Radiolab - Oops

Episode Date: June 28, 2010

Oops. In this hour of Radiolab, stories of unintended consequences.

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

Yeah. And NPR. We're going to start the show with this fellow. His name's Ben Zimmer. He's the on-language columnist. For the New York Times magazine. Because we figured, since we wanted to do a show called... Oops.

Right. We thought we should call Ben. And so it was. We came into the studio, and he brought with him a bunch of his favorite oopses. As an example, I just wanted to give one of my favorite examples of... The first one that he hit us with began its life. Was it in an AP news article? Well, it was an AP story, but the AP story was fine.

When the AP story appeared on a news site from the American Family Association... Which, by the way... ...is a conservative Christian group, the headline, first of all, said, Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials. Was it kissing guys or something that they would be good at? Well, if you read on, if you're confused by that headline, Barry. Here's how it starts. Tyson Homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the U.S.

Olympic track and field trials. And it goes on to say, you know, throughout the entire article, you know, on Saturday, homosexual misjudged the finish in his opening heat. The entire article had the word homosexual in place of gay. The sprinter's name is Tyson Gay. Oh my God. According to Ben, this is a classic. Classic example of a search and replace, oops.

This group apparently did not like the word gay. Because gay makes homosexuality sound very nice and... Very gay. So what they did was they ran a search and replaced every instance of the word gay with the word homosexual. But then you get Tyson Gay becoming... Tyson, homosexual. This was just one that they were a little careless with.

Just to be fair, here's a contrasting example. In 1990, the Fresno B ran an article. About the Massachusetts budget crisis, and it made reference to new taxes that will help put Massachusetts, quote, back into the African American. And they had to issue a correction saying, it should have said back in the black.

You know, this one might have been a newsroom prank. We're not sure. But it did get into the paper. Right. Just for the hell of it. Here's one last one. This one happened after the famous broadcaster Walter Cronkite died. When the Chicago Tribune did their online obituary

for Cronkite, what happened was every instance of Cronkite got replaced by Mr. Cronkite. You can understand the thinking behind that. They're deciding, okay, for deceased males, they should be referred to with the title, Mr. But then what this turns into is an obituary where it says he was born Walter Leland Mr. Cronkite Jr.

And it refers to his radio show Walter Mr. Cronkite's 20th century. It's got things about his family, his son, Walter Mr. Cronkite the third, his daughter, his daughter, Kathy, Mr. Cronkite. Oops. My heart went oops. I'm Chad. The moment that we met. My heart went oops. And I'm Robert.

I never will forget. On this episode of Radio Lab? The moment that I met you. Four oopses. Starting with a tree that went. Then we've got a goose that went. And an entire town that went. And a Harvard professor.

That really went oops. Now, we should just say before we start, oops. Oops is, oops can be a misleading term. Really what we're talking about here is something Greek. Well, you try hard to prevent one thing, and then you get exactly what you didn't want to get back at you. Right, and our first story falls into that category. Back a few seasons ago, we were doing a show on deception,

and we ended up talking with a professor named Ruben Gore. Hello? Hi, is this Professor Gurr? Yes, speaking. He's a psychiatrist who works at the University of Pennsylvania, and I'd call them to talk about his research on self-deception. It's fascinating stuff, and I'm not going to go into it now, because somewhere along the way, the conversation took a really weird turn.

No. Oh, yeah. Get out. Yeah, yeah. And it happened when he began to tell me about some studies. Strange studies. Done by a... What was the guy's name?

His name is hanging on... I don't remember the second. Henry Murray. Henry. And the reason we want to hear about Henry Murray is... What? I built it up. Don't you want to know more of this? Not yet, no.

Well, go tell me more. Okay, I'm going to let it unfold because we were so interested. interested in what Ruben Grewer told us that we found a guy. Who knows a whole lot about Professor Murray's name is Alston Chase. Very windy day today, isn't it? And he lives in a remote cabin in Montana. In the wood? In the foothills.

Okay. Professor Murray was a very prestigious scholar. He had been a professor of psychology at Harvard before the Second World War. During the war, he went to work for the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which was the forerunner of the CIA. And a couple of years into his government service, says Alston, something happened that really spooked him and spooked the country. During the Korean War, there were some GIs, he said, who had been captured in Korea. And afterwards, after the Korean War, they refused to come home.

They appeared to have betrayed their country. Renounce their own country and disappeared behind Red China's bamboo curtain. Does anybody want to go home? No! The CIA and their military establishment was very much concerned that the communists had found techniques for brainwashing. And so Murray and other psychiatrists in the government were charged with preparing those soldiers to resist that kind of brainwashing. And Murray himself developed a style of interrogation. Stressful interrogation was the term used.

That the army could use on its pilots. Yeah. He developed this method of kidnapping them before they were sent on the mission. And then, says Ruben Gour, he'd run them through a battery of tests. To see if they break. And if they didn't break, then they were fine to fly. This kind of psychological training was kind of a new front in the Cold War. And in the 1950s, Murray's back at Harvard, and he's thinking of ways to fine-tune his techniques.

And this is where things get interesting. He took a class of Harvard undergraduates, 20-some-od. Sophomores, mostly. Students were told to write an autobiographical essay. Like a diary. And he told him, you know what? Make it very personal. Write your deepest thoughts in there.

Highest aspirations and hopes. And while you're at it, write about your sexual fantasies. Go ahead. Clear class. And after the students were done, he said to them, now I'm going to pair you up into groups of two. To debate or discuss what they'd written. Students were like, okay, we'll share.

No big deal. But... They were duped. They were walked into this very brightly lit room. which turned out to be an interrogation room with a one-way mirror. Put in a chair, strapped in. Electrodes were attached to their arms, chest, their heart. To measure stress, basically.

And they were also filming them through the mirror. And then, instead of a classmate, in-walked, a total stranger. Older man. This guy was holding their essay. They didn't know it, but Murray had trained him. To do everything he could to anger and humiliate the undergraduate. And he just tore them away. part, piece by piece.

Using the essay to mock the students' aspirations and thoughts, then after this was done, these students have to come back week after week to view themselves on film being humiliated. That, to me, seems like the worst part. After they'd been humiliated, they had to watch themselves being humiliated over and over. People became tearful and miserable.

and he was proud how he destroyed people. What kind of a person is this? Like, why did he do it? Yeah, why Murray did it? There are any one of a number of explanations that they all could be true. One is, it was a grant grabbing. He was getting money to do these things. Also, you know, this was the Cold War, he was fighting communism.

He may have thought it was justified. Yeah, but he just said he was proud of this. Well, it also happens to be the case that he was having an affair. For about 30 years, with a woman, with a woman not his wife, and they had a sexual relationship that bordered on the sadomasochic, in fact, was sadomasochistic. In other words, Murray's interest in these was intensely personal. Whatever the case, in those Harvard experiments, there was one student who was just not prepared for any of it. His code name was lawful. Lawful. They gave each of these students a codename.

Because he was considered so conventional. He was... Really still just a boy? at high school at 16. Was living a thousand miles from home, two shirts and two trousers to his name. And Lofel apparently was an especially lonely kid. The notes I found of Murray did refer specifically to Lofel's essay, which he saw as highly alienated.

So when Lofel walked into that room, sat across from that stranger? The guy really did a job on him. He was young, so he was barely growing a beard. So the first thing that the guy tells him is, what is this on your chin? something trying to look like a beard. Then the guy opens up Laffle's essay

and lets him have it. Meanwhile, like all the students, Lofel had been hooked up to all these stress monitors. I analyzed his data compared to all the other participants. He had far in the way the strongest response physiologically. You mean like his heartbeat

the fastest in all that? Heartbeat everything through the roof. Amazingly, this experiment went on for three years, and decades later, a lot of the subjects were still upset. And he considered it one of the most traumatic experiences they'd had in their 20s. Lawful never forgot it.

That's right. He was resentful at the way he was treated at Harvard. He had nightmares about Professor Murray after he left Harvard. So what happened to this guy? Well, he finished up his four years at Harvard, got his degree, then got a PhD in math. Then he began to teach math. And then he became a household name. What do you mean?

Well, I mean this. The FBI raid began just afternoon in a remote mountainous area called Stemple Pass, about five miles outside the town of Lincoln, Montana. Turns out that Lawful's real name? The Fodor Kaczynski. No. Oh, yeah. Gozzynski was no.

Get out. The FBI dubbed him the Unabomber. In nearly 18 years, he found targets all over the country. His meticulously made bombs have killed three people and injured another 23. I blew my arm off to the side like this, And the first thing I thought was, why did they do that? Do you think that this study had anything to do with Ted Kaczynski's subsequent, very infamous acts? Well, I think he probably would have, if it hadn't been for that experiment,

he still probably would have been maybe reclusive, living somewhere in a cabin in Montana, regardless. But I think the evil twist was done there. Years later, while he was researching a book, Alston Chase corresponded with Kaczynski. In one of his letters, he mentioned that he participated in some psychological experiments conducted by Professor Murray. Of course, I was very curious, and I wrote it back to tell me a little bit more about it, and he said, well, you really don't, I don't know if you want to go into that can of worms. Ruben Goer is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, and Alston Chase is the author of the book Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber. Oops, my heart, man.

Here's one more from Ben Zimmer. What is the Cupertino effect? The Cupertino effect is the name given to the phenomenon of when you rely on a spell check. too much. It will give you a suggestion. And very often, it's a suggestion that you really shouldn't take. Why is it called the Cupertino effect? Well, in early spell checkers, if you wrote cooperation, the word cooperation, C-O-O-P-E-R-A-T-I-O-N, perfectly typical spelling of the word cooperation, in early spell checkers, that word was not there because it expected you to spell it C-O-hyphen. And so what it would do is,

is it would give you a suggestion. And the suggestion was Cupertino, the name of the town in California. So if you look at documents that are still online from the UN, from the EU, from NATO, you'll find dozens and dozens of Cupertinos that have found their way in there. For instance, here's a German NATO officer

was quoted as saying, the Cupertino with our Italian comrades proved to be very fruitful. And then there was a proposal from the EU, use scientific and technical research committee. They proposed, quote, stimulating cross-border Cooper Tino. Oops, number two, you go. The next, this is the next one is just a different flavor entirely.

We're going to meet someone, I don't know. I can't really say they did anything wrong. Yeah, I mean, this one is more like, like, would you say luck? I mean, suppose you just picked up a toothbrush and it was connected to a snake that was connected to a monster that was connected. to the devil himself. You wouldn't know you're just picking up a tooth. So this is a case where really bad things happen.

The story comes from our own reporter, Pat Walters. Yeah. It concerns. Well, I don't know. You go ahead and... Okay, so just to start, I want you to imagine you're on a mountain top. Okay. This mountain is in western Nevada.

The second highest peak in the state of Nevada. Got a name? It's called Wheeler Peak. And... Who's this? This is Michael Cohen. I go by Michael P. Cohen. He's a nature writer.

And he tells me that up on top of this mountain, there is a grove of old trees. And you can see the trees from a distance, and their wood is so bright that it actually glistens in the sun. What do they call? Oh, bristlecone pines. Yes. Can you describe what they look like?

Sure. They tend to be shorter, brought at the base. They get very, very old. And as they get old, they become tortured or gnarled. They sort of twist up towards the sky. The overall effect is sort of electrical. They look kind of like what you'd see in a Tim Burton movie. So you have that picture in your mind?

Okay, so the story is about this scientist named Don Curry. I'm going to take a drink of water. Wait, I'm going to take a drink of water. Okay. Story starts in 1964. Don Curry was a graduate student from North Carolina and he was young. Do we know how old he was? He was 30 years old. And he'd just gotten a big grant from the National Science Foundation.

to do some climate change research. Not like climate change now, though. Climate change thousands of years ago. Because he learned that you can actually sort of travel back in time. Go back into the past using the spacing between tree rings, the annual rings. This is Ron Lanner. He's a retired Forest Service scientist. And he says you can use the width of the tree rings.

To determine whether it was colder at one time or rainier at one period in the tree's life or whatever. So Curry's up on top of this mountain, up amongst, these trees and he needs to find one that he can look inside and kind of see what the weather was like way back in the past five minutes of looking is all that was involved this is from a nova documentary curry died a few years ago and this is actually the only time that he ever talked about this story on tape literally he found a tree there the first old tree that we climbed to that he described as looking super super old Curry takes out this special drill, which scientists used to take like a core sample to look at the rings.

Yeah. He presses it up against the tree, give it a good push to get it through the bark. And he starts twisting it in. Clockwise into the tree. But he wasn't having much luck. The normal approach to coring the tree wasn't working. It becomes harder and harder for him to turn this thing into the tree. And eventually...

the bit of his drill broke off in the tree. This isn't just any drill. He ordered it from Sweden. The whole time he's thinking, if I can't get this thing out of the tree... That would mean the research project would be lost for the year. So at this point... He kind of lumberes back down the mountain.

And... Dejected. He managed to find the district Bringer and told him the problem. Guys, my drill, it got stuck in the tree. What should I do? And they tell him, don't worry about it, Don. We'll just cut the tree down. This is one tree. There are dozens of these trees all around.

So... They start slicing into the tree. It takes a while to cut it down because it's really dense. A little knots and arles. And eventually the tree falls over. Then they cut some slabs out of the lower part of the tree. Craig gets one of these slabs back to his lab, throws it on a big desk, finds a magnifying glass

because the rings are really small and he starts counting and as he counts he's making little pinholes or pencil marks every 50 or 100 years by the end of the first day he gets back to a thousand years like the dark ages

were in Europe eating raw pasta day two 2006 by the middle of the day he gets back to like Jesus, Roman Empire, gladiators, and centurion. But even at that point, he was only like halfway finished. He kept counting. We could begin to see that we were getting over 4,000 years, over 4,500, over 4,500, over 4,600, and we ended around 4,900 years.

It had 4,844 annual rings in it. And at that point, the oldest tree that anyone had ever found was, 4,600 years old. In other words, he had himself the oldest tree ever. But he had killed it. And you've got to think, I've got to have done something wrong.

I better recount. I better recount again. But no matter how many times he counted the rings, the number never went down. The world's oldest tree was dead. It was truly, it was horrifying. It was like a family tragedy. People had given these trees names.

There was Buddha and Socrates and Methuselah. They'd called Curry's tree. The Prometheus tree. And the guy who named that particular tree was so angry that he wrote a magazine article where he called Don Curry a murderer. All across the country, there's a tremendous uproar. Saying, saying what?

About killing the world's oldest living, organism. What? I thought we were just saying. I think it was the oldest living tree. It's both. It's the oldest tree and it's the oldest organism. Wait, wait, wait.

You mean that the oldest continuously living animal shrub mushroom. Are you making, are you sure about this? What you just said was this is the oldest living continuous individual alive on the planet. what I said. This tree was older than any other tree on the planet. Older than the oldest sponge, which is like 1,500 years old. Older than the oldest animal, which is some sort of oyster, which is 405 years old, older than any other living thing on the entire planet. Oh, God. Where do we go? Here we go from there. So where does that leave Mr. Curry? So what happened to him? Well, right after this happens,

and Curry pretty much stopped doing research on trees. He basically studied salt flats for the rest of his career. Big, treeless, salt flats. And aside from that little Nova clip that we played before, he hasn't really ever gone on record talking about this. So it's hard for us to say how we really felt about it. But there was this one moment he was being interviewed by a TV reporter, like about his salt flats research.

This would have been in the 19, probably the late 80s, early night. years and years after the whole tree incident. All of a sudden, out of a clear blue sky, the television reporter asked him, Oh, aren't you the Curry who killed the world's oldest tree? He was completely ambushed. And Curry just turned his back and ran away. So that sustained this different to wear off somebody.

On the other hand, he did have the incredible misfortune to kill the oldest living organism on our planet. Yeah, but this is 25 years later, and he's still getting hassled about this tree. We're talking about one tree here. Well, no, we're talking about the tree here. Right. The thing about a tree that lasts for almost 4,000 years. More than that. 5,000 years.

It is a repository. It is a talisman for 5,000 years. thousand years of earth's history. But, I mean, would it be any less bad if the tree were three and a half thousand years old? This is just one more old thing. No, it's the oldest of all. You're taking like the Guinness Book of World Records.

Oh, you keep making me into like a Ripley's, believe it or not guy, but no. That's exactly what you're being. No, no, no. There's a, when you've been around longer than everybody else, there's a sort of big presumption. Which I've never experienced. Yeah. Have you?

Well, I'm a lot older than you. I walk in here and I look at you and I feel pity for all the things you don't know. Consider what the tree must have felt. Those are border Pat Walters. And we're happy to say that since our original broadcast of the story, a new, oldest living tree has been found. It's also a bristlecone pine, also in the White Mountains. And its current age, according to Dr. Peter Brown,

the Rocky Mountain Tree Ring Research Group is just about 5,060 years old, which makes it actually older than Don Curry's tree when it was cut down. So Don Curry, if you're out there listening from the afterlife, you can now rest in peace. We'll continue in a moment. Hi, this is Chuck from Albany, New York. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.

More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. And now to keep us in our oopsie mood. Here's another Cupertino oops from language expert Ben Zimmer. So back in October 2006, Reuters, the Newswire, had an article about honeybees. and there were some very interesting sentences in this article about honeybees. For instance, did you know, quote, Queen Elizabeth has 10 times the lifespan of workers

and lays up to 2,000 eggs a day? That's why she's a very nice girl but doesn't have a lot to say because there's all these eggs dropping on the floor. With its highly evolved social structure of tens of thousands of worker bees commanded by Queen Elizabeth, the honeybee genome could also improve the search

for genes link to social behavior. So every time, a queen reference came in, they were commanded to that particular queen. Whenever the words the queen appeared in this article, it had to be the queen. So the queen was being replaced with Queen Elizabeth. Yeah. Unfortunately in an

article about honeybees. This next oop. Singular oop. Wouldn't it be? I mean, if you have one oop wouldn't be an oop. Never heard that. No, it's just a new coinage. Oop. This next one, it raises a question of, I guess you'd say, of moral balance.

A question that I don't think any of us would want to have to answer. Comes to us from our producer Lulu Miller. Okay, so set up this story. This story happens where? It's in a little town in northern Michigan called Mayo. 7 a.m. just drove through the Delaware water gap. That's me on my way out there from New York. The sun is rising and...

It's about an 800-mile drive. And it's just gorgeous out here. Dude, listen to you. Lush and... All into the outdoors. It's like nausea. Yeah, I know. But I'm just one of those people.

I open my windows and... When I get out into nature, I feel my place in the world. Anyway, just crossed into Mayo. What was the reason you were going again? To see a bird. A very, not just rare, not just the kind of bird bird birders get obsessed about. This is a bird... This is what they call a life bird.

A life bird? Birders wait their life bird. life to see it. Really? Yeah. Only found right here. What's the bird called? The Curtlin Warble. Have you seen a curtail? No, I've never seen one. This is my first trip up here. This right here, where are you? We're just outside of the town on the edge of the forest about to go in, and I'm standing with about 15 people who've come from everywhere. Where are you folks coming from? To see this bird. Toledo. I'm from South Carolina. We're from Oregon. Wyoming. We'll walk out to a spot, try to stay single file. The park ranger,

leads us down a path into a little clearing and pretty immediately. In the background there. Way back there? Mm-hmm. A guy from Ohio spots of curtlands. Oh, there he is, yeah. A tiny yellow bird. Back there.

Right there. Up high in a jack pine tree. Oh yeah. Oh great, it's singing like crazy. A lady from Dayton starts clapping. Can you describe what you're seeing? I see a lovely bird with a gray back. This is a guy from Oregon, Jim Coleman.

blue gray back. And his wife Rita. Smaller than a robin, brilliant yellow. In the sunlight, it's just an absolutely radiant bird. Yeah. Is this worth the trip to more again? Oh, you bet? I don't know. It just makes me thankful that I'm here. And it makes me grateful that my wife is here. I know this is something she's wanted to see for a long time. Jim actually starts to tear up. This is a very special bird.

Oh, what he am. And that's what this story is really about. How special is this bird? Meaning. Well, how much is a species worth? Um, I know. Well, here's the backstory. Okay.

In the early 70s, the warbler almost went extinct. The reason why it was thought was because of a little creature called the cowbird. Want to go in? Okay. That's just the sound of them. It's a parasite, you know, on some... And who is this guy? This is Chris Mensing.

Fish and Wildlife Biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And we're standing in this cage full of cowbirds. What it looks like we've got six males and one female. Let me grab a couple. He just reached out and grabbed two of them. You're good at that. Can you touch that? Yeah, go ahead.

Imagine a tiny little gnarly crow. They've got really sharp little beaks. But with this blunt dagger-like beak. Very draught body, very dull. So here's what the cowbird does to the warbler. while the warbler is out of its nest Like getting a worm or something? Yeah, the cowbird lays one of its own eggs in the nest.

To make room for it so the warbler doesn't know anything is up, it pushes out one of the warbler's eggs. Oh. Get out of the nest? And the timing is such that the cowbert egg will hatch first and will double its size in 24 hours. Wow. So by the time that the holsterbirds hatch,

that cow burger may be up to four times the size. And when they start begging from food with parents, the loudest, most aggressive chick is going to get fed. The cowbird chick. So the warbler mom ends up shoveling food into this cowbird chick? Yep. Oftentimes it gets so much food that another warbler chick will die. Wow.

When the cowbirds first showed up in this area. In late 1800s, early 1900s. The warbler population just started plummeting. This huge drop. By 1971, there are only 200 males. On earth. Wow. So, what do you do?

Are you asking me? Mm-hmm. Um, I guess you got to kill the cowbirds. Exactly. This is one of 54 traps. It's a new one that we just built this year. Which is why we're out in this cage. It's actually a cowbird trap.

Oh, she just bite you? Just like anyone, if she had someone larger grabbing you, they don't appreciate it too much. Anyone know how they kill them? I kind of do, yeah. Therastic compression is the term we use. We basically squeeze the bird, suffocating it, preventing it from breathing.

Just with your hands? There's no. Yep. Yeah. Do you have to do that? Yeah. Like all the time? Yeah. Did you see this? No.

But, 1972, Fish and Wildlife Service sets up a bunch of traps. A few years and about 12,000 dead cowbirds later. It works. Kind of. The population stopped dying off, but then it didn't start bouncing back. What's going on? Yeah. Why aren't we seeing bigger numbers now that we're catching the cowbirds?

That's Rita Halbison. She worked with the Forest Service back in the 80s. And we thought, well, we finally concluded it. must be just there is not enough habitat. Like they don't have enough trees? Well, no, there are plenty of trees, but the thing about warblers is they like a specific kind of tree. They like them very young. That was weird.

I could feel it as I was saying it. They like them young. No, but they like young trees, is what you're saying. Yep. And there aren't young trees in this place? No, it's really weird. When they started looking around this forest, they noticed all the trees were really, really old. Why? Why wouldn't there be young trees?

Well, us. Only you can prevent forest fire. And it's true. Hey, smoky bear. See, when humans began to settle in this area of Michigan in about the 1880s, they brought with them that certain human disdain for fire. Only you can prevent forest fires. But fire is exactly what's needed up there to make new trees.

Yeah, this ecosystem is a fire ecosystem. Says Chris? It burns. Because when these trees burn, they release their seeds and make room for new trees to grow. It is a fire ecosystem. It is made to burn. So, I ask you again, what do you do? Do you start fires?

Would that be the solution? That would be the solution. So the forestry started doing what we call a prescribed burn. Basically, says Rita, they burned down a little patch of forest. A few acres. To regenerate it. And one windy spring day in 1980 at a place called Mack Lake. The Forestry Service started a fire that they probably shouldn't have.

Okay, my name is Dick Lord. At the time of the Mack Lake fire, I was part of the ignition crew for the prescribed burn. What is an ignition crew? They light the fire. So at 10 in the morning, Dick and his crew go out into the woods. He went out with a plan. Start setting up perimeters, and they begin lighting a few stands of shrubs. I was driving home. That's Bob Burner, best name ever for a firefighter. I could see Forest Service starting to do a burn. And I thought, this is not a good time. It was windy.

They didn't have the manpower. And I said, we'll probably be getting called out here shortly. Basically, we did not realize that the weather was going to change as rapidly as it did. The wind came up suddenly, something nobody could predict, and it took the fire across the road into a stand of mature jack pine and took off. There were flames probably 100 to 150 feet in the air. The sound is like a roaring train. The forest guys jump into their bulldozers trying to plow trenches alongside the fire.

To pinch it off. And I mean, you could feel the heat. It was way out of our control. Hitting the tops of the trees, rolling. I knew at the rate it was traveling that, you know, it's going to be a major catastrophe. In six hours, it had burned over 20,000 acres. It's one of the fastest moving fires ever documented. Yeah, it went through here.

The far as you can see, it was all black. These are two guys. Hi, Bob. I'm like. Bown houses in the area that got burnt. Remember the guy down there in the corner. Yeah. Garage was all burned up, black, charred.

Their houses were okay, but 41 houses were destroyed. All the way up to the lake. Just completely. Yeah. Nothing green. Like something out of a moonscape. As far as you could see, everything gone. And the worst part about it for all of us.

Let's Rita Halbison again. Was that it killed one of the Forest Service employees, a very young wildlife technician who was very well loved by his co-workers. A guy named Jim Swiderski. You know, Jim was a good friend as well as an employee. Dick Lord again, Jim's boss. He told me that Jim had been a postman for a few years, but just loved birds so much that he,

He took a huge pay cut to come and help protect the warbler. Basically, what happened was the fire overran him. Oh, the press was having a heyday, just tearing into the Forest Service for what had happened. The townspeople were very angry at the Forest Service. How could you do this? Rita says they were told not to wear their Forest Service uniforms in town. Gosh, it was so terrible. And the forest itself?

You know, there was nothing there. It was completely silent. But a year later, a little bit of green started to poke up, but the next year a little bit more. Eight to ten years after that Mack Lake Burn, just seemed like everywhere you turned around, you'd stop for listen. There were five or six birds. A tremendous number of war of birds.

That was the answer to the mystery. The fire. You know, if you look at a population graph... That's Chris Mincing again. After that Mac Lake Burn, population... went like that. He points his hands straight up. Yes, that's pretty dramatic. And today, the numbers are up to almost 4,000 birds.

And growing. Singing like crazy. Now that the birds are back, but a man is gone. When you walk around this town, a question lingers in the air. Is it a life of a fireman worth the life of a bird? Oh, take a look. Take a look. That's incredible. You got it. I know it.

No. In my opinion, it isn't. This is Ed Fawcett. I wouldn't trade your life for a bird. I'm sitting with him and his wife, Mary Jane. Amen. In a diner. And no matter where you go in this town,

what's the government doing? People don't tend to be huge fans of the warblowers. It's just a small bird. And I've been up here since 68. I've never seen one. Did you ever see one? No. Never have I seen one?

No. And back to Ed. I just got to say to you, what would you think about it if your father or a brother were killed for a bird? It would be pretty hard to accept, wouldn't it? But if you zoom out, one human life versus the end of a species. Do you know how many warblers there are in the United States? There's something like 37 species of warblers. The real number is actually closer to 60.

Wow. That's kind of ridiculous. And that's not all. They ask you, when are you done? And we really say never. Chris explained to me that they have to keep killing the cowbirds, and they have to keep doing burns, smaller burns, but every single year. If we let things be, the bird would be extinct.

That's the hard thing about this job, is knowing that we're never done. How many people are working? How much you do it? You're probably looking at hundreds of people. Well over a million dollars a year spent. And all this began to really sink in on one of my last mornings out there. All right, it is five in the morning. It was the annual Curtlin Warbler census.

Where birders from all over the world show up to help count how many warblers there are out there. Is it like, there's a warblower? Step, step, step, step. There's a warblower. Yeah, that's actually exactly how it works. I was paired up with this guy, Dave Mendez. We're going to kind of walk through the middle of these transects. We're going to come up.

He's kind of a dude, dude. He's an older guy, got a beard. I work for an electrical contractor. Told me he's got a man room. My man room, you know, most guys have got sports, but I've got Kurtland's Warbler pictures up on the wall. Nice. So I went into it thinking like this will be really cool.

We'll march along, we'll count them. I looked at the map. It was a mile, maybe, of a walk. We'll be done in 20 minutes. Well, okay, maybe not. We're walking through the forest, an hour tops. And? Hey, Dave.

We set off, dense brambly forest. Still dark. That was a hermit thrush. Okay. Let me just play you a quick little time lapse. 20 to 7 right now. The sun's just coming up and it's getting a little muggy out here. That was a curtlins.

Oh, yeah? Yeah. We can't count him though. He's not in our section. 707. He heard one way back that way. Yeah? Yeah?

Yeah. Yeah. But I'm not going to mark him in because I don't know exactly where he's at. 733. There he goes. Yeah? Yep, right there. So do you count them now?

No, no, no. No, no. We want to be a lot more accurate. We want to triangulate them. 9.56 and all's well in the Warbler woods. Hey, couple of ants are biting me. Yeah. They hurt, don't they?

They do a little bit. Yeah. Get out of there. 10.45 a.m. I know that there's a bird out there. I can still hear that bird. Way back there. So we ended up staying out there for seven and a half hours.

hours. I just marked one, right? Yep, I've only marked one. And I don't mean to sound like I'm making fun of Dave. I mean, he's doing his job well. But at some point in between the fire ants and taking four hours to confirm this one bird. He's going to be right off over here. I just started thinking about all the effort it takes. Two rows of trees over from us and we can't see him.

I just suddenly thought, it's this fussy, fragile little bird and it hasn't evolved. Who cares? I mean, this is not worth it. And so I started asking people who protect the bird. Why do that? It's so much money, and it's all for a bird. And I could see it maybe if it was for some, but it's just one warbler of 18 million different kinds of warblers.

Like, why do it? Well, we do it because we should. You know, we're stewards of the land. That's Chris Mensing again, cowbird killer. It's for future generations. And here's the fire starter, Dick Lorley. You know, the Kirtland's Warbler was listed under the Endangered Species Act, and we had a charge under the law to do what we could to recover its existence,

and that's the only thing that I can say that, you know, we had to do what the law required us to do. So we should do it, and the law tells us we have to do it. Unconvincing. And that question... The life of a fireman worth the life of a bird. And that guy, Ed, at the diner, it just stuck in my mind. And I realized I couldn't leave this town until I talked to the people who lost the most. Did I just get you to introduce yourself?

Whole name? Yeah, sure. Robert Swiderski, age 54. Kathleen Swidersky. Florence Swidersky. The mother. And the mother. The guy who died?

Yeah. I guess that's it. What ice tea or water or anything? We're all sitting around the kitchen table. There's a lot of hot dogs and beer. Jim's brother-in-law is there too. So I'm Calvin Caputri. And I asked them to tell me about Jim.

Quite a guy. Soft-spoken. Smart. Quite a character. Yup. They told me at first, they were furious. They should have never ever sent him in there. Angry at the Forest Service, angry about this bird.

You're very angry. Now, three decades later. I say you keep that little bird going. Exactly. Really? Jim's younger brother, Rob, Robert said that the thing he wanted the most is for the Kurtland's Warbler to become the state bird. That would be the ultimate.

That would be the biggest accomplishment ever would be that being a state bird. Wow. I guess in some ways I'm surprised. I didn't mean to come here with expectations, but in some ways I thought if it was my family that I would hate that bird, but I would just hate that bird. No, it's not the bird. I mean, that bird didn't do anything to any of us. You know, if we can keep it going, I mean, that's what he set out to do. Let's keep it going.

They think about Jim's death. Like the death of a soldier. Where would you be setting right now? We haven't lost all those soldiers in World War I, World War II. That he died protecting us. You know, it's only one species. Well, then it's going to be another species, and another species, and another species. Next thing you know, you'll walk out in the morning, and it'll be quiet.

Thank God for Teddy Roosevelt in the moment. boys that made our national parks. Imagine what if we didn't have those? It costs money, it's painful, blah, blah, blah. You've got to have the guts to do that. And Jim was really that kind of guy. Wow, that is convincing.

Yeah. But... I mean, do you agree for us? And I ask the mom. What can I say? The birds are coming back, but the life is gone. So why bring it up again?

It's done. you can't bring it back, so you have to live with it, but there's always a hole in your heart. Something that none of us will ever forget forever. And don't ask me any more questions, please. And then? The power went out. The power went out.

I think we're done. Luloo Miller. If you want more information on warblers or anything, or if you want to subscribe to our podcast, go to radialab.org. Hey, Radio Lab. This is Gretchen Korsmel, and I'm sitting in Oakland, California, looking out over beautiful Lake Merritt. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.

Hey, I'm Chad. And I'm Robert. And topic remains. Oops. Final oops coming up. It's sort of a double oops, I would say. We start with an oops that leads to another oops that then self-negates. It comes to us from a fellow who within the confines of the show we will call oopsie wheeler.

So maybe we could just start with both of you kind of introducing yourself and saying who you are and what you do. I mean, just something basically. Hi, I'm Andrea Sterley. Oh, me. I'm Donald Sterley. This is Don and Andrew Sterley. They're chemists. They're actually a research team. Here at University of Montana.

And they met back in the 70s... Back in 1979. At the University of California and San Diego. We met and almost fell in love at first sight. We dated for a week. He proposed. I accepted. They got married? And not long after Don got offered a job. So they left their home in sunny California.

Mind you, we lived about half a mile from the ocean. Nonetheless, they packed up a truck with all of our stuff. including about 200 plants and they moved to beaute montana which is a different thing all the other an old mining town that barely had a tree in the city limits i don't know if you want to know andrea's first impressions of bute or not sure i actually burst into tears and then started laughing i think we call that hysteria yeah the viewing stand used to be up on the hill over here when this was an operating pit. So I actually grew up in the town over from Butte and Montana.

It's kind of that town that you were afraid to go to when you're a kid, filled with abandoned buildings, depressed. And actually, if you walked through town right there, right next to the middle of town, I don't remember exactly where it was. I remember being in here in the late 70s. This open wound on the hill like this. This deep pit.

This is where the pit is. The Berkeley pit. The guy saying, wow, is Barrett Golding? I actually couldn't get back to Butte myself, so I asked Barrett to go over there and visit with a couple of engineers. So tell me who you are. Okay. Well, I'm Joe Griffin.

Montana Department of Environmental Quality. And I'm Nick Tucci. I'm with the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology. And the three of them are standing at the edge of the pit, which is kind of hard to imagine, especially the size of this thing. But when you're at the edge of the pit and you look down in, what you actually see is, How can you convey what we're seeing?

This enormous lake, kind of. Well, it's 40 billion gallons of water, which is a lot of water. It's one of the larger lakes in the United States. Just carved into this hill? Yeah. The main difference, though, between this lake and one that you might decide to take an afternoon dip in, is that this lake is a bizarre... The color of the water is red. This kind of sickly red.

And also... Green. and gray and black. It's technicolor. It shimmers in this way that words can't describe. And when you're standing there,

you can't help but wonder. The question I really have, and I'll rephrase it after I ask it, because it's not quite, is like, what the f***le happened here? I don't think that's going to air. I mean, what happened? Well, it's just, you know, the price of copper.

In the 1920s, when we were stringing up telephone wires and electrical wires and going through World Wars, a third of the copper in the U.S. came out of this hill. You know, the long and the short of it is, you wouldn't be standing here broadcasting this or recording this without copper in your wire right there. And in this heyday, you know, before the pit was even around, Butute was this mining boomtown. But by the 1940s, the price of copper had dropped,

a company that owned all the mines in Butte wasn't doing so well. And so they figured it'd be cheap. and easier to just blow the top off the hill. But things just kept getting worse, and by 1982, right around the time when Don and Andrea were coming to town, the mines completely shut down. When they shut the pit in early 1980s, but here's the thing, while they're actually mining, they keep all the groundwater pumped out of there so that's dry and they can work. And when they shut the mines down, they shut off the pumps.

The company turned off the pumps. I think it was Earth Day, 1982. 1982. Yeah, on Earth Day. After that, the pit started filling up with groundwater. And it took a good 10 years to actually see a kind of a rust-colored puddle in the bottom of the pit itself. But it was a puddle that was growing and growing and growing and growing. Now here's the thing about that water. The rock around the pit is filled with pyrite.

And when the water hits the pyrite and the air, three react. to create sulfuric acid. Uh-oh. In turn... That's Edwin Dobb. Freelance writer had been for about 20 years. Who actually grew up in Bute. The sulfuric acid hastens the removal of the metals from the ore itself,

like gold and silver and copper. Copper, cadmium, zinc, iron, sulfate, arsenic. And what you end up with is this toxic, acidic disaster. And it's still right. In fact, you know, since we started working on this piece, Jad, it's risen like about a foot. There was an incident, infamous incident, in the mid-1990s. Anybody who grew up anywhere near Butte knows this story. One stormy night, some 340 snow geese landed.

They landed on the water. Looking for shelter. And they, of course, drink some of it. The next day, there were 342 goose carcasses floating on the water. They were all dead. And the autopsy showed lesions in the esophagus throughout the digestive system. So it's like the water ate their insides. Yeah.

Were you struck at all like upon arriving there? Did you actually kind of go visit the mine, the old mine site? No, avoided it like the plague. We were too staunch environmentalists. And the idea of living in a mining town was so completely foreign. And when they first showed up in Butte, Don and Andrew, they were kind of struggling to fit in at the university. Because they're trying to study this little microorganism. The sponge in Bermuda.

But they're in Butte. Landlocked Butte, Montana. To make matters worse when they took off for a year on sabbatical? Our college accidentally unplugged our refrigerator, destroying all of our samples. Oh, my God. Desperation. Definitely. We had no funding.

We decided we just needed to start over. But one day, a scientist named Bill Chatham came into their lab. With a piece of wood. And on this wood, there was some green slimy stuff. And he says, you won't believe this, but I found this stick with the slime on it in the pit. Floating about a foot below the surface of the water. Now, here's the thing. I mean, that lake, this is like, this is the most deadly place you can imagine.

I mean, nothing grows here. Nothing should grow here. Nothing. Absolutely not. Not even anything but nothing. Yeah. What's less than nothing? Maybe absolute nothing.

Like negative numbers of nothingness. It's more than nothing. It's an active getting rid of thing. It's a negating nothingness. You know how there's love and hate? This is not a lack of love. This is hate. Okay.

But they got together with some colleagues. They looked at the slime and they realized against all odds. This stuff was alive. Life and acid mine waste. Life that no one had ever studied before. It really is what started. Everything we've been doing. now, gosh, for the last 15 years.

So far, we found virtually hundreds of compounds, organisms that were growing. Organisms that make molecules that can fight viruses. Several turn out to be good in our anti-cancer screens. They fight cancer, really? Yeah. So we have Berklic acid in Berkeley Amids and the Berkeley Acetelles. They've now published tons of papers.

I mean, their work has just taken off. So it's been pretty exciting research. But then they told me this story that totally took them by surprise. It was about a year after they'd first started looking at the pit water. We found this sort of a sticky, opaque, thick, gooey, black organism. Then they noticed that weirdly, if you put this little guy into a thing of the water from the pit, it actually absorbs the metals in pit water. What does that mean?

Like they're taking the metals out of the water? They become a little metal sponge, yes. So they're cleaning the water, is what you're saying. Yeah, and there's lots of people that work with microorganisms to try to clean up metal-laden water. But usually these things take in maybe like, I don't know, 10, 15% of the metals. This little guy will actually absorb between 85 and 95%. Whoa. So they got really curious about it.

And they started trying to figure out where it had ever been seen before. We had it identified. And they eventually discovered that the only place this yeast had ever been found was Where? Well... In the rectal swabs of geese. Ah. You mean like the snow geese that landed on the water?

Yeah. The geese left a little something behind. Wow. A present. Soren Wheeler. More information at radiolab.org. My name is Don Sterley, and Radio Lab is produced by Jad. Ab-Aparad and Soren Wheeler.

Our staff includes Ellen Horn, Lulu Miller, Michael Racial, Brenna Farrell, Pat Walters, and the one-and-only Tim Howard. With help from Sharon Shattuck, Raymond Tunga-Karr, Cole Coorie, and Sam Rodman. Special thanks to Barrett Goldine,

Phil Huber, and the whole Huber family, and Aaron Sands. There you go, I hope I haven't made too many mistakes.