Science Friday - Breast Cancer Cultural History, Butterfly Wings. June 5, 2020, Part 2

Episode Date: June 5, 2020

‘Radical’ Explores The Hidden History Of Breast Cancer  Nearly 270,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer every year, along with a couple thousand men. But the disease manifests in many different ways, meaning few patients have the same story to tell.  Journalist Kate Pickert collects many of those stories in her book Radical: The Science, Culture, and History of Breast Cancer in America. And one of those stories is her own. As she writes about her own journey with breast cancer, Pickert delves into the history of breast cancer treatment—first devised by a Scottish medical student studying sheep in the 1800s—and chronicles the huge clinical trials for blockbuster drugs in the 80s and 90s—one of which required armies of people to harvest timber from the evergreen forests of the Pacific Northwest.  She joins Ira Flatow to tell her story, and the surprising cultural history of breast cancer.  With Butterfly Wings, There’s More Than Meets The Eye  Scientists are learning that butterfly wings are more than just a pretty adornment. Once thought to be made up of non-living cells, new research suggests that portions of a butterfly wing are actually alive—and serve a very useful purpose.  In a study published in the journal Nature Communications, Naomi Pierce, curator of Lepidoptera at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, found that nano-structures within the wing help regulate the wing’s temperature, an important function that keeps the thin membrane from overheating in the sun. They also discovered a “wing heart” that beats a few dozen times per minute to facilitate the directional flow of insect blood or hemolymph.  Pierce joins Ira to talk about her work and the hidden structures of butterfly wings. Plus, Nipam Patel, director of the Marine Biological Laboratory, talks about how butterfly wing structure is an important component of the dazzling color on some butterfly wings. 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 Ira Flato. A bit later in the hour, the mysteries uncovered on the surface of a butterfly's wing. It's really, some really interesting stuff. But first, nearly 270,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer every year. And a couple of thousand men, too. But the disease manifests in many different ways, meaning few patients have the same story to tell. My next guest collects many of those stories in her book, Radical. the science, culture, and history of breast cancer in America. And one of those stories is her own. And she writes, as she writes about her own journey with breast cancer, author Kate Pickert details the history of breast cancer treatment as first advised by a Scottish medical student studying sheep in the 1800s. That is a really interesting story in the book. And hopefully we'll get to talk about it with Kate.

And she also chronicles the huge clinical trials for blockbuster drugs in the 80s and 90s, one of which required armies of people to harvest timber from the evergreen forests of the Pacific Northwests. And she writes about current targeted, personalized treatments and the surprising East Coast West Coast divide among breast cancer doctors, each one favoring their own medicine. We'll talk about all of that. And a question for you, listeners, if you or a loved one have had breast cancer, please share what your experience was like. what you wish you knew before you started treatment. Kate Pickard is former staff writer at Time Magazine,

a journalism professor at Loyola Marymount University, and the author of Radical, the science, culture, and history of breast cancer in America. We have an excerpt from her book on our website at ScienceFriday.com slash Radical. It's pleasure to have you on Science Friday, Kate. Thanks a lot for having me, Ira. Tell me, what's the first thing women need to know after they have been diagnosed with breast cancer? Oh, gosh, there is so much to learn and so little time to learn it.

After a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer, in most cases, treatment is, you know, will commence pretty quickly. So there's a lot to learn in those first early weeks. I would say the most important thing to know about a breast cancer diagnosis is some specifics about that diagnosis. What type of breast cancer have you been diagnosed with? Because that will drive a lot of the treatment decisions that come. on down the line later. And, you know, the advice that I always, I talk to a lot of newly

diagnosed breast cancer patients, and I always advise them to get second and third opinions, in part because the science is changing quickly around breast cancer in small ways, but in sometimes significant ways. And so it's really good to be up on the latest science and talk to as many oncologists early on as you can. Is the internet a good source of stuff, or are people going to be, you know, listening to stuff that has not been vetted in hearing stories that are going to misinformed them? I would say by and large there's a lot of inaccurate information on the internet. We all have that inclination to go to Dr. Google.

But the reason that I really don't advise patients just Google around and look for things online is because the science is changing. A lot of the information online is outdated. So, for example, some types of breast cancer, including the type that I had, actually there are really good treatment options for that type of breast cancer now. But if you go online, there's a lot of information that was put there before some of these new treatments were around. So information is outdated, and it's unless you're adept at reading medical journal articles and things like that, I think it's best to get your information from doctors directly.

But you're one person who is adept at reading these things? And what must it have been like for you, a health care journalist who is used to pouring over medical studies and writing about patients, then all of a sudden, you are one of those patients. Yeah, I mean, just like any other woman or man diagnosed with breast cancer, it was a very terrifying experience, especially in the beginning before I understood much about the disease or the treatment that I would undergo. I think that, you know, being a health care journalist and having had some experience writing about cancer and reading medical journal articles, I think was really empowering

and helpful for me because when my oncology, would explain a particular drug to me and say, you know, it's based on this study and this study. I sort of, I think, had the skills to go look those up and read those studies. So I think it was empowering for me as a patient to have had that healthcare, you know, background. At the same time, I'm a human being in addition to a journalist. And, you know, it was very scary at the beginning. Did you, did you know where to turn to, to seek advice, even with all of your experience? Well, you know, the first thing that I did was look around for the best comprehensive cancer center in my area, which is Los Angeles. And so I made my way to UCLA.

I reached out to everyone I knew who might have any connection to oncology to try to find out who are the best oncologists at UCLA that I could see or elsewhere in Los Angeles. So I had a lot of consultations in the first month after my diagnosis. Almost every day, my husband and I would drive. We were sort of crisscrossing L.A. County talking to different doctors, et cetera. So I think that I was really lucky to find some great oncologists fairly quickly, in part because I was in a big metropolitan area, which is not the case for everyone. Yeah, and it's interesting that you bring that up because that was one of the most light bulb moments of your book when I was reading it. I was surprised to learn that while you're out there in L.A., the doctors in the East Coast are prescribing some other kind of medication. And you describe it as an East Coast versus West Coast divide and how to treat cancer?

Yeah, I mean, I spent 10 years living in New York City before I moved to Los Angeles, and I'm originally from upstate New York. So I think I myself have a little bit of an East Coast bias. So right after my diagnosis, my first thought was I need to get to New York. But actually, it really turned out that UCLA was pretty much the best place in the world for me to be treated because it's sort of ground zero for research into the type of breast cancer that I had. You're right. There are cultural differences between doctors on the East Coast and the West Coast. And this isn't true for every single doctor in New York or L.A. or San Francisco.

But I write in the book about different chemotherapy regimens that are more commonly prescribed on the East Coast compared to chemotherapy drugs delivered on the West Coast. And this is kind of a cultural difference. And doctors, oncologists that I spoke to in both places admitted this. The chemotherapy regimen that I write about in the book that's more common on the East Coast, is an older chemotherapy regimen. It's very toxic. And it's basically statistically significant to this other chemotherapy regimen

that came along later. And yet doctors on the East Coast still deliver this chemotherapy regimen, even though it's more toxic than this other chemotherapy combination more commonly prescribed in California. For example, and the reason I wrote about that

was it was interesting and something I didn't know that there were these geographic differences in treatment, but also to try. try to inform people, women in particular, in breast cancer patients, that there may be differences, and you should ask about this, and speak to your doctors a little bit about sort of the science behind the decisions they're making about what they prescribe.

And you described the reason being that East Coasters and West Coasters in general, of course, it's not everybody, have a different mentality about how they want to be treated. Well, this is certainly what Larry Norton, who's sort of the breast cancer guru at Memorial Sloan Kettering told me, He kind of said, he compared it to East Coast Jazz and West Coast Jazz. And he said, you know, I don't know the exact quote in the book, but he said basically, like, people in New York are more concerned about dying and less concerned with, you know, all of these, you know, less important side effects, whereas people on the West Coast, you know,

tend to go for, you know, treatment regiments that, you know, don't cause a lot of side effects that are maybe gentler. And, you know, I think as someone who's lived on both coasts, I'm not sure that's entirely described sort of. of the differences in patients, but definitely doctors in New York definitely think that they have, you know, sort of the leading view on that. And again, that's not across the board, but that's a lot of physicians in New York, yeah. Yeah, it's like they talk about, we have the best bagels. Right. Well, that's true, though.

You write in some really fascinating history because I love history of science. You write in the book about the history of breast cancer, and it surprisingly goes back to a Scott. medical student in the 1800s who was studying lactation in sheep. Yeah, I mean, I wanted to write about so much of this history in the book just to convey to readers how much of science, especially in the early days, was, you know, because of chance and was kind of random and very, very messy. So, yeah, there was this medical student named George Beetson, and in the late 1800s, I think in the mid-1870s, he was finishing up his medical studies and he had one more thesis paper to write. And so he got sort of a side job helping a wealthy

man who lived out in the countryside in Scotland. It was sort of a side gig for him. So he thought, okay, I can live with this guy and earn a little bit of money and I'll work on my paper. And so some sheeps were being weaned at a farm nearby this estate where Beetson was staying. And so he wrote his paper about lactation. And so in the course of that research, he learned what a lot of farmers have known for a long time, which is that lactation and, you know, milking animals and mammary function is very closely tied to an animal's ovaries. So this idea that there was this connection between breasts and ovaries was something that Beetson was absolutely fascinated by. During lactation and during breast cancer, both, there are a lot of cellular changes in the

mammary glands. And so Beetson knew this and wondered, gosh, I wonder if ovaries are connected to breast cancer. And so he kind of set this. notion aside for some years, but later when he was a doctor in Glasgow, he would see a lot of breast cancer patients in the hospital. And back then, there was really no treatment for breast cancer other than some surgery. Basically, a lot of women diagnosed with breast cancer died fairly quickly. And so Beetzin thought, well, I'm going to try and experiment. And so the first woman that he proposed his idea to was a 33-year-old mother of two with a very bad case of breast cancer. and he asked the woman if she would allow him to surgically remove her ovaries in hopes of slowing down her breast cancer.

And she agreed, and he did, and the operation was successful in that it did slow down and, you know, sort of make her breast cancer regress. And so that was an amazing discovery. On the one hand, it was discovered that there may be, that, you know, surgical removal of ovaries could be a treatment for breast cancer. Something outside of mastectomy could treat breast cancer. And in addition, Beetzin and other doctors in the early days that tried the surgery, they realized that not all women's cancers responded. So the other also very, very important discovery was that not all breast cancer was the same. That's interesting. So some is fueled by hormones, some is not.

And that's, you know, kind of driven research into the disease ever since. Terrific. We're going to talk more with the Kate Pickert, author of Radical, the science, culture, and history of breast cancer. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. We're talking this hour about the cultural history of breast cancer and the science and how to diagnose and treat it with my guest, Kate Pickert, author of the book Radical, the science, culture, and history of breast cancer in America.

We have an excerpt on our website at science Friday.com slash radical. Kate, you really have covered a whole bunch of territory in this book. It must have been really terrible to try to do. to figure out what to leave out because there are so much in there. Let me go to a common question people ask you when they find out that they have cancer. And they already want to know what stage they're in, right? This idea, the question of staging has changed over the years, has it not? It has indeed, and I got this question so much after my diagnosis. And this question has become very complicated, actually, for a couple of reasons. One is that the way in the past,

the way doctors would stage a breast cancer was by measuring how large a tumor was and how many lymph nodes were involved. They were also invaded by disease in basic terms. And you can only really truly figure that out by removing the tumor and then measuring it, so through surgery. And these days, a lot of women, including me, receive chemotherapy and other drug treatment prior to surgery. So that changes, if all goes well, that changes the disease and sometimes can shrink it

dramatically, and so it's difficult to ever know the true stage for some breast cancer patients. But additionally, the other thing is that we've learned so much about breast cancer since the original staging system was sort of devised. And recently, there have been a lot of other factors sort of added to the equation for staging. So we now know that actually the biology of a breast cancer tumor, what type of breast cancer it is, is just as important, in some case is far more important than the size of the actual tumor. So there can be some types of breast cancer that are very aggressive, spread rapidly, and can be discovered when they're very, very tiny and be very dangerous. And then there are other breast cancers that grow very slowly, that are highly

treatable, that may be large when they're discovered, and still, you know, doctors still may be able to treat those effectively. So yeah, this question of what stage is it as if that that is a, you know, a complete picture of prognosis is much more complicated and not as true as we used to think it was. And that's interesting because it leads to my next question about the kinds of cancer. You mentioned there are all these different kinds of cancers and how to detect them. Talk a bit about mammography because you write in the book that we've really gotten really good at finding the wrong cancers, things that may not be cancer or may never return or turn into cancer, but we still have trouble finding the right cancers, the kind that will kill and need to be.

caught early. Tell me more about that. Yeah, I mean, and this is really based on the idea, you know, based on the fact that mammography, which is the primary means that we use to screen women for breast cancer, is a pretty crude technology. There have been some advancements with digital mammography, but it's still an x-ray. And so an x-ray is not a particularly sensitive tool for soft tissue, which is what a breast is. So it is the case that a lot of women have their, have breast cancer detected through screening mammography. And in a a hefty number of cases, those breast cancers really needed to be found and were dangerous. However, since the advent of widespread screening mammography, we've also begun to pick up a lot of

very, very, very early breast cancer. One particular issue I write about in the book is this issue about DCIS, which is also known as stage zero breast cancer. And these are very, very early cellular abnormalities that are not invasive disease yet. And so, So because we're picking up so much of this, and DCIS causes microcalcifications, and so that's why it can be picked up on mammography. And so we're doing a lot of surgery on these patients whose disease wouldn't have been detected in the past. So that's one issue.

But I actually argue in the book that I think the more important issue is that there are cancers that are not found through a screening mammogram. So this is particularly true for women with dense or very dense breasts, oftentimes young women who are premenopausal. And because their breasts are so dense, a lot of times that breast density can obscure an invasive breast cancer tumor that may be present and therefore may not be able to be picked up by a mammogram. But we are very reliant on mammography. It's our primary means almost across the board. This is what everyone gets. And this has been the case ever since widespread screening mammography began in this country in the early 1970s. But we've learned so much since then.

And so there are efforts underway to try to personalize screening in the way that we have personalized treatment. Some women are at high risk for developing breast cancer and some women are at very low risk. And we can actually stratify women by risk to some degree. And then, you know, hopefully in the future, we will be better able to tailor screening. So use other modalities like ultrasound and MRI screen more frequently or less frequently, depending on an individual situation. So I think that's where the, I think there's a paradigm shift underwe. and I think that's where the science is going. And when you say a paradigm shift, is it toward a different kind of screening, perhaps like MRI or toward what?

I think when I say a paradigm shift, I'm talking about instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, actually interviewing an individual woman at age 40 or at age 50 to ask, okay, tell me about your family history, maybe we'll do a little bit of genetic testing, tell me how old you were when you had your first period, if you're post-menopausal, how old were you when you entered menopause? these are things that can affect a woman's risk of developing disease. And then saying, you know, maybe to some woman who's at very high risk with a lot of family history of breast cancer, you need to be screened every six months with MRI, which is very different than what most women who kind of enter into the screening, you know, system now undergo. Yeah.

And we've had the discovery of the bracket genes, things like that, which have totally changed cancer screening. Has it not? Yeah, I mean, it's changed it for people who, you know, are found to have the BRCA mutation. And there are lots of other mutations that we are now learning more about and becoming aware of. So it's not just BRCA anymore. Genetic panels given to women can look for a lot of other types of mutations as well. And in fact, I mean, in general, the only people screened for BRCA are usually people diagnosed with breast cancer, even though not all women diagnosed with breast cancer, but young women in particular.

women who have a significant family history. And there have been calls in recent years, including by the scientists who first discovered the Brachene at Berkeley decades ago, should we perhaps be screening all young women for genetic mutations that may affect risk? And this is another kind of area that there's a lot of discussion about now. You know, kind of the same way that we screen all women for breast cancer, should we screen all women for genetic mutations to try to better understand their risk. And one commonly held belief is that earlier, the earlier screen for breast cancer, the better because you'll save more lives, but the science doesn't really back that up, right?

How did this belief in early mammography take hold? Yeah, I mean, this was one of, I mean, I had written about this issue. I'd written a couple of stories about it before my diagnosis back when I was a staff writer for Time magazine. So I was a little bit familiar with this issue, but I went deep into the research for my book. And what I found was, I mean, basically the source of controversy that your listeners and, you know, most people may have heard about is this debate over when should women begin screening for breast cancer. Should they start getting mammograms at 40 or 50? And there's been a lot of

consternation and arguing and debate and passion about that issue, especially over the last 10 or 15 years. But what I found in my research is that that debate over that age group, women age 40 to 50, and whether screening mammography helped them, that debate and that dispute has existed ever since the first breast cancer screening trial data was published in, I think, 1971. So we've kind of always known, at least scientists have always known, that mammography is flawed and that it doesn't work as well for, it works differently for different people. And yet, we haven't really done anything to sort of change how we do screening. And I think this is rooted in the fact that breast cancer is very scary.

The idea that there's a test that could find it early and save your life is a very, you know, a very alluring idea. And I think also we give women very simplistic messages, right, about breast cancer. Early detection saves lives, get your annual mammogram. And that's sort of like the only message a lot of women get about breast cancer and about early detection and breast cancer screening. And the picture is far more complicated. So what are your recommendations for women about screening and detection? You know, one study that I write about in the book was this study that showed that 90% of women do not know their true risk for developing breast cancer. So there are actually online.

There's one, I think, from the NCI and others from some really good nonprofit groups that have risk calculators online. So you can put in your data, your age, family history, and things like that. And it will help give you some idea of whether you're at above or below average risk for breast cancer. But what I tell women is, you know, that you should have this discussion with your physician. And, you know, a lot of times that discussion never happens, right? Your gynecologist or your primary care physician says, oh, you turned 40, go get a mammogram, and that's the end of it. So I think, like, starting a discussion with your health care provider is really helpful. Knowing your risk is really helpful.

And also there are some trials going on right now that are stratifying women by risk and paying a lot more attention to individual patients. So I would urge people to sort of look at those as well and see if they could participate in science and maybe get better care along the way. Yeah. Last time I was at my personal doctor, we were talking about things. And he said, you know, you should start examining yourself for breast cancer. And I said, men? He said, oh, yeah. He said, I'm telling all of my male patients. And you're right that breast cancer does occur in men and kills more men every year than testicular cancer. Yeah, that's right. And actually, I mean, that's wonderful that your doctor said that. I would wager that most men in America are not getting that advice, but it's good advice. And actually, I mean, it's important to know that more than half of all breast cancers diagnosed in this country are diagnosed after a patient finds a lump themselves, not through screening mammography. So we may have this belief that that's how it's always caught, but that's actually, it's caught more oftenly by touch. You write that a lot of cancer treatments in the book, take a psychological and physical toll, taking all the estrogen out of a woman's body, for example. How well are we able to deal with these side effects? I think we're getting better all of the time. There are, but still, you know, oncologists are focused on saving your life.

They're less focused on sort of making you more comfortable along the way. And I think good oncologists recognize that, you know, a woman, you know, trying to convince a woman to stay on treatment has a lot to do with can you manage my side effects, right? So in a way, managing side effects can sometimes be life-saving because a patient may not want to undergo a treatment with severe side effects and then may lose the benefit of that treatment. I mean, you mentioned women under, you know, on endocrine therapy, which is basically a way to remove estrogen from the body. And this has a lot of downstream side effects, including it can cause joint pain, mental fog, sexual dysfunction, and lots of other. I mean, you know, we are built as women to have, and men, to have estrogen in our bodies. And so having none, you know, can have some of these other impacts that we're not expecting nor want. That leads me to a quote from your book where you say chemotherapy represented a huge leap forward in treatment for breast cancer patients.

Now doctors know that taking a few steps back is also progress. What did you mean by that? What I mean by that is there are, you know, surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. These are the three main treatments that have been prescribed to women for many decades and that we're all pretty familiar with. And now enough progress has been made in breast cancer that scientists and doctors are now looking at like, do we need to do everything that we have been doing? As we develop targeted therapies that are a little bit better, and as we're able to do large-scale,

randomized trials and big studies and meta-analyses, physicians and scientists are learning that a lot of women who have been prescribed, you know, surgery and chemotherapy in particular, perhaps did not benefit or would have just as big a benefit from a smaller approach on that scale. So, I mean, there was a large study that came out a couple of years ago called the Taylor X study, which basically used a genomic panel, a test, to test women diagnosed with hormone-positive breast cancer, that the test would return results saying whether that woman would benefit from chemotherapy or not. And the results of the study basically showed that a lot of women, as many as 60,000 women a year who had previously been getting chemotherapy, did not benefit from it.

And so now those types of women are not getting chemotherapy. So there are, you know, as the science marches forward, we're learning a bit about how to subtract some things from the menu from some patients, which I think is tremendous progress. Yeah, Kate Pickard is with me. She's author of Radical, the science culture and history of breast cancer in America on Science Friday from WNYC Studios. So there's so much to talk about. I want to end on a really fascinating story. Fascinating story about a chance meeting in a Denver airport you write. That was the cat. for one of the most important breakthroughs in cancer, meaning Herceptin. Tell us about that. Yes.

So Herceptin is one of the really huge, one of the only, you know, major game changers that we've, so we've seen a lot of incremental progress here and there, but Herceptin was a game changer. And Herceptin was invented, was developed by Genentech, the biotech company based in San Francisco in collaboration with a scientist at U.S. UCLA. And this scientist at UCLA and a scientist at Genentech had both been kind of working on oncogenes kind of separately. And they happened to kind of be aware of one another's research. And they did run into each other, leaving a conference at a Denver airport and start talking about whether they might work together. And the scientist at UCLA was taking care of all of these

cell lines and trying to study whether there might be another subtype of breast cancer that could be treated with a targeted drug therapy. So we know that endocrine therapy, you know, anti-hormone, anti-estrogen therapy was effective, but there weren't really any other specific drugs. And so the scientist at Genentec made a probe basically that allowed, that he sent to the scientist at UCLA, who was able to basically, through some really smart research, discovered that there was one group of women diagnosed with breast cancer, whose breast cancer had a very, very poor prognosis and a very clear target on the cells that existed. And finding that target was really the key because then Genentech was able to develop a drug that hit that specific

target. And so it was kind of a chance meeting. Genentec wasn't initially very excited to develop this drug and was kind of pushed by the UCLA scientist to do it. And so they collaborated and developed Herceptin, one of the most important cancer drugs in cancer history. So so many stories I really commend you for writing this book because I think this will help so many people understand breast cancer and take action when they read the book. Thank you so much. Yeah, I really want women to feel like they, and men, to feel like they have some agency. And also it's just a fascinating story of history that teaches us a lot about science in general. Yeah, all kinds of interesting stuff.

And even about how much luck played hand in your life. It's in the book. If you want to read about it, get a copy of radical science culture and history of breast cancer. in America. Kate Pickard, former staff writer at Time, thank you. Thank you so much for taking time to be with us today. We have an excerpt from her book up at Science Friday.com slash radical. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, what researchers found when they took a second look at butterflies' wings, you know, they look like a little thin pieces of film. There's so much going on on a butterfly's wing that there's even a little heart, a pumping heart inside sort of

a cooling system like having your car, your radiator, inside the wing to keep them from overheating, all kinds of good stuff. We'll be back and talk about it after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Irafledo. When it comes to winged insects, the butterfly wins the beauty contest, right? Beautiful reds and oranges, deep blues and greens, vibrant yellows.

But as it turns out, scientists are learning that the butterfly wing is more than just a pretty membrane. It's actually alive. And its living cells are responsible for some important biological functions, like regulating the wing's temperature so it doesn't crisp up in the sun. And there's even a wing heart. Trying me to talk more about what she found probing the structural mysteries of the butterfly wing is Dr. Naomi Pierce, Professor of Biology and Curator of Lipidoptera. I love that word.

At the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira, nice to be here. Nice to have you. You know, for a long time, right, people thought that the butterfly wing was just a little lifeless membrane. All the important stuff was inside the body? Well, yes, more or less. The story usually is, if you take an entomology course, or even sometimes if you teach one, you would say, well, the wing is at metamorphosis, when the insect pops out of,

of that chrysalis, it pumps open its wings with the hemalymph or the blood of the insect. And it pumps open the wings. It takes about two minutes, and then the wings harden. And the insect withdraws the blood back after it's hard, and now the butterfly can fly, and the wings are nice and hard and not too sensitive. and the sense was that most of the hemolymph at that point is gone from those wing veins, and the wings are there to fly, but all the action in terms of blood flow in the insect is really happening in the thorax.

So, and I sort of ascribe, I think most, many entomologists had that sort of, it's a simple understanding of how, of the circulatory system of butterflies or moths. but it turned out to be a little more complicated than that. Such as? The wing was actually alive? Well, that was a fun journey. So I got together with the physicist Nanfang Yu at Columbia University, and we started looking at the scales on the surface of the wings of butterflies

and found that they were very heterogeneous across the surface of the wings. So in some places, the scales were modified. sort of sculptured in this nanosculpturing, sculptured in a way that made them act like perfect black body absorbers in the near infrared. That sort of means that they were, they have very high emissivity, and they were reflecting back the energy coming from the sun that was in the near infrared. But then in other parts of the wing, the scales look very different, different colors or different, but different shapes, and they weren't specially contoured. So, So we started exploring that more and found that really it was over the parts of the wing that you would call living parts of the wing.

So along the wing veins are also at these anderconeal patches. Those are sometimes the male butterflies have special areas where the cells in the wing produce pheromones that they use to attract lovely odors for the females. And over those patches especially, we found these highly specialized skin. scales that were acting, reflecting near infrared in that way. So, I mean, it just became more and more intriguing. Finally, we started to write a paper about how really it looked like this patterning of the scales and also the thickness of the cuticle itself, the thickness of the, the cuticle is sort of the skin or the crispy outside bits of the insect.

That that was conjured in a way to keep the butterfly cool, keep parts of the skin. It's cool underneath. And those all ran along wing veins and these endocrinial organs. So a reviewer, when we wrote the paper, a reviewer said, well, how do you know those wing veins are even alive? Are you sure there's hemalymphs flowing through those wing veins? So we went back and we took some butterflies. We carefully removed alive ones and, you know, sort of kept them cool so they'd be comfortable

on ice and then carefully took off the scales. so we can peek inside those wing veins. And sure enough, there was the hemolymph pumping away. And in many insects, the blood is a, it's a tidal flow. It goes in and out and in and out. It doesn't circulate around. So that's what we were seeing in the main wing veins, in and out, and we could measure it.

And in fact, that tidal flow continues at a regular pace right through the entire life of the adult butterfly. So day 24 for a painted lady, she's still pumping away. Is there a heart? And you say pumping, I get an image of an actual little heart in there. Well, the heart, yes, the heart is, it runs along the dorsum of the insect. It's called the dorsal organ, and it's, there you're thinking the fuselage, you know, not the wings, right in the thorax and the main part of the body.

And so, and I'm aware of that, and I assume that that was where, but there's sort of interaction with the breathing tubes. So also in those wing veins are these breathing tubes called trachea, and they expand and contract and expand and contract. So the two things go together. They sort of, that functions, we think they are coordinated to help pump the blood in and out. Fascinating.

But then when we looked at the endocrinial organ, the little male organ, we just saw something quite different. It was a directional flow. So there the blood was coming in and out at a regular pace about 20 times a bit. But it was only going down to the bottom corner. I mean, he wasn't going back again. And when we looked down in that bottom corner, there it was beating away this little wing heart.

So a little piece of tissue, a bit like your own heart, you don't think about your own heart beating. And the butterfly doesn't either. The little wing heart is beating all the time. pulling these blood cells through the organ, presumably nourishing and keeping that organ on. That's fascinating. We have a new movie Wingheart coming up. I want to bring on someone else who has studied the structure of butterfly wings

and found that a wing's color, because we all know, right? We're looking at wings. We see the beautiful colors, and he's found that a wings color can be determined by its structure. Dr. Nipam Patel, director of Marine Biological Labs in Woodhole. Dr. Patel, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you very much. You looked at how color is made on the wings and how the structure influences color.

Explain that to us. Yeah, so, you know, normally when we think of color, we think of pigments. We think of molecules whose atomic structure absorbs a particular wavelength of light. Then what's left is reflected, and we see that as color. So, for example, something that's yellow

has a molecule in it that absorbs blue light, What's left is red and green, and we perceive that as yellow. But there's another way to make color, which is through what's called structural coloration. And the idea there is that you have very, at least in the case of butterflies, you have very thin material made of chitin, which Naomi described to as the material that makes the exoskeleton. But you pattern that very precisely and very thin layers, and then light will interact with that in a way that certain wavelengths will interfere with one another to cancel each other out. or they'll reinforce each other. And so often in butterflies, what you see is green and blue

is not made by pigment, but is made by these nanostructures instead. And these have been described by physicists for a long time, and what we're very excited about is trying to understand how the cells actually make these structures. How do they? Do they have a talent for doing this? Yeah, so it's quite fascinating. First of all, it's extremely diverse.

There's lots and lots of different nanostructures that they can make. So I like to think about it is that the bubts. Butterfly is constrained by the laws of physics and that it only has this material Kiten to work with. But within that, it can come up with some very fascinating ways of doing this. The simplest one is just to make a very precise layer of Kiten, which is just right to basically give what's called constructive interference of a particular wavelength to create a color like blue or green.

But then you can have, like, the example of brilliant blue morphos, which have really elaborate nanostructures. So they can be made in lots of different ways. and that's one of the things we're trying to study. So there's no one answer as to how they do it. There's going to be many answers, but it's all related to sort of the question of individual cells, scale cells, how they can actually pattern things very, very precisely,

either by laying down layers in a precise way or creating really unusual geometries by taking the internal skeleton of the cell while it's still alive and bending it in very particular ways and then making that laying down chitin and having a permanent structure. Why would they have two separate ways, then? That is a great question.

So it turns out that it's actually very rare, not just in butterflies, but throughout the animal kingdom, to actually have pigments that are good at absorbing long wavelengths. The big exception to this in the world is chlorophyll, which is why the world is so green. But in fact, there's very few molecules that are actually able to do that because of their chemical structure. So instead, you often find solutions that are what we describe structural, or physicists have described as structural. And again, it doesn't only apply to butterflies. The same is also true in birds and in beetles.

Even human blue eyes are not made by a blue pigment, or rather made by a structural component. I just learned something brand new there. That was a... Did you know that, Dr. Pierce? Not all the details, but it's wonderful. Dr. Pierce, does it surprise you about the structure of the wings? Oh, well, I knew about the structure.

structural colors, but we were surprised at the properties in the near-infrared. So lots of work has focused on colors in the visible. And of course, I knew about structural colors like the beautiful blue wings of morphos. But you don't think about the colors you can't see. So it was a big discovery back in the 70s when one of my original advisors, Bob Silvergley, found that pierred butterflies were little cabbage. what we would call a sulfur or a cabbage white, reflect UV on the surface of their wings

and can use that as a private channel communication signal. And, I mean, I loved this. You take these two butterflies that look exactly the same to us, but if you put it under UV, one of them is shining in the UV and the other one's not. I just, I loved that when I first heard about it. And so when we started thinking about longer wavelengths, I was excited.

I thought, gee, maybe we're going to. going to find private channel communication in these longer wavelengths too. And I wondered, nobody had looked at it before. So it was really very eager to see. And we did find, you know, we found all this reflectance in the longer wavelengths, but most of it seems to be really involved in modulating heat, keeping the wings cool. And that was, is new, it's partly new because the tools are now available to be able to look at the temperature of a thin membrane like a wing. In the past, it would have been very hard because it's such a light and thin material. But now we can really appreciate a lot about these scales.

Dr. Patel, I've got to wonder why the director of the Marine Biological Laboratory is interested in butterfly wings. Well, first of all, so the marine biological laboratory, it is certainly true that we're great in marine biology and things like that, but we also do a lot of very basic science. And the story is that I actually started collecting butterflies when I was eight years old, and my parents definitely indulged me in that hobby. And so I've always been fascinated by making them part of the science that I do. So, yeah, about half my lab works on a marine organism, but the other half works on butterflies because it's great, basic biology. I think, you know, the excitement is that there are all sorts of, in any biological system, as you look closer and closer, there's lots of fascinating details.

And butterfly wings are a fantastic example of that. The more we look at them, the more things we discover. Well, are there creatures in the oceans that have the same kind of color system? Yeah, there are. So in water, it's a little bit different because, you know, in terrestrial environments, you're going from air into another material. and water is closer in what's termed refractive index than the material that biological structures are made of. So the physics has to work a little bit differently.

The equations are a little different. But you can do the same thing. So you can create structural color underwater. The other thing we study, which is also quite remarkable when you really dig into it, is transparency. So a lot of butterflies are also transparent. And it turns out that's actually not... Wait, wait, wait, back that up for a second. How do we see them if they're transparent?

That's great. So their glass wing butterflies is one group of them. And in fact, they are very hard to see. When you go to photograph, then the camera focuses through the wing to whatever is on the background. But one of the problems is they can be like glass, which is fine. It looks transparent in the shade. But if you put it in the sun, it reflects light. But on the other hand, butterflies have also evolved nanostructures to keep the light from being reflected like that.

So they really, really look transparent. And that's another thing that scientists have understood that for a while, but we're actually now just trying to understand how the butterfly makes these kinds of things. Dr. Pierce, if it's transparent, how does it have that plumbing system in the heart there to do all that stuff? Well, that's a good question, and that's something to study next. I'm hoping that we can find that out from Dr. Patel. You know, it's so fascinating to hear that something that we have seen our whole lives and we think we know about still holds all these secrets, Dr. Patel. Yeah, no, it is amazing. And, you know, one of the things we've really been trying to do is to watch the living wing get made.

So as Naomi said, you know, you think about the butterfly comes out of the chrysalis, it pumps up its, well, sorry, it pumps up the wing. But of course, it was alive when it was in the chrysalis, and it was making all these cells and these structures. And normally that's been inaccessible to us, but one of the things we've been working on are ways to visualize what's going on inside of that living chrysalis. And actually to visualize it in incredibly fine detail because these structures that it's making are smaller than a half-wave length of light. So, you know, something that's not easy to see with a microscope. But recent breakthroughs have made it possible to watch what it's actually doing. Fascinating. You ever think you'd get tired of it?

No, I doubt it. Never. There's a very practical side to this, the consequence of learning about these scales, incidentally. So my collaborator, Nanfang Yu, he's an applied to a physicist, and he was interested in trying to use sort of bio-inspired uses of this. And he developed a paint. It's a very, it's a simple and inexpensive paint that has a sort of polyunspired. base with little holes in it that are just very similar to the holes that you find in the scales of the

insects. And if you paint them on buildings in hot areas like they tested in Bangladesh, New York, and Phoenix, it can lower the energy cost of air conditioning by 30%. I can have to stop you there because we've run out of time, but you've piqued our interest. A practical, a practical thing from a lovely. Absolutely. Dr. Naomi Pierce at Harvard and Dr. Nepalm Pettel at Woods Hole. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Thank you very much.

It's a pleasure. If you missed any part of this program or we'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Every day now is Science Friday. And on the Science Friday Voxpop app, we're talking about robots and trust. Which human jobs would you trust a robot or AI to do well? and which job wouldn't you trust? Interesting question. Tell us on the Science Friday Voxpomp app, wherever you get your apps. Have a great weekend. I'm I Refledo.