Science Friday - A Land Return, A COVID Update, Texas’ Power Grid, and A Gene-Editing Thriller. July 15, 2022, Part 1

Starting point is 00:00:00 This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Later in the hour, we'll debrief with two COVID experts about the state of the pandemic. But first, big news in conservation. More than 1,000 acres of ancestral land will be returned to the Onondaga nation in New York State, making it one of the largest returns of land to an indigenous nation in U.S. history. Here to tell us more about this milestone and other science news of the week is Roxanne Kamzi, science writer based in Montreal, Canada, Roxanne, welcome back to Science Friday. Hi, Ira, it's great to be here. Nice to have you. Okay, so how did this agreement come about? Well, it's really great news, actually. So the Onondaga Nation and New York State and the Department of the Interior made an agreement with the company Honeywell, which has a predecessor company that had been polluting this region of central New York

Starting point is 00:00:53 with mercury and other toxic chemicals. And now it's going to be restored to, allow for wildlife like trout and bald eagles to thrive. Wow. So they're going to actually make it cleaner again? Yeah, it's great. There's a whole movement to restore stolen land to indigenous control, which is fantastic. And over the last several years, tribes from everywhere from California to Maine have been gaining back land and turning it into these conservation projects. Yeah. And how will the 1,000 acres be restored? Do they have a plan for this?

Starting point is 00:01:28 Well, I think that the main thing, first of all, is barring commercial development. That's kind of the major step here. And that will allow for steps to be taken to allow animals like great blue herons and the trout to regain control themselves over the land. So it's a little bit about like stopping more development from happening. I get it. Speaking of healthy lands, let's talk about healthy stories. You have one about how pulse accimitur.

Starting point is 00:01:58 is the stuff you put your finger into, right? Right. They don't work for everyone. No. Yeah, what's going on there? So pulse ximidors, everyone's probably familiar with them at this point in the pandemic. If you've ever been to a hospital, the first thing they'll do, they'll have you stick your finger in one of these things to check how much oxygen is in your blood, like how good is that

Starting point is 00:02:17 oxygen reaching your system? And it was invented around the late 1970s in Japan, but we've known since then that skin tone can affect how well the pulse exhumidors able to give readings. Now there's a new study that for the first time actually shows what the effects are of that discrepancy. And it's pretty profound. Yeah. And how does that affect the care that the patients received then? I imagine there must be some impact. So what the study found was that non-white ICU patients were actually getting less oxygen than they needed, which I find terrifying. Yeah, it doesn't sound good.

Starting point is 00:03:00 No, especially now that we're in the middle of a pandemic or we're kind of hoping to get out of it, we've seen how important it is to get enough oxygen. So there were two studies that recently came out, and one of them found out, for example, that in 3.7% of Asian patients and black patients, there were these misreadings compared with just 1.7, for white patients. So that's, those are small numbers, but the relative difference is huge.

Starting point is 00:03:30 Wow. Is there, is there some sort of way around this, some way of moving forward here? Well, this is what I find really hopeful and happy, which is that there's actually scientists trying to figure out a solution to this. For example, at Tufts University, there is a scientist who is named Valencia Kumson. She's working on a pulse oxymeter that actually also takes into account the person's skin tone and kind of uses that in the calculation of what the blood oxygen levels are. So actually, this is a problem that we can solve if we just pay attention to it, I think. Yeah, yeah, let's pay attention to that. And let's pay attention to another story you have about skin to its scent. There's new research on mosquito-borne diseases and how they affect what their

Starting point is 00:04:14 victims smell like. Roxanne, walk us through that one. It's all about skin this Friday. So viruses can be super sneaky and we're finding out just how sneaky they can be. The virus that causes dengue fever, which can make people very sick, and as well as Zika, another virus that can cause people to become sick and all sorts of complications, they hijack us and they make our skin smell better to mosquitoes, which then makes the mosquitoes take our blood and pass it on to the next person. So it's kind of a fascinating story. And what was really interesting to me was how they do this. Fill us in on how they do this. So not to freak you out, but our skin has bacteria. It's called acetophenone. And that compound is usually kept in check by a protein. But what happens when we get infected with these

Starting point is 00:05:06 viruses is that they somehow, we don't know how, reduce the production of that protein that keeps that stinky, smelly compound in check, unleashing it to become at high levels for the mosquitoes to come and nab us. So we sort of stick out now because we're so stinky. We do. And what they did is they infected mice with these viruses and they saw that the mosquitoes loved the mice when they were sick with these diseases. And also they swiped the armpits of people with dengue. And this compound attracted mosquitoes to the laboratory specimen they had with the armpit stink. Yeah. So I don't know. The story stinks, but it's true. Well, we've got skin in this game. I mean, the mosquito-borne diseases are a huge health concern around the world.

Starting point is 00:05:53 So this must have some terrific implications about how we think about preventing the spread of these diseases. Well, yes, I personally think it's just underscoring the need for mosquito nets and things like that. But the scientists behind the study have been working on like an electronic nose or this synthetic nose that they want to be able to sniff out disease without taking a blood sample. So maybe it will help us do that. Yeah. All right. Let's move on to some fun news, some fun plant news. A new carnivorous plant was discovered.

Starting point is 00:06:25 It belongs to a group called the pitcher plants. Oh, yeah, we all love those. Where the bug falls in and it can't get out? Tell us about that. I don't know. I don't know if insects love them. So I always think about the movie Little Shop of Horrors where that was a Venus fly trap. But picture plants are similar and then they love their carnivorous, right?

Starting point is 00:06:44 They love to eat insects. And this one is interesting. It's about the length of your finger and it's kind of a dark purple. And its name is Nepentes Putica. In Latin, Putica means bashful. The reason why the scientists named it that is that it kind of hides underground with the pitcher parts. And that's where it catches its insect prey, which is just so sneaky. That's crazy.

Starting point is 00:07:10 It catches the insect underground? Yeah. And, you know, the scientists, they were walking on this hike in 2012, and they saw what they thought looked like pitcher plants, but they couldn't really see where those pitchers were. They're kind of these vessels that the insects fall into, but they couldn't find them. So they dug around and they saw that they were actually underground. So this is the first time that we found a pitcher plant that traps its prey underground. All right. So what's the competitive advantage to a pitcher plant being able to do this underground?

Starting point is 00:07:41 One of the great advantages is that there's not a lot of competition underground for insects when you're talking about plants. So it's got that competitive advantage. Another reason the scientists think this might be helpful is that the soil is a little bit moisture than the dry environment around. So it might be helping to sustain the plant in that way. So I guess it's a win-win for the pitcher plant, but a lose-lose for the insects. Okay, so that plant eats insects. Our next story has to do with plants that just harm insects, specifically bumblebees. Tell me about this.

Starting point is 00:08:17 Yes. So this is a story that talks about how not all flowers are equal when you're talking from the point of view of a bumblebee in terms of their health. It turns out that for common bumblebees, they are more likely to catch this diarrhea-causing parasite from flowers like purple cornflowers and other ones that are kind of, a wide and they're less likely. All those like a nasca varieties, but the wide, the wide petals and thing, the flowers on them. Yes. And they're less likely to get this diarrhea disease from long, narrow flowers. I get kind of weird out thinking about, you know, bumblebees getting a tummy ache.

Starting point is 00:08:59 Yeah. Well, like the flocks family or something like that. Yes, the flocks family, exactly. And so this parasite, it's transmitted when the bees land. on these flowers, and they accidentally ingest the poo from a preceding bee that had been there before. And lo and behold, it kind of perpetuates this disease through the bumblebee species. I never would have thought the shape would be the problem and not exactly the species. Right. Yeah. Well, actually, so it might be that the UV light and the wind and different factors

Starting point is 00:09:30 in the environment kind of dry out the feces or help the feces get decontaminated. It's all these factors that scientists are still trying to figure out. But the point is, you know, if you're trying to make a happy bumblebee environment in your garden, you want to go for those flocks flowers, those long, narrow flowers. Bad news. Bad news from my garden where I have all these echinaceous and I'll have to not plant those black-eyed susans and things anymore. Well, that's the, yeah, that's the latest buzz. Oh, good one. All right, we have time for one more story. This one has to do with sea turtle conservation. What's new here, Roxanne? So, Iris, you probably know, people that want to protect turtles from poaching and predators and floodwaters, they'll sometimes move the eggs that are laid to a safer area.

Starting point is 00:10:22 And it's thought for a long time that this is a great thing. But a study that's super tiny, they just looked at 10 turtles, found that actually we might be doing more harm than good. because the turtles that they looked at on this Mexican beach that were moved were actually less able to turn themselves back over if they were flipped over and they had, you know, these rain anomalies that they thought were curious. And they think it might be because the environment that we create for these turtles is a little too dry and, you know, they're reptiles. So they're pretty fussy about temperature in terms of their development. We're on the road to hell when we tried to do that.

Starting point is 00:11:00 Well, you know, the upside is we could do better. We could just make. these artificial nests more like the natural ones, maybe keep the temperature and moisture a little bit more like the ones that they're used to growing up in. And, you know, that way it could better meet expectations. Ooh, that's a good place to stop right there before we heard any more people. That's true. Thank you very much, Roxanne, for taking time to be with us today. Thanks, Ira. Always great to me. Roxanne, Kamzi, is a science writer-based in Montreal, Canada. Before we take a break, we want to welcome our new listeners on WUTC and Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Starting point is 00:11:41 Welcome aboard. When we come back, we're in the midst of another COVID surge. New boosters are slated to roll out this fall. This virus is mutating to really skirt around our first line of defense. Omicron keeps mutating to do this better and better. And we have conflicting advice about testing. We're going to sort it all out. So stay with us.

Starting point is 00:12:06 This is Science Friday. I am Irafledo. I'm really eager to do this update on COVID for many reasons, but mostly because COVID is surging in the U.S. again, and it's raising so many questions. The latest sub-variants, B-A-4 and B-A-5, are now dominant. And things are feeling a little different during this surge, don't you think? I mean, people who recently got COVID are getting reinfected. The variants appear to be really contagious. And those who have so far far evaded the virus are getting it for the first time. And what about the boosters? How much should we rely on a new booster slated to roll out in the fall to boost our immunity against the virus? Dr. Anthony Fauci says don't wait for the new ones this fall. Get vaccinated now. But will they be ready for when my booster

Starting point is 00:12:56 runs out in October? And masks? Should we all be masking up again indoors? Joining me to help us debunk the latest COVID misinformation and update us on the current state of COVID are my guests. Cately Ngetalina, adjunct professor at UT Health School of Public Health, and author of your local epidemiologist newsletter. She's based in San Diego, California. And Jessica Malati-Rivera, Epidemiology Fellow at Boston Children's Hospital, Senior Advisor at the Pandemic Prevention Institute based in San Francisco. Jessica, welcome to Science Friday. Dr. Jedalina, welcome back.

Starting point is 00:13:34 Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for having me. Jessica, let me begin with you. Break it down for me. How big a difference is there between these new variants and the original Omicron variant? There is a pretty noticeable difference. When we talk about the technicalities of where these mutations are on the spike protein,

Starting point is 00:13:52 it has proven to be different enough where previous infection, is not something that we can really rely on for protection of a new infection, and that it is something that is a little bit confounding in the sense that, you know, we thought it would be a little bit more linear in the way that the virus is evolving, and it's kind of having a lot of offshoots. And because of that, it is complicating things. It is making it so that a lot of things we previously assumed on the window of time you had before you could get reinfected was longer.

Starting point is 00:14:24 It's probably not that anymore, because it is different. enough. Now, it is still SARS-CoV-2. I don't want folks to think that it is completely different. It is not some scary Frankenstein version of the virus, but it is definitely evolved to a place where we are now talking about more variant-specific immunizations to protect us. And more people, Caitlin, are getting reinfected. Why is that? Yeah, that's right. So it looks like about 25% of new cases right now are reinfections. This virus is mutating to really skirt around our first line of defense, which is called neutralizing antibodies. Omicron keeps mutating to do this better and better. And then there's also the combination of

Starting point is 00:15:09 antibodies waning over time. So this wall of defense is just getting shorter and shorter with time. And that's expected. And then third, some people just don't mount an immune response after a primary and typically mild infection. And so, unfortunately, with more transmission, this rapidly evolving virus, and a virus that did recently mutate to become less severe than Delta, we can expect and should expect SARS-CoV-2 reinfections. You know, that's good that you're bringing that up, because we used to think about 90 days as the benchmark of when you can't get reinfected. But that window is a lot shorter now, right? It is. And it's. It's not something that I think folks should really take as infallible or that it is absolute,

Starting point is 00:15:58 right? So it has always been variable. It has been roughly 90 days in the past. But now, as Caitlin mentioned, too, because of this immune evasion that we're seeing, because of all these different variables that have affected how this virus is now transmitting in the community, it's sometimes 30 days. It's sometimes 60 days. And sometimes it's even less than 30 days for some unlucky folks.

Starting point is 00:16:19 So if they get reinfected, are you more or less likely to have a severe infection the second time around? You're less likely to have a severe infection. We've seen many studies that show 60 to 90 percent lower odds of resulting in hospitalization and death with a reinfection compared to a primary infection. But that's not 100 percent. There are definitely still people that can have a severe reinfection. We are seeing that, especially if you're unvaccinated, if you're older, if you have comorbidities. And so that's why as an epidemiologist, it's really important to me that we continue to keep

Starting point is 00:17:02 transmission down and we continue to have many layers of protection so we can try and avoid reinfections as much as possible. Yeah, because there are some people that say, okay, I want to, I want to jump in the pool and get infected already, right? Get it out of the way because I'm going to get it. That's not a good idea. It's not. No, that getting an infectious disease is not an infectious disease strategy or a public health strategy for that matter. And I think that, you know, it's because there were some very poor comparisons in the earlier days of the pandemic that once you've got it, you can be protected, once you've got it, plus being vaccinated, you were ultra protected. And again, because of this dynamic of the virus evolving so much

Starting point is 00:17:43 and so rapidly, it's not a good strategy, not to mention the fact that there is a very real risk of long COVID and so many unknowns related to long COVID that it's not really the gamble that you want to make. I'm glad you brought that up because there's a lot of confusion circulating about that and about how long you remain contagious with COVID and how to find out whether you can spread it or not. I mean, we are told to keep testing at home, but some of us are getting the PCR test at a clinic because our doctor tells us to. Jessica, are they both good and equal indicators of our risk? They're both really effective tools, but they do different things.

Starting point is 00:18:21 And I think right now, and I'm a bit surprised, you know, two plus years into the pandemic where I'm still seeing, even coming from some medical professionals, confusion about how to use the PCR test and when to use a PCR test and when not to compared to antigen testing. We know the PCR tests are incredibly sensitive and specific, and they are excellent tools for determining, you know, detectable virus in your body. But if you are recovered, it's very likely that you could be testing positive on PCR for several weeks, even a couple of months, because it is so sensitive, it's detecting even those fragments of the genetic material of SARS-CoB-2. On the flip side, antigen tests are not a perfect proxy for determining infectiousness, but they are a really good indicator of active infection.

Starting point is 00:19:03 You've probably seen folks on Twitter talking about if you have a really dark second line on your antigen test, odds are you have a lot of virus and you should be isolating in that time. Antigen tests are very specific, and they are going to detect active virus. They're going to detect the spike protein on the virus. And so to me, I think that if you're still testing positive on antigen tests, not PCR, it's a good sign that you should still be in isolation and keeping away from others. And Dr. Jadalina, do you agree? Should people be testing before determining if they should leave quarantine? Absolutely. At-home antigen testing is one of the best tools we have right now to break transmission chains. I think that there's a little difficulty with antigen tests, specifically at the front end of infection. This is when we see false negatives more common,

Starting point is 00:19:54 especially with Omicron. And so when we're surging like we are right now, if someone has any symptoms, I just wouldn't trust a negative test right now. I would always assume that you have COVID-19 and to retest in about 24 to 48 hours, because it will likely turn positive. Now, antigen tests are really good at telling us when we're not infectious anymore because we have very few false positives. So if you find a positive and then you get a negative after that, I would trust that a lot and trust it to leave isolation only once that antigen test is negative. We see pretty strong evidence that an amycrohn infection lasts on average, about eight to 10 days. Now, some people will be infectious for less, some will be

Starting point is 00:20:43 infectious for more, and you really won't know unless you test. That's interesting, because the CDC's current quarantine guidelines are to isolate for five days after the onset of symptoms, then wear a mask around other people for five days. You're saying that's not enough. It's not enough. And I think Caitlin and I have both gone on the record very publicly to talk about how misguided that recommendation is, mostly because we know that it was actually based on Delta data and not Omicron, which is when they actually issued it. I have yet to meet a person who is asymptomatic and negative within five days in an Omicron infection. You know, it's allergy season, there's other colds. People are getting confused about those negative tests early on,

Starting point is 00:21:27 but they may actually be positive. And so these false negatives are a big concern if people are just counting down this rigid day of, oh, I only need to stay home for five days and then I can just wear a mask. If you have any symptoms and if you are testing positive, that is a really good sign that you are infectious and that you should be staying home until you test negative and until you are asymptomatic. I think there was a lot of confusion too about is it asymptomatic, is it resolving symptoms? To ask people to interpret resolving is very, very difficult. And I think that that opens a huge can of worms and causes way too much gray for people to be making decisions on something like infectiousness. So keep, so keep testing is what you're saying. Definitely keep testing.

Starting point is 00:22:08 And I will say, Ira, you know, I agree with Jessica. I do not like that CDC guidance at all. But because that CDC guidance is there, some people just can't stay in isolation that long because they need to go to work or their employers won't allow them a longer isolation because that's what the CDC says. And so if someone does have to leave isolation after five days and they're still testing positive, which there's a really good chance that there is, they really need to wear a good mask when that's well fit, when that's filtered, and everywhere once they leave isolation until they test negative again. I'm glad you brought that up. It's a good segue to talk about masking up because I see that people are not masking up, but I see the new recommendations coming out that we should be, masking up in closed places indoors with other people. Do you agree, Jessica? I do. I mean, I always caveat my recommendations on these kind of personal mitigation efforts with the fact that my risk tolerance is very, very low and it's probably lower than the average person. I have young

Starting point is 00:23:17 children at home. I don't want to get COVID. That said, I still think that wearing a mask is a very simple task. And at this point, with high transmission, it seems like a really good practice for folks to be wearing high-quality masks when indoors, when in large gatherings. I think, you know, these sub-variants, BA4 and BA-5, have also shown us that outdoor transmission is possible. Outdoor transmission has always been possible. It's just a little bit more possible now. Now, obviously, things outdoors are safer, and I'm still doing things outdoors, even unmasked

Starting point is 00:23:46 depending on the crowds. But I think masking in high-risk settings, especially indoors, in traveling when you're around folks who are, you know, immunocompromise or high-risk, or if you've yourself done something very high risk or you feel a tickle in your throat. Wearing a mask is a responsible thing to do. Yeah, I'm getting looked at, but I don't care when I have my mask on. Caitlin, we talked about how BA5 is better at circumventing our immunity, either from prior infection or from vaccines.

Starting point is 00:24:16 And this week, the Biden administration announced that they are planning to ask for approval for people under 50, under 50 to be able to get a second booster. Would you, would that do anything to blunt the current? wave? So boosters especially very recently, they do prevent infection. I think there's a lot of misinformation that they don't. And the reason that boosters do that is because they really ramp up neutralizing antibodies. Unfortunately, like I said before, these antibodies wane, but those neutralizing antibodies are effective in reducing infection. And if you don't get infected, then you can't transmit it. I think it's also really important, though, that we start walking away that the purpose

Starting point is 00:25:01 of vaccines is not to prevent infection. The purpose of vaccines is to prevent severe disease and death. And what we're seeing with a second booster, especially among adults over age 50, is that it broadens protection, that those people with two booster doses have about four times lower risk of dying from COVID-19 compared to those that just received one booster dose. Certainly, if you're over the age of 50, go get your second booster now. Don't delay. Don't wait for that Omicron booster. Also, if you're under 50 and have multiple comorbidities or even work at a high exposure occupation, I think it makes a lot of sense to get that second booster now. So when you say don't wait for that Omicron booster coming, what in the fall, what about people whose boosters are? What about people whose boosters are,

Starting point is 00:25:52 are running out by the fall. You know, it'll be six months, four, five, six months by the time that booster comes around. The number of people who have even received their booster is not very high, which is a bit discouraging. We have less than 50 percent of the eligible population in the U.S. that has received a booster dose. So it's certainly not harmful for folks to get a second booster if it becomes available. My concern is it's similar to what Caitlin said. We have this tendency to look at vaccines as a silver bullet.

Starting point is 00:26:22 that it somehow trumps all the other mitigation, but mitigation has to be layered. It has to be all the things we're talking about, masking, distancing, isolation, testing. We can create this false expectation that these next boosters are going to somehow be even more comprehensive than they are. But really what it's going to do is just buy a little bit more time

Starting point is 00:26:41 from maybe an infection or severe illness, but it's really not going to necessarily stop the pandemic. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Speaking of new boosters, could we see an entirely new variant like the original Omicron that comes from entirely different lineage and therefore this booster won't really help? So there is the possibility of an Omicron-like event, you know, a variant coming out of the blue that really changes the game. The last estimate I saw was that we have about a 30% chance of that happening within the year. So it's not zero, but it's not.

Starting point is 00:27:22 not 100% chance. We expect that, and hypothesize that amercron will continue to mutate into these latter-like mutations. And so I expect that even once we have this amercron booster rollout in October, there's already going to be a new amercron variant taking hold. But that's okay. You know, the purpose of boosters and variant-specific boosters is not to chase the variant-specific boosters is not to chase the variant. We're never going to win that rat race. The purpose of it is to broaden our protection. And no matter what Amercron subvariant is circulating, an Amher Khan specific booster this fall will no doubtly help against that. Do you expect that all of us Souter-relater are going to get infected? Personally, I do. Yeah, I remember back in March of 2020, Fauci said that he expects by the

Starting point is 00:28:22 time this is done, 80% of people will get infected. At the time, I didn't believe it, but now, absolutely, I think that it's going to become part of our lives. We have to put SARS-CoV-2 in this repertoire of what we encounter if we want to balance that with our quality of life. And I think it's just, it's going to happen. All we can try and do is to reduce that viral load as much as possible by using a lot of these layers and mitigation. So hopefully we help our immune system along the way to fight it as quickly as possible. Well, both of you have certainly helped answer my questions and I hope our listeners' questions too. This has been very, very enlightening. And thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Starting point is 00:29:11 Dr. Caitlin Jedalina, adjunct professor at UT Health School of Public Health and author of your local epidemiologist newsletter based in San Diego, and Jessica Malati Rivera, Epidemiology Fellow at Boston Children's Hospital, senior advisor at the Pandemic Prevention Institute based in San Francisco, California. We have to take a break, and when we come back, we'll talk about how a severe heat wave is melting the Texas energy grid. Oh yeah, it's the same one that froze last winter. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Irafledo. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNNO, St. Louis Public Radio,

Starting point is 00:29:53 KU. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. Deep in the heart of Texas, it has been a scorching summer. In Austin, for example, the highs have been over 100 degrees for nearly all of July. This is putting a huge strain on the power grid in Texas. The Electricity Council that supplies energy to residents has asked people to reduce their energy usage during this intense heat, and people are understandably not happy about that. Joining me to talk about what's going on in Texas is my guest, Moes Bouchel, an energy and

Starting point is 00:30:28 environment reporter for KUT Public Radio in Austin. Welcome back. Thanks, Ira. Nice to have you. I know you've been dealing with this Texas heat. Can you walk us through what's been going on with the energy supply this week? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the heat started in the spring, and it's been pretty much on stop. And obviously that drives up energy use. The main driver for power use in Texas in the summer is, of course, air conditioning. And when you have heat like this, people are going to crank up their AC. That puts a strain on the power grid. And, you know, our power grid is wobbly already, as we've talked about before. And so when the energy use goes up, you start hearing these conservation calls come in. Now, your famous power grid. Well, what are the standard recommendations for

Starting point is 00:31:13 people to conserve energy. Lower the AC, things like that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they ask people to lower their AC. They ask you not to run major appliances. You know, they recommend running a fan in your house if you can, as opposed to having your air conditioning up. So kind of common sense things that they put out these statewide requests for people to do with the hopes that if enough people do them, it will lower energy demand and kind of release some of the strain on the electric grid. I'm sure people are pretty upset at this. Where are they turning their? anger to the government or to the power company? Well, what you got here is, you know, obviously in Texas, we are the only state in the continental

Starting point is 00:31:50 U.S. with our own independent power grid. And you referenced the Electric Reliability Council of Texas earlier. That's really the kind of like face of what's going on here. This is our grid operator. They're the ones that put out these conservation requests. And ever since there's that big blackout that happened in 2021, people have kind of focused a lot of their anger for, you know, warranted or not at that grid operator, we call it Urquod. And as you mentioned, last time you were on this show back in 2021, that blackout was where the grid failed because it was too cold. And now we're talking about issues for being too hot.

Starting point is 00:32:27 Yeah. What's going wrong to create this grid problem? So, I mean, what we have here is kind of limited energy capacity in the state. They say that we have enough to get through what they expect to be the peak time. but when you start seeing really high energy use, the kind of cushion of extra energy to keep things safe starts to diminish. Then they start asking for conservation. They want to have that extra cushion just in case a big power plant breaks down or something goes wrong because they don't want to throw the entire grid off balance.

Starting point is 00:32:56 And so that's why you're seeing these conservation calls coming out three so far this year. But you also have not just fossil fuels. You're a huge state for wind and solar. What happened to those backups or main sources? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like I'd say in the first part of this year, we were about a third powered by renewable energy in Texas. A lot of people don't know that about Texas. But really big with wind, increasing solar capacity. Those resources have actually really been coming through this year to provide a lot of needed energy on the grid. But of course, the wind doesn't always blow. And when you have reduced renewable capacity coupled with breakdowns at our what they call thermal power plants, mostly our gas power plants, that can also kind of add to this energy crunch that we'll see here. Following the news, it seemed that this tremendous heat had stopped the wind from blowing for a while. Is that right?

Starting point is 00:33:49 Yeah, although, you know, this enters into a huge conflict that we see in the state, that we've seen for years in the state, which is a kind of a running battle between renewable energy and fossil fuel interests. Wind has actually been performing about at expectation. You know, the wind usually picks up in the evenings or in the, you know, kind of afternoons evenings in the state. you're not always going to see that resource available in the middle of the day during the summer heat. That's why solar complements it so well.

Starting point is 00:34:14 We have seen solar really pick up some of that slack. Well, it looks like the only ingredient you're missing of the batteries, right, that you could store the stuff when the wind's blowing and the sun is shining. That's right. I mean, like the big jargon word now in Texas has been dispatchable energy, right? You know, energy that you can kind of turn off and on as you need it. People that want to support the fossil fuel industry here, they kind of use that to try to justify building more gas. plants, but of course, there are other options. We are seeing growth in battery storage in the state, really big growth. Of course, it's starting from very little. And, you know, we also hear a lot of calls for increased solar coming in, because obviously in the summertime, the same conditions that

Starting point is 00:34:53 create this really high electric demand, those are the exact same conditions that create solar energy. So it would complement it very well. Well, thank you very much for explaining that to us, Moes. Thank you, Ira. And good luck with the rest of the summer. We're going to need it. Yeah, Moes Bouchel, Energy and Environment Reporter for KAT Public Radio in Austin, Texas. And if you want to learn more about the Texas Energy Grid, you can head over to our website, sciencefriday.com slash state of science. And Moses' podcast, the disconnect, power politics, and the Texas blackout comes back for its second season.

Starting point is 00:35:32 Imagine you wake up one morning and something feels different. No, it's not your allergies. It's not COVID. If anything, you feel sharper, you need less sleep, you can multitask and read at lightning speed. What's really going on with you? Turns out your genome has been hacked. Tiny changes have been made to your DNA to make you a bit of a superhuman. But at what cost? This is the plot of a new science fiction novel that mixes real science concepts like CRISPR with a fast-paced detective story. It's all woven artfully together by my guest, Blake Crouch, author of this new book called Upgrade. You may recall his last appearance with us about his past book, Dark Matter. Welcome back to Science Friday. So happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Nice to have you. I want to begin by playing a

Starting point is 00:36:26 little clip from the last time you were on SciFry back in 2016 talking about Dark Matter, and you were wondering out loud what your next book would be. I'm really interested to dig in on something new that piques my curiosity. In fact, that's where I'm at right now in terms of figuring out my next book, looking for that special thing that just checks the box in my head that makes me want to dive in and spend a few years. I know what it is. I know what it is. Oh, tell me. It's CRISPR. CRISPR. You know what CRISPR is? No, I've never heard of it. Oh, CRISPR is the latest technology to edit jeans. You can splice and dice jeans. You can, you know,

Starting point is 00:37:07 they're even talking about creating life forms now, synthetic life forms with this new tool. It sounds, Blake, like our conversation may have sparked an interest in the topic. So do I owe you royalties on this book or something? Just a little asterisk, that's all. It was really fortunate that I got to come on Cy Fri back for Dark Matter. And, you know, the idea of writing a gene editing thriller was sort of circling my wheelhouse. But I hadn't done any research. And I hadn't, didn't know what CRISPR was.

Starting point is 00:37:44 And once I started, I'll be honest, once I started digging into it, I said, God, that looks like a lot of research. And I didn't write this book next. I wrote a different one, recursion. But after I finished recursion, I said to myself, it's time. If you're not going to bite the bullet and jump into this, when are you ever going to do it? So thank you for the inspiration. Well, it's my pleasure. We're full service here at Science Friday.

Starting point is 00:38:09 Well, I'll expect you to have my next book idea by the end of our talk. Oh, good. I had better start thinking. Let's start off speaking of our talk with a synopsis of this book, which we were already talking about it being about gene editing, and it's a bit frightening. Give us a little thumbnail of what goes on. Sure. The protagonist of the book is a gentleman named Logan Ramsey.

Starting point is 00:38:31 He's an agent with this. fictional government agency called the Gene Protection Agency, and they're tasked with policing gene experimentation, because in the world of the book, we're living in this post-disaster moment in time, this horrible event called the Great Starvation, killed about 200 million people. And it was actually Logan's mother, Miriam, who, while doing some gene research and editing in China, accidentally unleashed this leaf blight that reprogrammed the breadbasket crops of the world. And as a result, famine hit. And he's working for this gene agency trying to sort of make amends, trying to find some atonement when he is exposed

Starting point is 00:39:17 on a raid of a suspected dark lab to something that might just be modifying his genome. Whoa. And that's all because there was a law called the Gene Protection Act, as you say, that has outlawed all private and university genetic research. Gene editing is a federal crime. That's right. That's right. I mean, there are some laws today. Congress banned germline gene editing a number of years ago.

Starting point is 00:39:45 So it is still a highly regulated field of research even now. What I'm imagining has taken those regulations and really ratcheted them down. You know, it sounds like you're taking on a Margaret Atwood sort of attitude about this, that you're not talking about science fiction. She refuses to call her work science fiction because it's all possible, right? And what you're talking about is all possible. I don't really even know how much longer I could consider myself a science fiction writer, because I do feel like we're living in the future now. I feel like the future is sort of here. And a lot of the technologies that I, that interest me and that are in my books are, they're here.

Starting point is 00:40:26 maybe we don't have the full mastery of them as the characters do in my books, but they're right around the corner. And I think it's important, especially with something like gene editing, which is hands down the most extraordinary discovery of our time, not just of our time, probably in human history, more than splitting the atom, more than anything else, the most extraordinary discovery of our time, because it's tinkering with the source code of life and create new creatures. We can rewrite what it means to be human. And I think it's important that we start thinking about this stuff. I mean, when I was on your show a few years ago, I had not heard of CRISPR. I wonder how many people in your audience have heard of CRISPR, probably more because of the, you know, it's a science

Starting point is 00:41:07 podcast or a science show. But I think that the average person out there, yeah, it was like me and had heard of gene editing, but didn't really understand how extraordinary and how close we are to achieving some of these wild, wild feats of science. Yeah, and you describe some of them because a lot of the scientists are there are a lot of scientists who are the criminals in your book because they're breaking that law. And they have all kinds of genetic crimes. They hacked cannabis and heroin, you say. They've made designer pets, spider silts and clothes, even designer bugs that could be used as weapons to attack people you don't like. That's right.

Starting point is 00:41:46 Wow, I never thought of that, but that really is scary. It's terrifying. It was interesting as I was really getting into the weeds of writing this. book and going down the research path, my subject matter expert continually pushed me to actually think bigger, to think more terrifying. His name is Dr. Michael Wiles. Dr. Wiles would say, no, you can go bigger, actually. What's on the horizon is much more terrifying than what you're imagining. This is Science Friday from W.A.N.I.C. Studios. In case you're just joining us, I'm talking to Blake Crouch about his new book upgrade. You know, what's interesting is that most of the

Starting point is 00:42:23 Most of the criminals in your book are scientists, right? Because they're running afoul of this law, and they're doing their science, and a lot of it is bad. Did you get any pushback from scientists who say, you know, you're painting such a bad picture of science? We don't like that. One of the things that I was very sensitive to in writing upgrade was that I don't want to paint science as, especially geneticists who are doing this amazing work. I don't want to paint him with a negative brush. I want to call out that it has a potential to give us longevity. It has the potential to wipe out disease.

Starting point is 00:43:02 It has the potential to solve food supply problems. But it also has some real downsides, some real terrifying possibilities that need to be addressed. One of the big moments for me as I was coming up with this book was reading, Jennifer Dowdena's a crack in creation. Dr. Dowdna is one of the co-creators of CRISPR. And Dr. Dowdana talks in this book about having

Starting point is 00:43:32 this nightmare soon after she had discovered CRISPR that Hitler had gotten his hands on it and imagining what that might reek on the world. And I thought, well, I mean, if Dr. Dowdna is this terrified of the

Starting point is 00:43:48 downside potential of this technology, shouldn't we all be? So I think it is a fine line of the possibilities and the drawbacks, and it's a conversation, I think, that we need to be having as a species. Yeah, and what are the lines about who makes the decisions, who makes the policy decisions, who judges what you can genetically engineer? And a lot of times, as you point that out in your book, and I'll read a line from it, the ones that hurt were the raids on real scientists, those who'd been doing. groundbreaking work for all humankind when governments panicked and made it practically impossible to be a genetic engineer. It's something you can imagine happening. One of the inspirations for the Gene Protection Act was what happened in America after 9-11. After 9-11, there was this big recoil

Starting point is 00:44:39 that came in the form of the Patriot Act. That was, quote-unquote, designed to protect us, but it also became a land grab for civil liberties. And I like to introduce the parallel with the Gene Reduction Act because I think a lot of times governments do have massive overreactions and pure science would definitely be on the chopping block in a scenario like I've presented in the book. Yeah. Do you think there are other technologies besides gene editing that are ripe for overreach and possibly good subjects to write about?

Starting point is 00:45:11 Oh, for sure. I think the way that we are handing over our agency and choices to artificial intelligence is pretty scary. You order an Uber. I was ordering an Uber a couple days ago and texting with the driver and the app was giving me options to say, hey, be right there or I'm running in late. And I just, you know, it seems innocuous. It seems simple. It's made to make our lives just a little bit easier. But I thought, what happens if you keep escalating that technology? What happens when AI knows us so well that it's communicating to our loved ones for us on our behalf, just to make it easier? where does that slippery slope lead as we continue to turn over the keys of agency and autonomy to

Starting point is 00:45:57 data, the big tech? I mean, we're already doing it right now. We're already so compromised. I think that's another big place where technology is really going to change what it means to be human in the coming decades. What happens when the singularity arrives? Oh, Ira. I mean, that's... It's your next book. We've gotten your next book. Scoped out right here. There it is. There It is. There is. All right. We have run out of time. Blake, thank you always for taking time to be with us today. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you, Blake. Blake Crouch, author of the book Upgrade. He was connecting to us from Chicago.

Starting point is 00:46:33 And aside for our book club, we'll be reading Blake's new book this August and to find out more about how you can join our book club. And to enter to win a free copy of your own, go to sciencefriiday.com slash book club. Here's Emma Gomez with some of the folks who helped make this show happen. Thanks, Ira. Our radio producers are Christy Taylor, Kathleen Davis, Shoshana Bucksbaum, and Rasha Ariti. Diana Montano is our experiences manager. Nahima Ahmed is our manager of impact strategy. Ariel Zich is our director of audience.

Starting point is 00:47:05 And I'm digital producer Emma Gomez. Thanks for listening. Thank you, Emma. BJ Leidman compose our theme music. And of course, if you missed any part of the program, or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts, or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Have a great weekend. I'm Iraflito.

Science Friday - A Land Return, A COVID Update, Texas’ Power Grid, and A Gene-Editing Thriller. July 15, 2022, Part 1

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.