven't had the resources at the time in order to compete. That’s talent loss. As a society, there's a cost to that.

We're talking about it at a very high level where that student actually makes it to college but maybe they end up switching majors, let's say, because they can't do the STEM major because they don't have all those accrue resources. They end up graduating. They can still go add value, and their children have a shot at the STEM degree, because they're going to end up moving to a community with the value added that we just talked about. It takes a generation to get to that.

What happens to the student who doesn't even get to college? They're geographically-bounded. They don't make it. They didn't have all the family and public resources before. Let's say they graduate from high school. Maybe they can compete to get a job that pays a reasonable wage. Not likely, because our economy has changed so radically. The manufacturing world that those people used to go to doesn't exist anymore. They're stuck in low-paying jobs. They're not going to be able to cross over into the geospace that we talked about. Worse yet, imagine if they don't graduate from high school and don't have the credential and/or the networking experiences associated with that. What's going to happen to them? They end up in a cycle of generally engaging with our criminal justice system. They end up with very, very poor health outcomes that we, as a society, end up subsidizing because they don't have insurance, so it's going to cost the rest of us. Once they enter into that realm, it just spins. Where do they end up living? They all live in the same places. They cluster geospatially. We keep them bounded by our rules and policies in certain areas.

They may have children and they end up in school. What's going to happen to them? It becomes a cycle. That cycle is extremely difficult to intervene on. That's why I say when you have a community that's emerging like yours with the new economy, that the extent to which you can design something that might provide opportunities for people indigenous, including the STEM opportunity and good healthcare, because they need that to develop the brain, is foundational to breaking that cycle.

Harding: Many distressed communities, not all, but many distressed communities are communities of color. I know we have a program here on campus where we're trying to increase Latinos, male and female, going into education and going into K through 12 education. If we were to increase, and there's not a lot to begin with if you take a look at the numbers and percentages, if we're to increase the number of teachers of color that are in K through 12, do you think that would have an impact on this distressed communities? Because they would have a tendency, at least from my experience, to go back to those communities, to give back to those communities because they want to be part of the solution, not the problem.

Dr. Tate: There have been a couple of studies that delineate that it is an empirical fact that having a mentor/teacher of your ethnic background, racial background, is an impactful part of your social development and your achievement. The extent to which we can do that is extremely important and it could be impactful. A lot of people are concerned that teachers who are not of the same background wouldn't be impactful. That's not what the research says. It just says having someone who you can identify with is actually an impactful experience. I think the extent to which schools are able to pull that off, we should do it.

Mojumder: It seems like we keep circling around the topic of incentivizing ways to develop these communities, to invest in these communities. What are some ways? Would it be political reform on the local level, on the national level? What are some ways that we can combat this and break the cycle?

Dr. Tate: Every community has a different history and a different design. The extent to which fragmented communities can figure out to create a more unified home, the more likely they are to be able to generate revenue that can be shared. They won't compete against themselves, and they're going to have a greater good around schooling in all municipal services. Imagine an inelastic environment where it's fragmented. One of those communities is going to get all the business. The high-end affluent suburb. That one will flourish while all the others are floundering.

That one will have the good schools. That's where the Honors program will be. That's where all the corporate types will live. That's where the golf courses will be. That's where Whole Foods will be. That's where Starbucks will be. That's where everything that everybody wants will be in that place. That's where the opportunity will flow from, and the rest of the community will flounder. This will be the demise of America if we don't fix it, and if we don't deal with the rural community and actually help them as well. It's both urban and rural. Some people just think it's urban. It's both. So many folks are just woefully underdeveloped because of this thinking.

Harding: Yes. The harm is the product of those that are in control that actually have the ability and the capacity to dictate them.

Dr. Tate: Well, I'll leave it right there. We need the will, politically.

Harding: Yes, true.

Mojumder: Honestly, it was a pleasure speaking to you today, Dr. Tate. He has a kind of eloquence to the way he speaks that makes it quite a pleasure, and it was nice speaking to him.

Thank you to our listeners for listening. I hope to see you guys at the next Discover Science lecture, and then the next Discover Science podcast.

[music]

Dr. Thomas White: At 5:51 on the morning of September 14th, 2015, a team of scientists witnessed something many thought was impossible: the direct detection of gravitational waves. These ripples in space-time caused by violent cosmic collisions, in this case, the collision of two black holes had been predicted by Einstein over 100 years earlier, and even he thought there would never be proof of their existence. Welcome to the Discover Science Podcast Series, where we sit down with some of the country's leading scientists and researchers for a conversation about the incredible discoveries that shape our world. I'm Thomas White, a professor of physics here at UNR.

Dr. Richard Plotkin: And I am Richard Plotkin, a professor of astronomy here at UNR.

White: Today we sit down with one of the scientists who first detected that great cosmic collision, Dr. González Gonzalez of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory or LIGO for short.

Plotkin: Gabby is a professor of physics at Louisiana State University. She was elected as the spokesperson for the LIGO collaboration from 2011 through 2017. She's the winner of numerous awards, including the 2019 SEC Professor of the Year, the Bruno Rossi Prize from the high energy astrophysics division of the American Astronomical Society, which was awarded to both her and the LIGO collaboration, and she is also a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and she's a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Gabby, thank you very much for joining us. We're really thrilled to have you here to kick off our podcast series.

Dr. Gabriela González: Thank you, it's an honor to be here.

Plotkin: You're, of course, a world-renowned expert on gravity and gravitational wave astronomy. For the listeners at home, can you just explain in simple terms, what's a gravitational wave?

González: Like you said, this is something that Einstein predicted right after publishing his theory of general relativity, which is a theory of gravity. It has a fancy name, but it's just a theory of gravity. It says that bodies attract each other because they deform the space-time, they curve the space where they leave weaker the space. I will say because we have mass.

Plotkin: Hopefully not too much.

González: Not too much. Not as much as the sun does and that's why the earth goes around the sun. It's not because there's a force of gravity like we learn in school from Newton's theory, it's because it follows the shortest path which is the curved one. Following that theory, that means that when the bodies move like the earth around the sun, then the space-time also changes, and if the bodies are moving in an oscillatory fashion like the earth around the sun, then the space-time has curvature like waves, and those are gravitational waves.

Plotkin: So is that like a boat disturbing water as it goes through?

González: That's right, except that it's in all three dimensions and time, so clocks are oscillating too.

White: These gravitational waves, they were predicted, like you said, over a century ago, and the LIGO project itself is now a decades-old project.

We were just wondering, what is it that kept you motivated this so long in this search because you must have had years where you were finding nothing, and not even ensure if you would find something, so what was your motivation through that period?

González: I have decades in this, not many decades. Almost three, but there are people, the pioneers in this field, they began thinking about this way of measuring gravitational waves in the '70s, so this is a question you should ask them, especially Ray Wise in MIT. He was the one who thought that if you use lasers measuring distances between mirrors, and if you put those mirrors kilometers apart, and if you build a vacuum system for the laser to travel, then you might be able to measure gravitational waves.

White: That's what you do, right? That's basically how LIGO works?

González: That's basically how LIGO works. Actually, what we do is we make the laser go through a beam splitter, so it splits in two, and then it travels four kilometers, that's two and a half miles on each side, and then bounces on mirrors all in a vacuum system, and then those lasers come back. When they come back, if the distances are different, which is what a gravitational wave would do, then the beams are not in face anymore. That's why we call this an interferometer because we measure the face or the interference of these beams.

White: When Dr. Weiss came up with this in the '70s, did he imagined that this could be done? The technology at the time surely was not advanced enough for this.

González: It was not and actually, even in those times when we read those original proposals to the National Science Foundation, they said this is probably going to take two faces. We need to be build two big facilities because if you see a signal in one, you need to confirm it with seeing the same signal in another facility. So two observatories were built, one in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana very close to where I live. I'm from Argentina, so my accent is much more Southern than Louisiana. Yes, we have these two observatories.

I think he imagined that this could be big, he knew it was going to take time, but the quest for doing these and building such a sensitive instrument was so exciting. It wasn't just discovering gravitational waves. This started when you asked what kept me going. I think what kept me, and he, and all the people going on these, they are very proud, they are very excited in contributing to the sensitivity of these instruments. You said that we discovered them, but I haven't told you yet how small these gravitational waves are.

Plotkin: Please tell us.

González: The first one that we discovered is still the largest one, it's still has a record of largest amplitude. What we measure was these two and a half miles getting longer and shorter, longer and shorter a few times by a distance that was smaller than an atom, smaller than a proton, it was four parts in a thousand of the proton.

White: Oh my, that is incredibly small.

Plotkin: I can't even imagine that, it's insane.

González: It's like comparing an atom to the distance between the earth and the sun.

Plotkin: I remember many years ago, I got to tour the Livingston LIGO Detector in Louisiana. Things I remember was they're telling me they could essentially hear trees falling down from miles and miles away because this thing was so sensitive to logging in the area.

González: That's right. Of course, sometimes those trees fall closer than that because the detector is in the middle of a logging forest, so if they log very close, then sometimes we have to stop, but that doesn't happen very often.

White: In retrospect, would you have positioned the detector somewhere else?

González: We know now a lot better about what to avoid, and we probably would have looked for some more solid ground, rocky ground, not so close to the coast. One of the noises that we hear apart from trees falling, that is actually once in a while, so it's not so bad, but the noise that bothers us the most is produced by the surf waves on the coast and they are resonant waves.

White: Wow, how far are you from the coast?

González: We are quite a few miles from the coast. We are like 60 miles depending on how you measured of course. Louisiana is a swamp, so it doesn't really have a coast, a well-defined coast, but this is something that you can measure in a seismometer anywhere in the world, but if you're closer to the coast, then that kind of noise is larger.

White: I think the next detector should be built in Nevada then. Large, flat, nowhere near the ocean.

Plotkin: That's quite a problem.

González: We are thinking about what we call third-generation detectors, which are longer, better, not cheaper. They are actually more expensive, but we would like to make facilities that are 10 times longer, 40 kilometers instead of four kilometers long. The longer you make the detector, the more you have to compensate for the curvature of the earth.

White: That's amazing.

González: Because the laser travels in a straight line, but the earth is not flat, we know it's not flat.

Plotkin: So even over only 40 kilometers, you have to worry about that.

González: Then you have to worry about that, you have to build some ground so that the laser is going to be straight.

Plotkin: Let's talk about the exciting moment, the first discovery of when you saw the first retrocession gravitational wave. This is in September of 2015 at 5:51 AM, very early Eastern Daylight Time. A signal is detected in both twin detectors. Often we have this image like we'll see in movies of a scientific discovery of this eureka moment.

The one I always think of like in the movie Contact when Jodie Foster is in the New Mexico desert listening to radio signals from outer space, and she finds aliens and she jumps into her car, back to control center screaming out coordinates, "Point it here, point it here."

I imagined those dramatic things are amazing if that's how it works, but it was mentioned it's mixed with something mundane at the time. What were you doing?

González: I was sleeping. Actually, it is an interesting story because we were preparing to take data, we hadn't begun taking data regularly like we do now in what we call observing runs, where we try to take data 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We were preparing for doing that and we were doing tests in interferometer pushing the meteors, simulating gravitational waves, calibrating the output of the detector. People were introducing noise in the detector to see how much noise cars introduce when they break, for example, and they had been working until very late in the night and they had stopped working.

When they stop working, then we begin testing the analysis algorithms. We take data and we do the analysis, computers do the analysis automatically, and then computers put the results on web pages that when people wake up at that time, now we have alerts and they receive phone messages, but at the time since we were testing, then these web pages appeared then people were looking at that. At 5:51 in the morning Eastern Time and Louisiana Central Time, so it was 4:51 in the morning, but people in Florida who wake up early and people in Germany where it was close to noon already, they saw these web pages saying there is something here.

Plotkin: They receive this in real-time or they process it afterwards?

González: No, it was hours later. They all thought that this was another test, that this was like the tests we had been doing in the previous days. They called up the operators on side and said, "Are you still doing tests?" They said, "No, everything is fine."

White: They thought it was a fake signal.

González: They thought it was a fake signal and it took us a day to convince ourselves that this was not a test.

White: Wow.

Plotkin: Did you know from the outset what you had, that would be a Nobel Prize-winning result?

González: Actually, when we saw it, it was so large in amplitude, I mentioned, this is still the record largest amplitude we've had. We could tell from the frequency of the signals that if they were produced, if it was a gravitational wave, it had been produced by two big black holes of a size that nobody had measured before. That was another reason to think this cannot be real. This is too good to be true.

Plotkin: There was no known physical explanation for how you could, that blackhole thing.

González: That's right, there were no black holes known of that size. Before our discovery was 20 solar masses, 20 times the mass of the sun, and this signal, it was produced by two black holes, each one having 30 times the mass of the sun, creating in the end, a bigger black hole.

White: What is the frequency or infrequency of the collision of two black holes of such magnitude? How often do we expect to see such a collision?

González: Of course, these things are happening all the time, but they're too far away, and then the signals are very small. The red gravitational wave is going through the earth all the time. The problem is that they were too small for our detector to measure. Now, this first discovery was in 2015. We have improved the sensitivity of the detectors quite a bit in the last observing run that we started on April 1st of this year. We have discovered 33 candidates in the first six months, so about one week.

White: Wow, pretty good.

Plotkin: That's amazing.

White: If I remember correctly, the press release was around five months after the discovery, so I wondered if you could comment on your feelings in between those two points in time. How did you keep it under wraps? Did you want to talk to people about it? What were your instruction?

González: As I told you in the beginning, we could not believe this was real yet, so we had to be really, really sure before we claimed we had discovered something. We had not started taking data with a detector. We didn't know where the data was like and we know the detectors are very noisy, so it was unlikely that it could be that the new detector decided to have noises that looked like gravitational waves. We couldn't know that until we took some data. That first day, we decided, well, now we have to begin taking data, so we stopped everything else. We began taking data.

We were going to take data for seven months, but we said we're not going to

wait seven months, weren't going to take data for one month, analyze that, and then see whether the signal is still significant with respect to the noise. That took a month to take the data, another month or two to analyze it, to deduce what were the masses of the black holes, to do all the analysis. We were going to write a scientific article and send it for peer review and wait for the response before we had a press conference because we wanted a thousand people looking this over, but we all wanted to see a gravitation wave there, so we were very afraid that we had forgotten something.

We waited for the peer review, it was positive, and then it was on February 11th, 2016 when we went on stage saying we did it.

Plotkin: You were famously a part of that press conference. What's that kind of experience like? I guess what I wonder is is that a fun experience or is it nerve-wracking?

González: It was nerve-wracking. In fact, we had been rehearsing this almost every day and it had been getting worse, and worse, and worse, and worse, so we were so nervous that we were sure this was going to be a disaster, but we have to do it. Then, in the end, I think it went okay.

Plotkin: I can tell you from an outsider's view that it went amazingly well. It was one of the best presentations of research that I've ever seen. I remember the next day, I was working in Australia at the time, so the press conference came very early in our mornings. I didn't get to see it live, but our entire work shut down. It's all everyone was talking about. We were watching replays all of it. It was a big deal.

González: It was a very big deal. There are so many coincidences in this history. We didn't plan it for this, but that day was the first day that was celebrated as the international day of women and girls in science, and there we were two women scientists among five people. That's not a fraction of women scientists, it was nice to represent that.

Plotkin: Yes, it was fantastic.

White: Outreach and science communication is important to us at UNR and I do lots of outreach events here. Happy Hour With a Scientist was one that we did recently. I wondered if you could give your opinion on why you think science education to the general public is important, especially given your position as the spokesperson for LIGO for six years.

González: I think it's an obligation that we have as scientists. We do our science, which is really expensive. People need to know what we do with money and people need to know that we do cool things, and they need to know also, and I think appreciate that, that we do this kind of science, not because it is applied right away for creating useful technology, which eventually happens, but we do it to understand the universe and that's in the sense of being human. Humanity is almost defined by being curious.

Plotkin: The example that I always remember was when they were going to service the HoloSpace telescope and it was the public, I feel, that just had the general outcry in saying, "We love these images. We love seeing what's out there in outer space."

González: That's right and they weren't asking what are going to get out of that, we were going to get images off the sky

White: Now we have some questions that was submitted from some students in the physics department. The first one is from Emily Chao, a final year physics student and she asks, what is it like working a LIGO? What do you do day-to-day?

González: Of course, now I'm traveling a lot and giving talks like the one today and tomorrow at UNR, but when I am at LIGO with my graduate students, I have a group with graduate students and postdocs and undergraduate students, we work in a very big team. Anything that we do is about 10 people at least doing it. In general, in the collaboration that I led the time of the discovery, we had more than a thousand people in 20 different countries.

Plotkin: Wow, I can't imagine those telecoms.

González: We are talking on the phone all the time in different time zones or sometimes we have to wake up at midnight, sometimes people wake up at 2:00 AM to attend telecoms, but we do it all on teams. We actually have four experiments. We have a very careful schedule of what can be done when.

Plotkin: Our next question comes from Donna Depollo who is a junior physics student, and she asks, who are the physicists or people who you looked up to throughout your schooling?

González: My two biggest mentors were my PhD advisor, Peter Saulson at Syracuse University, and actually later this week, I'm going to his 65th birthday party here. We are celebrating his retirement and his birthday. He's been a great mentor and a leader in the fields in the early times, designing the detectors, helping with the design of the initial LIGO detectors, and then the advanced ones.

Plotkin: So you still work with him closely?

González: I still, yes.

Plotkin: That's amazing.

González: I consider him and his wife my family in the US. Still, my parents, my brother, all my family is still in Argentina except for my husband, but Peter and Sara are my family in the US. Then Ray Wise. Ray Wise, after getting my PhD, I went to work at MIT with Ray Wise. His tenacity and his curiosity, I don't know how he keeps all these things in his head, but he knows about everything, and if he doesn't know, he finds it out and he writes the programs, and he is still active. I think he's long '80s and he still comes to Louisiana works with people, with electronics, with the vacuum systems, fixing things. That's who I want to be.

White: I think a physicist never retires. They just keep going and going.

Plotkin: Yes, sounds about right.

White: Trying to understand everything.

González: That context, yes.

Plotkin: Curiosity never goes away.

González: That's right.

White: Our next question is from Jacob Molina, a sophomore physics student, and he asks, of the courses you took during your undergraduate and graduate career, which ones did you enjoy the most and which ones do you think were the most useful?

González: The courses that I liked the best, well, it was probably the first product costing mechanics where one really learns how to apply the math to things that look simple but they're not so simply when you really want to describe them in detail.

White: I'm currently teaching graduate-level mechanics, so I'm really glad you said that if any of my students are listening.

González: When I taught, that's the one I like the best, and you use that all the time.

Plotkin: Andrew Sunquest, whose another physics student here, he asks, if you weren't a physicist, what do you think you would do?

González: I would be a teacher. I love teaching. That's what I thought I was going to be. My mom was a high school math teacher. I really wanted to be like her, so I wanted to be a teacher. I really love teaching, so that's the beauty of being a professor that I teach, I have students, and then I also do research, so I have the best of both worlds.

White: We have one more final question. This is not from a student. What does the future hold for gravitational wave astronomy? New detectors, new science, what's the next holy grail?

[music]

González: More than 400 years ago, Galileo used the telescope for the first time, and 400 years later, we have a number of kinds of telescopes and we are still building bigger and better telescopes, so that's going to be the field of gravitational wave. We will be building new detectors and measuring new gravitational waves from new sources, from centuries to come.

White: I can't wait.

Plotkin: Yes.

White: Also, LIGO in space sounds.

Plotkin: It sounds amazing.

White: Right.

Plotkin: Let me get this straight, it's spaceships shooting lasers at each other in space.

González: It's three satellites, five million kilometers away.

Plotkin: Five million kilometers.

González: Actually, I think the latest is two and a half millions, but still.

Plotkin: Wow, give or take a few million.

González: They would be orbiting around the sun, not around the earth but around the sun in an orbit behind the earth. They would be about 20 degrees behind the earth, and there would be these three satellites with lasers shooting at each other, getting a few photos at the end of those two and a half million kilometers.

Plotkin: Amazing. Thank you very much for doing this, this was a lot of fun for us.

White: Hopefully it was a lot of fun you.

González: It was a lot of fun for me, thank you. Those were very good questions.

White: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Discover Science Podcast Series and we'll see you guys next time.

[00:24:52] [END OF AUDIO]