Radiolab - Stayin' Alive

Episode Date: June 2, 2009

This week on the podcast we take a look at four unconventional ways to stay alive. We talk to geneticist George Church, who originally appeared in our So Called Life Show, biologist Bernd Heinrich, neuroscientist David Eagleman, and finally, we visit a CPR class.

You're listening to Radio Lab, the podcast. From W-N-Y-C and NPR. Hello, I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Krellwitch. This is Radio Lab, the podcast. And today on our podcast, we have four little stops we're going to make, all centered around that thing, which none of us can avoid that's coming for us all. I'm talking, of course, about the Big D.

Well, we all know we're going to die, except some of our science. friends. Remember when we were at Harvard and we were talking to George Church? George Church Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. We were doing the show about bioengineering. So here's an example where we might grow a large batch of cells in a fermenter. Yeah. George Church was the guy who was trying to use

a little bacteria to make gasoline. He is manipulating life. He also flirts around with the idea of eliminating the concept of death. I think I disagree that there is a quantum leap between living and non-living. I think there's a continuum between non-living and living, and you can create all sorts of things. Wait, wait, at some point, if I were to shoot you in the head and you would have fallen on the floor with a hole in your head and bleed, and I have no nurse or no doctor help you, at some point your state will have changed fundamentally.

You'll stop breathing and you'll be over. But I won't necessarily... Yes, you will be dead. I'm saying that depending on the probability of a doctor coming into the room and fixing me and the probability of more advanced technology being able to reverse all kinds of pathological damage, there is a value to saying that there is a continuum between life and death. I'll give you the continuum, but I'm also saying there will be a certain point in which you are unmistakably over. With current technology, but not necessarily with future technology.

And there may be... You're saying that it is possible that you can... can never be totally dead, that that might be a reversible state at some point? Well, if we recorded the position of all my atoms and we could recreate those position of all those atoms, you could completely burn me into atoms and then reassemble, and isn't there, isn't at the end, I'm alive again? Yes, I suppose in the conceptual, if you get to be really, really, really clever, I guess you could reverse everything.

But maybe we could never get that clever. Or do you think that... I mean, I just... I think it's going to boil down to cost. The idea of death implies that there is a sharp point at which you... A point of no return. And I'm saying this gets, gets harder and harder and harder. But not impossible.

And I don't see that it's particularly impossible. I mean, if you've recorded the state of the living thing before it starts going into this impossible decay, you just start from scratch and you pulled it from scratch. nothing is really completely lost, nothing is completely gained. The main thing that is retained through all this is the information. And George Church thinks that being alive

is having all that information. So, Jed, if I knew where all your atoms are right now, you could always come back. That's his view. Oh, God. Come back. It's a terrible thought for you, isn't it? For my taste, there's a,

much more pleasant way to think about it. What's that? The other way to think about it is to think like Burt Heinrich, a professor at the University of Vermont, who got a curious letter, and a wonderful letter, I think, from a student of his named Bill. He was a grad student in entomology

at UC Berkeley when I was teaching there, and he came out and visited at the camp in Maine. Burn, you see, has a cabin in the western part of Maine, up on top of a mountain. It's actually very beautiful, set in the woods, Bruce and Pine. Bill, the grad student, did spend some time there, and then he moved back to Southern California and a few years passed, and then this letter arrived. Did you have any sense

that there was anything wrong before you got the letter, or was this out of the blue? No, no, I had no sense whatsoever. No, he was healing hearty, and then I got that letter. So here's how the letter went. It begins, yo burnt. I have been diagnosed with a severe illness, and I'm trying to get my final disposition arranged in case I drop sooner than I hoped. I want an Abbey Burial. This phrase Abbey Burial refers to a guy named Edward Abbey, who was a very, very famous ecologist and who was brought into the desert by his best friends

in a sleeping bag right after he died and just put in the ground, no embalming, no coffin, lightly covered with sand, and that's where they left him. That is what Bill wanted to have happen. Anyhow, the upshot is, he wrote, one of the options is burial on private property. What are your thoughts on having an old friend as a permanent resident at the camp, signed Bill?

In other words, Bill wanted to be laid out on the ground, not even under the ground, at Burns Place in Maine. I wrote him, I think, I don't think I would want to have him laid out in front of my camp in Maine. I think that's, although, you know, if it was a wilderness where, you know, people are not going to be walking around, then, you know, I would think more favorably of it. I think right now, I don't think we want to have carcasses lying around in the woods.

You know, I definitely don't think that. But he did write Bill this. He wrote, I read you loud and clear. When it's my turn, I too want no less for myself. A casket would be for you, as it was for Edward Abbey, an unacceptable cage for otherwise free and ever-recycling molecules that would soon become incorporated into the Earth's ecosystem. You know, I agree with the idea.

I just feel that, you know, being sealed up, totally removed from all the natural processes that normally occur with every animal on Earth is very somehow frightening. It seems unnatural, and I don't know, it just... It's funny that you'd use the word frightening. I think most people lock themselves up in a casket because they're frightened to be munched on by worms and beetles and things.

Yeah, no, I don't find that frightening at all. I find that comforting to be part of the ecosystem. To be composed into grass, to be composed into ravens, to be composed into flowers and trees. You know, that's a comforting thought to me. That's the other way to think about it, is that you're releasing yourself for the chance to be lots and lots and lots of different, new, and more beautiful lives that will succeed you,

which... I don't know. Well, wait, wait, I would say that it is... If I could become plants and new animals... Well, would that make you swoon? No, it would make me feel like I'm... Like, I'm a collection of molecules. I'm here for a season, 60, 70, 80 years, whatever.

And then I let my molecules go. I disappear. And the molecules go on to new adventures. Yeah, but there's some... But then you're gone. Yeah, I'm gone. You're lost. Well...

The year that was here for 60, 70, 80 years, whatever. It's suddenly not here. anymore and there is in that an absence. There's a vacancy. Don't you feel that? I mean, I love for the Beatles and the things and everyone to be together again, but there is also the sense that when you disappear, you're gone. I mean, I understand on some level what George Church was saying to you. I mean, why, if you've got the technology, would you want to lose something so precious as a friend or a family member or a lover or something or a co-host? When you can bring that person back. And you know what? Forget us because it gets kind of egocentric when you're

talking about bringing yourself back. But what about collections of ideas that are lost forever, like a language? I think the status, like one language disappears every 14 days, disappears from the earth, never to be spoken again, because the last speaker of that language dies and then decomposes and is eaten by the Beatles according to your fantasy. Well, how would you recover them? Well, who knows? But we were talking to a guy, David Eagleman. He's a neuroscientist. I don't know what a neuroscientist would usually know about such things, but he mentioned this thought experiment that has to do with lost languages. For example, nobody knows what Latin sounds like, right? It's dead because all the people who spoke Latin, there weren't tape recorders around when they were doing it. And so essentially,

we all say, all right, that's, it's dead, it's gone. But it turns out somebody made a proposal that probably wouldn't work, but it was so stunning in its creativity that I thought it was very interesting, which is, he said, look, sometimes these Roman pottery makers, if you can imagine these wheels that turn, these pottery wheels, and you have a little stylus against the piece of pottery to make the line that spirals down. He said if there were people talking in the room while that was happening, there might be micro-vibrations that caused the stylist to move in and out, and as a result, it essentially could act like a record. And if you could play it back from these pieces of Roman pottery, you could actually hear the people in the room talking in

Latin. Ah! Ha! You could play a vase, like an LP, and then hear like Prathetheus, you know, the potter, you could hear his voice? Precisely. Now, the thing is, it probably won't work exactly like that. But what's interesting about the... idea is that we're constantly coming up with new technologies where then we can retrieve things that we once thought were dead. In other words, we thought the information sort of scattered off into the universe, and then we're finding with a new technology we're able to bring it all back together.

What was that? Those are dead languages coming back. I don't know what that is. It was probably from a sound like a library. Oh, I see. So all those languages that were disableness. appearing that's their return. It was a gesture. I was trying to evoke the sense of language is returning from the cosmos. Brilliantly done. All right, smart guy. You know, if you want to stand

for the proposition as you were earlier, that you'd be happy to decompose and become part of Mother Nature again. In my time. Well, that's what I was going to ask you. What if you had the choice right now to persist or, I don't know, I can't. Persist, obviously. Well, okay, then, And let's end with a sort of ode to the persistors. And this one comes from our producer, Ellen Horn. So everybody's going to count out loud. Okay, set the scene for me. Where are we? Well, we're near Wall Street in Manhattan.

And this is a CPR class. It's a Sunday afternoon. Okay. Everybody ready? There's about 25 students here. Begin. And everyone's basically pressing on dummies. Is that what's happening?

Yeah, they press in the middle of the chest. 30 times, and then they tip the mannequins head back and blow into the mouth twice. But here's the central problem with doing CPR really well. It's the tempo. You need to get the tempo right. If you do it too slow, you don't get enough pressure up to get the blood moving around the body. And if you do it too fast, then the heart doesn't have time to fill back up. And what's the ideal speed? This.

The 100 beats per minute. In this class, the class is just learning CPR, it's hard to hear, but if you listen... Two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, count out. Just a little bit too fast. And how exactly do you get people to do 100 beats for a minute? That seems like abstract or something. Well, it's been shown that if you ask people to think of a song,

they always remember it at the right tempo. Really? There's this guy, Alson Anaba. I'm a pediatric emergency medicine physician in Honolulu, Hawaii. And he teaches CPR. And he was trying to figure out a good way to remember what 100 compressions a minute should feel like when you're doing CPR. So I thought, find a song, a popular song that had a beat of approximately 100 beats per minute. So what's the song?

And the song he came up with. Stay in Alive by the Bee Gees. No. Yeah, yeah. Hopefully you help people stay alive. 11, 12, 13, 14, 14, 15, 17, 17. Wow, and they did this the class you went to? Yeah.

This is caught fire. CPR classes all over the world. Egypt, Argentina, Botswana, Japan. We're using this to teach the right tempo of CPR. Just happened to stumble upon it, and it was, I think, one of the best teaching tips I came up with in my career so far. There is another song, though, that has a much simpler, more direct downbeat. Same tempo? Same tempo.

And I asked the class to try this song. Now remember, it's one and a half to two inches. Remember those numbers. It's queen. One, two, three, again. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Oh, that's so wrong. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, six.

And another one's gone. Then another one day. Another one bites the dust. Eight. I'll get you to, but another one buys the dast. It's got a better beat in a way than the other one. Yeah, I guess. And it's certainly more frank.

Yes, but we should let this podcast die. And speaking of which, just want to urge you before we close to support your public radio station. Radio Lab is carried on more than 200 stations across the country. You can check RadioLab.org to see if your station carries us, if they do, Even if they don't, please consider making a gift to support that station because without them, without you, we wouldn't exist. We would die. Don't let us die. Radio Lab is supported by...

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