Radiolab - Dispatch 6: Strange Times

Episode Date: May 29, 2020

Covid has disrupted the most basic routines of our days and nights. But in the middle of a conversation about how to fight the virus, we find a place impervious to the stalled plans and frenetic demands of the outside world. It’s a very different kind of front line, where urgent work means moving slow, and time is marked out in tiny pre-planned steps. Then, on a walk through the woods, we consider how the tempo of our lives affects our minds and discover how the beats of biology shape our bodies. This episode was produced with help from Molly Webster and Tracie Hunte. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.  

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W-N-Y-S. See? See?

Yeah. Hey, it's Jad, Radio Lab. This is dispatch number six. Okay, calling. I'm initiating the call. Hi, can I speak to Mark, please? This is he. Hello, hello.

Hi, Mark. This is Jad, and I'm also here with Molly from Radio Lab. Hi, Mark. Molly, nice to meet you. Hi. Thanks for taking the time. Okay, as I mentioned last week, we've all been thinking about time these days. And in this dispatch, two completely unexpected time wormholes that I fell into while reporting about the coronavirus.

And just trying to get through this great pause that we're all in. The first wormhole deals with a guy who, as much as anyone, has really helped us. Understand the enemy that we're up against. His name is Mark Denison. He works at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee. Well, all right. I thank you again for making the time. It would super appreciate it.

Yeah. Yeah, you know, we just want to ask you some questions about your background, questions about the drug. I got Molly to come on because Molly is much smarter about these kinds of topic areas than I am. And she's been following your work as well. So, I guess. No, just those words alone. We've been following your work are like words I just have never heard before. You are having like a bit of a rock star moment, yeah?

Yeah, well, it's not my goal. Definitely not my goal. Yeah. You know, it has been a sort of a little bit of a down the rabbit hole through the looking glass sort of experience. What makes the moment so looking glassy for Mark is that he's been studying coronavirus for 30 years. This thing that we've all just woken up to, which is actually a very ancient virus, by the way. His lab has been studying it for three decades, which in human corona time feels like an epoch. His lab was the one that figured out one of the really novel.

parts of the coronavirus family, which is that they've got a built-in fact-checker that allows them to fact-check the copies that they make of themselves as they get made, which is what has allowed them to grow big and be complex. His lab figured that out in 2007. Seven years ago, they figured out how to trick that fact-checker and disrupt the virus's ability to make copies of itself, which has led to a drug... This may be the most sought-after drug on our pandemic-ridden planet. You've probably heard of. The experimental antiviral drug called remdesivir. Remdesivir. Remdesivir. Remdesivir. The FDA expected to grant emergency approval of the drug, is this the hope so many have been waiting for? Remdesivir in preliminary data has been found to shorten recovery times from COVID.

A significant positive effect. Under certain circumstances, it shortened hospital stays by up to four days. This will be the standard of care. I've studied it for seven years. I know. I know. No, it's really good at killing coronaviruses. In every coronavirus we've tested, in every animal we've tested, every aspect of this says, this is good, this is good, this is good. But he says right now, the drug. It's an IV drug. And so it can only be given to people in the hospital.

You have to be in the hospital to get it. And if that's the case, you're probably already sick. So we started talking about all this, and it quickly became clear, that this guy who's been studying this ancient virus for 30 years, It's like he's been plucked out of obscurity and his sense of time has had to radically change. All of a sudden he's under a lot of pressure. People are pushing for results.

His lab at Vanderbilt was one of the few facilities in the world that can work with the virus. So he's fielding calls from dozens and dozens of scientists and companies who are like, hey, I've got this compound. Can you test it against the virus? I've got a potential vaccine. We need your help running this experiment because we don't know how to do it.

You know, yes, we feel the pressure. It's like the world is suddenly asking him to go way faster than he thinks he can go. I understand this is very different. This is outside of any scope of anything, any of us have ever experienced in our lives. But a couple things. One is, I've sort of been telling my people over and over again, this is too urgent to go fast. Why wouldn't you say it's so urgent that we have to go fast? No, I mean, for multiple reasons.

For one, he says, Just there's some basic limits. Like if you're experimenting with the virus in the lab, you've got to grow it in the lab. And that takes time. You know, it takes two days or three days in culture to grow. If you're testing it with a drug, it may take longer. You know, what have you done today is really a test to be what have you done this week and this month, which is sort of counter to the speed, the need for speed.

And I just tell people that I will never make them accelerate their work to match a deadline, that the virus biology won't allow. Yeah, so you're not just kind of going in and doing an experiment. But then we started talking more about the lab itself, the BSL-3, biosafety level three lab, which he runs at Vanderbilt University. This is where they do the experiments on these dangerous pathogens. It took them two years to just set up the lab to begin with because it's got to be built in exactly the right way

with the right air-condition units that always suck air in a certain direction and the right rooms within rooms, within rooms, to make sure everything is always contained inside. It's one of the most regulated places on Earth. And he says when you are in that kind of space, it forces you into a completely different time flow. Work at BSI is hyper methodical. You do one thing at a time.

Like you take a flask, and if you open the, you don't do anything with your hip or your elbow or your other hand or your head. You know, you do everything with an intentionality. That's very, it's sort of anti-reilly how we train to kind of move forward fast and do lots of things in the day. You take a flask out, you move it to the incubator. You set it down, you go back, and you close the incubator.

Everything is written down. You follow the guidelines. You follow them one step at a time. Your phones, you can't enter a phone. You can't respond to an email. The world sort of comes to a stop while you're working in there. And you have to do that because it's so dangerous? Yeah.

No one can tell you to speed up when you're in the BSO3. I said about eight inches from my mouth, right? Should I just hold it like that? No one can tell you to go fast. Maybe just a little closer to your mouth? Okay. There was something about the way Mark talked about the BSL3, the way people have to move and operate in that place,

that made me want to talk to someone from his lab who worked there. My first name is Andrea. My last name is Dutch, it's praussers, which nobody can pronounce here. My husband always says trousers with a P and instead of T, so prousers. And what do you do with the lab? I direct the coronavirus antiviral research program. What's an average day like? Can you walk us through it? Yeah, yeah. So first of all, we usually, we prepare a lot outside the room because everything that goes into the room can never come out.

I leave a note on my door that I'm going to the BSL3 and what time I'm going there. Because if I'm not back in about six hours, somebody needs to come check on me. All right, this Monday morning, I am walking to the BSL 3. Walk down the hall with our cart. I got my stuff loaded onto a cart with our supplies. Spend most of the morning making dilutions, this drug that I'm testing against SARS-CoV-2. And I'm ready now. Do you ever get scared of the viruses you work with?

When we got that shipment of SARS-CoV-2, so the current coronavirus from the CDC, I did shake a little bit opening that box. You know, it was a big deal. When I approach, I can't really go into too much details. I'm here now. I can't tell you where to BSL3 is because it's a biosecurity issue. Does your husband know where it is? He does not. No, absolutely not.

He doesn't need to know. Letting myself in. Now I'm in the entry room, which is a lot. where I get dressed and put on my PPE. And so in the ante room, we take street clothes off, cover ourselves in Typhac, head to toe. I'm putting on gloves. We wear two pairs of gloves.

Second pair of clothes. And then I'm going to put on my capper, which is my respirator. Turning it on now. Wow, you're totally enclosed. closed. Which I like. This is the sign that it's working correct. I feel kind of like an astronaut when all that's set and done. So then once I'm all suited up, now I'm ready to go in. I let myself in and then I start my work. I set up my workspace. I'm going to take the virus out of the

freezer right now. It starts going to it's in a small tube. I check if there any lights flashing. I need to be aware of everything that goes on around me because we have redundant safety mechanisms but if they are failing,

I need to know about that. And I'm going to put it in a microcentrofuge. The centrifuge is for a little bit. It's very important that you're always aware of where you are. Is there somebody behind me? Is there someone next to me? Who might I potentially bump into? All right. So that's the sound of the microcentive's being done.

I'm going to take it out now and set up my assay. I'm going to dilute the virus further. You move your head. You look around. You're always aware of where you are, whose path we might be blocking. We're bigger than we normally are because we wear all that equipment.

Oh, yeah. All right, I've infected these cells with virus now. And now I'm going to have an incubate for about half an hour. Always know where your hands are. Every time you touch it, too, there might be a little bit of virus. on our gloves. So we always have to be aware of what we touch

and what order we touch it in. All right, now I'm going to qualify the number of infectious viral particles in a mixture. So whenever we open the tube of virus, it's inside the biosafety cabinet. You drop some volume. You put the volume in the next tube that's already open because I don't want to have to worry about having the liquid in my pipe pit tip

and then have to open the tube because it could create aerosols. We're very concerned about aerosols. which are tiny little droplets that could land on other things and they could contaminate other things. So we put it in the tube and then we move kind of in the same line in the same direction. Basically what I'm doing here is looking at the dense sheets of cells. Andrea says just to be allowed to walk in the room, it takes six months of training. We have all kinds of protocols for everything. Everything is very protocol driven.

To learn all the rules. How to move. How to do things in a precise order. One thing at a time. methodically. At first she says it's kind of stressful, but then a funny thing happens. There comes a point where the thoughts in your mind... So it affects itself and kills it and then moves down to the next... Just settle. It's kind of a place of sin. Because your focus, your alerts, I'm just in the now. My heart rate lowers.

I don't have many thoughts. In fact, it's not a good idea to think about other things. The only thing I can do is listen to the music. And the music is sometimes inspiring me to kind of bob my head a little bit without moving my hands involuntarily, of course. In the Zen space, do you... I'm wondering what your relationship with time is. It's funny because the clocks in there keep dying. I think it's something about the airflow and the battery keeps corroding. Oh my God, time doesn't work in there.

Sorry, what? Time doesn't work in the BSL3. Yeah, exactly. I do lose time. You have to really find your zen space. I say that because when you're in a respirator with your head and there's an eyelash that falls in your eye, there's nothing you can do about it. Oh, wow.

Or there's a pluck of hair just poking in your eye every few seconds. What do you do in that situation? I think it's a Buddhist principle. Kind of acknowledge it. I just tell myself, yeah, this is really annoying. There's nothing I can do about it. So I'll just focus on my work. It's a profound, profound mindfulness.

It is funny because I was saying to Jad at one point, I was like, it's like we've, when you started describing the lab earlier in the conversation, it reminded me of this feeling that I've had of like it feels like coronavirus has asked us all to be very present. Yeah. Like there's really no future that we're planning for. Yeah. The way Mark puts it, coronavirus has its own time. It's ancient. It's been around for millions of years

circulating in bats. Now it's in us. And how we feel about that, whether we think the pandemic's over, we can all go back to our lives, or whether we think it's only the end of the first part or whatever doesn't really matter. Because it's got its own time.

This gets to kind of, it feels almost like an existential kind of a thing as well, right? So viruses don't care. And if I was going to have entitled to an article, I don't care. I don't care. I don't care at all. And then I don't have thoughts. I don't have feelings.

You can project them on me if you want to. But all I do is find another host and I get into their cells and I replicate. Let's say there's even half a billion people who have been infected. Let's really project out. Well, there's, you know, 7.2 who haven't been. This is a grand new virus in humans. This virus has never been in humans before. I tend to anthropomorphize again, thinking about it.

Okay, well, I can go here. I can go in this tissue. Oh, see, I'm doing anthropomorphism again, the virus is just exploring it. And what is telling us, it's telling us about the difference in children and adults. It's telling us about the difference between pretty old people to really old people. It's telling us about the virology. It's also telling us about the fragility of the global organism of humans,

being our political and economic and social, financial, cultural systems and habits, that those are all being probed by the virus as well. And we're learning about how we're all interweaved and interleaved because it's breaking each of those apart and making us view them individually. You know what's weird? It just occurred to me. Like, there's been this inversion. We're now living in the place where you work every day. We're all living in the BSL3, basically.

section. Let me reiterate, without protection. Without protection. Coming up, one more time, wormhole, totally different situation, totally different location. That's after the break. Hi, this is Laura calling from Lincoln, Nebraska. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.

More information about Sloan at www. Science reporting on Radio Lab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simon's Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. I'm Chad Abumrod. This is Radio Lab. We're back. Okay, BSL 3 Time. We did that.

Now for the second chapter. Cow time. Some context. So this began in conversation with Molly, Molly Webster. She had been thinking a lot about all of the things. these ideas and was sort of rolling them around. I've just had so many conversations with people about time in this moment and like everyone trying to, I don't know, understand it or grapple with it or like somehow face it down in a way

that they never have before. Like I can only describe it as like a slipperiness. Like you can't quite hold on. As we were talking, can I tell you where my mind goes? Yeah. I told her a story about something that had just happened. a couple days before. Okay, so my family and I went to this farm.

It's not too far from where we're staying right now. Mm-hmm. Bless you. Because all the parks were closed. There was nothing to do with the kids. So a friend of ours was like, oh, I know somebody who owns a farm. It's very close to you. You should just go there and walk around.

She'd be totally cool with it. And me, the hook? Jeff. Jeff. Jeff the hawk. So the four of us went there. Great moves. I should say this was in Lebanon,

Tennessee appropriately enough. Huge farm, cows, goats, donkeys, sheep, they're all kind of milling around. No fences. And, uh, yeah, it's a good question, Emil. I was walking next to a meal, my 10-year-old. If time is actually frozen, how come it doesn't feel frozen to us? And he was asking all these questions about space time?

Here's another question. Yeah. If time truly is a hologram. I think he had just watched a PBS show about this? Holograms can rewind themselves. True? How come... He's like, why does time only go in one direction?

Does time ever? And it felt like he was processing some stuff about this moment, maybe... So I just asked him. Hey, I have a more ordinary question for you. Sure. How has time felt over this pause, or whatever we call it, where we had to go and start staying at home, moved to Nashville and stuff.

Has it felt like it's gone faster? Has it felt like it's gone slower? Or does it feel normal? It feels like, hmm, hold on. I have to think this through. Like when we're at home, we're really used to there. So like time goes fast for us, because like we're used to at home.

Like when we're here, time goes slower, basically because like we don't know this place at all. Interesting. Yeah, I think you're right. He said that? Yeah. Wow, profound little bucker. So he kept riffing on this as we walked across this open meadow, past a whole group of donkeys, past some sheep.

And then we got through the clearing and entered these woods, which stretched for about two miles behind the farm. Well, dragonflies eat the mosquitoes, I think. Yeah, they do. Whatever eats mosquitoes is a friend of mine. Frogs. Go frogs. And spiders.

Love the spiders. So we're about quarter mile into the woods, I think, when... I do love drive. Oh, wow. I took this out of this. Whoa. Whoa. That's like a hole.

When right there on the ground was this very big, very dead cow. Just a skeleton, but... Oh, my God. Completely intact. That's cool. Yeah. Wow. The skeleton was on its back, legs pointed up.

Birds hadn't scattered the bones, but the ants had cleaned it, so there's no flesh. That's a cow, right? That's definitely a cow. We just stood there and looked down at it. It's funny, you know, it's like your Jude Do broke five of his ribs. Look how many ribs they have. They have a million. Then we noticed it next to the big cow skeleton.

Oh, my God, a little baby skull, a baby cow. Can I have it? Well, I don't think your mom would like it if you took that. It's so cool, though. Wow. I take a picture of it. What do you think happened to that little baby? I don't know.

Hold on. Let me turn it over. Oh, wow ago. Oh, my God, it's tiny. Poor thing. So we were like, what happened here? Was there some kind of birth that didn't go right? He looks creepy, though.

Yeah. His eye socket. But what was interesting is he kept coming back to this question of like... Is that even a cow? Yeah. Are we sure that's a cow? because, you know, skeletons all look alike. It's funny, though, but have you ever seen a human skull?

Oh, I've seen that. Those are the weirdest thing I've seen. They don't look that different, do they? Well, a cow skull is more like a match like a human, but like the head would go down, and then they bring the mouth forward. We started talking about design, like if you take a human skull, smush it, pull the mouth out, slope the nose. Cow. Which caused him to ask, and I didn't record this part, unfortunately. why are they so similar?

Here's where you start to get to the time bit. Because I started trying to tell him about this idea that I'd read about 15 years ago, one of my favorite ideas ever. It looks like that's working. I want to see that it's rolling. I'm getting a meter, but why is it not? Oh, no, no, we're rolling. I learned about this idea from a guy named Sean Carroll biologist.

I'm Sean B. Carroll. I'm professor of biology at the University of Maryland. Okay, so Sean wrote a book about 15 years ago called Endless Form's Most Beautiful, Incredible book. And in that book, he tells the story of some research that he was involved in. Back in the 1980s, 1983, 1984. He and his colleagues were working with some fruit flies, and they discovered these genes. We discovered these genes because messing with them, essentially inducing mutations in them, has such spectacular effects.

For example, they'd mess with one gene, just one gene. Legs would appear on top of the head or an extra pair of wings would form. If out of 17,000 fruit fly genes, one mutation can eliminate an eye or one mutation can put legs where antennae used to be. You can imagine geneticist said, what the heck is that gene? Let's go find out. What they would eventually determine is that there were certain genes within the fly that acted as kind of master builders. Each one would turn on a whole bunch of other genes, and the end result would be a limb or a wing or an antenna, a whole body part, which was cool.

But it was just flies. But within a year, a couple teams of biologists discovered that these genes existed not only in fruit flies, but in almost every other kind of animal. Worms, whales, elephants, stickbugs, mice. Humans. All of these different creatures seem to have the same set, the same master toolkit of these little genes. That represents about 500 million years of animal evolution,

and to see those genes pretty much in similar arrangements to each other across the animal kingdom blew everyone's mind. Yeah. Everyone's mind. I don't know anyone who could have claimed they saw that coming. We've learned by looking at creatures from the outside, we look at their anatomy, and we say, okay, this is a mouse over here, an elephant over here, a fly here, a worm.

externally they just look, you know, incredibly different. But to find out that there are genes building those bodies that they all have in common was a stunning discovery. And the reason we all have these master toolkit genes, that's because we all came from the same creature way back in the beginning. And these genes have been preserved. Right. And how do you wrap your mind around that? The thing that builds the butterfly wing could be the same thing that builds my finger. Well, I think you just start from the observation that you and I and a lot of other animals are built of repeating parts.

Wait, wait, I think all of these are ribs too. Your rib cage were all the different kind of ribs. This is right here. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirty. Your fingers, your digits. Why are our fingers different lengths? That's a very good question, Tage. Which are slightly different variations on the same theme.

Your toes are the same sort of way. We could collect a hoof. You want to take a hoof? I wonder if it would be like having hooves and no fingers. Your spinal column with the vertebrae, where they're slightly different from your neck down to your lower back, what would be great was to have like a snake skeleton right next to that cow. Because there you'd see maybe two or 300 vertebrae with ribs coming off of them, right? If it was a good-sized snake.

And you understand, oh, okay, so that snake is mostly a little head and a little tail with all of these ribs. You can build, you know, so many variations on the same theme. So you're saying one way to understand why so many different creatures can be made with so few genes that we all share is that we're all basically made of Legos. That's right. That's right. It also makes sense why animals have basically the same parts of bodies. There's the same body parts of them. Yeah. It's a, that's such a crazy idea.

So, okay. It is. It's a prize. It's a crazy idea. But it just then kind of fring. the question in a different way, which is if these bodybuilding genes are so similar, how do you make different kinds of animals?

And that's where a lot of the research then turned. And the picture that started to emerge is that if so many creatures share the same set of master genes, well then it's obviously how those genes are used. When you turn them on, how long they stay on, when you turn them off. And tempo.

For example, if you have a gene that makes the repeating segments of a spinal column in humans, and it is the same gene that does that in a giraffe, well, in a human there will be a switch that goes like this, on, off. But in the giraffe, it goes like this, on, off. In other words, one of the big differences that explains the diversity of animals on this planet, and this is what we talked about in front of that cow, is time, these simple differences in time.

What are they called? They're called hoax genes. Yeah, the hawks jeans. So the hawks jeans, I guess you could say they separate animals by their rhythm. I mean, like, it doesn't really separate them because then we won't be able to see what I would. I guess the way they construct us is all about rhythm. Yeah, it's all about timing and rhythm, right? Mm-hmm.

I think that's one of the coolest ideas I've ever heard, don't you? Yeah. For some reason it's more understandable than space time. Yeah, for sure. Space time, I don't think I'll ever wrap my head around that. I mean, like, seriously. Okay, let's keep going. I wish I got to keep one of the bones.

Yeah. Like, there is something so interesting to think about how little changes of time create totally different endpoints. Yeah. You know, so like a like a, like a, a moment of time created a cow. The same thing with a different moment of time created a jad. The same thing with a different moment of time created a tadpole.

And then so you're like, what does this change in time? Like, what will it create? Yeah. Yeah. How will this moment of time essentially pressure humans to evolve in a different way? Yeah. Yeah. Do you see how it's changed by here, guys?

And now it's like more orange and yellow than it was just not even that long ago. Do you think those cows will let us come close? They're not supposed to hurt anyone. We're so human-centric that you just suddenly think, I wonder what time was like for that cow and its calf. Oh my God, totally.

And I remember we had to cross a creek to get back to our car. And about 20 cows, live cows, were in the creek. These are, I guess, the cousins of the cow that we had met, the former cow. Yeah, I looked there looking at us. Hey, buddies. Buddies and ladies.

And they were all just kind of hanging out. They're looking at us and chewing really slowly. I remember being struck by just how slow they were chewing. And I just thought, oh, the world's going to keep going. cows are going to keep chewing its grass flowers are going to keep blooming rivers are going to keep flowing there's a different arc to all of this something about time on a farm makes you think those thoughts oh yeah not getting those car when did time switch from slow to fast for you you know how when we started start we got here and time was so weird and it was felt still feels that way yeah

I do feel like we've been here a long time, though, or like our house feels far away. Yeah. But I think because I'm with my family, with you guys, feels like there's a normal scene of comfort. Yeah. Big thanks to Emil and Tage and Carla for being that through line that runs through everything. Big thanks to my dad for the same reason. to Molly Webster, whose thoughts inspired this episode and who helped me move through it, Tracy Hunt for the production assist,

and Soren Wheeler for yet one more late night push in a string of late nights that has gone back a decade. I'm Chad Abramrod. Thanks for listening. This is Ben Collins, Colin from Southeast London. Radio Lab is created by Jab Abinrod, Robert Crawwich, and produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Cliff is our director of sound design. Susie Lechtenberg is our executive producer.

Our staff include Simon Adler, Becker Brazler, Rachel Cusick, David Gable, Bethel Hapte, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Sarah Kielderi, Sarah Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. With help from Shima Oliiyai, with Harry Fortuna, Sarah Sandbach, Melissa O'Donnell, Tad Davis, and Russell Gragg. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris. I love Radio Lab. Thank you.