Science Friday - Bridge Infrastructure, Cat Ancestor Gap, Lab Mice, Power Of The Dog, Mars Book Club. Feb 25, 2022, Part 2

Episode Date: February 25, 2022

Pittsburgh’s Bridge Collapse Spotlights America’s Infrastructure Woes Our modern world is made up of infrastructure: Roads, buildings, and bridges all play a big role for many people’s daily lives. If these structures do their jobs well, we don’t think much about them. That is, until infrastructure fails. Bridge collapses are especially scary, like the structural failure in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania last month. These events are shocking, and cause people to wonder how this could be allowed to happen. But looking at the numbers, it’s actually surprising there aren’t more failures. According to the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, a third of bridges in America are in need of repairs or replacement. Moreover, seven percent of the nation’s bridges are considered “structurally deficient.” And the problem could accelerate: Larger vehicles, more traffic, and climate change put a greater strain on bridges that already need regular maintenance. Joining guest host John Dankosky to talk about the engineering jargon around bridge infrastructure and new ways of building more resilient structures is Abbie Liel, professor of civil, environmental and architectural engineering at the University of Colorado in Boulder.   Why Did Ancient Ferocious Cat-Like Creatures Go Extinct? Can you imagine a world without cats? No furry loafs adorning our sofa arms. And no bobcats, mountain lions or jaguars either. Before there were cats in North America, there were nimravids, also known as “false” saber-toothed cats (while they had elongated canines, they weren’t actually cats). About 35 million years ago, nimravids roamed all over North America. But after 12 million years of dominating the continent, nimravids disappeared. For roughly the next 6.5 million years, there were no feline-like creatures anywhere in North America. This time period is called the Cat Gap. But why did nimravids go extinct? Guest host John Dankosky is joined by Chelsea Whyte, assistant news editor at New Scientist, who’s based in Portland Oregon, to discuss her reporting on this feline-less era.   Why Are Mice The Most Frequently Used Lab Animal? Mice and rats make up nearly 99% of animals used in research. But how did medical research come to be so dependent on these tiny rodents? How exactly do scientists genetically engineer mice to be suitable to study pretty much any human ailment? And why do the majority of medicines that are effective in mice fail in humans? Dr. Nadia Rosenthal, scientific director and professor at the Jackson Laboratory for Mammalian Genetics, based in Bar Harbor, Maine, talks with guest host John Dankosky to answer these questions, and more.   The Science Behind ‘Power Of The Dog’ When you think about science in films, you might think about space missions, disaster flicks, or techie thrillers, but probably not westerns. But Jane Campion’s film The Power of the Dog, a period drama about ranchers in Montana, turns on an interesting science twist. It is also widely considered a frontrunner to win an Oscar or three—it’s been nominated in several categories, including Best Picture. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Phil, an unlikeable rancher, whose world is disrupted when his brother marries a recent widow (played by Kirsten Dunst) and brings her son Peter (played by Kodi Smit-McPhee) into the home. The film doesn’t have a lot of dialogue. It’s a slow-boiling story about depression, psychological distress, alcoholism, masculinity, and sexuality. But (SPOILER ALERT!) it is also a story about anthrax, and the way in which Peter leads Phil to infect himself with the deadly agricultural disease by providing him with a hide from a downed cow. Sonia Epstein, executive editor and associate curator of science and film at the Museum of the Moving Image, based in New York City, joins John Dankosky to discuss the film and the medical mystery embedded in a landscape of mountains, cattle, and simmering emotions.   Blast Off To The Red Planet With The Spring Book Club The spring Book Club is setting sail for Mars! Join us as we read “The Sirens of Mars,” by planetary scientist Sarah Stewart Johnson, and discuss the search for life on our red planet neighbor. Radio producer and Book Club crew member Christie Taylor talks to guest host John Dankosky about the exciting scientific journey ahead for readers, with help from LibraryLinkNJ’s Stephanie Sendaula.   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 John Dankoski. We're surrounded by infrastructure, roads, buildings, bridges. And if these things do their jobs well, we don't really think about them at all. That is until infrastructure fails. Bridge collapses are especially scary, like what happened in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania just a few weeks back. Three to four vehicles, including a bus, were on the bridge when it collapsed. Ten people, including first responders, sustained non-life-threatening injuries. Three people were transported to the hospital. Our first thought is, how could this happen? But when you look into the numbers, it's actually surprising there aren't more bridge failures. According to the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, one in three bridges in America needs repairs or replacement. But what does that

really mean? And how do we make our bridges better and more resilient? Joining me today is my guest, Abby Lyle, a professor of civil, environmental and architectural engineering at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado. Abby, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for being here. Hi, John. Thank you so much for having me. Well, let's dig into this report from this year about the state of the country's bridges. And it found that more than 43,000 bridges in the U.S. are structurally deficient or poor. Now, that sounds like a pretty alarming number. But the truth is, I really don't understand what those words mean, what structurally deficient means and how it is different from poor, how worried should we be about these numbers? You know, I think we should take that as a

warning sign to give that bridge more close evaluation, right? So it's kind of like you go to the doctor and they tell you like, oh, there are some indicators of things that might be wrong, but we need to do some more tests, we need to do some assessments, and then we'll figure out a strategy. So the reality is that some of those bridges, you know, are probably structurally deficient in a way that we really wouldn't want to drive on them. And then some of them are, you know, oh, we should really prioritize doing something about certain parts of that bridge, but we're not worried about it failing tomorrow. When we talk about one in three bridges needing repair or replacement, those are two very different things. Replacement sounds like that instance where we shouldn't be driving across that

anymore and it needs to be torn down and rebuilt. Repair sounds like maintenance. It sounds like something that we have to just do all the time, like you said, a checkup going to the doctor. Yeah, so I think, you know, we have this massive amount of infrastructure. We're trying to monitor it in the same way that our doctors are trying to keep track of all the possible things that could go wrong with each of us and apply the best preventative strategy. And our infrastructure is super complicated to maintain and replace, right, because we have this complicated set of owners of basically all levels of government who are trying to manage that job of understanding what most needs repair, what needs replacement. And some of the things that need replacement need replacement because they have big problems for resilience. And some of the things that need replacement need replacement because where and how we drive and the vehicles we drive have changed. And so they're just not appropriate for the infrastructure of today.

So there's all of these things that are kind of mixed together in thinking about what we should do about upgrading our infrastructure. Well, you've mentioned some of them, but maybe we can go through some of the factors that go into a bridge degrading over time. What causes it to wear down and to need repair or replacement? There's really a number of factors that play in here, right? So one of them has to do with like the materials and the components of the bridge themselves. And this might be the one we often think about. So usually these bridges are reinforced concrete and steel. So, you know, what is the condition of the steel?

What is the condition of the connections between steel components? What is the condition of the reinforced concrete? What is the condition of the reinforcing steel within that concrete? And those materials wear down over time. Many of these bridges are quite old, you know, over 50 years old. They might have been overloaded or overstressed at some point in their lifespan. They also might have seen some deterioration from things like salt or something put on roads that causes corrosion or just corrosion from every day kind of being out in the environment. So that deterioration in the materials and the components, that's one important aspect. I also mentioned changing use and functions. of bridges is important. Some types of vehicles have gotten heavier. Semitrucks are heavier. We drive different places more often, you know, different traffic patterns than we used to have. And that can affect the condition of the bridge if you're changing the loading scenario. We also, you know, have a changing climate, which comes with it, changes in rain and flood risks,

near coasts, coastal flooding, wind effects. They can accelerate the deterioration. of a bridge compared to what it would if we didn't have that changing climate. And they also changed the loading scenario. You know, we might be more worried about scour of some bridges now than we would have been even even a couple of decades ago. Why do you think that bridge maintenance has fallen behind across so much of the country? Why do we have so many bridges in need of repair or replacement? I like to think about it like our houses. So that's the piece of infrastructure I think we're the most familiar with. So I don't know what kind of resident you are, but my husband and I don't do main instance until the last possible minute. Like the thing has to break before we're going to do

something about it. You know, and that's a piece of infrastructure that I'm intimately familiar with. I see it every day. I know, you know, I know what I want from it. And some owners are not like that or some residents are not like that, right? They call their landlords much more quickly. They monitor their infrastructure more closely. Then you think about that problem. So that's the home problem. And you've extended to all these infrastructures, all of these owners. And the fact that maintenance is just not very glamorous, right? In our political and governance climate, it's easier to justify new shiny things and, you know, a reinforced concrete bridge that needs, you know, a new deck. It's not a glamorous choice. And in fact, it can be really disruptive, right, to do that maintenance for the traveling public. And so there's a lot of. of, you know, challenges with the owners of this infrastructure in actually making the decision to get that done and, of course, finding the funding to get that done, because these are expensive projects. And again, you can think about home maintenance, right? We spend a lot of money on our

homes and, you know, our infrastructure is much more expansive than that. I think one of the things that's interesting, Abby, is you mentioned this before. We expect things like our homes, but also the bridges we drive across to last 100, 150 years. Is that really? Is that a lot? You know, realistic that we should be driving across a bridge that was built around the turn of the last century? You know, our infrastructure is amazing. And some of the ways that we build have really truly stood the test of time, right? On the other hand, if you think about the things in your house, just to go back to the house example, none of those are 100 years old, right? Like our furniture, you know, maybe that's hold, but our appliances, our cell phones, right? Those things are 10 to 15 years old,

typically. And so I think, you know, we expect something different from our civil infrastructure than we do from almost every other thing we use or engage with. And, you know, to bring this back to maintenance, I mean, yes, a 100-year-old bridge can be just fine, but it's not going to be just fine if you just leave it, right? We want to monitor it, make sure it's not having troublesome problems due to weather or, you know, loading or other issues or else we really do run into a problem. And the design lifespan then of bridges is typically considered to be about 50 years. And that doesn't mean that at 50 years, like, you know, put a rope across it and we can't use it. But it does mean that we want to be cognizant of the risks of aging and deterioration and how to address those problems.

You know, we're always on the show trying to think of ways to make things better if we can. And so in your world, amongst people who study this stuff, what are you seeing as far as strategies for building better, more resilient bridges? If we have to replace a bridge now in 2022, is there a way to make it so that we don't have some of the problems that we've been encountering with our current infrastructure? Yeah, you know, there's some really cool advances in civil engineering technology and related to bridges, and both on the kind of the construction side as well as on the design side. So just one example that I was involved in has to do with earthquake resilience of bridges, which is another challenge because our understanding of seismic forces has changed over time.

And so we want to make sure that new bridges are seismically safe and operable after earthquakes, if it all possible. And so one of the technologies that's been developed recently is a bridge column or column or peer system that is several precast segments, so built separately and separated by a smooth sliding layer. So when an earthquake comes, instead of that column, cracking and, you know, rebar buckling and things like that, the deprivation and the energy demand from the earthquake actually just causes those pieces kind of to slide relative to each other. And the appeal of that kind of technology is that the energy dissipation is in a place and

in a way that you expect and that's easy to repair. And so the idea is, first of all, that you wouldn't get as much damage in that kind of system. But also that repairing that damage would be much easier. In this case, you could just slide those pieces back into place. And so the disruption after the earthquake would be much less. There are a lot of these kinds of technologies that we could be using to build faster to build, you know, more resilient as we think about upgrading our bridge infrastructure. That's really cool technology. I'm wondering how much you're thinking about those other issues that we talked about earlier. The fact that we're driving more cars and heavier cars and trucks over bridges more often, the fact that we're dealing with the effects of climate change,

are those being engineered into the bridges that we're building today? As a civil engineering community, you know, we're working really hard on that. You know, our building codes and standards are in the process of incorporating climate effects and some of the loading scenarios that we're working with. And I personally have been involved in thinking about how we might incorporate climate change effects in terms of our snow loading on structure. So we're moving that way. You know, I think civil engineers as a profession, you know, we very much understand the challenges of the changing climate, and we see it as our obligation, our opportunity to incorporate that knowledge into what we're

doing. And it is happening in various places and in various types of infrastructure, you know, more quickly or less quickly. You know, we mentioned this earlier. People don't really think about the bridges that they drive across until something terrible happens, like what happened in Pittsburgh or the Minnesota Bridge collapse of several years ago. I'm wondering what you think it will take for politicians to spend more time thinking about our infrastructure and the changes that need to be made right now and also in the future. You know, I think that we are seeing more challenges to our infrastructure now than we have previously. And my optimism says that as those events are making us more aware of our infrastructure and how much we rely on it, that I hope that

can help us motivate to invest more in it, recognizing that, you know, infrastructure is really central to, it's central to our way of life, it's central to our health, is central to our safety. And so we really do need to prioritize investment in that infrastructure. Abby Lyle is a professor of civil, environmental, and architectural engineering at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado. So, Dr. Thanks so much for joining us. I really appreciate your time. Thank you, John. We have to take a break.

And when we come back, we'll be talking about a time in ancient American history when there were no cats. Yes, for six and a half million years, no cats. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankowski. Can you imagine a world without cats? I know I can't. I've got four of them around the house and they're always finding their way into my Zoom calls.

but I'm not just talking about house cats here, no bobcats, no mountain lions or jaguars either. Let's go back in time a bit. Before there were cats in North America, there were cat like Nimravids, also known as False Sabretooth cats. And about 35 million years ago, they roamed all over North America. Then after 12 million years of dominating the continent, they just disappeared. And for roughly six and a half million years, there were no feline-like creatures anywhere. in North America. It's called the cat gap. But why did it happen? Joining me now is Chelsea White, assistant news editor and news scientist. She joins us from Portland, Oregon to discuss her reporting on this interesting topic. Chelsea, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, John. Thanks for having me.

So what made you decide to look into the cat gap? Well, it all started with a joke, actually. I was joking with a friend that cats seemed eternal. And then I, I, I thought, well, they weren't. I'm curious when they evolved and where they were in North America. And that led me to the Wikipedia page for something called the cat gap. And I had never heard of it. There were all of these interesting hypotheses for why the cat gap might exist. But I wanted to look into it more and see, you know, what sort of the consensus is in the scientific fields, what paleontologists really think might have happened. Now, I understand that while you were reporting this story, you actually had something of a cat gap yourself. I did. I did. My 18-year-old cat, Sienna, got out and went missing for five or six months. Oh, no. And yeah, it was a really hard time. But in that period was when I was reporting and writing this story about the cat gap. And then after I filed it, she turned back up.

You know, it was nice to have the end of my own little cat gap there. Absolutely. So your reporting focuses on this cat-like animal. It's called the Nimravid. And as I said before, they're also known as fake saber-toothed cats. Not actually cats, though. Maybe you can explain exactly what these were. Right. So they're not true cats. They're not felines, but they're what we know as phoforms.

So they look like a cat, but they're not quite part of the family. And that means that like a cat, like a true cat, they have retractable claws. They have a tail for balance. And they have, you know, specialized teeth for eating meat. But they also have these structures in their. inner ears and some nerve passages and blood vessels that differ from cats. And they also walked flat-footed, like a bear instead of on their toes, like, you know, you might see your house cat do. Describe them a little bit more. I mean, were there really big ones and really tiny ones?

They were all kind of fearsome creatures. But they, but they ranged a lot in size because they ranged a lot in where they lived. Their fossils have been found across North America from east to the west. and also up and down the continent, even up into the Canadian Rockies. There's a reason they were called false saber-tooth cats. They had these very large canine teeth that were used for stabbing into prey. There's one called Eusimilis, which translates to true saber. And that was about three feet tall, kind of a long-bodied leopard. Their names are really evocative.

There was one called Paganidon, which means beard tooth. And then the smallest one, Nanosimilus, was about the size of a bobcat. My very favorite name is denictus, which just means terrible cat. So these sound like some pretty fearsome creatures. If they were so fearsome, why exactly did they die out? So there was this hypothesis that potentially there was some ancient volcanic activity that could have done them in. But it turns out there was sort of this two-pronged problem that they had. One is that there was a period of massive cooling and drying.

And so what that meant is that their home forests turned into grasslands. And so that would have changed the way that they hunted. It would change the way that the prey that they hunted lived and survived. And when prey species go extinct, predators follow. The other thing that happened is that Nimravids had evolved to be hypercarnivorous, which means most of their diet was meat. You know, I described for you their long saber-tooth canine teeth, but they also had these teeth in the back of their mouth, where their molars might be, called carnassials. And these were triangular teeth that fit together sort of like puzzle pieces.

And as they grind down together, they sharpen. One of the researchers I spoke to called them horrible scissors. And what this means is that the Nimravids really were only specialized to eat meat. and they couldn't adapt to the loss of their prey. They're not able to survive. And then that precipitates this thing that we call the cat gap. How long was North America completely feline free once these Nimrabids went away? Well, the cat gap lasted for about 6.5 million years.

And, you know, when it was first discovered, it was maybe thought to be a little bit longer. And as we've, you know, found more fossils, we find. more and more in that cat gap has shrunk and shrunk. And the other thing that's happened is that we have a lot of these fossils in museums already. And some of them have been classified as felines. And then we go back and we reanalyze them and find actually these were Numeravids. So after six and a half million years, all of a sudden we start to see cats repopulating North America. How did it end? Where did they come from? Right. So that period of cooling and drying that I talked about continued. And with that, the glaciers grew, the sea levels dropped.

and the Bering Land Bridge that once connected Siberia to Alaska emerged. And then came a cat called Sudolorus, which is a lynx-sized cat from Asia. And this became the sort of ancestor of felines in North America. Now, after Souteloris came along, another Nimravid came along. There was a group called the Barbarofilids. They came after Soudeloris. So it wasn't like they ended the cat gap either. But then by five million years ago, Barbara Fielids were

extinct again. And now we just have felines, true cats. And we have them all over North America, which is, you know, for us cat lovers, exactly the way we like it. So now that you've looked into this fascinating part of history, what has this taught you about conservation, about animal habitats? You know, it was interesting when I was speaking with some of the researchers about what the problem is with becoming hypercargivorous, we started to compare it to some of the animals we see today. So one of the reasons bears do so well living amongst humans is that they can eat anything. You know, they can eat berries and fish. They can also eat garbage. And so that's one of the reasons that we, you know, sort of have some conflict with bears and humans. But that's why, you know,

tigers these days cannot live quite so well in places where we are encroaching on their habitat. So it's one of those things where it makes you think, you know, we do really need to be careful and save these sort of species. Otherwise, we're going to see them go extinct like the Nimrabids did. Chelsea White is assistant news editor and new scientists. She's based in Portland, Oregon. She brought us the story of the cat gap. Chelsea, thanks so much for your research and thanks for bringing this story to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. Okay, since we've just talked quite a bit about cats, it's only fair we devote some time to their mortal enemies, mice. Specifically, we're going to be talking about the kind you find in the laboratory.

Mice and rats make up about 99% of animals used in research, but how did research come to be so dependent on these tiny rodents and how exactly do scientists genetically engineer mice to be suitable to study pretty much any human ailment? One of the largest suppliers of lab mice is the Jackson Laboratory for mammalian genetics. They've developed 11,000 genetically modified strains, and they ship out about 100,000 mice each month, to scientists around the world.

Joining me now is Dr. Nadia Rosenthal, scientific director and professor at the Jackson Laboratory, based in Bar Harbor, Maine. Dr. Rosenthal, welcome to Science Friday. Great to be with you, John. Let's start with a bit of history first. Mice made their way into research labs

with a little bit of help from an amateur geneticist at the turn of the 20th century. Is that right? That's correct. It's a great story. It involves a woman with a big barn. In the U.S. and Britain, people were keeping fancy domesticated mice as pets and breeding interesting specimens.

And Abby Lathrop was one of these mouse fanciers. And she was living in Granby, Massachusetts, and she was a really savvy businesswoman. And she established a mouse breeding business in her barn. And she had more than 11,000 mice at one point. Now, I mean, barns are a good place to store mice, but that's a lot of mice. And she kept very careful breeding records. And when she noticed that some of fancy mouse strains were developing skin problems, she got in touch with some prominent scientists. and they diagnosed inherited cancer in some of her lines. And they started working with Abby. And she was actually performing breeding experiments in her barn.

And she established that cancer is a heritable disease even before we knew what DNA was. And it's really interesting because Clarence Cook Little from Harvard, who founded the Jackson Laboratory and his colleague, George Snell, established the most frequently used mouse for the past 90 years. It's a mouse called C-57 Black Six. It's black. and it was the 57th mouse that Abby had actually analyzed. That mouse is still heavily used today, and George Snell went on to win a Nobel Prize for his work on genetics of immunology using those mice.

Well, you mentioned the C-57 black mouse. It's still the most commonly used mouse in medical research. Why is that still, and why is that sometimes a problem? There's a commonly held notion that drugs that are successfully trialed in mice don't often pan out in humans. The very reason that we use one mouse all the time, in this case the C-57 black six mouse in many experiments, is because that takes out a variable. If all the mice are the same, it means that whatever else we're measuring can be attributed to some other variable, not to the fact that they're different genetically. But the problem is that's not how people work. It's an inconvenient

truth that most medications that pass clinical trials in people work in only a relatively low fraction of patients because we're all unique. And the same is true in mice. If you test a medication in a mouse like C-57 black six, the chances of it working are about the same as if you tested it in one person. And to complicate matters, these lab mice are in bread like purebred dogs, and they each have their own set of characteristics and disease susceptibilities. So if you want mice to respond to medications like human, you need to make them more like human. So that's one of the things you're trying to do to try to diversify lab mice. So they will be more similar to the genetic diversity of the human population. That's correct. So we're actually breeding mouse

mutts, sort of like labradoodles or cockapoos. They're designer mice and they're healthier and unique and highly variable in their response to medications just like people. So if someone claims a drug doesn't work in mice, I sort of channel my inner Abbey Lathrop and ask them which mouse? How many different mice did you test? I'm John Dankosky, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. explain a little bit more about how you're able to genetically modify mice to develop diseases that scientists want to research. Sure. Let's say somebody's child has a rare disease that's caused by a defective gene that's already been identified. We can often intentionally mimic that disease in a mouse by creating the human mutation in that mouse with genetic engineering. And the way we do that is with stem cells, embryonic stem cells, mouse ones, or fertilized eggs sort of like IVF.

and that we can modify with techniques like CRISPR, which you may have heard of, that allow us to change the genetic makeup of that mouse to look more like the child we're trying to cure and to test therapies on that mouse as a sort of an avatar. There are a number of studies that show that mouse studies don't always translate that well to humans. We've already talked about that a little bit. So maybe we can talk for a moment about why that is. and how we get away from a model that doesn't really replicate what humans have going on inside of them.

I can give you an example from our current COVID-19 pandemic. Scientists were stuck because mice don't get COVID-19, so they couldn't be used to test vaccines or antivirals. It's because there's a protein on the surface of human cells that lets the SARS-CoV-2 virus to get into the cell, and it's slightly different in mouse than it is in human, so the virus can't get into the mouse cell. So the solution was kind of obvious. Let's get that human version of the gene into the mouse. And that was done. And suddenly the mouse comes down with COVID-19 when exposed to the virus. And by the way, it was the C-57 black six mouse. Same mouse that was an happy barn. Only problem was the effect was really severe. As we know now, there's a broad spectrum of responses to COVID-19. So we needed to model that spectrum of response in the mice. So how do we do that? You try it on the mutts. So we crossed the mouse bearing the human gene to 10 different strains of mice in our collection

and tried the virus on the next generation of mouse muts. And the results were spectacular. One mouse got very sick, another got respiratory infection, and recovered. Another got infected and still shows no sign of illness. And so because we know where the grandparents and the parents of these mice come from, we can trace the inherited basis of the disease and use that knowledge to understand how to better treat the consequences of like long COVID in humans. There's also been research showing that mice that are stressed aren't necessarily very good test subjects. What are you doing to improve the living conditions of mice so that they're actually living better

lives and thus not under the types of stress that might influence in some way how they behave and how they behave in these experiments? Now, mice are really perceptive and they can pick up on human behavior just like dogs can. So our caretakers have to be highly trained to minimize stress when they handle the mice. They're on the lookout for any illness or injury. So our first goal is to keep them very healthy and stress-free, as you say, a sick and depressed mouse is not a good topic for study. This includes their housing. Fortunately, mice actually love small spaces to make them feel safe, like under your kitchen floor.

So my pet project at the moment is to redesign the boxes we use to give mice a more natural setting with little spaces they can cram themselves into to sleep with a separate latrine, which they really like, and a design that minimizes the number of times we need to clean the cages because we learn a lot more from a happy, healthy mouse than a frazzled, depressed one. And we strictly follow the framework of what we call the three R's, which was established 50 years ago to ensure humane treatment of animals in research. It's replacement, reduction, and refinement. So we try to replace an animal test with another test like using cells whenever we can. We reduce the number of mice used whenever possible, and we refine the approaches in our research to try to minimize any sort of. stress or pain. There's, of course, a larger ethical consideration here, and you've addressed this somewhat already, but we breed and destroy millions of mice a year for experimental purposes. It's

an enormous toll in terms of living, breathing life forms. So what's being done to just get away from this model entirely? A lot is being done. It's something that really disturbs all of us who work with mice. So as you know, every cell in your body contains the same genetic material, and it's unique to you. And for every mouse, it's the same. So especially those mutts have unique genetic material. So if we extract a cell from a mouse, we can actually then generate an embryonic stem cell that is what we call totipotent. That means that we can make any tissue we want out of that cell. And the tissue will literally be identical to the tissue in the mouse. Now, it's not perfect because, of course, you don't have a full circulatory system. You don't have hormones

raging around in the tissue culture dish. You don't have immune cells. But it's a big step away from animals. If you have cells in a dish, you can add different drugs to cells and you can do that to thousands and thousands of cells and thousands of dishes at a much, much

cheaper and more ethically appropriate way. You're always going to need to go back to the animal because of the complication of the organism. But if we can get most of the answers out of cells, and then do the final tests in the animals, we could drastically reduce the use of animals and research.

It's really fascinating. That's all the time we have. I'd like to thank my guest. Dr. Nadia Rosenthal is scientific director and professor at the Jackson Laboratory for Mammalian Genetics, based in Bar Harbor, Maine. Thanks so much for your time. Oh, it's my pleasure, John.

Coming up after the break, a look ahead to Oscar season and a surprising science twist in an acclaimed Western. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. In just a few minutes, we'll be launching our book club for this late winter. Get ready for a trip to Mars.

Now, when you think about science in books and especially films, you probably think about space missions or techie thrillers, not Westerns. But Jane Campion's film The Power of the Dog, a period drama about ranchers in Montana, turns on an interesting science twist. Oh, and it's also the frontrunner for Best Picture at this year's Oscar. years. Joining me now to help unravel the science in this story is Sonia Epstein, executive editor and associate curator of science and film at the Museum of the Moving Image

based in New York City. Welcome back to Science Friday, Sonia. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. Now, I do want to give a heads up to our listeners here. We will be talking about some key plot points. So if you haven't yet seen the power of the dog, let this serve as your spoiler alert. So for folks who aren't up on all their films of this year, maybe you can give us a nutshell summary of what the story is about, Sonia? Yeah, sure. I mean, the first thing to know is this is adapted from a book, so I want to give credit where credit is due. Tom Savage wrote this book in 1967. This is a sort of play on the Western genre, I guess. It's set in Montana in 1925 and follows a ranching family, two brothers, whose lives are sort of disrupted when one of them

marries a former widow and her son comes to visit. And this is also, I wouldn't say a love story exactly, but it is a story of a gay man, I guess I should say two gay men and a lot of repressed sort of tensions and power plays. Yeah. And that's really been a lot of the focus about this film, this kind of slow-boiling story. But we're going to talk about a different take on this film and it really is an interesting twist. Yeah, I'm kind of thrilled. You know, I'm someone who watches films and always has an eye out or an ear out for anything science related. And so in the first five minutes of this film, Anthrax is mentioned. And I just like, lasered in on this. And I remember finishing it. And I was like, wait a minute. Nobody mentioned this to me as a science film.

But there is a way that it is a sort of medical mystery, if you will. And so I'm very excited we get to talk about that. Yeah. There's some foreshadowing. of anthrax right at the very start of the film. And then later on in the film, it's mentioned again. Do many of the calves die from wolves? There's always a few who get tore up or hamstrung, or die of anthrax, call it Black Lake. You know, you talk like a big troller record.

You know that? No. I didn't know. Yeah, well, you do. Now, those are the main characters. They're Benedict Cumberbatch, who you might not recognize. because he's usually not playing Montana ranchers. And Peter, who is played by Cody Smith McPhee, he's the younger boy, they're talking there about why some of the calves die, why some of the cows die. And it's the second time we actually hear about anthrax in this film. Yeah,

anthrax is, it's a bacteria. It's commonly found in the soil. It was actually the first, I believe, disease that was pinned to a specific microbial agent as sort of its causative agent. It was identified in 1877, but in the 1920s, it was actually a pretty common agricultural disease. In the opening scene of the film, you see from the distance a cow with its sort of legs in the air. Yeah, and Phil, the rancher played by Benedict Cumberbatch at that point says, steer clear, you don't want to touch the cow with anthrax. So it was pretty well known by the 1920s in Montana amongst the ranching community that anthrax was something that could kill your herd. Certainly. There were herds dying off. There were methods.

of containment by that point, even, you know, 10 years after it was discovered, you might notice Cody Smith McPhee, who sort of manages to weaponize, for lack of a better term, this disease, you'll notice that whenever he comes into contact with it, he wears gloves. Yeah, and Peter, this character knows this because he's studying medicine. He's always got his nose in books at one point in the movie. He's dissecting a rabbit. So he understands these things, and the scene that Sonia is talking about here, he goes and gets some hide from an infected cow, and he seemingly knowingly gives it to Phil, the bully played by Benedict Cumberbatch, to work with to try to make a rope. Phil, I've got Rahad to finish the rope.

You got it. What are you doing with raw hide? I cut some up. I wanted to be like you. please take an of God. So I have to say when I saw the movie, Sonia, I didn't immediately make this connection. I didn't understand as I was watching it

that by giving Phil this potentially infected rawhide that he may be signing a death sentence for this guy. Yeah, it's very subtly done. In the shot that precedes what we just heard, you see the rawhide hanging and you see that it has these black spots on it. And that was a marker of anthrax. And so for me, I guess that was a sort of

indication in addition to the fact that when he went into the mountains he wore gloves, that something was afoot, but then you also see the scene with Bend de Kumberbatch, dealing with this rawhide and his big gash and his hand, just kind of like fermenting in the water with this raw hide and something's going on. Yeah, thinking back on this, it's pretty chilling. Of course, we know in recent memory anthrax can be weaponized, not in this particular way. Many listeners will remember the anthrax mailings that happened after 9-11. It killed and injured several people around the country when it was sent through the mail. So we have actually seen anthrax weaponized in recent

memory, Sonia. Yeah, that was terrifying. And I actually listened to your, I know that you helped to cover that, John. Yeah, it was a very scary story. It killed a woman who just opened up her mail and came in contact with some anthrax spores. So, you know, this year we saw the first of the movies that are really influenced by the fact that we're living in a pandemic right now. And I guess I'm wondering what you think this movie tells us about our relationship with a mysterious disease that we probably don't think about very much. Yeah. I mean, it's also a zoonotic disease, which COVID is as well.

So I read some statistic where over 50% of emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic in nature. And I think, as we all know, with climate change and global movement, population growth, we are living in closer proximity to animals of all kinds. And that's not something necessarily to be scared of, but it's something to be conscious of how we are changing the environment around us and the environments that we're newly coming into and that we are part of an ecology. I think even though this film is fictional, it's set in Montana in the 1920s, I do think that there is something to take away and that is relevant. to our, you know, sort of current circumstances. The movie is The Power of the Dog, and it's nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, amongst many other awards that it's up for.

Sonia Epstein is executive editor and associate curator of science and film at the Museum of the Moving Image, which is based in New York City. Sonia, great to talk with you. Thanks so much for being with us. Thank you. Okay, so we just talked about a movie that's based on a great book, and now it's time to blast off into another good book. And who better to recommend one than SciFri Book Club crew member, Christy Taylor?

Hi, Christy. Oh, boy there, John. Welcome aboard the spaceship. Yes, indeed. Getting aboard the spaceship just in time for the one-year anniversary of the Perseverance Rovers' arrival to Mars. Hey, are we going to the Red Planet too? You guess correctly, John. As they say in the ancient and wise movie Total Recall, Get Your Butt to Mars.

And as we announced a couple weeks ago, this spring we are reading The Sirens of Mars by planetary scientist Sarah Stewart, Johnson. It is a book about the centuries-long quest to understand the red planet and how exactly you go about answering the question of, is there life over there? Was there life here? And maybe a bit more mind-blowing, what is life anyway? Oh boy. Yeah, it's a big question. And it seems like a fair question to ask when the only data point we have is life here on Earth. Exactly, John. And I wanted to get everyone out there in listener land as excited about the Sirens of Mars as I currently am. SciFri Library friend Stephanie Sendala, join me to chat a bit about some of the things we were most hyped about. But I also managed to sneak in a chat with author Sarah Stewart Johnson herself.

Here she is reading a short excerpt from the Sirens of Mars. As inconceivable as it sounds, Mars wasn't always understood to be a place. To be sure, the ancients knew there was something intriguing about Mars. The Mesopotamians noticed that it followed a strange loop in the night sky, drifting separate from the fixed stars. Everything in the immense night moved together, everything except five little wanderers. Of those, only one appeared as a blazing red lamp.

It wasn't only the planet's distinctive color that made it perplexing, but also its motion. Marge drifted eastward night after night in relation to the other stars. But for about 10 weeks, every couple of years, it suddenly turned and backpedaled against the zodiac, wandering west for 60 to 80 days before resuming its normal course. From this, Plato concluded that the planets had souls for what could these retrograde acts be, he reasoned, if not expressions of free will. It wasn't until Galileo looked through a spyglass from a colonated terrace and Padua that Mars began its transformation from a glacial.

lent of light into a world. Galileo constructed his telescope with his own hands. He mounted it on a stand and because of its tiny field of view, he had to be utterly still, barely breathing, hoping the following evening temperatures wouldn't cause the glass to mist over. But through its tiny aperture, he determined Mars to be a spherical body illuminated by the sun. Stephanie Sandala is here now. She's a programming and outreach specialist with Library Link, New Jersey and a regular guest on this show. Hey there, Stephanie. Hi, thank you for having me. It's great to be here again. Okay, Stephanie, it is your fault that we're reading this book. So tell me why you recommended it. I just really like how much, first of all, how much I didn't know about Mars. And the fact that so many other people,

they're fascinated by it, amazed by it, sometimes even confused by it. And to see so many philosophers like Plato and scientists like Galileo and just people, wondering about what is this place? Is it a planet? What is it like there? So that quote especially that just like really drew me because I was thinking, oh, it's not just me who's amazed by it. It's these other people as well throughout history. This image of Galileo just like holding as still as he possibly can, holding his breath just in order to observe Mars as a sphere, you know, with this tiny telescope in the night air is just my heart pounds a little bit just thinking of it. It's so stressful.

See, scientists were literally up all night wondering about this planet or this place and what can we learn from it. Just to sort of back up to a wider view for just a second. I mean, this is a book that starts with, you know, the earliest observations of Mars. But it also has these really thrilling moments where, for example, we get a closer look at Mars via the Mariner 4 mission in 1960. And it's our very first close up. And I wanted to know, did you have a favorite moment or part of the book? Yeah. I had a few, but one that really stood out to me.

It's the part where she was in college and she was studying science and she travels to Hawaii. And she is going up the volcano. So it's Monakia. And they climbed to the summit. And at the top, she notices a fern just isolated there, growing by itself just in this desolate condition. And she is saying at that moment is when she wanted to be a planetary scientist. Because if that can grow all alone, all isolated by itself, what else could be on Mars? Yeah. Well, and I feel like I got such a bigger appreciation for this question of life on other planets. William Pickering, who was studying Mars an astronomer. He studied Mars around the time of World War I. He had this gloriously romantic view of Mars as being lush and green, and he would send these observations where he said he saw, you know, seas and floods and even like parts of the planet snowed in at times. But it seemed like Pickering at least like he placed all of his despair at the war.

and hatred of like the conflict he was seeing on this one little planet in the sky and just kind of hoped it was a better place. Oh yeah, definitely. What was your favorite part? Was it that part too? Just people exploring it and trying to find out more about it? Just a quick reminder. I'm Christy Taylor and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

I actually really like this moment that was kind of a turning point in our understanding of Mars. So we went from again, maybe it has ferns, maybe it has trees. There are these optical illusion canals that people thought might be evidence of people or might be at least evidence of vegetation of some kind. And then the Mariner 4 mission in 1960 got the first sort of flyby close up of the planet. What they figure out that they're seeing is just tons and tons and tons of craters, which is a bummer.

And here's Sarah explaining why. Those craters meant that there was no significant atmosphere, no significant weathering, you know, the oceans and the rivers that we have here on Earth, they hadn't been operational on Mars for, you know, billions of years to accumulate that many craters. There was no weathering, no erosion, no plate tectonics, like none of the sort of features that we were familiar with seeing, like here on our own planet.

And, you know, the New York Times even declared that Mars was probably a dead planet. Yeah, that part I thought was very powerful. Just also the part where she talks about thinking about Mars might be just like Earth, but in reality, it's so different. And just the emotions of seeing people, you know, trying to study it. And then also their misconceptions and realizing that what they thought about it, like the canals you mentioned, might not always be what they seem. So it is really emotional in a sense for that reason because you're like, oh, they solved it. And then a couple chapters later, there's new research on it. So we're learning more about it all the time.

We are asking the question, is there life on Mars? Or was there at one time life on Mars? And, you know, she's a scientist. She doesn't necessarily come down strongly to a definitive answer. Yeah, I feel like I'm still undecided, to be honest. I think I'm more fascinated by the watery past, just the evidence, you know, that there were lakes and bodies of water at one time on Mars and what has happened to them. But I'm not entirely sure about past civilizations or, you know, I think Sarah leaves it vague, too. So it's kind of up for us to decide. so I could go back and forth. Stephanie, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me again. It's great to be here. Stephanie Sondala is a programming and outreach specialist with Library Link, New Jersey.

We'll be seeing her again in a few weeks. Christy, I'm really excited now to read this book. What exactly do people need to do in order to join this extraterrestrial book club? You know, there is so much you can do, John. First, any information you could possibly want is going to be on our website, ScienceFriiday.com slash book club.

Get that in skywriting, write it on your hand in Sharpie, anything you want to do to remember that, ScienceFriiday.com slash book club. But the biggest thing we want you to do really is just start reading. Get a copy from Powell's Books, Bookshop.org, or your local indie bookstore. And if you're still not sure yet, if this is the book for you, we have an excerpt and a full chapter on our website for you to check out. And of course, there are oodles of libraries out there that have this book. Some of our amazing library partners have even gotten extra copies, so you don't have to wait

in a hold line to start reading. We've got a bunch of online events, weekly questions to tickle your brain, and a whole lineup of fascinating scientists ready to help us appreciate the difficulty and wonder of searching for life on a planet like Mars. We are going to talk about meteorites. We are going to talk about water. We are going to talk about space gadgets. The full list is on our website and say it with me again, John. ScienceFriiday.com slash book club. This sounds really exciting, Christy.

Thanks so much for this preview. Thank you so much, John. That's it for our show today. missed any part of this program or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts. Or you can ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Every day is now Science Friday. Ira is back next week. I'm John Dankoski.