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1:00

Supported, WNYC

1:02

Studios. From

1:17

WNYC Hey,

1:22

hey,

1:25

how you doing? All right, it's freezing

1:27

in here so I have on a

1:29

winter hat and a blanket Well your

1:31

luck is we're actually headed somewhere

1:34

Hot. Okay. Extremely hot.

1:36

Can't wait. And our guide

1:38

there, ironically enough. Hi.

1:40

Hey, how are

1:42

you doing? How are

1:44

you? Is a scientist

1:46

named Hudson Freese. Dr.

1:48

Freese. There have been a lot

1:50

of comments on that. What's Freese doing

1:52

working on hot stuff, right? Anyway,

1:55

so this story that I brought

1:57

HUD here to tell actually happened

2:00

at the beginning of his career

2:02

60 years ago or something

2:04

but I've been thinking about this

2:06

story a lot in the

2:08

last couple months because I don't

2:10

know every time, you know,

2:12

like just a new headline comes

2:15

out which is like funding

2:17

cuts to the National Science Foundation

2:19

or National Institutes of Health

2:21

or NASA. Yeah, just the sort

2:23

of gutting the avalanche of

2:25

cuts to publicly funded science and

2:27

basic research that we are

2:30

witnessing right now. And I

2:32

guess maybe for now it's enough

2:34

to say that that Hudson frees this

2:36

story. It kind of feels to

2:38

me like a parable for the moment

2:40

we are in right now. OK,

2:47

so let's just start way at the beginning. How

2:49

did you get involved in any of this? Well,

2:52

let's see. I was born in

2:54

a small railroad town in Indiana.

2:57

And as a junior in high

2:59

school, I spent some time at

3:01

Indiana University. It's

3:04

thrilling, you know, for somebody who hasn't

3:06

seen more than a two -story building before,

3:08

this was a big deal. And

3:10

I met faculty people there and...

3:12

HUD says he actually did a science

3:14

project while he was there about

3:16

what it would take for a microbe

3:19

to survive on Mars. And

3:21

he says he just fell in love

3:23

with the university, with the science he

3:25

was learning there, and so when he

3:27

graduated from high school... I came back

3:29

to Indiana University. And I was able

3:31

to get in the bacteriology department. And

3:33

he really wanted to work with one

3:35

scientist named Dr. Thomas Brock.

3:37

I had heard him give a lecture before

3:39

about mating types in yeast. And,

3:42

you know, anytime you're talking about mating types

3:44

in college, you know, you're going to be a

3:46

hit. And so anyway,

3:48

I got on to see him thinking I'm

3:50

going to work on mating types. And

3:52

he says, well, we're not working on mating

3:54

types anymore, but we are going to

3:56

Yellowstone National Park to look into the hot

3:58

springs for bacteria. So

4:01

at the time, the

4:04

scientific consensus was that nothing

4:06

could live above 73 degrees

4:08

Celsius, 163 degrees Fahrenheit. It

4:10

was seen as kind of

4:12

an upper limit. on life.

4:14

Burn, boil, shred itself to

4:16

death. Yeah, but Thomas Brock had

4:18

recently vacationed in Yellowstone and he had

4:20

seen these hot springs where boiling

4:22

hot water comes up from the interior

4:24

of the earth. And he knew

4:26

that if you go to these hot

4:28

springs, you see around the edges

4:30

where the water cools down. There's stuff

4:32

alive there. Like what? Like mosses

4:34

and like algae, bacteria, little spider

4:36

mites, stuff like that. Okay. And he

4:38

thought, maybe. This

4:41

could be a place where

4:43

he could find some little microbe

4:45

that is defying that limit

4:47

of life. That's right. And so

4:49

he had a small, relatively

4:52

small grant in basic science. A

4:54

grant of $80 ,000 from the US

4:56

government. To go out and see what

4:58

he could find. And he's like, hey,

5:00

HUD, would you like to go to

5:02

Yellowstone? And I thought,

5:04

that's perfect. You know, I had done

5:06

before it was Mars and it's cold

5:08

there. Now I'm going to go to

5:10

the complete opposite. I'm going to go

5:12

where it's boiling hot. And also for

5:14

a small town kid from Indiana, this

5:17

seemed like a great adventure. Because

5:19

I had never been west of

5:21

Chicago. So he

5:23

hops on a train. I got

5:26

on in Garrett, Indiana. And then went

5:28

through Chicago, that's where I picked

5:30

up the train that went nonstop. Through

5:32

the farmlands of Wisconsin, into

5:34

the plains of the Dakotas. Twenty -some

5:36

hours altogether. And he was like,

5:38

this dough -eyed kid, just looking out

5:41

the window. A lot of the Midwest

5:43

is pretty flat. But then as

5:45

he crossed into Montana, and I looked,

5:47

I said, boy, those are funny

5:49

looking clouds. Oh

5:51

my God, those are not clouds, man,

5:53

they're mountains. They're real mountains. It's

5:55

just like mountains that I used to see in

5:58

the cowboy shoes. You know, I mean, I

6:00

was just I was really thrilled to be able

6:02

to see this kind of stuff. Oh,

6:04

I'm really getting out there. So

6:06

I mean, it was it was just a

6:08

great trip. So

6:10

I get off

6:13

in Billings, Montana

6:15

and take a bus to West

6:17

Yellowstone. That's where the lab was

6:19

set up in this little

6:21

cabin. You know, a kitchen and

6:23

sort of a living room, but it

6:25

was sparse. You know, you wouldn't advertise it

6:27

as a lab in these days. It

6:29

looked more like, you know, where

6:32

Ted Kaczynski might hang out. This

6:34

is like a shack. It was a shack.

6:37

Yeah. Anyway, Brock and his crew,

6:39

you know, we get going

6:41

at about seven o 'clock, something

6:44

like that. They drive into the

6:46

park and then hike several miles up

6:48

to these very remote hot springs. Have

6:51

you ever seen those pictures of like, or have

6:53

you ever visited? No, I haven't. I haven't. I've never gone.

6:55

I would love to. Um, she sent you a picture here. You

6:57

want to see? Yeah, please. I would love to. Okay. Oh,

6:59

I haven't seen that. Wow. So

7:02

we've got, yeah, we've got, it

7:04

looks almost like this, like unicorn eye

7:06

of dazzling blue rimmed with yellow,

7:08

rimmed with oranges and red. Yeah. You

7:10

would start out more yellowish and then

7:12

the orange would start coming through.

7:14

It was just beautiful. And there was

7:16

one hot spring in particular that

7:18

Brock and his team got interested in.

7:20

Mushroom spring. At the center is

7:22

a pool of water. It's about 30

7:24

feet across. Water at the center

7:27

can reach 70 degrees Celsius, 160

7:29

degrees Fahrenheit. Steam coming

7:31

off at every direction. Surrounded

7:34

by light gray rock and dead

7:36

trees. And so they'd

7:38

walk right up to the edge of

7:40

this pool, trying to get as close as they

7:42

could. And... We

7:44

would take these glass slides that

7:46

had nothing on them, put them

7:48

in the spring, so if there

7:50

were any organisms that were bubbling

7:52

up out of the interior of

7:55

the Earth, they might be able

7:57

to attach. Trawling, basically. Trawling for

7:59

life. And the

8:01

water is so hot that if they

8:03

happen to fall into the spring...

8:05

Oh, adios. Yeah. Luckily,

8:10

no scientists were harmed in the

8:13

doing of this research, but they

8:15

got their samples they took them

8:17

back with them to their little

8:19

shack lab and What they do

8:21

is they would add these radioactive

8:23

chemicals that would react with stuff

8:26

in the sample whatever proteins or

8:28

sugars or whatever Yeah, and that

8:30

would be a sign of something

8:32

living in there and we actually

8:34

proved that the material It was

8:36

actually live. But what they still

8:39

didn't know was if the living

8:41

things in there had come from

8:43

the center of the springs

8:45

or you know if it had

8:47

fallen from the outside or

8:49

what exactly it was. So they

8:51

took these samples back to

8:53

Indiana University and it was HUD's

8:55

job to see if the

8:57

samples they got could really grow

8:59

and thrive in super hot temperatures.

9:01

Yeah, yeah. So I had a

9:03

whole series of different tubes at

9:05

different temperatures. So now HUD's got

9:07

all these samples and they're sitting

9:09

in these hot water baths on

9:11

all these burners so that each

9:13

one is set to a different

9:15

temperature. So it's starting a little

9:17

cool, getting hotter, eventually going

9:19

past that supposed limit that is

9:21

too hot for anything to

9:24

be alive. So every

9:26

day I would go in there and

9:28

I'd look to see if there was

9:30

anything that looked like it might be

9:32

growing. But he has to keep refilling

9:34

these hot water baths. And the darn

9:36

things could run dry. The water keeps

9:39

burning up. The water keeps boiling off.

9:41

Running up the electric bill of the

9:43

microbiology department. So anyway, day after day,

9:45

he's tending to these little vials, always

9:47

checking on them. Always looking for a

9:49

change in the soup if bacteria

9:52

were growing. It

9:54

would be cloudy. It

9:56

might even start to smell a little bit. So

10:00

he's waiting. He's waiting. The

10:03

liquid is clear. Day one, he's waiting. Day

10:05

two, he's waiting. He's waiting a couple days. I

10:07

couldn't find anything. And

10:12

then on the fourth, maybe

10:14

fifth day, September

10:17

19th,

10:20

1966, He

10:22

picks up one of the vials. I

10:25

just tapped it with my finger. And

10:28

there was all this swirly stuff that came up.

10:30

I mean, it looked like, it

10:32

looked like diamonds kind of

10:34

running around. It was like all

10:36

around inside the tube. And

10:39

I thought, oh my God, maybe

10:41

this is it. So he takes

10:43

a look under a microscope. And

10:45

what he sees are these

10:47

little worms, kind of like

10:49

cut up spaghetti. Just floating around in

10:51

there. And they're moving? And they're

10:53

moving. Yeah, they're alive. At almost

10:55

boiling water. You

10:58

know, according to the current thinking, like nothing should

11:00

be able to live in here. But they were

11:02

growing, they were reproducing, they were making more of

11:04

them. They were like, proliferating. They're thriving. And

11:08

I said, I said, oh my god, I

11:10

am the first person in the world

11:12

ever to see this. The

11:18

next day I'm I'm telling everybody

11:20

in the lab about I'm telling

11:22

Tom Brock and One of the

11:24

one of the guys in the

11:26

lab says well, I think we

11:29

ought to call it had Sony

11:31

I freeze the answers. Hey You

11:33

could have had a you could

11:35

have had a Species named after

11:37

you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but then

11:39

Brock was like, oh, no, no,

11:41

no, we're not gonna do that

11:44

can't name them After people anymore,

11:46

we are gonna call it thermus

11:48

Aquaticus thermus Aquaticus thermus Aquaticus

11:50

tack tack is short

11:52

for thermus Aquaticus hot

11:54

hot it literally just means hot water

11:57

I'm going around the labs is the dawning

11:59

of the age of Aquaticus age

12:01

of Aquaticus. I

12:03

like it. It's it's it's

12:05

simple. It's clear How

12:10

do they, I mean, how do they do

12:12

it? How do they live in this temperature that

12:14

kills so many, so much? Well,

12:16

so usually in hot water, the

12:18

water molecules are just jostling

12:21

around so much. I mean, that's

12:23

why we can't go out

12:25

and sit at 180 degrees because

12:27

our proteins fall apart, our

12:29

enzymes fall apart. But TAC has

12:31

evolved proteins and enzymes that

12:33

are more tightly structured. That's right.

12:36

They can survive without falling

12:38

apart. which, beyond being a cool

12:40

trick, opens up a

12:42

door that life can do a

12:44

whole new thing. Like, there's a

12:46

whole new superpower that we didn't

12:48

even know about. Which does open up.

12:50

Like, could there be life on Mars?

12:52

Could there be life in Lava? Could there

12:54

be life in these places we thought

12:57

were inhospitable? That's right. Yeah.

13:01

You know, this was the thing that led

13:03

us to say, Well, what if you go

13:05

down 5 ,000 feet under the sea where we

13:07

know there are volcanoes down there? Boy, I'll

13:09

bet nothing lives down there. Well, yes, it

13:11

does. Oh, I haven't seen that.

13:13

Wow. So we've got, yeah,

13:16

we've got, it looks almost like this,

13:18

like unicorn eye of dazzling blue,

13:20

rimmed with yellow, rimmed with oranges and

13:22

reds. Life

13:27

will be fine we may

13:29

not be fine, but life

13:31

will be fine right yeah

13:33

life will still continue to

13:35

exist as long as you

13:37

have liquid water That if

13:40

I had to pick anything

13:42

is really the sort of

13:44

lesson of this life will

13:46

exist Anywhere where there's nutrients

13:48

it will go any place

13:50

where it can find energy

13:52

to use energy to grow

13:54

I'm gonna I'm gonna quote

13:56

Jeff Goldblum here Life finds a

13:58

way Life finds a

14:00

way So

14:07

I was like, oh my god,

14:09

this is amazing like was this

14:11

on the cover of time magazine.

14:13

Yeah. Yeah, and he's like no

14:15

It has no use it has

14:17

absolutely no use You know, it's

14:19

curiosity. I mean it's science for

14:21

science sake its fundamental research That's

14:23

the way science goes and the

14:25

rest of the world the non -scientist

14:27

world was just like and well

14:29

who cares so and so they

14:31

they preserved a sample of tack

14:33

and they just put it in

14:35

a Kind of like

14:37

a library of

14:40

microbes. Yeah, yeah.

14:42

It's a germ library. Beyond that,

14:44

we didn't think about it. They moved

14:46

on to other things. And

14:48

then 50 or so years later, Hudson

14:50

is sitting at his desk and he

14:52

gets a call. He said, this is

14:54

like this. And I want to talk

14:57

to you about a science prize. And

14:59

I thought, oh my god, it's the

15:01

prize patrol. If I sign up for, you

15:03

know, Scientific American for six years at

15:05

this bargain rate, I'm gonna get a, you

15:07

know, something in the mail. But what

15:09

it was, it turns out, was

15:11

something called the Golden Goose

15:14

Award. Oh, Golden Goose! Thank you

15:16

for joining us for the annual

15:19

Golden Goose Award ceremony. Right.

15:21

Okay, so you remember we did an episode

15:23

about a couple years back. Okay,

15:25

well, there's a map. We even sent

15:27

one of our producers Maria Vasquez -Jerez to cover

15:29

it like in red carpet. Check out the

15:31

scientist outfits. Right, right. Is

15:33

this event a big deal? It is

15:35

the Emmy of Science. It was held

15:38

in Washington, D .C. in a big

15:40

fancy building near the Capitol. So

15:42

I'm asking people what they're wearing. What are you wearing? That's

15:44

a good question. I am wearing a suit.

15:46

It's like mostly blue, but then there's this

15:48

subtle light blue. It's pretty funky. a statement.

15:51

With this window pane. Hello. Yeah,

15:53

yeah, yeah. But um, anyway, basically

15:55

it was an award created back

15:57

in the 80s, 1980s, when Congress

15:59

was ridiculing a lot of the government

16:01

funding of basic scientific research. And you

16:04

know, there were like headlines all

16:06

the time about like, we're wasting money

16:08

spending. you know, funding

16:10

a study about snail sex or

16:12

whatever, whatever it was. Yeah,

16:14

yeah. And then the Golden Goose

16:16

Award was sort of this tongue

16:18

-in -cheek, nerdy response in the form

16:20

of an award that goes to

16:22

research that is funded by the

16:24

government that sounds dumb or

16:26

sounds useless, sounds absurd, but

16:28

then turns out to completely

16:31

change the world. Right. So now

16:33

HUD is getting a call from them

16:35

saying, tack. deserves

16:37

this award. The hot worms? But

16:40

how did that research change

16:42

the world? I thought they were

16:44

sitting standing on a shelf. Well,

16:46

that is exactly what I'm going to tell

16:48

you after the break. Radiolab

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Why do people vote? How

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18:33

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18:35

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18:39

jelly? Or are they made of

18:41

jelly? Find But Why wherever

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you get your podcasts. Okay.

18:49

Lulu. Latif. Radiolab. Hot worms. And

18:51

the place where the hot

18:53

ones went next, which nobody could

18:55

have ever predicted, only really

18:57

happened because of a drug -induced

18:59

biological fever dream. What? And that's

19:01

the story I'm going to

19:03

tell you now. Okay. So maybe

19:05

no surprise, we're going to

19:07

leave Indiana and jump instead to...

19:10

California. All right. We're still

19:12

in the late 1960s. Only

19:14

now I want to tell

19:16

you about a guy called

19:19

Kerry Mullis. Okay. He's a

19:21

PhD student in biochemistry at

19:23

UC Berkeley, but instead of

19:25

being a lab, he seems

19:27

to prefer experimenting in biochemistry

19:29

by synthesizing his own LSD.

19:31

Okay. He's literally famous on

19:33

campus for doing this. Anyway,

19:37

so he gets his degree gets a job

19:39

in a bio lab But then he just

19:41

hates like how many mice they kill all

19:43

the time and then he gets a job

19:45

in a cafe He's like he's like

19:47

this floating guy. Yeah until one

19:49

day He's working in the coffee

19:51

shop and a customer is like aren't

19:53

you that guy who used to make your

19:56

own LSD and and they get to

19:58

talking and Eventually this guy

20:00

offers carry a job. Whoa at

20:02

this biotech startup called Cetus. Okay

20:04

Now, just to give you a

20:06

sense, at this point, we're in

20:08

the late 70s. Today, science is

20:10

on the threshold of a new

20:13

era. And the thing that scientists

20:15

everywhere, especially the scientists at CEDIS,

20:17

are obsessed with is DNA, deoxyribonucleic

20:20

acid, the essence of life. The

20:22

stuff of which all life is

20:24

made. The key we've been looking

20:26

for. They have this hunch that

20:28

decoding DNA is going to unlock

20:30

lots of secrets about the human body.

20:32

The answers lie within these long,

20:34

thin, twisted And

20:36

Cetus, the company where Kerry Mullis

20:38

got his job, they want to

20:40

be on the cutting edge of this.

20:42

And so they have teams of

20:44

scientists trying to figure out how to

20:46

read DNA. Okay, and their main

20:48

problem at the time is that reading

20:51

DNA is extremely, extremely hard. The

20:53

whole process of trying to read

20:55

or even just find and

20:57

isolate like microscopically tiny little molecules

20:59

of DNA, it was so

21:01

inefficient. that it was just

21:03

not, it was non -starter, it was not

21:05

feasible at all. So scientists as sedas

21:08

were scratching their heads trying to find

21:10

a better way to do this. Got

21:12

it. Now, Kerry Mullis, he was not

21:14

doing any of that. He was stuck

21:16

doing very slow, very repetitive, boring lab

21:18

work, but... day, he's out on a

21:20

drive after work. I was driving along

21:23

one night. Kerry Mullis actually died back

21:25

in 2019, but while he was alive,

21:27

he did a bunch of interviews where

21:29

he talks about this moment. I was

21:31

driving to the little cabin I have

21:33

in Mendocino County. Driving through the mountains

21:35

on these windy, steep roads. It's super

21:37

dark. It was really late at night.

21:39

And in his mind, he's turning over

21:41

the problems of reading DNA. The

21:44

way he described it, he's like

21:46

trying to read a piece of DNA

21:48

at that time, was like trying

21:50

to find a license plate on the

21:52

interstate in the middle of the

21:54

night from the moon. And then you

21:56

still have to read it. So

21:58

just impossible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And

22:01

all of his colleagues are focused

22:03

on basically devising a more powerful,

22:05

more precise telescope to spot the

22:07

DNA. And he's thinking like, how do

22:09

you fix this thing? I mean, what do you do?

22:11

And all of a sudden, He

22:14

sees DNA

22:16

everywhere. Blue

22:18

and pink strands of DNA just floating

22:20

in front of him as he was

22:22

driving, like through the windshield. As

22:25

he said it, they injected themselves somewhere

22:27

between the mountain road and my eyes.

22:29

He hadn't done any LSD that night,

22:31

allegedly, but he says that he had

22:33

done it so many times that he

22:35

could almost get his mind there without

22:38

having to take it. I mean, who

22:40

knows? But like, it's almost like he's

22:42

imagining himself riding a piece of DNA.

22:46

And

22:52

then

22:55

he has this

22:57

thought that just snaps him right

22:59

out of it. Everyone's working on on

23:01

a better and better telescope from the

23:03

moon, right? What if instead you fucks

23:06

with the license plate? Like what if

23:08

you can make copies of the license

23:10

plate? And copy the copies and then

23:12

copy the copies so you go from

23:14

having one copy of it to two

23:16

to four to eight to sixteen to

23:18

thirty two to sixty four to a

23:20

hundred and twenty eight on up to

23:22

a million if you've done it twenty

23:24

times and a billion if you've done

23:27

it thirty times a billion of them.

23:29

It's as if the whole planet Earth now

23:31

is covered in the license plate that

23:33

you wanted to see and all of a

23:35

sudden it's going to be way easier

23:37

to find it. Yeah, and therefore

23:39

to read it. Okay, interesting. I

23:41

don't quite get how having a

23:44

Billion copies would make you see

23:46

it better, but I think that's fine

23:48

I think that's fine like the all the

23:50

only thing you need to know is he

23:52

has this vision for a machine That's like

23:54

kind of a DNA Xerox machine. Okay, and

23:56

he's like he's like this is it like

23:58

he talks about he had like deoxy ribonuclear

24:00

bombs going off in his head

24:02

as he's driving like Eureka yeah, okay

24:04

He literally stops the car and

24:07

writes it. He like looks in the

24:09

glove compartment. He like finds an

24:11

old receipt and he's like writing things

24:13

down on the back of it

24:15

kind of. Oh my gosh. Okay. So

24:18

he takes his idea into

24:20

work and everyone thinks it's really

24:22

stupid. Oh no. Why? I

24:24

think it's because it's such a

24:26

simple idea. They're like, of

24:28

course it's not gonna work, but

24:31

also Carrie, he sucks. Oh.

24:33

Basically he sucks. He takes things

24:35

very personally, gets into fights with

24:37

colleagues at work all the time,

24:39

literally a fist fight at one

24:41

point. Allegedly, one day he brings

24:43

a gun to work to threaten

24:45

somebody. Okay, so the Xerox machine

24:48

ideas come in from Carrie. Yeah,

24:50

Carrie, right. But the thing is,

24:52

Carrie's sort of already working out

24:54

in his head how this DNA

24:56

Xerox machine theoretically would work. So

24:59

you have a piece of DNA. Imagine

25:01

like a long zipper. Because remember DNA

25:03

is it's made up of matching base

25:05

pairs. C's go with G's, A's go

25:07

with T's, right? And they're all zipped

25:09

together. Now in order

25:11

to copy it, first you have to

25:14

unzip it. So now you have two

25:16

halves of it, right? Then basically

25:18

you find new base pairs to

25:20

match up with each side of

25:22

the zipper. For every G you

25:24

find a C, for every A you find a T. kind

25:27

of perfectly recreate the other half. Right. And

25:29

then it's like you can zip it up

25:31

with a new zipper, right? Right, right. Okay,

25:33

then do it again. Unzip, and

25:35

then copy both. Okay. And then you keep

25:37

doing that over and over. Zip, unzip, zip,

25:39

unzip. You do that 30 times, you have

25:41

a billion zippers. Whereas

25:44

you just started with one. Clever.

25:47

By this point, he managed to convince

25:49

his boss who has assigned people

25:51

by force to work with him. and

25:53

they keep trying it and trying

25:55

it. They're working on it for months

25:57

and they keep failing. One

26:02

of the problems is

26:04

to unzip it for whatever

26:06

chemical reason, the temperature

26:08

needs to be really high.

26:10

Okay. And then to

26:12

rezip it, the temperature needs

26:14

to be lowered by a lot.

26:16

And he notices this one

26:19

part. the DNA zipper like the

26:21

slider the thing that zips

26:23

the DNA teeth together is this

26:25

enzyme called a polymerase and

26:27

he notices that anytime he raises

26:29

the temperature too high The

26:31

polymerase falls apart without getting too

26:33

in the weeds here the

26:36

polymerase is a protein and typically

26:38

if proteins get too hot

26:40

they just sort of disintegrate And

26:42

so Carrie and his team

26:44

were like, oh, if only there

26:46

was a polymerase somewhere that

26:48

could live at this high temperature.

26:51

So then someone from their team

26:53

went to this library, this

26:55

microbe library. OK. And what did

26:57

they find? The

26:59

hot worms. The hot worms.

27:01

Thirms Aquaticus. So he's

27:04

like through the card catalog

27:06

like 90 degrees Celsius. Yeah. And

27:08

as Hudson Freese explained to

27:10

us, Thermis Aquaticus has its own

27:12

polymerase. As you might call

27:14

it, TAC polymerase. And again, because

27:16

every part of TAC is

27:18

evolved to take the heat. This

27:20

polymerase, when you heat it up,

27:22

it can survive without falling apart. So

27:25

Cary and his team are basically

27:27

like, oh. This is exactly

27:29

the thing we were looking for.

27:31

Yeah. And they plug it into

27:33

their machine and it basically works

27:35

like a dream as if it

27:37

was made to do that. Oh

27:39

my... Like all of

27:41

a sudden they can add the

27:44

tack polymerase run this reaction to

27:46

Replicate the DNA over and over

27:48

and before you know it They

27:50

have a billion copies of the

27:52

gene snippet. They're looking for I

27:54

think we had just finished cloning

27:56

a gene at Cetus that took

27:58

40 people six months I can

28:00

do that in one afternoon by

28:02

myself now Wow And

28:05

so the process that they

28:07

invent, it's called polymerase

28:09

chain reaction, or PCR. PCR.

28:11

PCR. Polymerase chain reaction.

28:13

And it completely changed

28:15

everything. This process has been

28:17

held as one of

28:19

the monumental scientific techniques of

28:21

the 20th century. Why?

28:23

Because PCR made it so

28:25

much easier and faster to read

28:27

DNA. Suddenly, scientists everywhere start

28:29

using it. We're here to celebrate

28:31

the completion of the first

28:33

survey of the entire human genome.

28:35

They finally decode the human

28:37

genome and all the knowledge that

28:39

comes with it. And from

28:41

there on out, I would say

28:43

every biotechnology company in the

28:45

world, every lab anywhere that's studying

28:47

DNA has to use PCR

28:49

to put that a different way.

28:51

Every major scientific breakthrough that

28:53

involves DNA, in any way, in

28:55

the last several decades, it's

28:57

all run on PCR. To detect

29:00

genetic markers. Like diagnosing genetic

29:02

diseases. Diseases including cystic fibrosis. Things

29:04

like HIV detection. And sickle

29:06

cell disease. Determining ancestry. Like,

29:08

think of like 23andMe, Ancestry.com. All

29:10

of that. The whole industry. DNA

29:12

discovery. Help the woman meet the

29:14

little brother she never knew she

29:16

had. We have... Forensic DNA testing.

29:18

To identify the suspect's DNA. The

29:20

whole world of forensics. Solving crimes

29:22

with DNA evidence. Or…

29:24

Proving people

29:27

innocent. Even

29:29

identifying bodies for things like

29:31

reuniting loved ones after wars

29:33

or natural disasters. Or…

29:36

Also another thing,

29:38

this whole renaissance

29:40

in learning about

29:42

human origins. Homo

29:45

sapiens picked up some of

29:47

the DNA from the Neanderthals. None

29:49

of this stuff would have

29:51

been possible without PCR. It's

29:55

just wild. Like, as you're running

29:57

through this litany, it is wild

29:59

that it all runs on something

30:01

that we found in these random

30:03

little worms, these random little bacteria

30:05

that happen to live in really

30:07

hot water. This is wild. Crazy,

30:09

right? Yeah. Okay, and here's my

30:11

favorite example. Yeah. There's something called

30:13

a PCR. At the moment, we're

30:15

using something called a PCR test.

30:17

The PCR test is the very

30:19

same PCR that we use during

30:21

the pandemic to test for COVID.

30:23

That's really the most accurate way

30:25

to tell it's the most reliable

30:27

test. PCR was the sort of

30:29

gold standard of a test. That's

30:31

right. Multiplying COVID RNA so

30:34

it was detectable. Okay, this is

30:36

it's almost eerie that like these

30:38

these hot worms let us to

30:40

COVID test. Yeah, and it's hard

30:42

to know how many more people

30:44

would have died without them. Totally.

30:47

Now, obviously, the development of PCR

30:49

was not just Kerry. It was

30:51

this huge team effort. But in

30:54

1993, Dr. Kerry Mollis, I

30:56

now ask you to receive

30:58

the Nobel Prize from the hands

31:00

of his majesty, the king.

31:02

Kerry Mollis wins the Nobel Prize.

31:04

And the critical component is the

31:06

tech polymerase. And, you know, I

31:08

did ask. Hudson -Freeze, like, are

31:11

you, like, better that you didn't

31:13

win the Nobel Prize? But that

31:15

isn't why you do the science,

31:17

right? Right, right, right. I realized

31:19

it was a critical component, and

31:21

that was sort of payoff in

31:24

itself. Yeah. To know that my

31:26

contribution really counted. Yeah. Like, I

31:28

had a hand in this, like,

31:30

amazing world -changing technology. I don't know.

31:32

It's kind of like if your

31:34

kid is, like, Michael Jordan. Just

31:37

by the way, his radio lab

31:39

producer, Maria Paz Gutierrez. And he's,

31:41

like, playing in every game. Oh,

31:43

God, yes. Yes.

31:46

My little bug. My little bug

31:48

has made it. Yeah.

31:51

Yeah, you're the scout. You're the

31:54

talent scout who saw Michael Jordan. Yeah.

31:58

Today actually Hudson Freese works in

32:00

an institute where they work on

32:02

like rare genetic diseases, including and

32:05

especially in children. Like they use

32:07

PCR all the time at his

32:09

institute to help, you know, to

32:11

help, like to literally save lives,

32:13

you know, make people's lives more

32:15

livable. It's really, really beautiful work.

32:17

It took a long time before

32:19

I was able to use TAC

32:22

and to really make a difference

32:24

for individuals and keep people alive

32:26

that likely would have died. It's

32:29

funny how 1966 was a

32:31

real turning point. Yeah I

32:33

find this like a just

32:35

a beautiful beautiful story About

32:37

what is life capable of

32:40

like what can life even

32:42

do totally and in the

32:44

end like It really became

32:46

this life -changing, life -saving discovery.

32:48

And in such a pure

32:50

way, it's like this open

32:53

-ended question, could there be

32:55

life in this extremely hot

32:57

place? Yeah. Let me do

32:59

really good samples and you

33:01

did good science to find

33:03

out. Yep. And then all

33:06

I do is put it

33:08

in the library. There's

33:10

something like pure on

33:12

so many levels. Yeah,

33:14

like just idle curiosity.

33:17

paying off way more and

33:19

in ways that nobody

33:21

could ever expect. All of

33:23

that came out of

33:25

$180 ,000 grant from the

33:27

US government. That's why

33:29

Hudson Freeze and Thomas Brock, they

33:31

won the Golden Goose Award

33:33

in 2013. Honestly,

33:36

like you could hand out a

33:38

Golden Goose Award every day, you

33:40

know, pretty much anything that is

33:42

some kind of technology making life

33:44

better in some way, it all

33:46

started in basic science. So

33:49

as we've been working on this

33:51

story, Latif, you know, you mentioned at

33:53

the beginning, it is this sort

33:55

of parable of our time. Well, I

33:57

mean, when you put it next

33:59

to what is going on in the

34:01

news right now, which are all

34:03

of these cuts, it feels like a

34:05

tale of a... that we are

34:07

in danger of losing. Yeah. So to

34:10

kind of bring this story to

34:12

connect it to the avalanche of cuts

34:14

coming to publicly funded science, we

34:16

turn to somebody whose voice you probably

34:18

recognize. My name's Carl

34:20

Zimmer, and I'm a

34:22

columnist at The New York

34:24

Times. He has been watching all

34:26

the cuts really closely, detailing

34:28

it in his newsletter called Friday's

34:30

Elk. So what I've been

34:32

doing is trying to to still

34:34

for myself just summarizing what

34:36

my fellow journalists have been digging

34:38

up. And so we called

34:40

them up to give us a

34:43

more granular look at what's

34:45

been frozen, what's been shut down,

34:47

what's been lost. I

34:49

don't think we know yet, honestly. There

34:51

are lots of efforts to push back that

34:53

are happening now. There are a number

34:55

of lawsuits. There may be more

34:57

lawsuits, but we don't know how judges will

34:59

rule. We don't. know at this point if

35:01

the Trump administration is going to really adhere

35:03

to what the judges say. But

35:06

I can say government scientists

35:08

are getting laid off in

35:10

the tens of thousands. Opportunities

35:13

for young scientists

35:15

are getting wiped out.

35:18

Grants are being eliminated. Universities

35:20

are suddenly having billions

35:22

of dollars of research suddenly

35:24

pulled. There was a

35:26

big diabetes program at Columbia.

35:28

There was a program

35:31

on studying chronic fatigue. These

35:33

have been going on for years. They're

35:35

gone. No one's

35:37

in those labs? Just empty? They're

35:40

gone. They're shut down. Things

35:42

are happening on all fronts. Carl

35:44

says a lot of the cuts

35:47

to scientists and basic research are

35:49

coming in the form of broad

35:51

cuts at government agencies. For example,

35:53

the Trump administration has put forward

35:55

a budget in which NASA's science

35:58

budget would be a cut in

36:00

half, which experts have described as

36:02

kind of an extinction level event

36:04

for science at NASA. This is

36:06

all the stuff that you read

36:08

about in the newspapers, like, you

36:11

know, what did we discover on

36:13

Mars? Or there is a space

36:15

telescope called the Nancy Grace Roman

36:17

Space Telescope. It is built. If

36:20

it gets into space, it will

36:22

be able to give us an incredible

36:24

picture on the whole universe, including

36:26

the evolution of galaxies and even better

36:28

look at planets around other solar

36:30

systems might help us find life on

36:32

other solar systems in the proposed

36:34

budget. That telescope is dead. It gets

36:36

no funding. It's just going to

36:38

sit there and do nothing. Yeah. Yeah.

36:41

It's absurd. Then the

36:43

National Oceanographic and Atmospheric

36:45

Administration's climate science program,

36:48

that is being proposed to be

36:50

shut down. Just shut

36:52

down. Fully, fully. Shut down.

36:55

The EPA. At the EPA,

36:57

they have research scientists who

36:59

do science to understand the

37:02

threats to... health, there's movements

37:04

to have all 1 ,000 of

37:06

them laid off. The

37:08

EPA will not have a research science

37:10

staff if this follows through. You

37:13

know, the Centers for Disease Control,

37:15

for example, Center for Disease Control used

37:17

to have an office full of

37:20

experts on lead poisoning. And

37:22

in fact, Milwaukee has just had

37:24

a lead poisoning emergency and they would

37:26

like to have CDC send their

37:28

experts. There are no lead poisoning experts

37:30

at the CDC. They're just

37:32

gone now. They've been fired. What

37:34

about, I mean, what about NSF, NIH? Yeah,

37:38

NSF, their proposal is to cut it

37:40

in half. And Department of

37:42

Health and Human Services. That's the department

37:44

that houses the National Institutes of

37:46

Health. Ten thousand people have been fired.

37:49

That has included lots of people

37:51

involved in doing basic research on

37:53

biomedicine. And in one example, Carl

37:55

told us about a group of

37:58

scientists who've been working over the

38:00

last several years. Trying to make

38:02

a coronavirus vaccine that is going

38:04

to be able to give us

38:06

some protection against other strains of

38:08

COVID or maybe some entirely new

38:10

coronavirus. They've made a lot of

38:13

progress and a lot of their progress came with

38:15

a deeper understanding of how the immune system works. So

38:17

they've learned a lot of basic science along

38:19

the way and it has been delivering a lot

38:21

of promise. And

38:24

that grant has just been

38:26

pulled with no explanation. That

38:28

research is now over. There are

38:30

projects looking for antivirals for a

38:32

range of different viruses that might

38:34

start the next pandemic. That's been

38:36

canceled too, and those scientists aren't

38:38

even sure if they'll be able

38:40

to write up their results. Like,

38:43

you may not find out what they've done. There's

38:46

just too many to choose

38:48

from. I mean, I've been talking

38:50

with a researcher who has

38:52

a massive program on understanding tuberculosis

38:54

in the immune system. This

38:56

is the most deadly infectious disease

38:58

we have these days. It

39:00

kills over a million people a

39:02

year. His grant was canceled,

39:04

and honestly, he's not sure why.

39:07

This huge program that could

39:09

give us new insights about

39:11

tuberculosis and might eventually lead

39:13

to new treatments is just

39:15

Gone. Just gone. So

39:18

there are definitely very

39:20

short -term impacts of

39:22

what this administration is

39:24

doing, cutting off the

39:26

supply of drugs for HIV or

39:28

halting a clinical trial, potentially give a

39:30

treatment for cancer. These people are

39:33

in the middle of these trials and

39:35

they're just stopping. So those are

39:37

really short -term things. I mean, is

39:39

there some chance that businesses like the

39:41

private sector in general would come

39:43

in and fund all of this, like

39:45

pick it up, get back up. That's

39:51

not great business. You'd be waiting

39:53

a long time for those drug

39:55

companies to pick up all that

39:57

basic research that governments like the

39:59

United States have been covering for

40:01

decades. And a lot

40:03

of this stuff, you know, when it's dropped,

40:06

it's really difficult to ever start it up again.

40:08

You don't bounce back. from this

40:10

sort of shock to the system.

40:12

And, you know, a system of

40:15

searching for knowledge, there is so

40:17

much that needs to be ready

40:19

to go. Equipment, materials, administration, all

40:21

the gathering up of research subjects,

40:23

and then the scientists themselves. In

40:25

1970, there was a poll that

40:27

Nature did recently. They've asked hundreds

40:29

of scientists about... effect all of

40:32

this chaos is having on them

40:34

and their thoughts about their future.

40:36

And 75 % of these American

40:38

scientists said they have been thinking

40:40

about maybe moving. Other

40:44

people may just leave science.

40:47

35 years of being a science writer. I

40:50

haven't seen anything close to

40:52

this. And I

40:54

mean, Carl says what we

40:56

are seeing right now is just

40:58

Uncharted territory really I mean

41:00

at this point I'm thinking We're

41:03

well on our way to

41:05

the United States losing its prime

41:07

position in science All right,

41:09

I'm just gonna put my head

41:11

on the desk and leave

41:13

it here Maybe we can have

41:15

you know talk about happier

41:17

things at another time, but this

41:19

is what we need to

41:21

be talking about now Okay,

41:48

Lulu. So I know

41:50

we're in shambles here. Yeah.

41:52

But I kind of saved,

41:55

there's one extra detail from

41:57

the Hudson Freeze tack story,

41:59

knowing that we would need

42:01

to pick me up at

42:03

the end here. Okay. Because

42:05

it's like one of my

42:07

favorite little details about this

42:09

story. Please. Well, okay. Yes,

42:11

please. In the late 1980s,

42:14

a Berkeley paleobiologist started

42:16

using PCR to find DNA

42:18

in ancient weevils. Okay. And the

42:20

ancient weevils were found in

42:22

amber. Okay. And it counts very

42:25

little bit, but the story

42:27

goes that the novelist Michael Crichton

42:29

heard about that. Yes,

42:31

oh my god. he was

42:33

like, huh, that's a great premise.

42:35

Jurassic Park. So he wrote

42:37

Jurassic Park, which is amazing because when

42:39

we interviewed Hudson Freeze, his

42:41

takeaway from his research was

42:43

like, life. Finds away, and

42:45

you're like yeah, that's from

42:47

a movie that was inspired

42:49

by the thing you discovered

42:52

that is Incredible yeah full

42:54

circle yeah, okay, okay, so

42:56

that's our episode for today

42:58

big. Thank you of course

43:00

to Hudson freeze and Our

43:02

little friend thermos aquaticus. We

43:04

didn't say this earlier, but

43:06

his professor and co -author Thomas

43:08

Brock died in 2021. And

43:11

the song that

43:13

Hudson Freeze sang at

43:15

Thomas Brock's funeral.

43:17

It is the dawning

43:19

of the age

43:21

of Aquaticus. Age of

43:23

Aquaticus. Aquaticus.

43:25

That's right. Something like that.

43:27

Give me a little time to

43:29

warm up. Thank

43:34

you as well to Joanne

43:36

Padrone -Carney, also to her

43:38

team Erin Heath, Valeria Sabate,

43:41

Gwendolyn Bogard, Meredith Asbury, and

43:43

Megan Cantwell at AAAS for

43:45

being a tremendous help to

43:47

this episode and for administering

43:49

the Golden Goose Award. Thank

43:51

you as well to Gregor

43:53

Kavlik and Derek Muller and

43:55

the rest of the Veritasium

43:57

team, who I actually collaborated

43:59

with to do a YouTube...

44:01

about this topic. They

44:03

even go into how

44:05

post Nobel, Kerry Mullis,

44:08

went totally off the deep

44:10

end and lost all his

44:12

scientific credibility. Check out

44:14

that on YouTube. This

44:18

episode was reported by Latif Nasser and

44:20

Maria Paz Gutierrez. It was produced by

44:22

Maria Paz Gutierrez and Sara Kari, edited

44:24

by Alex Neeson with help from Sara

44:26

Kari. Music and sound design by Jeremy

44:28

Bloom. And our fact checker on this

44:31

one was Emily Krieger. That's it. Thank

44:33

you so much for listening. See you

44:35

next week. Catch you next week. Hi,

44:41

I'm Priya Ramachandran D'Souza, and

44:43

I'm from Finland. And here

44:45

are the staff credits. Radio Lab was

44:47

created by Jad Abumrod and is

44:49

edited by Sauron Wheeler. Lulu Miller and

44:51

Latif Nasser are our co -hosts. Dylan

44:53

Keefe is our director of sound

44:55

design. Our staff includes

44:58

Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom,

45:00

Becca Bressler, W. Harry

45:02

Fortuna, David Gable, Maria

45:04

Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Gnana

45:06

Sambandan, Matt Kialty, Annie

45:08

McEwen, Alex Mason, Sara

45:10

Curry, Sara Sandback, Anissa Veitse,

45:12

Arya Wax, Pat Walters, and

45:15

Molly Webster. Our fact checkers

45:17

are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger,

45:19

and Natalie Middleton. Hi,

45:23

I'm Arturo, calling from New York

45:25

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