Radiolab - The Age of Aquaticus

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

For years, scientists thought nothing could live above 73℃/163℉.  At that temperature, everything boiled to death. But scientists Tom Brock and Hudson Freeze weren’t convinced. What began as their simple quest to trawl for life in some of the hottest natural springs on Earth would, decades later, change the trajectory of biological science forever, saving millions of lives—possibly even yours.This seismic, totally unpredictable discovery, was funded by the U.S. government. This week, as the Trump administration slashes scientific research budgets en masse, we tell one story, a parable about the unforeseeable miracles that basic research can yield. After that, a familiar voice raises some essential questions: what are we risking with these cuts? And can we recover?Special thanks to Joanne Padrón Carney, Erin Heath, Valeria Sabate, Gwendolyn Bogard, Meredith Asbury and Megan Cantwell at AAAS. Thank you as well to Gregor Čavlović and Derek Muller and the rest of the Veritasium team.EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Latif Nasserwith help from - Maria Paz GutiérrezProduced by - Sarah Qari and Maria Paz GutiérrezOriginal music and sound design and mixing from - Jeremy BloomFact-checking by - Emily Kreigerand Edited by  - Alex Neason with help from Sarah QariEPISODE CITATIONS:Videos - Latif also helped make a version of this story with the YouTube channel Veritasium. Articles - Hudson Freeze NYT OPED: Undercutting the Progress of American ScienceBooks -Thomas Brock, A Scientist in Yellowstone National ParkPaul Rabinow’s Making PCR: A Story of BiotechnologyPodcasts Episodes:If you haven’t heard, listen to our first episode about the Golden Goose awards. Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail] support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Listener supported. WNYC studios. Oh wait, you're listening? Okay. Alright. Okay. Alright. You are listening to Radiolab. Radiolab.

From? WNYC. See? Yup. Hey. Hey, how you doing? WNYC. See? Hey. Hey, how you doing? Alright, it's freezing in here so I have on a winter hat and a blanket.

Well, you're in luck because we're actually headed somewhere hot. Okay. Extremely hot. Can't wait. And our guide there, ironically enough. Hi. Hey! How are you?

How are you? Is a scientist named Hudson Fries. Dr. Fries. You know, there have been a lot of comments on that. What's Fries doing working on hot stuff? Anyway. So, the story that I brought Hud here to tell actually happened at the beginning of his career, 60 years ago or something. But I've been thinking about this story a lot in the last couple months because, I don't

know, every time, you know, like, just a new headline comes out, which is like funding cuts to the National Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health or NASA. Yeah, just the sort of gutting, the avalanche of cuts to publicly funded science and basic research that we are witnessing right now. And I guess maybe for now it's enough to say that Hudson Fries' story, it kind of feels to me like a parable for the moment we are in right now.

Okay, so let's just start way at the beginning. How did you get involved in any of this? Well, let's see. I was born in a small railroad town in Indiana. And as a junior in high school, I spent some time at Indiana University. It's, it's thrilling, you know, for somebody who hasn't seen more than a two story building before this was, this was a big deal.

And I met faculty people there and- HUD says he actually did a science project while he was there about what it would take for a microbe to survive on Mars. And he says he just fell in love with the university, with the science he was learning there. And so when he graduated from high school, I came back to Indiana University and I was able to get in the bacteriology department.

And he really wanted to work with one scientist named Dr. Thomas Brock. I had heard him give a lecture before about mating types in yeast. And you know, anytime you're talking about mating types in college, you know, you're going to be a hit. And so anyway, I go down to see him thinking I'm going to work on mating types. And he says, well, not we're not working on mating types anymore, but we are going to Yellowstone National Park to look into the hot springs for bacteria. So at the time, the scientific consensus was that nothing could live above 73 degrees Celsius, 163 degrees Fahrenheit. It was seen as kind of an upper limit on life.

Burn, boil, shred itself to death. Yeah, but Thomas Brock had recently vacationed in Yellowstone, and he had seen these hot springs where boiling hot water comes up from the interior of the Earth. And he knew that if you go to these hot springs, you see around the edges where the water cools down, there's stuff alive there. Like what? Like mosses and? Like algae, bacteria, little spider mites, stuff like that.

Okay. And he thought maybe this could be a place where he could find some little microbe that is defying that limit of life. That's right. And so we had a small, relatively small grant in basic science. A grant of $80,000 from the U.S. government. To go out and see what he could find. And he's like, hey, HUD, would you like to go to Yellowstone?

Ooh! And I thought, that's perfect. You know, I had done before, it was Mars and it's cold there. You know, now I'm going to go to the complete opposite. I'm going to go where it's boiling hot. And also, for a, you know, small town kid from Indiana, like, this seemed like a great adventure. Because I had never been west of Chicago.

So he hops on a train. I got on in Garrett, Indiana, then went through Chicago. That's where I picked up the train that went nonstop. Through the farmlands of Wisconsin, into the plains of the Dakotas. 20 some hours altogether. And he was like this doe-eyed kid,

just looking out the window. A lot of the Midwest is pretty flat. But then as he crossed into Montana... And I looked, looked out there, I said, boy, those are funny looking clouds. Oh my God, those are not clouds, man, they're mountains. They're real mountains. It's just like mountains that I used to see in the cowboy shoes. You know, I mean, I was just, I was really thrilled

to be able to see this kind of stuff. Oh, I'm really getting out there. So I mean, it was just a great trip. So I get off in Billings, Montana, and take a bus to West Yellowstone, that's where the lab was set up, in this little cabin, you know, a kitchen and sort of a living room, but it was sparse. You know, you wouldn't advertise it as a lab in these days.

It looked more like, you know, where Ted Kaczynski might hang out. It was like a shack. It was a shack, yeah. Anyway, Brock and his crew. You know, we get going at about seven o'clock, something like that. They drive into the park and then hike several miles up to these very remote hot springs. Have you ever seen those pictures of like, or have you ever visited?

No, I haven't. I haven't. I've never gone. I would love to. Should I send you a picture here? You want to see it? Yeah, please. I would love to. Okay. Oh, I haven't seen that. Wow. So we've got, yeah, we've got, it looks almost like this, like, unicorn eye of dazzling blue rimmed with yellow, rimmed with oranges and reds. Yeah. You start out more yellowish and then the orange would start coming through.

Oh, it's just beautiful. And there was one hot spring in particular that Brock and his team got interested in. Mushroom Spring. At the center is a pool of water. It's about 30 feet across. Water at the center can reach 70 degrees Celsius, 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Steam coming off at every direction. Surrounded by light gray rock and dead trees.

And so they'd walk right up to the edge of this pool, trying to get as close as they could. And... We would take these glass slides that had nothing on them, put them in the spring. So if there were any organisms that were bubbling up out of the interior of the earth, they might be able to attach. Trawling basically, trawling for life. And the water is so hot that if they happen to fall into the spring... Oh, adios. Yeah.

Luckily, no scientists were harmed in the doing of this research. But they got their samples, they took them back with them to their little shack lab. And what they do is they would add these radioactive chemicals that would react with stuff in the sample, whatever proteins or sugars or whatever. And that would be a sign of something living in there. And we actually proved that the material was actually alive. But what they still didn't know was if the living things in there had come from the center of the springs,

or if it had fallen from the outside, or what exactly it was. So they took these samples back to Indiana University, and it was HUD's job to see if the samples they got could really grow and thrive in super hot temperatures. Yeah, yeah. So I had a whole series of different tubes at different temperatures. So now HUD's got all these samples and they're sitting in these hot water baths on all these

burners, so that each one is set to a different temperature. So it's starting a little cool, getting hotter, eventually going past that supposed limit that is too hot for anything to be alive. So every day I would go in there and I'd look to see if there was anything that looked like it might be growing. And he has to keep refilling these hot water baths. And the darn things could run dry. The water keeps burning up.

The water keeps boiling up. Running up the electric bill of the microbiology department. So anyway. Day after day, he's tending to these little vials, always checking on them. Always looking for a change in the soup. If bacteria were growing, it would be cloudy. It might even start to smell a little bit. So he's waiting. He's waiting. The liquid is clear. Day one, he. So he's waiting, he's waiting.

The liquid is clear. Day one, he's waiting. Day two, he's waiting. He's waiting a couple days. I couldn't find anything. And then on the fourth, maybe fifth day, September 19th, 1966. He picks up one of the vials. September 19th, 1966.

He picks up one of the vials. I just tapped it with my finger. And there was all this swirly stuff that came up. I mean, it looked like, it looked like diamonds kind of running around. It was like, whew, all around me inside the tube. And I thought, oh my God, maybe this is it. So he takes a look under a microscope, and what he sees are these little worms,

kind of like cut up spaghetti. Just floating around in there. And they're moving? And they're moving, yeah, they're alive. At almost boiling water. According to the current thinking, nothing should be able to live in here, but they were growing, they were reproducing, they were making more of them.

They were like, proliferating. They're thriving. And I said, I said, oh my God, I'm, I am the first person in the world ever to see this. The next day I'm, I'm telling everybody in the lab about it. I'm telling Tom Brock. One of the guys in the lab says, well, I think we ought to call it headsonia ifresiensis. You could have had a species named after you. Yeah. Yeah.

But then Brock was like, oh, no, no, no. We're not gonna do that. Can't name them after people anymore. We are gonna call it Thermus Aquaticus. Thermus Aquaticus. Thermus Aquaticus. Tac. Tac is short for Thermus Aquaticus.

Hot water. It literally just means hot water. I'm going around the lab singing, It is the dawning of the age of Aquaticus, Age of Aquaticus age of aquaticus. I like it. It's simple, it's clear. Aquaticus.

How do they do it? How do they live in this temperature that kills so much else? So usually in hot water, the water molecules are just jostling around so much. I mean, that's why we can't go out and, you know, sit at 180 degrees, because our proteins fall apart, our enzymes fall apart. But TAC has evolved proteins and enzymes that are more tightly structured. That's right. They can survive without falling apart. Which, beyond being a cool trick, opens up a door that life can do a whole new thing. Like, there's a whole new superpower that we didn't even know about.

Which does open up, like, could there be life on Mars? Could there be life in lava? That's it. Could there be life in these places we thought were inhospitable? That's right. Yeah. You know, this was the thing that led us to say, well, what if you go down 5,000 feet under the sea, where we know there are volcanoes down there? Boy, I'll bet nothing lives down there. Well, yes, it does.

Oh, I haven't seen that. Wow. So we've got, yeah, we've got, it looks almost like this, like unicorn eye of dazzling blue rimmed with yellow, rimmed with oranges and reds. Life will be fine. We may not be fine, but life will be fine. Right. Yeah. Life will still continue to exist as long as you have liquid water. That, if I had to pick anything, is really the sort of lesson of this. Life will exist anywhere where there's nutrients. It will go any place where it can find energy, to use energy, to grow.

I'm going to quote Jeff Goldblum here. Life finds a way. Life finds a way. Life finds a way. So I was like, oh my god, this is amazing, like was this on the cover of Time magazine? Yeah. Yeah. And he's like, no. It has no use. It has absolutely no use. You know, it's curiosity.

I mean, it's science for science sake, it's fundamental research. That's the way science goes. And the rest of the world, the non-scientist world, was just like... And well, who cares? So... And so they preserved a sample of TAC

and they just put it in a, kind of like a library of microbes. Yeah, yeah, it's a germ library. Beyond that, we didn't think about it. They moved on to other things. And then 50 or so years later, Hudson is sitting at his desk and he gets a call. He said, this is like this,

and I want to talk to you about a science prize. And I thought, oh my God, it's the prize patrol. If I sign up for Scientific American for six years at this bargain rate, I'm going to get a, you know, something in the mail. But what it was, it turns out, was something called the Golden Goose Award. Oh, Golden Goose! Thank you for joining us for the 11th Annual Golden Goose Award Ceremony. Right. Okay, so you remember we did annual Golden Goose Award Ceremony. Right.

Okay, so you remember we did an episode about a couple years back. Okay. Well, there's a mask? We even sent one of our producers, Maria Vazgatierrez, to cover it like in red carpet. Check out the scientist's outfits. Right, right. Is this event a big deal? I don't know.

This is the Emmys of science. It was held in Washington, D.C. in a big fancy building near the Capitol. So I'm asking people what they're wearing. What are you wearing? That's a good question. I am wearing a suit. It's like mostly blue, but then there's this subtle light blue. It's pretty funky.

It's a statement. With this window pane, hello. But anyway, basically, it was an award created back in the 80s, 1980s, when Congress was ridiculing a lot of the government funding of basic scientific research and there were like headlines all the time about like, we're wasting money spending, you know, funding a study about snail sex or whatever it was. And then the Golden Goose Award was sort of this tongue in cheek nerdy response in the form of an award that goes to research that is funded

by the government that sounds dumb or useless, sounds absurd, but then turns out to completely change the world. Right. So now HUD is getting a call from them saying, TAC deserves this award. The Hot Worms? But how did that research change the world, I thought they, how did, how did that research change the world? I thought they were sitting standing on a shelf.

Well, that is exactly what I'm going to tell you after the break. Mm-hmm. Okay. Lulu. Latif. Radiolab. Hot Worms. And the place where the hot worms went next, which nobody could have ever predicted, only really happened because of a drug-induced biological fever dream. What? And that's the story I'm gonna tell you now. Okay.

So, maybe no surprise, we're gonna leave Indiana and jump instead to Berkeley, California. Alright. We're still in the late 1960s, only now I wanna tell you about a guy called Kerry Mullis. Okay. He's a PhD student in biochemistry at UC Berkeley. But instead of being a lab,

he seems to prefer experimenting in biochemistry by synthesizing his own LSD. He's literally famous on campus for doing this. Anyway, so he gets his degree, gets a job in a bio lab, but then he just hates like how many mice they kill all the time. And then he gets a job in a cafe. He's like he's like this floating guy until one day he's working in the coffee shop and a customer is like, aren't you that guy who used to make your own LSD?

And they get to talking. And eventually this guy offers Carrie a job. Whoa. At this biotech startup called Cetus. Okay. Now just to give you a sense, at this point, we're in the late 70s. Today's science is on the threshold of a new era. And the thing that scientists everywhere, especially the scientists at Cetus, are obsessed with is...

DNA. DNA. Deoxyribonucleic acid, the essence of life. The stuff of which all life is made. The key we've been looking for. They have this hunch that decoding DNA is going to unlock lots of secrets about the human body. The answers lie within these long, thin, twisted strands.

And Cetus, the company where Karymollis got his job, they want to be on the cutting edge of this. And so they have teams of scientists trying to figure out how to read DNA. Okay. And their main problem at the time is that reading DNA is extremely, extremely hard. The whole process of trying to read, or even just find and isolate

like microscopically tiny little molecules of DNA, it was so inefficient that it was just not... It was a non-starter. It was not feasible at all. So scientists at Cetus were scratching their heads trying to find a better way to do this. Got it. Now, Carey Mullis, he was not doing any of that. He was stuck doing very slow, very repetitive,

boring lab work. But one day, he's out on a drive. doing any of that. He was stuck doing very slow, very repetitive, boring lab work. But one day he's out on a drive after work. I was driving along one night. Carey Malz actually died back in 2019, but while he was live, he did a bunch of interviews where he talks about this moment. I was driving to a little cabin I have in Mendocino County.

Driving through the mountains on these windy, steep roads, it's super dark. It was really late at night. And in his mind, he's turning over the problems of reading DNA. The way he described it, he's like, trying to read a piece of DNA at that time, was like trying to find a license plate on the interstate in the middle of the night from the moon. And then you still have to read it. So just impossible.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And all of his colleagues are focused on basically devising a more powerful, more precise telescope to spot the DNA. And he's thinking like, how do you fix this thing? I mean, what do you do? And all of a sudden, he sees DNA everywhere. Blue and pink strands of DNA just floating in front of him as he was driving, like through the windshield.

Whoa. As he said it, they injected themselves somewhere between the mountain road and my eyes. He hadn't done any LSD that night, allegedly, but he says that he had done it so many times that he could almost get his mind there without having to take it. I mean, who knows? But like, it's almost like he's imagining himself riding a piece of DNA. And then he has this thought that just snaps him right out of it. Everyone's working on a better and better telescope from the moon, right?

What if instead you futz with the license plate? What if you can make copies of the license plate? And copy the copies and then copy the copies. So you go from having one copy of it to two to four to eight to 16 to 32 to 64 to 128 on up to a million if you've done it 20 times and a billion if you've done it 30 times. A billion of them. It's as if the whole planet Earth now is covered

in the license plate that you wanted to see. And all of a sudden it's gonna be way easier To find it. Yeah, and therefore to read it. Okay, interesting. I don't quite get how having a billion copies would make you see it better, but... I think that's fine. I think that's fine.

Like, the only thing you need to know is he has this vision for a machine that's like kind of a DNA Xerox machine. Okay. And he's like, this is it. Like, he talks about he had like deoxyribonuclear bombs going off in his head as he's driving. Like Eureka kind of a movement. Yeah, okay. He literally stops the car and writes it.

He looks in the glove compartment and he finds an old receipt and he's writing things down on the back of it. Oh my gosh. Okay. So he takes his idea into work. And everyone thinks it's really stupid. Oh no. Why? I think it's because it's such a simple idea. They're like, of course it's not going to work.

But also, Carrie, he sucks. Basically he sucks. He takes things very personally, gets into fights with colleagues at work all the time. Literally a fist fight at one point. Allegedly, one day he brings a gun to work to threaten somebody. Okay, so the Xerox machine ideas come in from Carrie, so... Yeah, Carrie, right. But the thing is, Carrie's sort of already working out in his head how this DNA Xerox machine theoretically would work.

So you have a piece of DNA. Imagine like a long zipper. working out in his head how this DNA Xerox machine theoretically would work. So you have a piece of DNA. Imagine like a long zipper. Because remember, DNA is made up of matching base pairs. Cs go with Gs, A go with Ts, right? And they're all zipped together. Now, in order to copy it, first you have to unzip it. Unzip it, so now you have two halves of it, right?

Then basically you find new base pairs to match up with each side of the zipper. Oh yeah, right. For every G you find a C, for every A you find a T. You can kind of perfectly recreate the other half. Right. And then it's like you can zip it up with a new zipper, right? Right, right. Okay, then do it again.

Unzip and then copy both. Okay. And then you keep doing that over and over. Zip, unzip, zip, unzip. You do that 30 times, you have a billion zippers. Whereas you just started with one. Clever. By this point, he managed to convince his boss,

who has assigned people by force to work with him. And they keep trying it and trying it. They're working on it for months. And they keep trying it and trying it. They're working on it for months. And they keep failing. One of the problems is to unzip it, for whatever chemical reason, the temperature needs to be really high. Okay.

And then to rezip it, the temperature needs to be lowered by a lot. Huh. And he notices this one part of the DNA zipper, like the slider, the thing that zips the DNA teeth together, is this enzyme called a polymerase. And he notices that any time he raises the temperature too high, the polymerase falls apart.

Without getting too in the weeds here. The polymerase is a protein, and typically if proteins get too hot, they just sort of disintegrate. And so Cary and his team were like, oh, if only there was a polymerase somewhere that could live at this high temperature. So then someone from their team went to this library, this microbe library. Okay. And what did they find?

The hot worms! The hot worms. Thermos aquaticus. Oh! So he's like through the card catalog like 90 degrees Celsius. Yeah. And as Hudson Fries explained to us, Thermos aquaticus has its own polymerase. As you might call it, TAC polymerase.

And again, because every part of TAC is evolved to take the heat, this polymerase, when you heat it up, it can survive without falling apart. So, Cary and his team are basically like, oh, this is exactly the thing we were looking for. Yeah. And they plug it into their machine, and it basically works like a dream,

as if it was made to do that. Oh my god! Like all of a sudden, they can add the TAC polymerase, run this reaction to replicate the DNA over and over. And before you know it, they have a billion copies of the gene snippet they're looking for. I think we had just finished cloning a gene at Cetus that took 40 people six months. I can do that in one afternoon by myself now. Whoa. And so the process that they invent, it's called...

Polymerase chain reaction, or PCR. PCR. PCR. Polymerase chain reaction. And it completely changed everything. This process has been hailed as one of the monumental scientific techniques of the 20th century. Why?

Because PCR made it so much easier and faster to read DNA. Suddenly, scientists everywhere start using it. We're here to celebrate the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome. They finally decode the human genome and all the knowledge that comes with it. And from there on out, I would say every biotechnology company in the world,

every lab anywhere that's studying DNA has to use PCR. To put that a different way, every major scientific breakthrough that involves DNA in any way in the last several decades, it's all run on PCR. To detectetic markers. Like diagnosing genetic diseases.

Including cystic fibrosis. Things like HIV detection. Sickle cell disease. Determining ancestry. Think of 23andMe, ancestry.com. All of that. The whole industry. DNA discovery.

Help the woman meet the little brother she never knew she had. We have… Forensic DNA testing to identify the suspect's DNA. The whole world of forensics solving crimes with DNA evidence or recent DNA evidence exonerated him. Proving people innocent even identifying bodies for things like reuniting loved ones after wars or natural disasters or Osama bin Laden is dead. His body identified using DNA evidence. Also another thing, this whole Renaissance and learning about human origins. Homo sapiens picked up some of the DNA from the Neanderthals. None of this stuff would have been possible without PCR.

It's just wild. As you're running through this litany, it is wild that it all runs on something that we found in these random little worms, these random little bacteria that happen to live in really hot water. This is wild. Crazy, right? Yeah.

Okay. And here's my favorite example. Yeah. There's something called a PCR. At the moment, we're using something called a PCR test. The PCR test is the very same PCR that we used during the pandemic to test for COVID. That's probably the most accurate way to tell if someone tested. The most reliable test.

PCR was the sort of gold standard of a test. That's right! Multiplying COVID RNA so it was detectable. Okay, this is, it's almost eerie that like these, these hot worms led us to COVID tests. Yeah, and it's hard to know how many more people would have died without them. Totally.

Now, obviously the development of PCR was not just Kerry, it was this huge team effort, but in 1993. Dr. Kerry Mullis, I now ask you to receive the Nobel Prize from the hands of His Majesty the King. Kary Mullis wins the Nobel Prize. And the critical component is the tact polymerase. And you know, I did ask Hudson Fries, like, are you like, bitter that you didn't win the Nobel Prize? But that isn't why you do the science, right? I realized it was a critical component and that that was sort of payoff in itself. To know that my contribution really counted.

Like I had a hand in this amazing world-changing technology. I don't know, it's kind of like if your kid is like Michael Jordan. Just by the way, his radio lab producer Maria Paz Gutierrez. And he's like playing in every game. Oh God, yes. Yes. My little bug. My little bug has made it.

Yeah. Yeah, you're the scout. You're the talent scout who saw Michael Jordan, yeah. Ha ha ha. Today actually Hudson Frees works in an institute Scout who saw Michael Jordan, yeah. Today, actually, Hudson Fries works in an institute where they work on rare genetic diseases, including and especially in children. They use PCR all the time at his institute to help, you know, to help, like to literally

save lives, you know, make people's lives more livable. It's really, really beautiful work. It took a long time before I was able to use tech and, you know, make people's lives more livable. It's really, really beautiful work. It took a long time before I was able to use tack and, you know, really make a difference for individuals and keep people alive that likely would have died. It's funny how 1966 was a real turning point. Yeah. I find this like a just a beautiful, beautiful story about what is life capable of? Like what can life even do? Totally.

And in the end, like it really became this life changing, life saving discovery. And in such a pure way, like it's like this openended question, could there be life in this extremely hot place? Let me do really good samples and like, you did good science to find out. Yep. And then all I do is put it in a library. Like, there's something like pure on so many levels. Yeah, like just idle curiosity paying off way more and in ways that nobody could ever expect. All of that came out of one $80,000 grant

from the U.S. government. That's why Hudson Fries and Thomas Brock, they won the Golden Goose Award in 2013. Honestly, like, you could hand out a Golden Goose Award every day, you know, pretty much anything that is some kind of technology making life better in some way, it all started in basic science. So as we've been working on this story, Lajif, you know, you mentioned at the beginning, it is this sort of parable of our time.

Well, I mean, I, when you put it next to what is going on in the news right now, which are all of these cuts, it feels like a tale of a thing that we are in danger of losing. Yeah. So, to kind of bring this story, to connect it to the avalanche of cuts coming to publicly funded science, we turn to somebody whose voice you probably recognize. My name's Carl Zimmer, and I'm a columnist at the New York Times. He has been watching all the cuts really closely, detailing it in his newsletter called Friday's Elk.

So what I've been doing is trying to distill for myself, just summarizing what my fellow journalists have been digging up. And so we called them up to give us a more granular look at what's been frozen, what's been shut down, what's been lost. I don't think we know yet, honestly. There are lots of efforts to push back that are happening now. There are a number of lawsuits. There may be more lawsuits, but we don't know

how judges will rule. We don't know at this point if the Trump administration is going to really adhere to what the judges say. But I can say government scientists are getting laid off in the tens of thousands. Opportunities for young scientists are getting wiped out. Grants are being eliminated. Universities are suddenly having billions of dollars of research suddenly pulled. You know, there was a big diabetes program. There was at Columbia, there was a program on, you know, studying chronic fatigue.

These had been going on for years. They're gone. No one's in those labs, just empty? They're gone, they're gone. No one's in those labs, just empty? They're gone, they're shut down. Things are happening on all fronts. Carl says a lot of the cuts to scientists and basic research are coming in the form of broad cuts at government agencies. For example, the Trump administration has put forward a budget in which NASA's science

budget would be cut in half, which experts have described as kind of an extinction level event for science at NASA. This is all the stuff that you read about in the newspapers, like what did we discover on Mars? Or there is a space telescope called the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. It is built.

If it gets into space, it will be able to give us an incredible picture on the whole universe, including the evolution of galaxies and even better look at planets around other solar systems might help us find life on other solar systems. In the proposed budget, that telescope is dead. It gets no funding. It's just gonna sit there and do nothing.

Yeah. That's absurd. Then the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's climate science program, that is being proposed to be shut down. Just shut down. Fully, fully. Shut down. The EPA.

At the EPA, they have research scientists who do science to understand the threats to human health. There's movements to have all 1,000 of them laid off. The EPA will not have a research science staff if this follows through. You know, the Centers for Disease Control, for example. The Centers for Disease Control used to have an office full of experts on lead poisoning. And in fact, Milwaukee has just had a lead poisoning emergency and they would like to have CDC send their experts. There are no lead poisoning experts at the CDC. They're just gone now. They've been fired.

What about, I mean, what about NSF, NIH? Yeah, NSF, their proposal is to cut it in half. And Department of Health and Human Services. That's the department that houses the National Institutes of Health. 10,000 people have been fired. That has included lots of people involved in doing basic research on biomedicine. And in one example, Carl told us about a group of scientists who've been working over the last several years. Trying to make a coronavirus vaccine

that is going to be able to give us some protection against other strains of COVID or maybe some entirely new coronavirus. They've made a lot of progress and a lot of their progress came with a deeper understanding of how the immune system works. So they've learned a lot of basic science along the way, and it has been delivering a lot of promise.

And that grant has just been pulled with no explanation. That research is now over. There are projects looking for antivirals for a range of different viruses that might start the next pandemic. That's been canceled, too, and those scientists aren't even sure if they'll be able to write up their results. Like you may not find out what they've done.

There's just too many to choose from. I mean, I've been talking with a researcher who has, you know, a massive program on understanding tuberculosis and the immune system. You know, this is the most deadly infectious disease we have these days. It kills over a million people a year. His grant was canceled and honestly, he's not sure why. This huge program that could give us new insights

about tuberculosis and might eventually lead to new treatments is just gone, just gone. So there are definitely very short-term impacts of what this administration is doing. Cutting off the supply of drugs for HIV or halting a clinical trial potentially give a treatment for cancer. These people are in the middle of these trials

and they're just stopping. So those are really short-term things. I mean, is there some chance that businesses, like the private sector in general, would come in and fund all of this, like pick it up? Get back up? That's not great business. You'd be waiting a long time for those drug companies to pick up all that basic research that governments

like the United States have been covering for decades. And a lot of this stuff, you know, when it's dropped, it's really difficult to ever start it up again. You don't bounce back from this sort of shock to the system. And you know, a system of searching for knowledge, there is so much that needs to be ready to go. Equipment, materials, administration, all the gathering up of research subjects, and then the scientists themselves. You know, there was a poll that Nature did recently. They've asked hundreds of scientists about, you know,

what effect all of this chaos is having on them and their thoughts about their future. And 75% of these American scientists said they have been thinking about maybe moving. Wow. Other people may just leave science. 35 years of being a science writer. I haven't seen anything close to this. And I mean, Carl says what we are seeing right now

is just uncharted territory. Really, I mean, at this what we are seeing right now is just uncharted territory. Really, I mean, at this point, I'm thinking we're well on our way to the United States losing its prime position in science. All right. I'm just going to put my head on the desk and leave it here. Maybe we can have, you know, talk about happier things at another time, but this is what we need to be talking about now Okay, Lulu, so I know we're in shambles here. But I kind of saved, there's one extra detail from the Hudson Fries tax story, knowing that we would need to pick me up at the end here.

Okay. Because it's like one of my favorite little details about this story. Please. Well, okay. Yes, please. In the late 1980s, a Berkeley paleobiologist started using PCR to find DNA in ancient weevils. Okay.

And the ancient weevils were found in amber. And it counts very little bit, but the story goes that the novelist Michael Crichton heard about that. Yes! Oh my God! And he was like, huh, that's a great premise. Jurassic Park! So he wrote Jurassic Park, which is amazing because when we interviewed Hudson Fries, his takeaway from his research was like,

Life finds a way. And you're like, yeah, that's from a movie that was inspired by the thing you discovered. That is incredible. Yeah. Full circle. Yeah. Okay. Okay, so that's our episode for today. Big thank you, of course, to Hudson Fries and our little friend, Thermus Aquaticus.

We didn't say this earlier, but his professor and co-author, Thomas Brock, died in 2021. And the song that Hudson Fries sang at Thomas Brock's funeral. It is the dawning of the age of Aquaticus, age of Aquaticus. Aquaticus. That's right. Something like that. Give me a little time to warm up. Yeah, right.

Anyhow. Thank you as well to Joanne Padrone-Carney, also to her team, Erin Heath, Valeria Sabate, Gwendolyn Bogard, Meredith Asbury, and Megan Cantwell at AAAS for being a tremendous help to this episode and for administering the Golden Goose Award. Thank you as well to Gregor Kavlik and Derek Muller and the rest of the Veritasium team, who I actually collaborated with to do a YouTube video about this topic.

They even go into how post-Nobel, Kary Mullis went totally off the deep end and lost all his scientific credibility. Check out that on YouTube. This episode was reported by Latif Nasser and Maria Paz Gutierrez. It was produced by Maria Paz Gutierrez And check out that on YouTube. This episode was reported by Latif Nasser and Maria Paz Gutierrez. It was produced by Maria Paz Gutierrez and Sara Khari, edited by Alex Nisen with help from Sara Khari.

Music and sound design by Jeremy Bloom. And our fact checker on this one was Emily Krieger. That's it. Thank you so much for listening. See you next week. Catch you next week. Hi, I'm Priya Ramachandran Desuza. And I'm from Fiji.

I'm a music teacher. I'm a music teacher. I'm a music teacher. I'm a music teacher. I'm a music teacher. See you next week. Catch you next week. and Keef is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bresler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhuq Nana Sambandan, Matt Kailty, Annie McKayvon, Alex Nason, Sara Curry, Sara Sandbach, Anisa Veitse, Arya Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, I'm Arturo calling from New York City. Leadership support for Radiolab Science Programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation,

Science Sandbox, Assignment Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. A whole new season of terrestrials is coming. Radiolab's family-friendly show, All About Nature. This season, we are back with a new batch of episodes where we come face to snout with some of the wildest,

gnarliest creatures on this planet. We discover music, magic, medicine, and a whole lot of fun. Starting April 17, all on the Radiolab for Kids feed, wherever you listen to podcasts.