Science Friday - Back-To-School Health Concerns, Artemis Moon Mission, Designing A Better Lanternfly Trap. August 19, 2022, Part 2

Episode Date: August 19, 2022

Teen Innovator’s New AI Tool Helps Create Affordable Drugs The U.S. has some of the highest prescription drug prices in the world, which can push patients into bankruptcy over medications they cannot afford. More than three in four American adults think the prices of prescription drugs are unaffordable, prompting the Senate to recently pass a bill intended to help lower prescription drug costs for seniors. One young innovator set out to find his own solution. 17 year-old Rishab Jain developed ICOR, a tool to improve the rapid production of drugs like COVID-19 vaccines. Ira talks with  Jain from Portland, Oregon, about his innovation and vision for the future.   When Trapping Invasive Bugs Is Science Homework The spotted lanternfly, an invasive species, was first introduced to the U.S. in Pennsylvania, around 2014. Since then, it has spread aggressively, and has now been spotted in 11 states. The bug is pretty—adult spotted lanternflies are about an inch long, and feature striking spotted forewings and a flashy red patch on the hindwings. But they are also very hungry, and pose a significant threat to agricultural crops, including grapevines. Many control efforts have focused on either stomping the insects on sight, or on spotting and destroying the egg masses that the lanternflies lay in the fall. However, researchers have been developing trapping techniques for the bugs as well. One, involving a sticky band looped around a tree, is effective—but can also snare other insects and even birds. Experts at the Penn State Extension have come up with a new style of circle trap for lanternflies, based upon an existing trap for pecan weevils. Now, STEM educators at Rutgers University are using that design as the starting point for an engineering design challenge, asking K-12 teachers and students to come up with improvements to the design. Read the rest at sciencefriday.com. Should Kids Get Vaccinated If They’ve Already Had COVID-19? It’s nearing the end of August, which means it’s back-to-school season. There’s a big difference between this school year and last: All children are now eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine. This means the risk of disease will likely be way down, compared to the past two autumns, according to vaccine researcher and pediatrician Paul Offit. But for kids who have already been infected by COVID-19, will the vaccine add meaningful immunity? “My answer to that question is yes,” Dr. Offit tells Ira. “Then you can be sure that they will then develop the kind of immunity that will likely lead to fairly long-lived protection against serious illness.” Ira and Dr. Offit also discuss the risk of monkeypox and polio spreading in schools, and how to best keep our kids safe against infectious disease this fall.   The Countdown Begins For Humanity’s Return To The Moon NASA’s largest and most powerful rocket ever began inching its way to Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Tuesday night. Over twelve years in the making, the long-delayed, over-budget Space Launch System rocket is finally nearing its first chance for liftoff at the end of this month. The August 29th targeted launch will mark the beginning of the Artemis program—NASA’s series of missions designed to send humans to the Moon and, eventually, Mars. The multi-billion dollar orange rocket now stands taller than the Statue of Liberty, resembling a colossal upside-down carrot. Its maiden uncrewed flight will carry a trio of mannequins equipped with radiation sensor vests in preparation for crewed flights slated for 2024. These future missions will be the first to return people to the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm I Refleado. The U.S. is notorious for having incredibly high drug prices, which often leave people deciding between groceries and medication. In fact, more than three and four American adults think the prices of prescription drugs are unaffordable, and the Senate recently passed a bill that will help lower prescription drug costs for seniors. A next guest has been working on his own solution for years. He's part of our Young Innovators series, Teen, taking on big problems. Our final innovator is 17-year-old high school student, Rishab Jane, who has developed a new model to reduce cost and increased production of important drugs like COVID-19 vaccines. It's called I-Corp. He joins me now from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to the

program, Rishap. Hi, it's so great to be on. Thanks so much for having me. You're quite welcome. Now, this is a huge problem to take on. So what inspired you to find a solution. So it kind of actually goes back to when I was taking a biology class around two years ago. And in that class, I was doing a case study on COVID-19. And I came across this term known as recombinant vaccines, which was really interesting to me because I kept seeing this idea of recombinant technology come up in a lot of the past literature that I was reading, a lot of the science research that I was doing. So I decided to dig in a little bit more. And I came into this fascinating world where essentially people can take genes and express them in cell factories to produce output proteins, which can be used for drugs, medications, and vaccines.

And I wanted to see if I could use my skills in programming and artificial intelligence to help actually improve this technology, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, to help make more effective vaccines. help make them faster. Okay, so tell us. You've developed a model to make drugs more affordable. Can you walk us through it? So this model is called ICOR, and it uses this really cool artificial intelligence technique known as deep learning. And what deep learning is really known for and what it's special for is its ability to really look at huge data sets and grasp patterns that perhaps humans can't really see from that data. So one of the really big things in this model is that it's able to look at thousands of genes in the genome of an organism called E. coli, which is a simple bacterium. And it looks at these genes in order to learn the types of patterns and the usage of individual, like,

repeat elements within E. coli's genes. And based off of this, my tool I-Corps is able to better optimize other genes, like, for example, human insulin. or a gene for producing a malaria vaccine in order to have more expression when they're introduced into an E. coli system. Basically, you've created a really productive protein factory, right? Yeah, exactly. So right now, protein factories or cell factories are really useful in the field because they already have kind of brought down costs a little bit compared to chemically engineering proteins. But my tool essentially allows us to do the,

this even more. So I found through some testing that my tool is able to result in 236% more protein for the same amount of input cell and gene. So given this, we could potentially produce far more vaccines and pharmaceuticals in the same amount of time, which can definitely help save a lot of cost. Yeah, the more you can make, that makes each one of them cheaper. What kinds of drugs can you produce this way? Really, there's a lot of drugs right now, and there are quite a few FDA-approved recombinant drugs. Some of them are as common as human insulin. So most human insulin is actually manufactured today through recombinant techniques. There are also some developments in the area of vaccines, so vaccines for certain types of hepatitis, as well as malaria, and even more

recently I've seen some COVID vaccines being tested out recombinately. And then there's also cancer drugs. So drugs for lung cancer and breast cancer, specific immunotherapy and chemotherapy drugs that can be made within a cell like yeast or E. coli and then purified into a protein, which can then be given in the form of a drug for a human. I know that you are especially interested in cancer research as a cause you really care about, right? Yeah, that's something that's been really close to my heart over the last almost five years now. I've been working on cancer research, and I've had a couple other research, projects where I've focused specifically on improving cancer therapeutics. And I believe through this project as well, by making drugs more accessible and making them more affordable through like mass

production and scaling them up, this can also be applied to the cancer drugs that I mentioned. As you just said, you've been doing this for like five years now. You're 17. That means you started before you were a teenager working on this problem. Where do you get that motivation? How do you do that? It really goes back to a young age for me. When I was just four or five years old, some of my fondest memories came from STEM, like science, technology, engineering, and math-related activities. I remember going to the Science Museum with my older brother and having a lot of fun there and also developing apps with him at a young age. I remember forming my first app development in company with my older brother when I was, I think, just maybe six or seven years old.

And so these passions for me in the areas of science and technology evolved over time. I was able to look at problems that I was facing in my community and that the world was facing as a whole and wanted to see if I could use the knowledge and experience that I gained through my various projects in the past to apply to these problems. Your first company when you were six or seven. Yeah, it was actually a simple app development company where we would publish apps on the Android Play Store. And I think they actually got several thousand downloads. So I remember making a couple mini games, a couple apps for utility like compasses and things like that.

So it was a lot of fun. And I learned a lot about programming at a young age through those experiences. I'll say, let's get back to your company, I-Core. Is anyone using I-Core yet? Yeah. So ICOR has been licensed by a biotech company, and they've been aiding me in the process of validating and testing this tool. So currently, ICOR is backed by essentially five industry standard metrics that indicate its performance in the real world and suggest that it would have a higher amount of protein expression, but it hasn't yet been tested in the lab. So that's something that I'm working on and that I'd like to do in the near future.

Amazing. and you still have a year left of high school. Good luck to you. Yeah, thanks so much. Rishab Jane is an inventor and high school student from Portland, Oregon. More on invention now. We have talked about the efforts to halt the spread of the invasive spotted lanternfly. Remember? It was accidentally introduced in Pennsylvania in 2014. It has now been found in 11 states. It's a pretty insect. The adults are about an inch long with a striking spotted pattern on the forewing and a bright patch of red on the hind wing, but it's also very hungry and a threat to many important agricultural crops. We have been encouraged to stop on them to help slow the spread.

Really old tech. You know what we really need? We did a good old bug trap, and that's what science educators at Rutgers University in New Jersey have been doing, a project asking teachers and students to design to invent traps for the spotted lantern fly. Joining me now to talk about that is Dr. Brielle Cichellick. She's the I-Sem Coordinator in the Rutgers University Center for Mathematics, Science, and Computer Education. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward to helping bring about innovation and invention to deal with this problem. Well, you're very welcome.

Now, to build a trap, and what's the guiding and bits of information here? What do you need to know about the lantern fly biology or its behavior? Definitely looking at the life cycle. That's kind of where we start with teachers and with students. And we've worked with K through 12 teachers and then K through 12 students is talking about that life cycle and how right now we're in August. And that's when you're going to find more of the fourth instar and the adult lantern flies.

So if you're building traps right now, you want to think about, okay, I have the adult bug that I'm trying to catch. they don't fly. They more like hop, so thinking about how they get on and off of the trees, on and off the vineyards, or if we're building the traps more in April, May, June, which we've done as well, we're looking at the really tiny first stage in stars. So that's a big factor. And then also thinking about what you're going to put the trap on. So is it going to be on an apple tree? Is it going to be on a grapevine? Because those sizes are going to affect the type of trap as well. Right. It looks like the idea here is more encompassing than just building a trap. It seems to be all about the process of the design, right? Getting kids to think about how to design it.

Absolutely. We use the engineering design process. So we've connected with the science standards, the engineering standards, NGSS. So we go through those steps of the ask and the research and planning and coming up with different prototypes and brainstorming. We also use, which is really neat, its type of a morph chart where it really gets them to think about the materials they're using to build. And then also what stage of the life cycle and then again, what type of tree you're using to. All right, let's talk then. Drumroll, please, about the basic trap that you've come up with. How does it work? So we started with looking at Penn State University, their extension created one. And we gave our students and our teachers a whole bunch of other materials for them to use. So we have netting. We have wire. We have recycled materials. We have string and yarn. They actually get a chance to draw out and play with all the materials before they build. And we've had great conversations like one teacher actually. noticed that the lanternflies love to be on the metal ramps in Norc where she teaches. So other teachers ask, hey, can we use foil on our traps to see if that heat or that absorption of heat on that metal will attract them more. And then a lot of the students also come up with ways for it to blend into the environment. So they're taking some of the stuff from nature like bark and other materials to try to put on the trap to have it blend in so

it doesn't stand out. So the trap is basically some mesh netting that wraps around a tree and then funnels the insects into a collection bag of some kind. Exactly. And then they will vary in sizes again depending on the tree. I will say students struggle a little bit with understanding the size of the trees. So it's helpful if you can get them outside to really observe the environment before they start building so that they can better understand the sizes that they need for the traps. That is very cool. They are very creative and you are should be commended for taking on the project, Breel. Thank you. We have enjoyed it.

We definitely love problem-based in engineering and design challenges. Breal Kochelich is the I-Stem coordinator in the Rutgers University Center for Mathematics, Science, and Computer Education. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you so much. You're welcome. And if folks want to build their own, we have pictures and information on building lantern flytraps all there up on our website, ScienceFriday.com slash book.

bug trap. We're going to take a break and when we come back, it's almost time to head back to school, which means vaccinations for your kids. Dr. Paul, often a virus expert, is here to clear the air about COVID monkeypox polio. We cover them all.

This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. We're more than halfway through August, and thoughts are turning to, back to school. Yes. For parents and pediatricians, back to school means another year of trying to keep kids safe from COVID-19, we now have vaccines for our youngest kids, but what if your kid has

already been infected naturally? Do they still need a shot? And what about other diseases in the news like monkeypox and polio? Well, to gear us up to go back to school, healthy and protected, I'm joined by my guest, Dr. Paul Offutt, Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He's a longtime pediatrician and vaccine researcher. based in Philadelphia. Welcome back to Science Friday. Thanks. I'm happy to be back. By long time, I assume you mean old. And yes, that's all three. Both of us. Let's talk about the biggest difference between this back-to-school season and last years, where all kids over six months of age can get vaccinated against COVID-19. How do you think this will change the amount of

transmission we'll see in schools? Well, I think we're much. better off than where we were. I mean, think about when this virus came into this country in January 2020. We had a completely susceptible population. We didn't have monoclonal antibodies. We didn't have antivirals. We didn't have vaccines. And this virus rolled through this country, causing, you know, hundreds of thousands and millions of hospitalizations and intensive care unit admissions and deaths. I mean, now, now fast forward to where we are now. We have monoclonals. We have vaccines, we have antivirals, and more importantly, we have probably about 95% population immunity, meaning people who have been naturally affected or vaccinated or both. So I would have to believe

that the level of disease, meaning the important disease, meaning the kind of disease that causes you to be hospitalized or go to the ICU or where STI is going to be way down from where we were in the previous two fall seasons. That's great news. Let's talk about something we get asked a lot by our listeners. What to do about vaccines? What to do about vaccines? if your kids have had recent COVID-19 infections. Let's say you have a four-year-old who got COVID over this summer. Should they get vaccinated? So the question that I'm often asked is, does natural infection protect you against severe illness?

Because that's really the goal of this vaccine is to protect against severe illness. This is a short incubation period, respiratory infection. So you're not going to protect against mild disease, even if 100% of the world were vaccinated, and even if the virus never mutated, you still would have mild disease. So what to do now? I think that if you're naturally infected, the odds are you are protected against severe disease, but it really to some extent depends on the nature of the natural infection. So for those who are mildly infected or asymptomatically infected, they generally develop lower frequencies

of memory B cells, memory T cells, the kind of cells that are important in protection against serious disease. So when people ask me the question, look, my child was naturally infected, had a mild infection, had an asymptomatic infection, do I need to get back? vaccinated. My answer to that question is yes, because then you can assure that they will then develop the kind of immunity that will likely lead to fairly long-lived protection against serious illness. It assures that because when you're naturally affected, you're given a variable dose of the virus, if you will, but when you're vaccinated, you're given a known dose. So you're saying the immunity from the vaccine is not equal to the immunity from an infection?

I'm saying that the immunity from the infection can be variable. And it can be as good as the vaccine, but you don't know because it to some extent depends on the level of simitematology with that natural infection. I get it. I get it. Now, parents, of course, have options. There are different vaccine makers out like Pfizer and Moderna. Do you recommend one over the other for our youngest kids? Well, so the Advisory Committee for Immunization Praxis, on which I'm a voting member, did meet about these two vaccines in mid-June and didn't make a distinction between the two. But there is arguably with modernist vaccine, which is a two-dose vaccine, as a synch from Pfizer's vaccine, which is a three-dose vaccine, you can argue that your protection will then occur sooner after that, say, first dose of modernis vaccine, which would be arguably six weeks later, which is, you know, which is, you know, just two weeks after that second dose, as compared to Pfizer's vaccine, which is going to be closer to 16 to 18 weeks later. So both vaccines are likely to be equally effective at preventing a mild to moderate to severe disease. But you could argue that you're going to be immune quicker with modernist vaccine. And for babies and toddlers who've never been vaccinated, are they going to be protected

from the variants also that are going around now? No, the good news is that while it's true, that these vaccines, whether it's Pfizer's vaccine or Moderna's vaccine or Novavax vaccine, were all made to protect against the original strain, the original Wuhan street, the so-called ancestral strain. We've now gone through many variants, and the key variant is the most recent one. When Omicron crossed the line, because with Omicron, you had a virus that was so mutated that you really weren't very well protected against mild disease, the so-called immunovasive strain, and that's also true with these Omicron sub-variants like B-A-4, B-A-5. But the good news is what never did mutate is the so-called epitopes, which are immunologically distinct regions on SARS-CoV-2 spike protein that are recognized by T-cells.

so-called T-helper cells or cytotoxet cells because those are the cells that are most important for protecting you against severe disease. So although you are not as well protected against mild disease with omercrone infection or with omicron sub-variants, you are still well protected against severe disease. And I think people need to understand that because that's the goal. The goal is to keep people out of the hospital, keep them out of the ICU and keep them out of the morgue. How much hesitancy are you seeing from parents to get young kids vaccinated? enormous amount of hesitancy. I mean, you look, for example, as you go down the line to younger and younger children, there's greater and greater hesitancy. So, for example, for the 12 to 15 year old,

the uptake in that group is about 60 to 65 percent of children in that age group have been vaccinated. For the 5 to 11 year old is closer to 35 percent. For the less than five-year-old, it's about 5 percent. So parents are hesitant to give their child this vaccine, and I think in part because it's always difficult, I think, to watch your child inoculated with a biological agent, which you might not understand very well, and so are susceptible to the kind of misinformation that surrounds these vaccines. And more importantly, I think people just consider their children to be invulnerable. They can't imagine that anything bad would ever really happen to them. But if you ever pay attention to these parent advocacy groups, like families fighting flu, meningitis Angels,

National Meningitis Association, these are parents whose children have suffered or died from vaccine-preventable diseases who had chosen not to vaccinate them. And all those parents tell the same story. I can't believe this happened to me until it happens to them. You know, this is so different from we baby boomers, a generation, which we welcomed all the vaccines that came by. Yes, it was a different time. It was more trusting time. I mean, I'm a child of the 50s. I remember the poll. I was, when I was five years of age, I was in a polio award for about six weeks. I certainly remember that disease. I remember my mother crying when that vaccine was, was license and recommend it. But think about it. In 1955, when Jonas Salk made his polio vaccine,

five companies stepped forward to make it. One company made it badly. Cutter Laboratories of Berkeley, California, failed to fully enactivate that virus. As a consequence, 120,000 children were inadvertently inoculated with live, fully virulent, dangerous polio virus. 40,000 developed abortive or short-lived polio, 164 were permanently paralyzed, and 10 were killed. I would say that was the single worst biological disaster ever to happen in this country, and it in no way shook the public's confidence in vaccines or vaccine makers. Yeah, yeah. So while we're on Polaro, because Polio was around now, you and I who got that vaccine back in the 50s,

are we still protected from it? Yes. Well, I mean, I was born in 1951. So I got the inactivated vaccine, meaning Jonas Salk's vaccine, and then also got the vaccine on sugar cubes, which was actually. Albert Sabin's vaccine. So I was inoculated arguably with the so-called sequential schedule, meaning an activated vaccine, oral polio vaccine. So the question is, do we have long-lived memory response? Are we still protected against polio having received those vaccines as children?

Yes. The answer is yes. And what about parents getting polio vaccines for their kids now? They should go out and get them most definitely? Most definitely. You know, the problem with polio is we're never going to eliminate polio from this country until we stopped giving the Oropoleo vaccine. I mean, the oral polio vaccine was great in the sense that we were able to eliminate polio from our country by the 1970s. We were able to eliminate it from the Western Hemisphere by 1991. That's what the oral polio vaccine gave you. But the price you paid for the oral polio vaccine was it in rare case. It's very rare, roughly one per 2.4 million doses. That vaccine virus could essentially revert to so-called neurovirulantite, meaning you could be

paralyzed by the oral polio vaccine. And so although we eliminated polio from this country by the late 70s throughout the 1980s, throughout the 1990s, for those 20 years that we continued to use the oral polio vaccine, every year eight to 10 children would be paralyzed by that vaccine. And some who came in contact with those who had been inoculated with that vaccine, where the vaccine virus had reverted essentially to wild type. And that's why in the year 2000, we stopped using neuro polio vaccine in this country and went back to the inactivity. vaccinated vaccine. I know I got us off on the polio truck, but I still have so many questions about COVID. I want to go back to some of those because we've been asked so many things from our listeners.

Getting back to getting kids vaccinated, this is a two or three series vaccine for kids under five. I mean, when should they start if they want to be adequately protected before the school year begins? I mean, and is it too late to time it perfectly? Well, I think you should start now. Again, this virus is going to be with us for years, if not decade. So you want your child to be protected. It's a two-dose vaccine in the case of modernis, with those two doses separated by about a month. It's a three-dose vaccine for Pfizer, where the second dose is three weeks after the first, and the third dose is two months after the second. So, sure, get vaccinated. Now, but you don't have to go to school to be at risk. I mean, you're at risk because these viruses are circulating even now. There's certainly, it is at its

heart still, I think, a winter respiratory virus. So you do want to be protected in the fall and winter, but get vaccinated now. And for older kids who got two doses of the vaccine and then got COVID, should they get boosted? I don't think so. I think that that natural infection following two doses was the boost. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And like the vaccine for adults, there have been some reports of side effects in young kids. Does that change how you feel about advising people? parents to get their kids vaccinated? Well, what you worry about is it's not the sort of the mild side effects, meaning, you know, pain or redness at the injection site, fever, headache, joint pain.

I mean, those are parts of your immune response. I mean, those symptoms are symptoms of an immune response. What you worry about, at least what I worry about is myocarditis, which is inflammation of heart muscle. I mean, when that vaccine was then recommended, say, for everyone over 16 years of age, you knew that for the, say, 16 to 17-year-old male after the second dose, usually within a week of the second dose, those people could get myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle, which, you know, although short-lived and generally transient and self-resolving, is still quite worrisome. I mean, it was about one in 20,000 risk. And so you worried, I worried, as we moved down to the 12 to 15-year-old and the

five-to-11-year-old, since this was a young male phenomenon, would it be even greater as we got to younger age groups, and that wasn't true. It was less and less real. So it wasn't one in 20,000, one in 50,000, or one in 100,000. But remember, SARS-CoV-2 virus also causes myocarditis. I mean, there was a study done among athletes at Ohio State University. So these are men and women between 18 and 22 years of age. And what they did was they looked at people who had COVID, whether they had symptoms, cardiac heart symptoms or not. Everyone got a cardiac MRI to answer the question, how common was myocarditis with COVID? And the answer was one in 45 people had had evidence of myocarditis. Two-thirds of them were asymptomatic. One-thirds of them were

symptomatic. So a choice not to get a vaccine is never a risk-free choice. It's just a choice to take a different risk. And I would argue if you're risking COVID, which you are, it's a choice to take a more serious risk. This is Science Friday from WNIC Studios. We're talking with Dr. Paul. Offit, pediatrician, and a vaccine expert based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Okay, let's shift gears to another infectious disease that's been in the news a lot. And of course, I'm talking about monkeypox. We've heard concerns from parents who worry that if it gets into the general population that spreads in schools could be a nightmare. What's your take on this? I guess I don't see that. I think this is a virus, which is for the most part spread by skin-to-skin contact.

If you look at where the cases occur, 95% of these cases are in men who have sex with men, and especially men who have many sexual partners. So can children get this virus? Yes. They get it typically by having an adult in the home who has monkeypox in whom they have either skin-to-skin contact or end up sharing things like blankets or towels. That's where you see monkeypox.

Where you worry about school spread is for virus, that have a respiratory root as an important part of pathogenesis, meaning that the virus is contained in small droplets that are spread from one person to another by talking or sneezing or coughing. That's not this virus. So I don't really see this as a problem in school. Because we know the kids are notoriously non-hygienic, right?

They're going to be touching and feeling everything and they get their hands on. Yes, that's exactly who they are. Yeah, yeah. Do you think we're going to get to a point where we start giving the monkeypox vaccine to kids, though somewhere along the line or no? I don't think so.

It's a, the vaccine that's used, it's currently being used, is so-called the genios vaccine. So I should take a step back, which is designed to protect against smallpox, human smallpox. There's not really a monkeypox-specific vaccine. This is a vaccine designed to prevent smallpox, which is really the way the first vaccine was made. I mean, when Edward Jenner made his smallpox vaccine, he used cowpox because it was antigenically, now we know, antigenically related enough so that infection with one could protect against disease caused by another. So there's a lot of this sort of cross-species protection.

So this genio's vaccine is made by taking really the original smallpox vaccine. It was this called anchor restraint and then modifying it by passing it like 500 times in chick embryo fibroblast cells, which significantly weaken that virus and dramatically really virtually eliminated the side effects which were significant associated with the smallpox vaccine, the original smallpox vaccine, which could cause myocarditis, paracarditis, and serious illness. So we've eliminated that. I think there's not a lot of vaccine available is part of the problem. So what the government decided to do is to be able to expand the amount of vaccine

by essentially giving one-fifth of the dose and giving an intradermally, which makes sense, actually. I mean, the intradermal area, the area just under your skin is rich in the kind of so-called antigen-presenting cells like dandritic cells that makes that a more effective vaccine. Essentially, it mimics in many ways the scarification procedure that was used when you and I got the small part of the skin. Yeah, scratching the skin. Yeah, scratch. Left you with a scar.

Okay. I think we've covered it all. I just want to ask you if you have any parting words about infectious disease is the school year that you want to leave with parents. Well, just that get your child vaccinated. I think our job as parents is to put our children in the safest position possible. and vaccines afford that safety. That's it.

Well, as always, thank you so much, Dr. Offen, for taking time to be with us today. Thank you. It was my pleasure. Dr. Paul Offett, Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. We have to take a break, and when we come back, I'll look behind the scenes at the upcoming Artemis Mission to put people back on the moon. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato.

It's been more than 54 years since Apollo. circled the moon with three astronauts in preparation for the first moon landing. You may recall that iconic Earthrise photo taken by Bill Landers. Well, on August 29, NASA will try to circle the moon again. To mark the beginning of the Artemis program, it's NASA's long-awaited series of missions designed to send humans back to the moon. This time, though, no humans. The mission will carry two phantom women dummies testing out an anti-radiation vest.

In Greek mythology, Artemis is Apollo's twin sister, but this visit to the moon will be no mirror image of the last. Artemis relies on a new level of international and commercial partnership. It also plans to land the first woman and person of color on the moon. Joining me to talk about the Artemis' generation of space exploration is Jacob Bleacher, who holds a Ph.D. in Geological Sciences. He is chief exploration scientist at NASA. Welcome to Science Friday. Yeah, thanks, Ira, for having me. I'm really excited to be here and talk to you about Artemis, our exciting program to go explore the moon.

Well, that's a good way to begin, because I can't help but look at Artemis to think, hmm, going to the moon, it's like deja vu all over again. We've been there, done that 50 years ago. We had a moon buggy driving around. We collected rock samples. We had a golf ball or two. In fact, it got so routine after Apollo 17 that NASA had decided. decided to spend the money elsewhere and cancel the last three Apollo missions.

So what do we have left to prove and improve? Oh, there's very much that the moon has yet to tell us about our place in the solar system and the history of the universe. That's one of the reasons we're so lucky to have the moon there. It's like having a library about the history of the universe right next door. But, you know, you're correct. We did go to the moon during Apollo. But I don't like to think of this as kind of starts and finishes.

This is a trajectory or a path of exploration that we're on. We went out to the moon during Apollo missions, and we landed in a handful of locations on the near side, near the equator of the moon. But just like you can't characterize the entire Earth by only a few spots that you went to one time, you can't characterize the moon that way either. But what we did learn was that we had a lot to learn

about spending longer periods of time in space. And that's what led to the International Space Station. We've had astronauts on the space station for 20 years continuously. We just passed the two-decade mark. So those folks have taught us a lot about how to survive and live and even thrive in the space environment, which is all critical for us if we want to spend more time on the moon and eventually start to think about destinations farther away like maybe Mars. We learned from Apollo that we needed to study how to survive.

We also have learned from those samples what questions to ask. What is it that the moon has to tell us? And now when we go to the moon, going to the south polar region of the moon, where no one's ever been, and it will be very different looking than what we saw from Apollo. I know that one of the aims of the Artemis mission is to actually create an orbiting space station. And then is it eventually to build a moon colony? So Artemis will be our first step in working together, multinational effort to be able to spend more and more time out in space. So just like the International Space Station is a collaborative effort, Artemis will be a chance for us to work with partners, work with industry, work with academia, to think about and develop an approach to humanity spending more time out in space.

space, to be able to study complicated processes. We can do that with robots, but there's a certain aspect that having people there that's very valuable. But we've got 20 years, as you said, going around the Earth doing these kinds of things. Didn't we learn enough from all those years doing those things in the space station? What would be the bigger questions we have on the moon? So the moon is this great place. It doesn't have an atmosphere like the Earth does. And so on the moon is evidence about what was going on here on the earth, for instance, when life started. Big questions that we actually can't answer by staying here on the earth. One of the reasons we're going to the south pole of the moon is because at the poles of the

moon, there are impact craters, basically holes in the ground where rocks from space have hit the moon and made a big circle. You can actually see them with your naked eye when you look at the moon at night. You can see that there are kind of round features on the moon. Well, those are places where big rocks from space have hit the moon. At the polar region, those depressions, those craters, they never see sunlight. And so from the entire history of the moon, which spans basically the history of the solar system, it's been slowly collecting water, volatiles, other volatile elements from, for instance, comets that may run into the moon, maybe even volatiles that were released as it was cooling. Those volatiles track how the solar system has evolved through the time

period that life got a foothold here on the earth. And if we can get access to that type of material, we can actually start to answer some big questions and maybe learn how to ask even more questions about, you know, why are we here? How did we get here? You know, is this the only place that we are? those are kind of the big level kinds of questions that NASA gets tasked with tackling, and you have to go find that evidence. It's not readily available here on the Earth. It's been reported that last year, China and Russia are going to jointly build a moon base, basically competing with Artemis.

Are we in another space race? Well, you know, they could go and build what they want. We are definitely working with other partners globally to go. go and build research stations as well. Our interest is to go in partnership and kind of get a foothold on the moon where we can kind of use that to grow. So we'll go and we'll land with some of our first Artemis missions and come home. The missions won't be very long, but they'll help us learn about surviving in the South Polar region. But then unlike Apollo, our plan is to start putting down infrastructure. So maybe a habitat.

or maybe some rovers that can be reused so that we don't have to bring the same hardware back each time with us and we can start to build up. That doesn't exclude anybody else from doing the same thing. The goal here is to learn about the moon. I've heard NASA say that their ultimate goal is to go to Mars. I mean, Mars has a whole different atmosphere, a whole different surface. I mean, what can you learn from spending this time on the moon? Wouldn't it be better to invest in going to Mars like the stated mission says? Yeah, so Mars is ever a destination for NASA. It's one of the places out there in the solar system.

It does actually still have a little bit of an atmosphere, and it has some of the resources that we might need to be able to survive long periods of time without being able to resupply from the Earth. But it's really far away. And so we are, just like we use the International Space Station over two decades, just to learn about the impact on the human body of living in space, we need to learn about living in deep space at the moon to prepare for that trip to Mars. Now, the International Space Station in low Earth orbit is protected from the solar wind,

the radiation from the sun by a magnetics field. At the moon, you're not always protected in there. And so we can actually start learning about that next step, So we learned about surviving in kind of the weightlessness, weightless environment in lower orbit, but still protected from the sun. At the moon, we'll learn about how to really survive out in deep space. How do you protect yourself out in that environment? And what is that environment truly like? So we'll be able to make measurements and characterize that environment and start to learn what we have to prepare our astronauts for, as well as our hardware, to make that trip out to Mars.

We're kind of writing the blueprint now for exploring the solar system. And Mars is certainly part of that blueprint. As I said, there are a couple of mannequins on this mission instead of real people. And I think one of the mannequins is wearing a vest to protect from radiation to study that. That's correct. Yes. So our first Artemis mission, Artemis 1, which could be launching as soon as the end of this month, August, is the first test run of our space launch system, which is the big rocket that can push our crew capsule, the Orion, out to the

moon. Inside the Orion capsule, which will go out and circle around the moon for this first Artemis mission and then return and splash down here. It's a checkout of the system. We are doing science the whole time. So we have radiation sensors in the inside of the Orion. We actually have some biology experiments that are looking at what's the impact to life. science out there beyond low Earth orbit. But then what you're pointing out is we have two mannequins that will be traveling and testing some capabilities to actually protect our astronauts from radiation. So basically wearing like a protective vest coupled with the measurements we're making, we'll be able to tell how well that that attempt is at protecting our astronauts.

Of course, there have not been a lot of people who have set foot on the moon, but there have been a number And the more times it seems that we send people to walk around on the moon, the more we are affecting our lunar experiment, are we not? I mean, the people compact the soil, they leave behind human waste, they leave behind our microbiome. Astronauts walking around change the environment. Undoubtedly, yes, there is an impact from astronauts. So one of the things that we try to do actually is, you know, use robotics as well to help characterize. drives the environment. So we actually have a whole set of robotic landers that are going, starting to go to the moon here in the next couple years. They'll get there before our astronauts,

and they're going global. So they're landing in different places, but some of them will be in the South polar region as well. Some of them are scouting out, looking at the water, trying to help us understand how much of it is there, what status it is, so we can understand if it's something we can use or if it's something we can study, what's the right way to sample it. But we'll also have measurements there that help characterize what that environment looks like, which is a key measurement to understand before our astronauts get there. There would be some people who would say, well, why do we send people? Then we have really good robots who've proven themselves on Mars.

And if you're going to send robots to the moon, why not just send, you know, very smart Martian-like robots and not have to send the astronauts? Well, yeah, so that's kind of a much bigger philosophical question. So is humankind going to explore, you know, around us in the solar system or not? And I think that the answer to that question is we want to send people to explore. We want to send people to learn if there are other places we can survive in the solar system. But also, there are certain activities that humans do a much better job at than robots. can. So robots are really good at, you know, making consistent routine measurements. They can go into

places that maybe are more hazardous to humans if you design them to handle that. But there are also activities that maybe we need that ability for the human cognitive approach to take over. So if you're sampling something, for instance, that's volatile by nature. The word volatile means that it's not necessarily stable. And so if you expose, ice or water on the surface of the moon, it will quickly go away. And so you need something to be able to make choices and decisions rapidly. And that only gets more and more difficult as you move farther and farther away, for instance, to Mars. At Mars, you have at best eight to ten minute one-way communications, and it can be up to over 20 minutes. And so you may, you know, following on your question,

you may say, well, maybe you don't need the people to do that at the moon because it's so close. But this is the proving ground that helps us learn how to do this elsewhere in the solar system. I'm I, Roflato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. What is the timeline of the first landing on the moon? And what would constitute a successful first mission here of Artemis, as you say, that's launching at the end of the month. Yeah, so we're aiming to get our astronauts out to the moon in what would be Artemis 3, around 2025.

But, you know, it's all dependent on what we do learn from this first mission. And then a second mission, Artemis 2, that would actually do the same thing as Artemis 1, but carry astronauts along. So those astronauts won't land, but they will be part of that mission. It's kind of like Apollo 8. You mentioned the Earthrise. These would be the astronauts that are in a very similar seat to those astronauts from Apollo. What would make Artemis want a success is, you know, flying all the systems,

hopefully flying them in a near nominal status, you know, they do what we expect them to do, and they return safely. And anything that's not nominal that we are able to understand it. You know, why did that happen, get good data that supports an interpretation of what happened so that we can move forward to the next mission. This is something like a 40-day mission, right? So my question is, why so long to just prove you can, you know, make these maneuvers and get back to Earth? Yeah.

So, well, first of all, we don't have the astronauts in there, so we're not burning hard to get out to the moon in the minimal amount of time. And we want to collect enough data about the environment that we're flying through to make sure that our systems are working. So what we really are trying to do is put these systems through a full test. So an Artemis mission with astronauts goes out with the Orion into what we call a neorectilinear halo orbit, which is fancy jargon for a big orbit that kind of goes around the poles of the moon. And the astronauts there in the Orion would then dock with what's called the human landing system.

And the human landing system will take them down to the surface. and then it will bring them back up to the Orion and then come home. And so a whole Artemis mission with crew is not something that you do in only a few days. And so what we're trying to do with Artemis I is mimic kind of the duration of the activities that we'll do in the environment that our astronauts and hardware will be in so that we have the right data to know that the systems work well. Well, we wish you great luck, Dr. Bleacher and everybody else at NASA and, in your first orbit back to the moon. Yeah, thank you very much.

I mean, it's exciting for us. I hope it's exciting for everybody. There's going to be a lot of people watching on with great interest here at the end of the month as we get ready to launch this rocket. As I remember from launching of Apollo, you get to feel it and hear it more than see it. Thank you, Dr. Jacob Bleacher

is the chief exploration scientist at NASA. Thank you very much. And a special thanks to McKenzie White for producing this interview. In fact, McKenzie herself is a planetary scientist. Yes, she joined us this summer as a mass media fellow through the American Association for the Advancement of Science. You heard her work when we covered everything from plant immune systems to our teen innovator series to the first human lunar exploration since Apollo. Thank you, McKenzie, for your hard work and insightful production, wishing you good luck. in your next endeavor. If you missed any part of this program or you'd like to hear it again,

subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Of course, you can say hi to us all week on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or email us the old-fashioned way, SciFri at Science Friday.com. Send feedback. Tell us what you'd like us to cover. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.