60 Minutes - 09/21/2025: Disrupter U., Sculpting Evolution, Flight of the Monarchs

Episode Date: September 22, 2025

Charlie Kirk’s assassination last week has prompted a nationwide conversation on free speech, a founding principle of a Texas startup university that correspondent Jon Wertheim first reported on in November. The University of Austin has been labeled by some as “anti-woke,” but founders, students and advisors tell Wertheim they believe they’re grounded in free speech, disrupting modern academia by fostering debate and ideological openness in their classrooms. Researchers on Nantucket are attempting something unprecedented: using genetic engineering to curb Lyme disease, a tick-borne illness spreading across the U.S. Instead of targeting deer or ticks, they hope to release genetically altered wild mice that are immune to Lyme disease and thereby curb its transmission. CBS News chief medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook visits the island to meet the scientists and hear how their first-of-its-kind approach could reshape the future of disease prevention. One of the most awe-inspiring and mysterious migrations in the natural world stretches from the United States and Canada to Mexico. This incredible spectacle involves millions of monarch butterflies embarking on a monumental aerial journey. Correspondent Anderson Cooper reports from the mountains of Mexico, where the monarchs spend the winter months sheltering in trees before emerging in February to take flight again. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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bestel in market upholing. everyone has an opinion on, quote, wokeness, nowhere more than on our college campuses. Politics should be studied at a university. It shouldn't be the operating system of university. In Texas, one new university is prioritizing open debate

to reset the marketplace of ideas. If our universities are screwed up, and I believe they are, then that will screw up America as a whole quite quickly. The natural disaster in our area is not hurricanes or tornado, earthquakes, it is Lyme disease. Genetic engineers believe they found a way to slow the spread of the debilitating disease carried by ticks. It is amazing to see this. Tonight, a look at something that's never been attempted,

genetically engineering wild mice to prevent people from getting sick. Do you worry about fooling around with Mother Nature? It's not easy to get to. to, and it's not easy to see at first, but then one of the most amazing migration stories in nature reveals itself. Towers of monarch butterflies. Orange, twisting, soaring, and one of the most remarkable things we've ever seen. I'm Scott Pelly. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alphonsey. I'm John Wertheim.

I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Leslie Stahl. Those stories and a preview of what's coming up in our 58th season tonight on 60 Minutes. These are not soaring times for higher education. Tuition costs rise unchecked. Contempt for campus culture, the trigger warnings, safe space, microaggressions, help swing the election, a political win aided in part by the work of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. His assassination 11 days ago has prompted a nationwide

conversation on free speech, which, as correspondent John Wertheim first reported last year, is a founding principal of the University of Austin, a college startup touting open debate, a shout-nothing but say-anything philosophy, and for now, free tuition. Will this be just another politicized campus swinging right, or a true disruptor resetting the marketplace of ideas? 141 years old, the University of Texas at Austin ranks among the country's largest schools. Football games draw more than 100,000 fans, but blocks away in between a Ruth's Chris and a velvet taco

on a floor of what was once a downtown department store, one of America's smallest universities. UATX, the University of Austin. How would you describe members of the founding class? You're outspoken. You'll never enter a conversation and leave without something that you didn't know before talking to someone. Olivia Altunas, Dylan Wu, Constantine Whitmire, Grace Price, and Jacob Hornstein are among the 92 students in the inaugural class.

If UT is celebrated for Longhorn football, the focal point of UATX... Pursuing the truth. Are you stopped by telling the truth? Pursuit of truth. Fearless pursuit of truth to me is I have this kind of mentality that the best way that you should go about your life is to always assume that you're wrong in some capacity. You're prepared for that. Right. To be challenged and stress-tested and confronted?

It's not just even prepared. That's why I'm at this school. I want them to be challenged, because I know that I'm wrong in some way. What are some things that differentiate you guys? We're very intellectually diverse. I've met people of every political persuasion here from, like, far-left Democrats who are for Bernie Sanders or to the left of that even, to people who would make Donald Trump look like a liberal.

Roughly half the students come from Texas, a third or female. They share academic strength, averaging in the 92nd percentile on the SAT. Some were accepted at schools like the University of Chicago in Georgetown, but chose UATX for what it is and is not. I remember visiting a college in the northeast of the U.S. and the student guiding me there was like, ah, we have different dorms for different student groups. I didn't want to go to a space that was like that.

Why do you think it's important to be at a college where differing views aren't just accepted and tolerated, but welcome. We're actually listening to the other side and understanding each other. And still, we're friends with each other. I vehemently disagree with many of the things. Jacob says, and I think you do, too, I don't want to. It's like why. I'm still going along pretty well, and it's a beautiful thing.

Not exactly the vibe on so many other campuses. Long before, Hamas attacked Israel on October. On October 7, 2023, colleges have been sites of protest and have leaned left. But the atmosphere has intensified over the past decade. Speakers shouted down. You're not listening. Professors canceled when students feel unheard. And Hamas now!

Then the reckoning. Campus chaos led first to congressional hearings. Ms. McGill, the fact is that Penn regulates speech that it doesn't like. Then to the resignation of the presidents at Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. From a historian's point of view, it's terribly important that the United States improves reforms, revitalizes its universities. Scottish-born, Oxford-educated, and recently knighted, Neil Ferguson is one of the founders of UATX. An historian, also known for his conservative views, Ferguson spent more than a decade as a professor at Harvard

and is now a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. You say something is rotten in the state of academia. What do you mean by that? Right up until, I guess, the early 2000s, it still seemed like universities were the places where you could think most freely and speak most freely and take the most intellectual risk. And at some point in the last 10th,

10 years, that changed, and it changed in a way that began to stifle free expression. We came across some data that less than 3% of the Harvard faculty identifies as conservative, more than 75% identifies as liberal. Wildly out of proportion with the American public. There's a huge disconnect now between the academic elite and the average American voter. Ferguson says this political imbalance, plus social media, plus an army of campus administrators monitoring speech, equals a culture where, per one study, nearly 80% of today's students self-censor on campus for fear of being ostracized. Faculty feels the chill, too.

The president of a university I won't name once told me that he received, on average, one email a day from a member of the university community calling for somebody else to be fired for something they'd said. That reminds me vividly of the battle days of Stalin-Soviet Union. Stalin-Soviet Union, and yet it's happening on American campuses. The stakes are that high. I think if a university system starts to go wrong, then something is bound to go wrong for the society as a whole. The ideas that start on campus pretty quickly spread to corporations, to media organizations.

University forms the way you think about the world for the rest of your life. If our universities are screwed up, and I believe they are, then that will screw up America as a whole quite quickly. In 2021, Ferguson launched UATX with founder of the Free Press, Barry Weiss, Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of data analytics company Palantir, and Pano Canellos, the former president of St. John's College in Maryland. Larry Summers, the former Harvard president and U.S. Treasury Secretary under Clinton, became an advisor. In this ad, they announced they were, quote, done waiting for America's universities to fix themselves. UATX received initial approval from the state of Texas and raised nearly $200 million from private donors in part to cover tuition. Good morning, everyone.

Canellos was named president. Our work is to stir up settled ideas. Now the school's chancellor, he says that to the detriment of learning, colleges have become echo chambers. What is going on on campuses that are leading you to draw this conclusion? It's as if people have come to expect that they're just sort of two versions. of everything, and therefore there's a right version and a wrong version, depending on which side you stand. But the truth is that one opinion, meeting another opinion,

shouldn't leave us with two opinions, it should leave us with better opinions. What do you mean about that exactly? The Christian values that we have. To combat fears of saying the wrong thing in class, UATX comes armed with a weapon. Tell an American audience, what do you mean by Chatham House rule? The Chatham House rule is a great British invention, And it says that if you are a participant in a discussion and you hear an interesting thing said, maybe a controversial thing, you can refer to the information that you've gleaned,

but you can't attribute it to a person. People fear that the thing they said that was not right was politically incorrect, ends up on X or for that matter on Instagram. And that which happens in the classroom should stay in the classroom. At UATX, classes are small seminar style and based in Western civilization, the Bible, Greek classics. Faculty includes a former Navy captain, a Greek Orthodox priest, Father Maximos teaches a class on chaos and civilization, and a tech entrepreneur.

You're trying to play the Steve Jobs role here, right? There are no on-campus science labs, but founders chose Austin for its booming startup culture, linking students with companies like Elon Musk's neuralink. How do you take this cutting-edge research? And helping the kids sharpen their tech skills and even fund their own ideas. We have both a nonprofit and a startup side. To STEM, the scandalously high costs of higher education,

the UATX campus is bare bones. No dorms, the students live in apartments next to UT undergrads, and no meal plan. Cook for yourselves, kids. The closest thing we found to a college rager, students learning the Texas Two-Step. When the guys next door are playing beer pong and you're reading Aristotle and working with lasers. Playing chess. Any envy?

That's not to say that we're all prudes and we just spend all day reading Aristotle. We have fun. As for admissions, UATX swaps DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion for what some call. call MEI, merit, excellence, and intelligence. Gender, race, ethnicity, what is the factor of that in your admission decisions? We don't take any of that into consideration of admissions. The primary thing that we're interested in is the mind. Meaning what?

The kind of capacity to think deeply, to answer questions, to challenge norms. I've got to tell you, we did not see a particularly diverse student body. We are putting resources into finding talent of an intellectual variety. And if you're interested in diversity, I recommend you look at the social backgrounds of our students, at the family circumstances of our students. High-profile UATX donors include Trump-backing billionaire Bill Ackman, a Harvard grad who vocally criticized his school after October 7th. And Harlan Crow, close friend of conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Critics attack UATX as a right-wing university, simply wearing the cloak of free speech. UATX has been called the anti-woke university.

Harvard is a liberal university. UATX is going to be a conservative university. Politics should be studied at a university. It shouldn't be the operating system of university. Any university that is identifiably political is not fulfilling its highest mission. Pushback might be, are you going to be too dependent to don't? dependent to donors. We've seen on other campuses what happens when the donor class gets dissatisfied. Do you worry about that?

If donors are ever pushing us in a way that is not aligned with our mission in that, somebody's going to call us out on it. In the backers aren't solely from the right. A liberal legal scholar Nadine Strausson was president of the ACLU for nearly 20 years and was until recently a UATX advisor. The most important topics of public policy debate are not being candidly and frankly discussed on campus, including abortion, immigration, police practices, anything to do with race and gender. Provided it comes with no serious harm, Strassen argues all speech should be allowed. You think censorship leads to worse outcomes than allowing even the most objectively hateful speech.

My concern is to try to eliminate the underlying discriminatory attitudes. You don't do that by punishing. expression. You do that through education, through more speech, not less. Free-range, free speech resonated. When UATX announced its founding, thousands sent in job inquiries. Some of UATX's academics were disciplined, canceled, they may say, at their previous schools. Some of the advisors and faculty came here under some clouds of controversy. I mean, that's not what we're seeking. I mean, we're not, you know, shelter for...

Even for the council. Even for people. have canceled, but many of the people who are pushing boundaries in academic culture, let's say, in the public sphere, have paid a price for that and still should be heard. UATX's national accreditation won't be decided until the first class is graduated, a standard for new universities. Meanwhile, new student applications are open. Tuition still free.

So is the speech. Crime doesn't take a day off, and neither do we. I'm Katie Ring, host of the Crime House Daily podcast. Twice every weekday, we bring you the biggest crime stories as they unfold. In the morning, get the latest updates. At night, dive into the moments that matter. The pursuit of justice never stops, and with Crimehouse Daily, you won't have to either. Listen to and follow Crimehouse Daily, available now wherever you get your podcasts.

Now, Dr. John LePook on assignment for 60 minutes. Biologist Charles Darwin began crafting his theory of evolution on a trip to the Galapagos Islands, where he discovered animals had developed unique traits that varied from island to island. Nearly two centuries later, on a different island, scientists aren't just observing evolution. They now have the technology to shape it. This past year, we met a team of modern-day Darwin's on Nantucket, where they're hoping to use genetic engineering to reduce the transmission of Lyme disease, a tick-borne illness found primarily in the northeast and upper Midwest,

but also throughout the United States. The scientist's target may surprise you. It's not the deer often associated with the disease or even the ticks, but wild mice, the main carriers of Lyme. It's a first-of-its-kind approach, where scientists and locals are working together to decide whether to sculpt evolution. 30 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts

is the island of Nantucket, a 14-mile-long, three-mile-wide oasis known for its natural beauty, pristine shorelines, and protected landscape. But hidden is a scourge that's afflicted 15% of its residents. The natural disaster in our area is not hurricanes or tornadoes or earthquakes. It is Lyme disease.

It is the one plague that might be severe enough that communities might want to engineer a wild organism in order to get rid of it, or at least reduce the level a lot. Last October, deep in the island's brush, we found MIT Associate Professor Kevin Esfeldt, a pioneer in genetic engineering, waving a white flag in search of ticks.

So we just grab it. These tiny vectors of Lyme disease were not hard to, to find. Let me just pop it in. These are the big ones. Yeah. Because these are largely adults. If the adults are this small, imagine the tiny, tiny, what are they called, nymphs?

Yeah. You often think of poppy seed-sized. Esfeld's collaborator is Sam Telford, an epidemiologist at Tufts University, who's been studying ticks on Nantucket for the last 40 years. There's a 50% chance, maybe more, that this is actually carrying Lyme disease. disease. But you're not afraid because it has to be embedded and attached for more than 24 hours. Right.

To infect you. That's correct. These guys will swell up. Yeah. 50 to 100 times that size with blood, you know, it becomes that big. And that's how you know when they're in gorge, you know, that they've been feeding on you. If you see it that big, then you're in trouble. The scientists aren't here just to collect ticks.

They're interested in this critter. This is a wild mouse? This is a wild white-footed mouse. And you've tagged it? I've tagged it, so when I come back in April or May of next year, we get an idea of what overwintering success is. Telford is tracking the mouse population on Nantucket as part of a novel project. The scientists want to use genetic engineering

to interrupt a cycle of infection necessary for Lyme disease to flourish. White-footed mice are the main host of Lyme bacteria. When an uninfected tick bites an infected mouse, the bacteria transfer to the tick. When that infected tick then bites an uninfected mouse, the cycle continues. Deer don't get infected, but they help spread the disease because ticks embed on them to feed, then reproduce, with a single female tick laying as many as 2,000 eggs. Here's Esfelt and Telford's big idea. Change the genetic makeup of the mice so they're immune to Lyme.

That way, the ticks that bite them won't get infected. You don't have to kill the mouse in order to interrupt the cycle. It'd be so much more economical and straightforward to just go out and poison all the mice, right? Get rid of the mice. But then there's a whole food chain that might depend on these mice that would be impacted. The dream is that we can use new technologies to ensure that wild creatures can live in peace, playing their normal ecological role but without causing disease

that make people suffer. Come on in, Winnie. If Esfeld's dream becomes a reality, 80-year-old Dr. Timothy Leprey might finally be able to retire. So how did you get Lyme disease, do you think, Wynie? Over the past 40 years, he's been the island's emergency room head,

sole surgeon, even its medical examiner. Today, Dr. Leppery runs the only private practice on Nantucket, where he treats dozens of patients with Lyme disease each year. Fall my finger. And yes, that's a giant tick in his waiting room. Being in private practice, it is, well, not well paid. You get paid in like, what, chickens and doughnuts? We prefer lobsters, actually.

Lobsters, clams, and scallops. But you'll take anything, right? I will take anything. Come on down, Shauna. Lime disease can be treated with antibiotics. But if left untreated, the infection can spread to the heart, joints, and nervous system, as it did for 33-year-old Shauna Asplant. My body hurts all the time.

Okay. I don't know if that's for my Lyme's disease or what. My neck is stiff, my ankles are sore, and my hips. Asplant was first diagnosed with lung. When she was 10 years old, a few years later, the left side of her face stopped moving. A residual effect from the disease is still noticeable today. Let's see your smile. It's still a little off, and then if I raise my eyebrows, it just doesn't move.

We see people with facial palsies. We see little kids with swollen knees. We see people with lime rashes. So it alters people's behavior and activities. The problem on Nantucket can be traced back to 1926 when locals voted to import two female deer to the island to give a lone buck company. As the deer population grew, so did the ticks. On top of that, by the 1950s, half the land on the island was put into conservation. The untamed brush and wild grasslands create an ideal ecosystem for Lyme's host to thrive.

We have a problem with tick-borne disease because we engineered the environment to maximize the number of ticks and maximize the number of mice that are the best host of Lyme disease. And it came back and bit us, literally. A trip at age 11 to the Galapagos Islands sparked Esfeld's lifelong obsession with evolution. In 2013, he was the first to propose that CRISPR, a revolutionary technology that enables scientists to edit DNA, could be used to change a species' genetics in perpetuity, hacking the laws of inheritance.

I mean, it's not like we won a fitness advantage. This idea led to the project they call mice against ticks in the sculpting evolution lab Esvelt runs at MIT. For the last nine years, he and researcher Joanna Buckthall have been studying whether they could add a gene for an antibody that prevents Lyme infection to a mouse embryo that, as we see here, has progressed into two cells. Is it going to be into one of those cells? Or both of them.

So our technique involves injecting both cells to maximize the likelihood that we get the antibody gene in their DNA. Buckthall and embryologist Zach Hill showed us how they genetically engineer lab mice. He's going to actually inject through the plasma membrane and into the nucleus for both of these cells. How are you at darts? Not very good. A lot better at this. You're going to hit the center of this.

Oh yeah. Okay. So I already have an embryo set up. on the dish here. So I'm just trying to find the nucleus here. It is amazing to see this. So that little burst that you can see in the nucleus is when he's actually injecting the genome engineering tools

directly into the nucleus where the DNA is. The injection mix contains both the antibody gene and CRISPR, which acts like molecular scissors. After CRISPR finds and cuts the targeted area of DNA, The cell inserts the gene into the mouse's genetic code. When this mouse is born, it will be immune to Lyme disease. And so will its children. If I get a polio vaccine,

my kids aren't going to be immune to polio unless they get the vaccine too. That's exactly right. So this is a heritable immunization. What do you mean by that? What we're actually doing is we're encoding immunity so that that immunity is passed on generationally. And every mouse that gets the antibody gene is actually immune. Typical standard evolution happened very slowly, right? Over thousands, maybe millions of

years. Are you speeding up evolution here? We are absolutely speeding up evolution, and that's precisely why we have to be careful, because we are doing things that couldn't happen naturally. The plan is to release thousands of engineered mice on Nantucket over time, starting during the winter months when the native mouse population is low. But first, Esfeldt needs community buy-in. He chose Nantucket, not only for its high rate of line, but also for its tight-knit, well-educated community, with the tradition of town hall democracy. I am going to call the October 23rd Select Board meeting to order at 5.30 p.m. We also need to start small. We saw this in last fall, when, for the 10th time, the scientists presented their latest findings to locals.

So it appears that we have indeed produced the first heritably Lyme-immune laboratory mice capable of breaking the disease transmission cycle. Followed by a public Q&A. We have a huge population of field mice here. Shall we expect a larger population? Having had Lyme disease twice, I thought, what a cool idea. But mice are kind of the first. are kind of the foundation of the food chain.

So tinkering with the food chain makes me a little cautious. How long before it's actually going to take effect and keep me from getting Lyme disease again? When you're in these meetings, what's that been like? Some people are really gung-ho about this. Some people have deep reservations. But what I found heartening about this, and Nantucket in particular,

is that pretty much everyone agrees that This is how we should go about developing these kinds of technologies. That it should not just be scientists in their laboratories, get a clever idea, and then boom, it's there. Dr. Timothy Leprey says he's supportive of the proposal. But as an avid falconer, he wants more testing to be done to ensure there won't be unintended consequences to the island's ecosystem. Could have changed in the field mouse lead to a change in the hawth.

That's the question. I don't think so. But I think that has to be shown. Do you worry about fooling around with Mother Nature? Absolutely. But on the other hand, I'm not terribly fond of Mother Nature if she's going to give my kids disease. All of technology is saying to Mother Nature, you're beautiful and we appreciate you very much

and we need to conserve you, but we're not always happy with the way things work naturally. And so we're going to change it. In this case, you're changing the environment for everybody. This is, I agree, different because it's hard for individuals to opt out. And I think that means we need to do the science differently because we need to ensure that people have a voice early enough to actually influence the direction that the technology is developed. If federal and state regulators agree,

the team plans to first release the engineered mice in a small field trial on a private island so they can better understand the ecological impacts before any potential experiments on Nantucket. What is the home run for you? I think it's a field trial that works. It's something that allows us to dramatically reduce the fraction of ticks that are infected,

that doesn't have anything obviously go wrong with the ecosystem. And then the community has a good discussion, and then they decide. And I think there's benefits, as we discussed, even if they say no, and then we walk away. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and vary by race.

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This year, we reported on one of the most remarkable and mysterious migrations in the natural world happening every spring from Mexico to the United States. Tens of millions of monarch butterflies are on an epic aerial journey home. They've spent the winter hanging out in trees and a forest on a remote mountain in Mexico, resting up after flying all the way from Canada and the northern U.S. where they were born. It's believed monarchs have been making this journey for thousands of years, but there's a lot of lot fewer of them than there used to be. The population in Mexico has declined 70% in the last 30 years. We arrived there in February, just in time to watch the monarchs emerge from their slumber

and begin to take flight. The monarchs come to these mountains in Micho O'Conn and central Mexico, starting in late October. Do you still get excited going up to see them? Every time there's no No substitute. One of our guides, Jorge Rickards, is the director of the nonprofit World Wildlife Fund in Mexico. We're going to leave the horses, walk a little bit, very, very carefully and very quietly, so we won't disturb the butterflies. The monarchs roost in patches of fir and pine trees 11,000 feet up. There are some 66 million of them here, but it's hard to see them.

at first. There are what appear to be clumps of dead leaves hanging from sagging branches. But those are butterflies, tens of thousands of them, clustered together in trees all around. There's so many of them on the branches of the trees, the branches are all pointing toward the ground. Imagine, imagine the likeness of a butterfly, and they are so many of them here that they actually bend the trees, and they like the firs because they have so many little leaves. or spicules, so there's lots of surface to cling on to. The monarchs earn a kind of hibernation. On the way here, they've faddened up on nectar,

which helps them survive and rest through the long winter months. The climate on this mountain is ideal. The canopy of trees protects the butterflies from storms, and though the air is cool, it's relatively humid, so they stay hydrated. The clusters are so drab when you're looking at them because they have their wings closed. In many butterflies, on the underside is drab or less lightly colored, and that happens in nature a lot.

So it's not very inviting. To a predator. Why are we whispering? They are very sensitive to sound. They are also sensitive to CO2. So the less we talk, the better. They relate that with a predator. So they can sense like a mouse breathing.

Or a bird. That is right. On the forest floor, all around us, monarchs litter the ground. But most are not dead. They've just fallen from trees during the night, and their muscles are too cold for them to fly. Cup them in your hands, you can revive them with your breath. They need a certain temperature to get their wing muscles back.

They are very, very vulnerable when they're on the floor. And the birds know that, and the mice know that. That's almost ready. There you go. Come on, little buddy. Maybe a little more. There you go. He likes you.

Wow. When the sun begins to hit the trees, flashes of orange appear. The monarchs are warming and slowly opening their wings. It really is the day warmed up. We're going to see more activities. Cort Whalen has been bringing tour groups here and photographing monarchs for more than 20 years. He shows us a spot where some butterflies have taken flight.

Then, after a few minutes, suddenly the air is filled with them. This is extraordinary. This is it. This is what's all about. This is nature knows when to put on a show, huh? and how to put on a show. Why have they all now just suddenly taken off? So it's a warm day. We're getting a lot of sunlight,

so we're just ramping up, ramping up. I mean, what's insane is it's not just over here, it's over there, it's over there. I mean, it's extraordinary. But yeah, it's all the heat and it's all the sun. You can actually hear the sound of butterfly wings. Yeah. Let's just be quiet for a second.

Look at that, look at that up there. Oh my gosh. Whoa. This is about as good as it possibly gets. It's like a snow globe of monarchs. You got a butterfly on you. Oh, there we go. It's still something of a mystery how these monarchs manage to get here.

Most only live about a month. They spend their short lives, eating and mating, and females lay eggs. But in late summer and early fall, what's called a supergeneration of monarchs appear. Hatched as caterpillars, they transform into chrysalises. And then, after a week or two, emerges butterflies. And that's when they do something extraordinary. With winter coming, they sense the shorter days in changing temperatures and suppress a key reproductive hormone,

a process called diapause, which helps them conserve their energy and live up to nine months, nine times longer than most monarchs. It's crazy that there's this supergeneration of monarchs that can make it all the way, and then the rest or die off after a month. What is amazing is how they detonate this process

of not developing sexual organs, but using that energy for the flight. Monarchs born west of the Rockies stay there and migrate shorter distances. It's this super generation born in Canada and east of the Rockies in the northern United States that flies to Mexico. Hundreds of millions of them join up on a journey of some 3,000 miles, which can take them three months or longer. To help them find their way, monarchs have circadian clocks in their antennae and navigate using internal compasses that respond to the position of the sun and the Earth's magnetic field. Why are they coming here?

Well, that's a big mystery. Maybe it's a prehistoric root. Maybe it was determined by geographical conditions in terms of topography. Maybe it had to do with climate. You're talking about multiple generations who all have this exact same instinct. instinct and know where to go and all go to the exact same spot. That's one of the most magical things that can happen in the natural world. How do they know?

The monarchs were discovered by researchers on this mountain range in 1975, and the Mexican government declared the area of Federal Reserve 11 years later. But for decades, illegal logging threatened the butterfly's roosting spots, which once covered as much as 45 acres. It's now down to four and a half. World Wildlife Fund has spent years trying to combat the destruction, assessing the health of the forest, measuring the size of butterfly colonies, and planting trees.

They've also worked with local communities and indigenous groups to protect the land and help them profit from tourism. The good news is the forest is rebounding. Because it's just so unusual to see this. It's like almost an optical illusion because everything's beating at this weird frequency. It's like the whole world is kind of pulsing. So what are they doing here? Yeah, so this is kind of a classic mud puddling of modern butterflies.

Mud puddling? Yeah, mud puddling. It's a real scientific term. So they're mainly after hydration, but butterflies are known to need some trace elements like salts and whatnot. And it doesn't look like much, but just this little bit of water. water in this mud puddle is enough for them to get some water, and then what will happen is they'll return to the roost before evening. After about four months in Mexico, this supergeneration of monarchs are near the end of their long life cycle. They're finally ready to mate and migrate north to lay their eggs. They'll die before they can make it back to where they were born,

and their offspring might not live long enough to get there either, but future generations will, and there's an army of people trying to help them. In Kansas, volunteers come out to catch and tag monarchs so scientists can track their migration. They're recruited by Chip Taylor, an 87-year-old ecologist who's been fascinated by monarchs since he was a child. There's over 100,000 species of butterflies and moths, but pretty much the only one people know are monarchs. What is it about monarch butterflies? Well, monarchs have got charisma. I mean...

Wait a minute. Monarch butterflies have charisma? Well, yeah, they have charisma because they are accessible. They're large. They're beautiful. They're slow. You can catch them. It involves Canada.

It involves Mexico. Taylor founded a non-profit called Monarch at the University of Kansas 30 years ago. Nice. And so far, it's helped tag more than two million of them. How do you tag a butterfly that's so delicate? that's so delicate. This is a rough butterfly, and that has to go thousands of miles.

So it's a pretty tough butterfly. It's resilient. Yeah, it's resilient. But that resilience is being tested. Monarchs returning to the U.S. need milkweed plants to lay their eggs on, and it's the only source of food their newly born caterpillars will eat. But milkweed is now hard to find. It's been virtually eradicated on agricultural land

because of genetically modified corn and soybean crops. that allow for mass spraying of herbicides. Monarch Watch encourages people to plant milkweed in their gardens and on public land, creating what they call monarch way stations. 50,000 of them have been planted so far. In Mexico, those efforts have gotten noticed. Eduardo Rendon, head of World Wildlife Fund's Monarch Butterfly program, showed us a tag he recently found.

So this is one of the tags from Monarch Watch from Chip Taylor. Exactly. I find maybe 12 meters for over here. Yeah, I was measuring the colony, and then I see the ground, and I find this tag. But it's the only way that we can to prove that monarch from the United States and Canada come here to over winter.

Less than 20% of the monarchs that head out on this miraculous migration actually make it to the mountains of Michoacom. Scientists say worsening storms and rising temperatures kill off many, though this past year the number of monarchs that survived the trip nearly doubled. It was particularly welcome news in Mexico, where the butterflies' arrival in late October coincides with a deeply spiritual celebration, what's known as the Day of the Dead.

That's when many here believe the souls of family and friends who died return to visit their loved ones. And so that's why the butterflies are returning as well. Local people believe that the monarchs are the returning spirits of... That is correct. Of the death. That is correct, yes. So who knows? Maybe we are, actually, you are reviving,

you're helping someone's ancestor fly back. Yes indeed. So it's very magical. Over the past months, 60 Minutes has criss-crossed continents in search of new stories. Now, like travelers returning home, we're eager to share what we discovered along the way. We ventured to the highest mountains. Here it is. Out to sea. And along the front.

Would you mind playing for us? I would pleasure. We were awed by virtuosos. Oh, look at that. Oh, my God. Natural wonders. Say the other place you were thinking of. Thailand was the other one you were going to go with. Come on!

A master mentalist. Okay, now you're freaking me out. And a machine program to create a masterpiece. Go to black, go to black, go to black. We also tapped into fun. It's all improvised. We shnaddle with each other. Are you and I shnadling?

We're in the process of shnadling right now. We're in the process of shnadling right now. I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back next week with the 58th season premiere of 60 Minutes. Now streaming. Everyone who comes into this clinic is a mystery. We don't know what we're looking for. Their bodies are the scene of the crime.

Their symptoms in history are clues. We saved her life. We're doctors and we're detectives. I kind of love it if I'm being honest. Solve the puzzle. Save the patient. Watson, all episodes now streaming on Paramount Plus.