Radiolab - Yellow Fluff and Other Curious Encounters

Episode Date: January 12, 2009

The quest for scientific knowledge is one of the great and noble pursuits of humankind. It's also one of the most dangerous, frustrating, ego-driven, transcendent, dirty, sublime, tedious, demoralizing, inspiring...you get the idea. This hour, stories of love and loss in the name of science.

You're listening to Radio Lab from Public Radio, W-N-Y-C-N-Y-C-N-P-R. For Steve Strogetz, a mathematician who we sometimes have on the show, it all started with a pendulum. He was sitting in math class. Our teacher handed us a little toy pendulum. Basically just a little device with a ball on the end of a string. That was retractable. that is you could change the length of the string. Like an old telescope, you know, that the pirate stretches out of spyglass, click, click, click.

You could make it longer in discrete clicks. And then the teacher gave us a stopwatch and said, I want you to time how long it takes for this pendulum to swing back and forth 10 times. Okay, so I do the experiment. Ten swings. I record how many seconds it took. Then he says, now make the pendulum a little bit longer. One click longer.

Click, do it again. And as you might expect, since now the string is longer, takes a bit more time. To make the ten swings. And I write down the number. Click, do it again. Click, do it again. And I do this five or six times dutifully plotting the results on graph paper, which is what the experiment was really supposed to teach us, how to use graph paper.

So he's clicking, measuring, making a little dot. Click, measure, dot. Click, measure, dot. Soon the thing is filled with dots, and that is when he noticed something. This spooky thing was happening, which is that the dots were falling on an arc, on a curve. They weren't on a straight line, they fell on a particular curve, and I noticed that this curve was a curve I had seen before, because I had just learned about it in algebra class, and it's called a parabola. And this really gave me the creeps. I had a sort of feeling of the hairs on the back of my neck standing up,

because it was as if this inanimate thing, this... pendulum new algebra. My 13-year-old mind couldn't understand that. How could this thing, swinging back and forth, know something about parabolas? Or how could that be built in? Then, an even creepier thought occurred to him. Wait a second. This parabola on my paper, which is the same one as the math book, is also out in the world.

It's the shape that water makes coming out of a water fountain. It's also the shape of, you know, when you shoot a rocket into the sky and it slowly descends. It was in that moment that I suddenly understood what people mean when they say there's a law of nature. Do you remember what it was that made your hairs stand on end? Was it that you had peeked in and discovered a secret or that you just simply found the right answer? Much closer to the first thing you said, that there was this sort of veil over reality, a hidden universe that you couldn't see unless you knew math. It really felt like being led into some sort of secret system.

And that wasn't so much the point. I mean, it's not like I cared about being in this priesthood. It's a very intimate personal thing, this feeling of wonder of a sense of living in an incomprehensible and beautiful universe. But partly comprehensible. That's the beauty of it. I mean, if you're a lobster, you don't have this thought. A lobster doesn't get to think about the laws of nature. And so I've often thought to myself that it's a blessing that we live in a certain window of intelligence, that if we're

intelligence, that if we were infinitely smart, godlike, we'd have such powerful brains, we could see every implication of everything. So math wouldn't be fun for a being that's too smart. And of course, for the lobster, that's not smart enough, math is no fun for them either. It's in this intermediate window where math and science become something to rejoice in. Today's program is about a kind of search, a search for order, for patterns, hidden truth. Hidden truths. And it's about the scientists who go out looking for those things and sometimes find them. Whoa.

What's that? And sometimes don't. I felt humiliated. I felt stupid. Question is, what makes these people tick? And we're calling this show... Why do I love the fly that's eating my brain? That'll make sense later.

I'm Chadabumrod. I'm Robert Krollwitch. This is Radio Lab. Okay. You ready? Yeah. Off we go. I think there's always been a desire to somehow...

categorize and classify the world around us. Remember it? And when you were in, I don't know when it would be, like, in eighth grade, when the teacher comes in general science and he pulls down the periodic table of elements. Oh, yeah, sure. I mean, that was one of the first times where I was like, yeah, I don't want to be a scientist. It's not for me. But for kids who love this kind of thing, take Oliver Sacks, for example.

Yeah, you should come in. I should come in? Yeah, so a couple years ago, we had went to talk to Oliver Sacks about something. Well, it was actually mostly you that was going to talk to him, and I was just tacking along for the hell of it. And for some reason, we ended up in his bathroom. Maybe to look at a book or something? He seems to have facts and figures in this as well. There's a lot of us in there.

I'm sorry. And that's when we noticed. You know the periodic. I tried in the bathroom. But he had a periodic table of the elements on the wall in the bathroom. We thought, wow, how funny. Periodic table in the bathroom. But then he said, well, you know,

if you go out into the couch, you'll see some cushions, embroidered with the periodic table, and then he took us to his bedroom. Although I don't usually take people into my bedroom. Oh, welcome. Where he showed us his periodic table comforter. I tend to sleep here right under tungsten.

But the cool part was when he took us to the living room, where you had this... Describe what isn't before us here. It looks like an altar. It's like a little dictionary stand, on top of which was a bit of a little dictionary stand, on top of which was a beautiful mahogany box. A fine wooden box.

About the size of a backgammon set. It is a very fine wooden box. And if you care to open it, it's made of some sort of fine wood. It comes from Russia. It does. All right. Is there a trick to opening this?

Okay, we've all seen the periodic table bringing along a chart, but in Oliver's box. There were the actual elements. These are all these, we have here, like 90-some-odd little tubes. Little samples. Little T-Viles. Almost all the elements. Silver, arsenic, bismuth, co-oxygen, cop-hydrogen, phosphorus, iron, manganese, mercury, nitrogen, libitinum, gold.

Since I'm, for example, having my 77th birthday tomorrow, and element 72 is hafnium, there is a little hafnium. Two little rocks. Here's what they sound like if you straddle them. I have coming to me. I hope it arrives today an ingot of hafnium, which would be very much more satisfying. What would you do with an ingot that you can't do with the two little pebbles?

I'll be able to hold it in my hand. My first love of chemistry had to do with the sensuous. Here, one of the liquid elements, romine, I loved the colors, the brown, faintly brown fluidy thing. The luster. Ailed golden mercury. Very, very beautiful.

The physical properties. This is a gas trapped in a little vial? Yes. One wouldn't want to drop that. Why not? Well, it's not good to breathe. Can I just jump in here for a second? Sure.

Because I really need to jump in. But the thing that's really crazy about that box, and this you don't get from looking at a periodic chart on a wall, is it all those elements? Lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen. That's like the world. I mean, everything that we can see and perceive this table right here, the teeth in my mouth, the sky, the ocean, the mountains, it's all made of some combination of elements from that box.

And the box itself gives it all a deep, deep order. I had noticed myself, I can't help noticing, that the elements are organized in a very special sort of way. For example. I have managed to not notice. I find it a little odd that you could organize them at all. I don't even know how to begin the process of figuring out they're related in some way. Well, then you are sort of recapitulating what everyone felt in the early days. Of course, in the really early days, people thought there were just four elements.

The ancient notion of elements took the form of earth. fire and water. Basically, the thought that the whole world could be composed of these four ingredients in different ways. But then, in the 18th century, we're skipping ahead a bit. Chemists began to break things down into smaller pieces, like wind became. Gases like oxygen and hydrogen and nitrogen. And Earth got divided up into things like... Sulfur, phosphorus, ion.

By the way, in order to do this kind of investigating, do you have to... boil and pull and tug and fry and steam and do things like that. All of the above. So to fast forward, after enough of this boiling and tugging and frying and steaming, chemist got all the way down to the root of it, which was the atom. That's really what an element is. It's a particular kind of atom. The problem was, though, when chemists began to start measuring these atoms,

they found that they were all different sizes and types. Like one would be heavy. Another would be light. Third one would be really friendly, likes to link up with their atoms, whereas the fourth would be a loner. And they would come in combinations like heavy, friendly, heavy, shy, light friendly, light shine. What was the pattern? That was the question. Could they fit all of these differences and similarities into one big scheme? Since we mentioned his name, let me here show you a picture of the...

Here's where we get to Oliver's hero. The Siberian bigamist, as he is called. That would be Dmitri Mendeleev. The great Mendeleev, whom we will talk about. Oliver has a black and white picture of him on his kitchen cabbass. This man is not going to win any beauty contest. No, he looks like a mixture between Rasputin and, um, who do I mean? Well, you mean he has a big nose, a shaggy, slightly unkempt white beard,

a mustache that goes all over the place, piercing eyes, thick eyebrows, and looks like he's in a hunchback position. Generally, if you met him on the sidewalk, you'd probably want to walk around him. Yeah, he didn't believe in wasting time going to a barber. Let me just ask you, as the degree of your passion, when you look at this man, do you think he's a beautiful-looking guy, or do you see what I see? I think Mendelev had a beautiful mind. Okay, in 1860, around 1860, there were trains going all over Russia,

and Mendelev could afford to take trains. often on enormous journeys, and to while away the time, since he couldn't do chemical experiments or whatever, he would take playing cards with the name of various elements, their chemical and physical properties, and he would play what he called chemical solitaire. Sorting them for likeness or sorting them? I'm afraid I don't know the details. But you know what we can imagine, right? Sure.

So let's just say he's sitting there on the train, he's looking out the window. He sees trees made of carbon. Carbon nitrogen. A lake made of hydrogen and oxygen. Behind that a mountainous. Mountain theater. Made of silica. And he's shuffling their properties

and their atomic weights in his mind. Wondering. How do these things go together? What's the pattern? And he's shuffling. I'm shuffling. Shuffling. Shuffling.

Shuffling. Shuffling. And he did this for years. Until one night. This we think is true. In February of 1869, he is said to have had a dream. In his dream, all the atoms of all the elements of all the world. The fat ones, the small ones, the dense ones, the heavy ones, the friendly ones, the shy ones.

They all began to dance in his mind. And then they snapped into a grid. He awoke with a vision of the periodic table. This is one of those dreams. Which he then wrote on the back of an envelope. The thing about what he wrote on the back of that envelope is that it starts out so simply. Left to right, the atoms just get heavier and heavier and heavier. Heavy, heavier.

But every so often, and this is what he intuited in his dream, is that while they're getting heavier their other traits, like whether they're shy or magnetic or whatever, those traits repeat. Periodically changed back again. Every time they do, start a new row. The properties repeat again. Out of this simple repeating structure, hush, mandalayas! you get a table that you can read in a million ways. There are so many ways to read this table.

I think I'm going to call this the periodic table. That if you use your imagination, you can see yourself in there. I was a rather shy kid with difficulty forming relationships, and I sometimes compared myself to the inert gases. Inert gases are very isolated. They react with nothing. because I felt they too had difficulties forming relationships. But I did...

He has now left the chair and has moved to the library and is taking it in a hugely thick, actually a dangerously thick book. This is the handbook of physics and chemistry. As you see, it says 5,000 pages. I had a smaller version as a boy and from brooding in this book. It seemed to me just possible that one... one of the inert gases, xenon, might be seduced into combination by the most active element of all, which was fluorine.

This lonely, lonely gas might find a partner somehow. Yeah. Did they ever get together? In fact, it came to me with great joy when I found out in the 1960s that a, actually a Canadian chemist, had in fact made a fluoride of xenon. elemental love. And speaking of love, he then took us... I think let's come here, one sec. To the living room, and he showed us a small painting.

In the painting, there was this dramatic figure of a bearded, scowling character on the side of a mountain, holding two stone tablets over his head, and the sky was filled with lightning. And who was it? It was Dimitri Mendele. When I heard of how Mendeleif had discovered the periodic table,

I imagined Mendeleif as a sort of Moses, going up to a chemical cyanide and coming down with the tablets of the periodic law. And when I mentioned this fantasy to Peter Selgin, my friend, an artist, he did this imaginative picture of the young Mendeleif, the peaks of a chemical cyanide behind him, holding aloft the tablets of the periodic table. Which raises maybe the deepest question of all. Did Mendelief think this up and impose it upon the world? Or was this pattern always there? In which case, Mendelieff just removed the veil and said, oh, there you are? Is the periodic table a discovery or an invention? Is it a human construct or is it a reveling?

of the cosmic or divine order? Is it, so to speak, God's abacus? Radio Lab will continue in a moment. Message 1. Radio Lab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the National Science Foundation. Radio Lab is produced by WNYC and distributed by National Public Radio.

Hey, I'm Chad Abumrad. And I'm Robert Crilwit. This is Radio Lab. And we continue with our ongoing appreciation of the great Dimitri Mandelaev. And Delayev. And, and, let's also get back to the question that Oliver Sacks asked about Dimitri Mandelaev before the break, which is... When a scientist looks out at the world and sees a pattern, is that the scientist's mind projected onto the chaos of the world? So is the discovery in the scientist?

Or is it out there in the world? Right. Meaning it just exists independent of us, doesn't care if we find it or not. Exactly. Is it a human construct or is it a revelation of the cosmic or divine order? That's the question. And it can lead to some fairly, well, sad and riveting moments. This story comes to us from Alan Lightman, a theoretical physicist working out in Caltech once upon a time.

Alan, when he was a scientist, he was working on a problem. A problem that had to deal with an astronomical object called a globular cluster, which is a collection of about a million stars. So he's got a glob of stars orbiting each other. And the question he's asked is, how do they hang together? Tell me a little bit about the gravity that links them. And he thought he'd made a discovery that was brand new. So I was in the process of writing up the paper.

I'd done the calculations. I was writing the paper. And I was in the library, as one often does, putting in the footnotes and the references. And one of the things that you do with the references is you cite other people who have done similar things. And ideally, you should do this before you start the problem. So I was flipping through some of the most current journals, and I saw a title that looked alarmingly like the title that my article would have been. I got this terrible pang of anxiety that went through me.

So I opened up the journal, and these two guys from Japan had solved the same problem that I had, and I pulled out my notebook of results and started comparing my results against their results, and the numbers agreed to like three decimal places. So what they'd found was exactly what you had found. Well, they would have to find exactly what I'd found, because this is the world of science and the world of science has this terrible precision. I was crestfallen. I was so disappointed. I felt humiliated. I felt stupid. And then another sensation went through me and that was a feeling of amazement that these two

guys on the other side of the planet with no communication with me sitting at their desks, worked on the same problem and had gotten the same results. The exact same results. You know, all of the philosophers like Bishop Barclay who said it's all in our mind, they're all wrong. Any scientist anywhere in the universe solving this problem would have gotten that answer. There really is something outside of our bodies and independent of our minds. And this is both a wonderful thing and a terrible thing.

thing. It's a wonderful thing because there's a beauty to it, there's a feeling of power and control. But the tragedy of this, which I felt at the same time, is that what is the relevance of me as an individual person? If anybody else could have solved the same problem, then why was I needed? What is the meaning of my life? How do I leave my individuality on the world? Certainly not through science. So here's what happened. Alan gave up the practice of bench science and became a novelist.

Einstein's dreams won the Pulitzer Prize. Great book. That's his word. It couldn't have happened without him. And that is a profound difference between the sciences and the arts. If the ode to joy had not been in Beethoven's head, you don't think necessarily would have come around.

That's right. The Tempest is not going to have been written by anybody but Shakespeare, the brief and wondrous life of Oscar Wayo by Gino-Diaz, which is the novel I just finished, is only going to have been written by him. So it's good by science. But let's argue the other side for just a second. Okay.

There's... Oops. Okay, I'm back. There's an idea floating around that gives the scientist a little bit more... I don't know. You'll probably like it. It comes from another physicist. Can you just introduce yourself?

Casey, forget your talking to it. I'm Paul Davies. I'm director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University. So Paul Davies starts with a basic question, which humans have been asking forever. Why are we here? If you think about it, it's totally crazily improbable that we are here asking these questions that, I don't know. 13.7 billion years ago. The universe is born in a shower of particles that somehow cool in just the right way to form atoms, which somehow gather in just the right way to form stars and galaxies and a planet

with sunrises and sunsets and just the right atmosphere to give rise to a creature that can look at the sunrises and sunsets and say, wow. If the fundamental laws of physics or the initial conditions on the universe were only slightly different, then there would be no life and no observers, no one to say, wow. And the question is, is that a significant fact or just an incidental fact? A lot of scientists would say, well, it's a fluke that we're here, that we have a mind, that we ask these questions. And I think it's a big deal.

We've been made privy to the fundamental nature of the universe, the rules on which the universe runs, its basic laws. If we're just an accident, why aren't we just here looking at the universe surviving, but having no clue? And the only way I can make sense of it is to suppose that there is some sort of link between the laws of the universe and the emergence of, of life and consciousness, that the existence of observers like ourselves is part of the explanatory story. In other words, says Paul, the fact that we're here. Understanding. At least trying to.

How the universe works. On some scientific level, he thinks that's part of the grand scheme, that somehow the universe, the atoms in the universe, need to be understood. Well, the universe has engineered its own self-awareness, that the universe has thinking beings within it who can think observing. If you were to compare the thinking beings, like on the one hand, maybe you had Cézanne painting a portrait, and on the other you had Einstein doing an equation. It sounds like if understanding is the key, as you just said, that this theory would put the scientists ahead.

Well, it does. And I'm always wary about saying that for fear of infuriating my art. Me, for example. I'm from Cézanne. That's not to diminish the value of art and poetry, but this thing we call science is a near miracle. I'm not using miracle in the religious sense, but the fact we can do it, I think, is stupendous.

We're incredibly privileged. And I think there is some bigger, I want to say agenda, but you have to be very careful with these words, but certainly a scheme. And that we judge that scheme to be ingenious and beautiful. for reasons we know not. I love this idea. Because it seems to me

that if the earth were to have a beautiful day and there was no one around who could reflect on all that beauty, then what is it? It's there but unappreciated it's not quite there enough.

You know in the Bible God creates a bit of the universe every day, but at the end of the world, each day, almost as a necessary function, God says, and it was good. He gives himself a grade. He gives himself a grade. So maybe this is just the atom's way of admiring itself.

Because what is a scientist? It's just a bunch of atoms. Yeah, you know, it's a nice idea. But actually, in the end, I don't buy it. You know. No, because he's saying the purpose of the universe is to create thinking beings, like us, to examine it. And the best examiners of them all are the physicist.

Well, guess what? Here's a physicist. He is the very thing that he's sort of... It's a little Miss Piggy, I guess. Yeah, and I don't think anything that we've learned in science the past couple hundred years would lead us to believe we are at the center of anything. I think most scientists in the world would agree with you. And one more thing.

But I don't care. Just on the level of aesthetics of beauty, isn't it more beautiful to think that all of this is an accident? I hate that idea. Why? You think that all of this beauty coming into being by accident is better... Than having some purpose? Yes. Because if it has a purpose,

It means it's supposed to be here. And if it's supposed to be here, then it's just somehow a little less amazing. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I just think you're wrong. Okay, okay, let's keep it moving. If appreciating is the key, according to Paul Davies, well, in science, that is sometimes harder than it sounds. Because what if you're out there in the world, you're on the cusp of a major discovery?

It's right there in front of your face, but you happen to be looking the other way. For example, take this story. So I'm very excited to hear about your journey. But first, tell me who you are. Okay. I'm Erica Lloyd. I'm an editor and freelance writer. Testing.

Looks like the mic is on. And Erica recently took a trip with a bunch of scientists. Everything is working. Very far away. Quite a ways. Where exactly? Somewhere between Greenland and Siberia. And all you're seeing every day is just lots and lots of ice.

What's that like? The ice is really beautiful. July 5th, I'm on the deck overlooking the Arctic Ocean. I mean, it's just one guy called it is Cold Campfire. Chili here, it's hovering around zero degrees. I mean, sometimes when the sun is up, and it's just sparkling like diamonds. When you look out, it's mesmerizing. You get how isolated you are.

Warm or close. Warm or close. Yeah, man. Mittens. Maybe you can introduce yourself. I'm Rob Reeve-Sone. I'm a scientist at the Woodtale Oceanographic Institution. He's sort of the main guy of this expedition.

We have extra shoes like this. Should I wear one? You're welcome to. So he raised the money. Yep, millions of dollars of government funding. So for him, career-wise, this is very important. This is it. When I was coming out of graduate school, I was trying to think,

how was I going to make my mark in the scientific world? And, you know, the more mature a field gets, the harder to is to do something important. And sometimes in graduate school it can feel like you're you know gnawing on bones as a scientist. And the Gackle Ridge has been a little bit of a, you know, in a sense it's one of the final frontiers. Wow. That's the ship hitting the ice. So we're going to the Gackle Ridge. What's so important about the Gackle Ridge? Well it's one of the great unexplored places on the planet. Basically, it's an Arctic mountain range. Two or three hundred miles from the North Pole.

At the bottom of the ocean. It's like two and a half or three miles deep. Making matters worse, in terms of getting there, is it the top of the ocean? It's covered in ice. Really, really thick this ice. But the thought is if you could somehow get there, get underneath the ice, get all the way down to the bottom of the ocean, you'll find volcanoes. And, you know, where you have volcanoes, you might have hot springs. Where you have hot springs, you might have. Life. Just imagine. Black smoke. Really toxic.

Billowing out of a chimney on the seafloor. Hot enough to melt lead. Jeezly. With all manner of bizarre, biological organisms making a little oasis around it. Like what kind of creatures were they expecting to see? Weird kinds of... I mean, everyone wanted to see a three-eyed tube worm.

Yeah. Really? Yeah. Is there such a thing as a three-eyed tube worm? No, not yet. But the point is that every time that they've seen these hot springs in different parts of the planet, found completely new things. Something like 600, previously

unheard of species. Like really strange looking shrimp. With eyes that have moved to their backs. And they have found tube worms. Big ones. They look sort of like plumes. They're very cool looking and they're big. They have these little flower caps. In any case, this spot that they're going to, for various geological reasons that I don't really

understand, it might be the most interesting one of all. But no one's ever seen it. It's too early in the morning. 3.20 am. I just rolled up 10 minutes ago. Sun is up, of course. It took a few days to get to the first site.

This is probably our cutter location. This is a place where there was evidence of... These vents. So we thought, well, that's where we're going to start. Erica, how are they actually going to get through the ice to go down? Well, Rob Reeveson, thinking, how am I ever going to get to the Gackle Ridge? I had a newborn child. This is, I guess, 1996.

I was giving her a bath. and, of course, a whole layer of bath bubbles. I mean, you couldn't see the bottom of the bathtub. Then one of the toys that she had was a Sesame Street submarine, the Cookie Monster and Elmo as the captains and all this kind of stuff. We were playing around with it, so we dove the submarine under the layer of bubbles. Oh, wait a minute. The submarines underneath the bubbles, if we could develop robots.

Robots. It could go under the Arctic ice cap. to the seafloor. That would be a way to move beyond, you know, gnawing on bones, and maybe bring down some big game. So finally, finally, they're going to put this thing in the water. In the verge of history, man. All right, go down, John, all the way. Here we go. What the hell?

I'm ready to go. I'm in this shack that's sitting on the deck. A nice, small heated enclosure. And it's tiny. There's a couple of grad students, and, you know, I'm hanging in there, just kind of squeeze into a corner. Everybody's got these big exposure suits. on in case you fall into the water. Pretty quickly it starts smelling like body odor and peanuts, you know.

Because although people are doing laundry, no, they're not washing their fleeces. How's the stress level? How's your stress level? And then they dropped the robot in? Mm-hmm. Letting the baby go. No, it's like sending your child to preschool for the first time. So they're watching it go down.

Deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper. It's going down, down, down, and they can watch on the computer monitor. On the screen, what you're seeing is streams of data. So just, just data, no pictures. Right. X, Y, Z, depth, time, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 30 meters down, coming up. We're dropping. This is taking hours. Hours? We're driving about a meter every five seconds, so 12 meters per minute. It equals now at 187 meters. We're now at 273 meters. We're at what? 400 meters. That's exciting.

Well, we're really, the problem. The problem is that nobody's a neat music out. I don't got my eye time. You know, they start playing music. Diva? It's Diva. Of course it's Diva. Working in the coal mine.

Oh. Down down. Come on. That quality was good. Awesome. 641. 641 meters. 641 meters.

Yes. That's the new record. That's the depth record. for negatively in the Arctic. I wonder if somebody go up for breakfast. I'll go in just a minute. I'm not going anywhere. I want to just move to a thousand.

So it's past the 1000 meter mark and it's moved on. It makes its first mission goal 1,000 meters. Everything's looking great. It's moving on to its next goal, 2,500 meters. And then it aborts its mission. What? Oh! The vehicle aborted?

Shit! The software died. Software puck. Software? Software! What's the matter with you? Can't you test the software? the software before we come up here?

So you're pissed off at this point? No, I wasn't because I knew how hard it was. Uh-huh. But I was so stressed out. So stressed out. I had a facial tick, tightness of my chest, labored breathing, eating my fingernails to my knuckles, you know, 10 years of effort. Millions of dollars, this entire scientific career.

All that's on the line. You know, people kept asking me. Of course, you know, Erica, you know, had a microphone there. How do you feel? trying to kind of get me to take this kind of introspective look on it and I even tried. I sat there one night after things that kind of died down and went on the front with the stars and said, okay, you know,

feel the moment, dude. I can't feel the moment. We haven't had comms from the AUV for two and a half hours. You know, I've got to get back down there. You only have so many days on station to do what you've been planning 10 years to do. And for it to abort. Yeah, you're burning the clock, you know, tick, tick, tick.

And you feel it. You feel that. You can feel the fuse. We're not finding vents here. The clock is ticking. Let's move on to this next site. We went through five time zones to get there. Took a week.

Took a week? Yeah. So you're back just chugging through the ice for a week. Yep. And then... Whoa, I guess we're hitting some ice here. Everything's rocking. A really, really big ice flow moved in and ran us out of town.

Meaning you were stuck? Yeah. In a big traffic jam of ice chunks? Exactly. There's absolutely nothing we can do. Dick, tick, tick, tick. We're just waiting in the ice, you know, and just people are like, oh. Or it didn't come up here to wait.

Let's keep working. Let's make something happen. So this CTD team drops in their equipment because that's what they do. You know, if you're just sitting around anywhere, I drop the equipment, right? You mean so they were just stuck there, and they're like, ah, let's throw it over the side and see what happens. Right. And they found remarkable signals. Much stronger signals than they'd found anywhere else.

Oh, so they got lucky. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like interesting stuff everywhere is what it's kind of looking like. And this time did the robot have a camera? Yeah. They got all this video footage. Wonderful, wonderful, high-definition video.

Superb. You know, and we could watch from the ship. We're seeing it, you know, in the control. troll van in real time. Is it going to be two berms? Is it going to be clams? Is it going to be mussels? This is Phil Fort, one of the engineers. Oh, over the next rock mound. There is going to be, there is going to be the next smoker.

There's going to be the next Cali Field with clams and muscles and who knows what we're going to see. And? We go over this crater, a big rim and then drop back down on the other side. And we found these like fields. A whole hilltop.

Fields just covered in this. It was so eerie. It was... I haven't seen anything like that before. Yellow... Yellow fluffy stuff. And it was... Really beautiful.

Yellow fluffy stuff? Yeah. It was just everywhere. Floating around or where? On the seafloor. We were seeing ski slopes. It's like cotton candy or something that might be growing in your yogurt. Whoa.

What's that? Like there would be like a waterfall. of it or a waterfall. Wow. Like it would just be coming down rocks off of scarps. Wow. Kind of beautiful, but eerie. And it was really, really frustrating.

What? There was a certain faction on the ship that was really disappointed and they were really angry with me. But why? I felt that I failed them. Really? Absolutely. In what way?

That, you know, the combination of the AUVs and our technology and my leadership hadn't resulted in finding three-eyed two worms. That's what we all wanted to see. Everyone wanted to see a three-eyed tube worm. Something really kind of spectacularly new and creepy and weird. And instead, the new stuff that we found was, you know, this yellow fluffy stuff. So the fluff was just like whatever? Well, it was exciting because it meant, well, okay, what's going to eat this stuff? We're on the right trail. Right? There's got to be something eating this stuff. nothing seemed to be eating no three-eyed two worms

and of course all that is built on the supposition that there are three-eyed tube worms there to find you know the world is the world the Arctic Ocean is the Arctic Ocean it doesn't care what we want to see what's there is there

so here's the interesting thing Rob Reef Sones comes back all that way thinking basically this trip that I've planned for the last 10 years was a bust no vents, no tube worms, nothing cool and amazing, just this fluff, whatever it is. But then they get back and they look at it more closely and they realize, okay, this stuff is microbes, but not your run-of-the-mill microbes.

These are some of the oldest known living organisms on Earth. We were the first to see it. And what's funny is that, like, you didn't even know that until you got back. Like, you almost missed it. Yeah. Right. Are you going to be doing this again? Any more trips?

Well, that's a good question. I mean, I'm broke now. Money's all gone. The field program's over. I am, you know, free falling a little bit. But the three-eyed worm is still out there. That's still there for the taking. It's mythic three-eyed worm.

The unicorn of the Arctic. Thanks to Rob Reef Sones and Eric Lloyd. And also, before them, Caitlin Wachnfuss and the Brooklyn Tech Cheer Squad. Radio Lab will continue in a moment. This is Christine Stone from Maplewood, New Jersey. 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. Hello, I'm Chad. I'm Boomrod. I'm Robert Quilwitch. This is Radio Lab. And we're talking about how science. scientists think about the world. And appreciate. Yeah, except appreciation.

This is something that scientists do differently from the rest of us. And I think this next story is an active appreciation so different from the rest of us that it makes me want to barf, gag. Bring it. Once upon a time in a rainforest in Costa Rica in Central America, there was a little botfly. It's a botfly. Botflies are hairy flies that live in moist tropical areas. on Earth. So they're not like New York City flies.

No, no, no. What a botfly does is when a botfly is pregnant, and our botfly was a pregnant female botfly, she has her baby, flies up into the air, carrying her baby, she sees a nice, hairy mosquito. He grabs, actually grabs onto the mosquito. Mid-flight? Oh, yeah.

And drops her baby onto the mosquito. Why? The mosquito, well, because the mosquito's going to do something very important for the baby, but the mosquito, of course, is a mosquito. So it's a mosquito. looking to bite somebody. Right. When the mosquito lands on a nice, warm, palpitating mammal,

so she can have some blood, the bot-fi baby is programmed to fall off into the mosquito bite and make a little home. Wow, that's impressive. Completely. The mosquito probably has no idea of any of this. No idea at all. You got all that?

Got it. Okay, so now I want to introduce you to a particular palpitating mammal who happened to be in Costa Rica on our very day. I guess I was about 24. It was 1973. His name is Jerry Coyne. Thirty-some years, I guess, 35 years. But I remember it like it was yesterday. This isn't an experience that you forget easily. You were working at Harvard as a grad student at the time? Yeah, I was. I was doing a laboratory experiment on flies ironically. And there was a program for Harvard graduate students to go to the tropics for two months during the summer so they could get some experience in the field and learn something about the diversity of tropical. nature. So now we've got Jerry Coyne in Costa Rica walking through a forest.

Doing some research or something? Doing some research. And through the air, you hear the distant sound of a mosquito. Getting closer and closer and closer to it. It's Jerry. Right on the head. Not too far from the crown. And I scratched it.

But, you know, I didn't go away when I got to be about the same. size of a pee, I consulted one of my fellow students. This friend of his happened to be an entomologist, she climbed up onto a bunk bed. She looked in my head, pulled the hairs back, and she said, oh, my God, there's something moving in there. That's when I freaked out completely. I started running around the field station going, oh, my God, oh, my God. I mean, just physically running in circles.

In his mosquito bite, there was a little hose or something protruding. Through the top of the mosquito bite, and it was sort of wiggling around. The breathing tube, like a little small. straw. I was really completely freaked out. I mean, I had a worm in my body. Nobody knew how to extract it. Why couldn't you just grab onto the to the periscope part and pull? Because like all marvels of evolution, the bot fly maggot has devices to keep you from pulling it out because it makes it living in your body. So it has a pair of hooks on the anal end, the other end, that are dug into your flesh. So if you try to pull the thing out, it just digs in and you'll break it into. That is the

thing you want to avoid because it can cause a serious infection. Oh, no, you don't want to do that. No, you don't. But what you could do, however, is you could try what they call the meat cure. Put a slab of meat over the wound, strap it to you. I would have to have strapped, for example, a steak to my head, which is not practical wall. And then the worm thinks, you know, the worm's breathing tube, which is through the mosquito

bite, gets cut off and it's deprived of air, so it thinks that the steak is part of your flesh and it burrows up through the steak. And when it comes out, almost all the way you can just remove the steak with a worm in it. What a clever idea. Yeah, the idea of toiling in the tropical heat every day where the T-bones strapped to my head was not something that I wanted to do. Meantime, it's causing problems this thing. It was a terrible itch, and from time to time it would, like, move or twitch, and you'd feel this sort of sharp pain in your skull, or you could feel it grinding up against there.

And when I went swimming or took a shower, it would get sort of, sort of, freaked up because its airhole would be cut off and then it would really go nuts you know make a lot of pain so so I tried to avoid getting my head underwater meanwhile the lump was getting bigger and bigger till it sort of got noticeable wait how does it what is it eating in order to get bigger and bigger well it's uh um yes it's eating my muscles and tissue and my scalp it's eating your flesh then yeah it is oh it's turning human flesh into fly flesh. This fly, it's eating Jerry, so it's more and more, well, it is Jerry.

It is, and that's the part that made me like it. So Jerry, and the part of Jerry that is now the botfly, leave Costa Rica, and it's time to head back to Cambridge, Massachusetts at Harvard University where Jerry is the grad student, and, you know, he has to check things out. So I went to the health clinic, and, you know, in about 10 minutes, there was 20 doctors around me. Nobody had ever seen anything like this at Harvard. They were all curious and poking and prodding and looking at it and owing and on. But, of course, none of them knew what to do about it.

And I just decided screw it. You know, I'm going to let it come out, make the best of it. I, you know, enjoy it as much as I could and marvel at it. I mean, when you really think about it, it is amazing that an animal can take human flesh and turn it using its own genes into a fly. I mean, and you have to marvel. This is so weird of you, actually. I mean, people think this behavior might seem weird to the layperson,

But to a biologist, it's sort of absolutely normal to be very curious about something. You know, I make my living on flies. I work with fruit flies. I'm a geneticist. And here was a fly making. It's living on me. You know, I was getting more and more curious. I wanted to see what it looked like when it came out.

I didn't want to kill it. What about girls? I mean, assuming you're dating. So, like, wasn't this like a total turnoff to say, hi, this is me and my maggot? Well, I was, you know, I was dating a nurse at the time. And this is the good thing about it. The nurse was actually quite fascinated with. this? I thought it was disgusting. Sarah Rodgerson was Jerry's friend. She inspected the fly. Did you give it a name?

No. No. Jerry may have felt that way about it, but no, I didn't. This was more of a scientific experience. This is something you were okay with you? Well, I don't remember being informed that there were any other options. I thought, I thought this is just what had to happen. So a couple of weeks pass, and the bot fly is just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. It goes from jelly bean size to something like the size of an egg. An egg? Yeah, it was pretty big. Like a coil egg.

Whoa. He's covering it now with a baseball cap, which is maybe one reason why they decided to go to Fenway Park, one particular evening. That is correct. Yeah, there's a Red Sox Yankees game. I wasn't going to miss that. And every once in a while I would rub my head.

I mean, throughout this whole gestation of this thing, just to check on it. And during the game, when I wrote my head, I felt something coming out of the lump. Jerry kept saying, oh, my gosh, oh my gosh, that's coming out. I can feel it. So was this a little distracting? Yeah.

A foul ball came up where we were sitting and it hit in one of those wooden seats at Fenway and we narrowly escaped getting hit because we really weren't paying much attention to the game at all. But it took a long time. So it started at the game and then it went on?

It started the game and then continued on it until the evening. We went back to Jerry's apartment and he kept reaching up and checking to field alum. We were just hanging out. It's a little bit more risque than that. And I said... He reached up and said,

It's gone. It's out. We've got to find it. I turned on the light. And there it was on the pillow, and it was horrifying. What did it look like? Is it a wiggly little wormy thing? It's sort of bulbous on one end, and then it tapers down to a little tail.

It's white. Big, fat, white grubworm. An inch and a half long. Wow. And it has... little black teeth. No, I thought, oh my God, that's what was in my head. Had I known that, I might have been more freaked out.

When you are greeting your baby there, did you have a feeling of pride or just a... Well, no, extreme curiosity. The one thing that was extremely striking to me was that its exit was completely painless. You know, it's painful when it's in there, but when it comes out, it does so very painlessly. And that's another evolutionary phenomenon. Of course, if the worm did it painfully and exited, then the horse or the monkey or whoever it's infecting would just slap it and kill it. So what did you do once you had the baby there on the pillow? Well, then I decided I was going to try to rear it into an adult fly.

You know, I'm a scientist. That's what you do. So I had prepared a jar of sterile sand. I took the worm and I dropped it into the sand and put the top on with air holes and hoped that it would pupate. but unfortunately it died. Did you get sad? I was extremely sad. You know, in the temperate zone in Boston,

a botfly is not going to make it. It just can't live. And so it was doomed from the start, but I wanted to see it complete its life cycle. And unfortunately, it didn't quite make it. So I did the best I could with what I knew. You know, I think it's as it added some richness to my life. It really did.

People still get completely horrified when I tell them the story. even though to me it's sort of a nice story. Jerry Coyne works at the University of Chicago, and his forthcoming book is called Why Evolution is True. And we have time for one more story. A couple of years ago, I sat down with one of the great bug scientists, insect scientists in the world. His name's Tom Eisner.

He teaches up at Cornell and has taught more scientists to love insects than anyone in the world, probably. And I guess I wondered, If you spent your whole life having feelings and very sophisticated feelings about tiny, almost alien life forms, how does that happen? We spoke at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. Your interest in insects, can you remember when it began? According to my parents when I first stood on my feet. Really?

All I cared about was bugs. Indeed. Beatles, caterpillars, ants, termites. cockroaches. I picked them up. I learned quickly not to put them all in my mouth. I kept them in my room. My room was a zoo. You were born in Berlin. Correct. From a Jewish family. You were about three years old when you left, or thereabouts? Three years old, went to Spain. So you went from the Nazis in Berlin to Spain? Yes, and the Spanish Civil War fled for France. My parents decided we should really start somewhere else, and we went to South America. And that was an entomological paradise.

Every living organism has some sort of odor. You can build these up in your memory. And I used to take a whiff of an insect and classify them in my mind's eye according to what they smell like. Caterpillar, ant, beetle. And do you ever dream of insects? Yeah, I tend to dream that I am an insect. What does that mean that you dream that you are an insect? I mean you scurrying and walking upside down on the ceilings?

Indeed, even escaping swattings. The weirdest situation that I ever got into in a dream was I dreamed that it was an insect and I was telling another insect that I occasionally dreamed that I'm a human. That's your meta-dream. Insects were somehow my great love. I was very much a loner, and if I didn't have a room full of insects live, I was unhappy.

Tom, I wanted to ask you. At this moment, Oliver Sacks, who was on the stage with us, he asked Tom this question. Whether you feel that insects respond to you, you know, whether you feel them sort of purring and whether they know that you're gentle and reliable and for them. You know, it's a good question. I don't presume to read responses on the part of the insects.

But the older I get, the more difficult I find it to experiment with them, and there were ways that killed them. Bombadier beetles can live for one, two, up to three years in your lab. You become very attached to them. you give them names, and when they die, it's an event. So you must somehow have moments where you feel that things are going on in that tiny little brain, that they have secrets hidden up their sleeves, that they might reveal if you found a common language.

I find that I can love nature, no matter how distant the individual organisms are from me, but I reach out and hope that I can shorten the distance and create some feeling of coexistence. Tom Eisner's book is called for the love of insects. That's really what it's called. Yeah. Well, we should go. Check our website,

RadioLab.org for more information, and you can always send us an email at RadioLab at WNYC.org. Radio Lab is one word. Yes, it is. I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Krollwich. Thanks for listening. Message 3.

Hi, this is Jerry Coyne, the Bot Fly Man. Radio Lab is produced by Amanda Aroncic. Jud Abumrod. Our staff includes Lulu Miller, Sorin Wheeler, Jonathan Mitchell, Ellen Horn, and Jessica Benko, none of whom are afflicted

with botflies. Other help? Ike Shuskandarasa, Chi Chang-Land. Special thanks to Pauline Davies and Kate Edgar. End of message.