Science Friday - Celebration Of Weird Ice, Non-Melting Jelly, Former NIH Director Reflects On His Tenure. December 31, 2021, Part 2

Episode Date: December 31, 2021

From the Arctic To Enceladus: A Celebration Of Unusual Ice With the Arctic’s annual summer ice cover hovering at record lows; and a new record low in global sea ice coverage recorded earlier this year; and a large crack threatening the collapse of a large ice shelf in Antarctica, it can feel like the news about earth’s polar ice caps is all bad. But for researchers who spend time in the frigid polar seas, ice is also a beautiful and unique phenomenon. Ever heard of frazil ice? How about pancake ice? Far from goofy names, these are key steps in the evolution of sea ice from water to a solid sheet. Oceanographer Ted Maksym shares his insights into the ice at earth’s poles. Plus, how is Antarctica a good place for a painter of other planets? Astronomical artist Michael Carroll recounts how he explored Antarctica for hints about frozen moons like Europa and Enceladus. (See some of his art here.) Finally, planetary scientist Rosaly Lopes takes Ira into the coldest reaches of our solar system, where there’s growing evidence of volcanoes powered not by magma under rock, but by frigid water bursting through icy crusts. It Wiggles and Wobbles, But Won’t Melt Away Imagine a trip to the grocery or fish market, and seeing cuts of fresh fish laid out on beds of ice to chill. The shaved ice keeps the fish at the proper temperature—but what happens when that ice starts to melt, or gets dirty? Researchers at the University of California, Davis, have developed a reusable "jelly ice" cube that does not lose its shape when it warms. The cubes, which can take a variety of shapes, are a hydrogel material made from 10% protein-based gelatin in water. The researchers say the cubes can be rinsed off and re-frozen up to 10 times—and when their life cycle is done, can be composted or mixed into plant growth media. Luxin Wang, an associate professor of food science and technology at UC Davis, describes the material and its properties.   Francis Collins, Longest-Running NIH Director, Steps Down Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will be stepping down from his post at the end of the year. Collins is the longest serving NIH director, serving three presidents over 12 years: Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. Before his role at the NIH, Collins was an acclaimed geneticist, helping discover the gene that causes cystic fibrosis. He then became director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, where he led the project that mapped the human genome. A lot can happen in 12 years, especially in the fields of health and science. Collins joins Ira to talk about his long tenure at the NIH, as well as how his Christian faith has informed his career in science. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm I Refleto. Later in the hour, a conversation without going NIH director Francis Collins. But first, what better way to think about winter and winter holidays than with an exploration of ice? Yeah, so we're dipping into the Science Friday cold storage to bring back this conversation from 2017, a tour of the unique kinds of ice throughout the solar system, like, for instance, frazzle ice. And I mean, that's not ice that's extremely stressed or harried, despite how you might feel after this year. It's just one of the many kinds of ice you may find forming in the seas at our poles. Also, there's pancake ice, sugar ice, ridge ice, grease ice, and a whole lot more. Mariners and scientists who spend time in the sea ice by the poles have more than

two dozen names for the types they see. Joining me to help explore those is Ted Maxim, Associate Scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me, Ira. You're packing for a trip to Antarctica even as we speak where there's a lot of ice? Yes, I am. We're going down to Antarctica this austral winter, so it's sort of our summer. It's actually April and May. And trying to get as deep into the ice pack as we can to see what's going on there.

So that's going via an icebreaker then? It's going via an icebreaker, yeah. And going through sea ice, so it's not through big glaciers. that would be impossible. The sea ice is down there is usually only a few feet thick, so you've got a strong enough ship you can get through pretty well. So is it still dark down there? Is it going to be getting dark soon? I should say it's Austro. Right, right. So it's the opposite of us, right. So it's quite light down there. By the time we get down there, which is going to be mid-April, it's going to be starting to get dark. And we

plan to get as far south as you possibly can at sea on this planet. which is about 78 degrees south. By the time we get there in mid-May, it's going to be 24 hours of darkness. And it's not scary to be in the ocean and was surrounded by all that sea ice? No, it's not scary. You get used to work.

In a dark? I mean, like an ice fisherman, you know, he's comfortable walking on ice in Minnesota. We get used to it. It's not really that scary at all. But it's certainly an eerie feeling. It's sort of a very odd, landscape and in the darkness, it adds an extra element to it.

I'll bet it does, having been down there in the summertime. I can only imagine what wintering over must be like or in the dark. Let's talk about some of the ice that's down there. This thing I mentioned, frazzle ice. What is that? Yeah, so frazzle ice is really just a term for loose crystals of ice. It could be in the ocean or it could be in a river. It's kind of like a little bit like a snowflake in the water, I guess.

And that forms because the water is turbulent, and you get lots of this in Antarctica, because if you know your geography in Antarctica, it's surrounded by the stormiest ocean on the planet, more or less. And so you have these big waves traveling through it. So it's really hard to form a solid sheet of ice, as you can imagine. So it has to form loose crystals first. This forms a soupy mass of frazzle crystals, and eventually they start to agglomerate together as it damps out the waves. Now we have all kinds of ice. I mentioned there were a dozen.

What is pancake ice? So pancake is the next stage of ice. So as you get a lot of this frazzle in the ocean, it looks kind of like a mass, a soupy mass of slush. Now what that does, it sort of damps down the waves a little bit. And as it does that, things can start freezing together. But, you know, the waves are really big there, so it's hard to damp them down right away. so these soupy masses sort of stick together and bang against each other. And so you get these tiny little pans, well, you know, tiny maybe three to ten feet across that are just banging into each other like a bunch of pucks on an air hockey table, if you will.

And they form these round shapes that, you know, people thought looked like pancakes, but they got kind of rough edges because they're always crashing into each other. Yeah, we have photos of these ices on our website. They are amazing. They do look like I was waiting for the maple syrup to come out. And then you have ridges and nalas and sugar. Tell us about these. Right. So, yeah, they're kind of like Eskimos with all their words for snow.

Because things take different forms. You want to be able to describe it in a concise way. So Shuga is actually a kind of ice you don't see very often. It's when the frasal kind of gloms together in almost like snowballs floating around in the ocean. Nylis is sort of the opposite of frazzal ice. It's when you have fresh ice forming. And I think everybody who's been in cold weather is familiar with this, you see it as a very thin veneer of ice on top of a lake.

On the sea ice, sorry, on the ocean, it looks a little bit different because that is a little bit salty. So it tends not to be as clear as it would on a lake. So that has to form. You can imagine you need really calm. conditions for that yeah I'm no waves so that forms sort of in the interior of the pack once you've got pack ice if you've got any cracks or openings Nylis conform in there and that's quite thin and then it starts to thicken because it's Antarctica it's

really cold and as the ice continues to move around that can sort of pile up as big plates of ice crash together plates we call call them ice flows crashed together and bits break off and sort of pile up into these big sort of walls of ice if you will, that can be many feet thick. In the Arctic, you get, because the forces are so large there, you can get ice piled up to tens of feet thick. Well, you know, I remember when I was in Arctic right on the shoreline of McMurdo there. It was some of the most beautiful stuff I'd ever seen,

was the sea ice piling up, you know, changing shape, forming caves. It's beautiful. I can imagine, you know, why you'd want to go through that. Yeah, and that's something, you know, when we go south, we're sitting on these ice breakers, and we're always getting off on the ice and doing our measurements and we're busy with our science. But to me, you know, one of the most enjoyable things

is just sitting on the bridge of the ship, just watching for hours as you're going through different types of ice or different formations of ice. It's always constantly changing. It's not, you know, I don't want to say it's boring on a lake, but it's pretty uniform on a lake. Most of the time. The Great Lakes are a little bit more interesting,

suppose. But, you know, somewhere like Antarctica or the Arctic, you have this constantly changing landscape. But it's all ice. We have, we've had people on Twitter asking us about the brinnacles, icy fingers of death. There's a wonderful YouTube video on this that looks just like a CGI. It's so spooky looking. But have you ever seen one? Tell us, describe what's going on there. Yeah. So this is an interesting thing about ice. It's, or sea ice. It's, it's, it's, It's not like other types of ice in that it's a composite material because the ocean is salt water, of course, but it's hard to freeze that salt into the ice. So what it does is it traps ice in little, I mean, sorry, salt in little pockets of brine in the ice. And that really determines the properties of that ice.

Now, when you get the salt trapped in there, it doesn't like staying in there. So it tries to drain out through this porous network within the ice. There's all these little channels of brine. And so when you get ice thick enough and the salt starts draining out, it sort of drains out kind of like a little river going down vertically. Now, in Antarctica, sometimes like you mentioned, McMurdo Sound area, you can get these sort of rivers of brine coming down into water that's at the freezing point. But that brine is much colder. So as soon as it hits that water, it freezes. So it starts forming this kind of icicle going down into the ocean below, except it's hollow,

so it can have this brine coming out down through this tube. And some of these tubes can be many feet long. And then that video is kind of cool. And then you had this drainage happen very rapidly. And when that brine hit the bottom of the ocean, that is what it's in a state we call supercooled. So it's actually colder than the freezing place. point. As soon as it hits something where it can start nucleating ice, it starts to freeze

and you saw that spread along the ocean bottom. It was really cool because you saw all these sea stars trying to run away from this, but then get trapped in the ice. Right. It's a great little video. It's great to see that. You mentioned the Antarctic oceans. How are the oceans different? How is the ice in Antarctica different from the Arctic ice up north? Right. Well, I should say that they used to be. quite different. They're getting more and more alike. In the Arctic, the ice, because the Arctic is sort of this enclosed basin, the ice doesn't escape the Arctic Ocean very easily. So it can circulate there, because ice drifts around, it can circulate there for many years and get thicker and

thicker. So you have ice there that used to average maybe 10 feet thick. And it can get quite thick because the ocean doesn't have the deep ocean, the heat has trouble getting up to the ice and melting it. In the Antarctic, things are very different. It's a wide open sea that it's exposed to. So it's always buffeted by the waves. And deep beneath the surface of the ocean, there's actually some really warm water that gets stirred up really easily. And that keeps ice very thin. So actually, most ice, unless it's ridged, rarely gets more than a few feet thick in the Antarctic, which is convenient for those of us who want to drive our icebreaker through there.

But it makes it for a very different environment. The Arctic has this thick ice with big, thick ridges. The Antarctic has thin ice with more pancake ice, and things are moving around much more rapidly. But that's all sort of changing a little bit because we've seen over the past decade that in the summer in the Arctic, almost half of the ice has been disappearing.

We were getting about half of what we used to have, say, back in the 1980s. So the Antarctic is sort of an interesting analog for what might expect to see in the Arctic. And actually, about a year and a half ago, we were up there, and we saw this extensive fields of frazzling pancake ice that really haven't been seen in the high Arctic before. This conversation was recorded in 2017. I'm talking with Ted Maxim and Associate's, scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. We have to take a break,

and when we come back, adding to the cool conversation with someone who sees the polls with an artist's eye. Of course, in the outer solar system, a lot of these moons are ice worlds. Europa has an ocean, probably 100 kilometers deep beneath an ice crust. And on that crust, you see these pressure ridges and things that are somewhat similar to what we see down in Antarctica on the open sea ice. What can looking at Earth's poles teach an artist about distant planets and icy moons? Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're taking a tour of some of the strange and wonderful, dare I say, cool ice in our solar system

in an archival conversation from 2017. Ted Maxim is an associate scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And joining me now is Michael Carroll, an astronomical artist based in Littleton, Colorado. His work often tries to imagine the surface of distant worlds. He spent three weeks exploring Antarctica looking for inspiration for the surface of icy moons like Europa. Welcome to Science Friday. Oh, I love your show, and it's great to be here, thanks. Well, thank you. We're very happy to have you.

You know, why is Antarctic such a good place to look for inspiration for a moon of Jupiter or Saturn? Well, for some of the same things that your other guests have been talking about, it's unique in so many ways, the way the ice behaves down there. Of course, in the outer solar system, a lot of these moons are ice worlds. Europa has an ocean probably 100 kilometers deep, and ice crust. And on that crust, you see these pressure ridges and things that are somewhat similar to what we see down in Antarctica on the open sea ice right there next to the Ross Ice shelf. But more than that, there are some fairly specific analogs we were looking at up on Mount Arabis

on the big volcano down there. Nearly such as what? Well, so Erebus has these fumaroles, these volcanic vents all over its slopes. And so the hot air comes up through these things that hits this frigid air up above, and it forms columns of ice. And these towers of ice are just the most bizarre things. They are beautiful and inspiring. The blues, the textures in them.

Some of these things are five stories tall, and they look like a nightmare from Salvador Dali's diary. They're just the most bizarre things. But because you get this constant flow building these structures, we think that things similar to that may happen on, for example, Saturn's Moon Enceladus. Wow. Talking about ice and the poles, and now we're moving out into space. Ted could a place like Antarctica, help science. scientists somehow plan for a mission to icy moons? Yeah, definitely.

And there are scientists doing specifically that. One of the interesting things in sea ice, like I said, there's liquid brine in the ice. What that has in it is these organisms that can tolerate extreme cold. And so people are interested in looking at sea ice as an analog for what kind of habitats you might possibly have on a moon like Europa. But Antarctica is also a really nice proving ground for vehicles that you might

design to explore a moon like Europa. And so there are a couple of groups that are trying to develop vehicles, sort of prototype vehicles that might go up to Europa and putting them under these ice shelf to see how you can

technologically achieve you know, getting down through many kilometers of ice. down to some unknown ocean. Michael, Carol, when you look at a place on Earth like this, how do you account for how a moon or another planet might look differently? Well, the main difference is, of course, air. We've got lots of nice air to breathe here on Earth,

although up on Mount Arabis there isn't that much. But when you're dealing with a vacuum, these towers that build may take on some different textures. textures and forms because on Antarctica they're sculpted by by wind but nevertheless we do think that there are some fascinating structures out there and and for an astronomical artist we we try to learn from nature to inform us for those guesses that we're making in terms of the geology on on other world because you have such a good eyes on a star

As an artist, do the scientists come to you and say, hey, have you seen anything that we have missed, perhaps? Well, you know, it's always a wonderful collaboration. My colleague that I traveled to Antarctica with, Rosalie Lopez, who has been on your show, by the way, she is often talking to me about how things would look because she doesn't think in those terms. and so she'll give me some numbers, and I take those and translate them into something visual that the non-scientists can understand and relate to. Well, we're going to have Rosalie join us right after the break, and we have to say goodbye to both of you because we are running out of time. Fascinating. Ted Maxim is Associate Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Woods Hole. Michael Carroll is an astronomical artist based in Littleton, Colorado. and we have actually up on our website some of your artwork at ScienceFriiday.com slash space art. So it's really interesting stuff that you're doing.

And thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Have a great weekend. Hey, thanks, Ira. Thank you. If you just joined us, we were just marveling at the ice at the Earth's poles. And it certainly is beautiful and it is interesting. But we're not quite done with ice yet because it's certainly not as unusual as the icy phenomenon at work in the far reaches of our solar system. And I'm talking about the cryovolcano. It is like a volcano,

but instead of hot magma, you have this frigid slush bursting through an icy crust. Cryovolcanoes have been suspected on the icy moons of Saturn and Jupiter, like Enceladus and Titan, and even dwarf planet Pluto may have some. My guest, Rosalie Lopez, a volcanologist and manager of planetary sciences at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. knows a lot about this. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Oh, hello. Hello. It's nice to be back. Nice to have you back. How are ice volcanoes possible? What's going on inside there? Well, they're very weird. We didn't even think that they were possible until we actually saw evidence,

because there is nothing like them on Earth. But when the Voyager spacecraft flew by, Neptune in 1989, it actually saw some 8 km high plumes and also some very smooth regions that people figured out had to be caused by volcanism. But not rock volcanism or magma volcanism like with UNF, but a very special kind of volcanism that we call cryovocanism. Does the science of these ordinary volcanoes translate easily to cryo volcanoes, or are they just different in how they behave? Not easily now, and we're still figuring that out. Essentially on a cryovulcan, it happens when you have an icy crust, like on Jupiter's Moon Europa or Saturn, the Sun in Salad, or Titan, and underneath that icy crust, you have an ocean of liquid water,

water, maybe liquid water with things like methane or ammonia. And so volcanism, we actually had to redefine what volcanism is because volcanism used to be defined as the process that brings mountain rock from the interior of a barge to the surface. But now we had to redefine it and say it brings magma, whatever the magma is for that specific body. So if the magma is water or slushy ice, that's what that volcanism on that body will bring up. So you've actually had to also redefine what magma is? Yes, exactly. It's a magma on an icy moon or on Pluto. It's different. It's not molten rock, like on Earth or on Venus or on Mars.

And when we study volcanoes on Mars, for example, which I have done, we can use Earth analogues quite easily. You can go to Hawaii or Iceland places, for example, that have shield volcanoes. But when you're studying cryovocanism, there are no cryovocanus on Earth. So that's what makes figuring out the process difficult. So, you know, as you say on Earth, it's this hot magma that comes shooting up. we can imagine why it would do that. It's hot. It's coming out of the, you know, underneath the ground.

What is driving the slushy water up through a volcano? Well, that's what is difficult to figure out because, you know, if you think about just having a glass of water and ice cubes on top, ice cubes float. So the difficulty is how do we get around that density difference? that the ice will want to be on top of the water. So how do you actually get the water up to erupt? And there are various theoretical explanations. You could get maybe part of that ice shell melting because of tidal heating,

and then they could make close reservoirs of magma closer to the surface. You might get fractures like giant crevasses opening up. up and maybe that cryomagma has a lot of bubbles that would make it easier to come up. Maybe even that ice shell is not completely ice, but it might have some silicates in it. There are a lot of things that we don't know yet. I have a tweet coming in from Randall Manda says, could a solar refrigerator suck in salt water during the... Could you send somebody there to...

the space, you know, a mission and investigate, and should you? Should that be part of any mission to these moons of Jupiter or Saturn? Oh, I think it's very important to investigate cryovulcanism, because if you have heat and you have water, those are two of the conditions that you need for life. So if you're going to look for life and these icy moons of the outer solar system, the presence or absence of cryovulcanism is very important. And if I sent a land at one of these worlds, I would definitely want to land near a cry volcano. And NASA just released a report on a study of a lander to Jupiter's moon Europa.

So maybe we're going to get there with a lander. So yes, we need more mission. Would this tell you, do these volcanoes speak anything about the possibility of any forms of life on any of these moons? Yes, because you need, as I said, heat and you need water. Those are not the only two things that you need for life, of course, and, you know, astrobiologists are still arguing about what are all the conditions that you need. But you certainly need those two. So the places maybe near the surface where you actually have pockets of this molten ice water would be a good place to sample to see if we actually have any kind of microbes there.

And in fact, many Antarctica studies, some astrobiologists are going to Antarctica to actually study what kind of microorganisms we find there. I have to ask you a question akin to asking which child you like best. You study both hot and cold volcanoes. Do you have a favorite? Just between you and me. Okay. I actually like, maybe I like hot volcanoes better because I can actually go to them.

Good point. Good point. And then you can go home again, as they say, with different kids. That's right, yes. But I did go to Erebus, which is not a cry of a world. volcano, but it was very, very cold. And Michael Carr and I went to Arabis in December, which was a fantastic trip. Yeah, I was there. I was there over 30 years ago myself. It really was a fantastic experience.

Dr. Lopez, thank you very much for taking time to be with us today. Oh, thank you so much. And we'll have you back when, you know, tell us more about these volcanoes. Rosalie Lopez is a volcanologist and manager of planetary sciences at NASA's JPL in Pasadena, California. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. We've been talking about unusual ice throughout the solar system, but recently researchers here in Earth unveiled a kind of ice I'm sure that you haven't seen before. Here's what I mean.

You know how you go to the grocery or fish market and you see cuts of fresh fish laid out on beds of ice to chill and that shaved ice keeps the fish at the proper temperature. But of course, the ice is going to melt and probably get dirty. But what if you could have recycled? cycleable ice. Enter jelly ice. What's jelly ice? Lucian Wang, an associate professor of food science and technology at UC Davis is here to fill us in. Tell us what this jelly ice is made of. Sure. This jelly ice cube is made of protein and water with supplementation of natural antimicrobials. The high percentage water is the major cooling agent of this jelly ice cube.

And does the ice melt like regular water does? It does. of the cube. So what we do is we have this physical and chemical cross-linkers. They build this network for our proteins. Those network will trap the water inside of this cube. So even when the water is at its unfrozen status, it will not be released into the environment or go outside of the cube. So should I be thinking of this like a sort of a solid cube of jello? Yes. I think that's a good way to think about it. So Dr. Wang, why are your jelly ice cubes better than regular ice cubes or these food packs, you know, that we put in coolers? There are several unique aspects about this jelly ice cube. First of all for, as we mentioned earlier, it does not generate melting water.

So we don't have to worry about the melting water caused contamination. Secondly, it has this color changing property that can facilitate your recognition of the temperature change. When this jelly Ice Cube is that it's frozen status, it has this beige color. When it's unfrozen, it's more transparent. You can cut it to the shape you want, based on the shape of your food, you want to cool. You can cut it so that you have the best contact between the jelly ice cube and your food item. Lastly, commercially available ice packs, most of them have this plastic shell. So for jelly ice cube, it does not have that plastic. It is plastic-free. So after, you use it for multiple times, according to our lab result, you can use it up to 10 times.

So after you finish using them, you can just dispose them in your backyard or in your compost bin. Wow, so it's biodegradable when you're done with it. Yes. Can you put it in your drinks for New Year's Eve? That's a very good question since it's a protein-based theoretically, yes. However, at this point, the current type of jet ice cubes, we are more target for the code chain, transportation. We believe down the road, the next generation will be more for consumer to use for their drinks. Do you imagine that someday I will be able to buy it or there'll be a mix like

making jello and folks whip up a batch of cubes when they need it? Since we also add natural antimicrobials in there, it may be quite challenged to make it at home. But we do believe once we partner with industry manufacturers, we hope that you can easily. get access to those jelly ice cubes at your local grocery store. Well, Dr. Wang, thank you very much for taking time to be with us, and good luck to you on your new ice cubes. Thank you very much for having me. Lucian Wang is an associate professor of food science and technology at UC Davis. Happy New Year to you also.

We're going to take a break, and when we come back, talking with Dr. Francis Collins, probably our final interview with him as he is stepping down as head of the NIH. Stay with us. Hey there, folks, Ira here. I'm counting down the minutes to 2022 and reminding you that it's your last chance to make a donation for 2021. We still have that dollar-for-dollar donation match in effect. So take advantage and make your gift before midnight tonight. Go to science friday.com slash support to make a difference now. Thanks and wishing you a happy and science-filled New Year. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Dr. Francis Collins, the longest service

director of the National Institutes of Health, stepped down from his post last week. Dr. Collins served three presidents over 12 years. Dr. Collins is an acclaimed geneticist. He helped discover the gene that causes cystic fibrosis, and when he became director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, he led the project that mapped the human genome. In a statement, President Joe Biden called Dr. Collins, quote, one of the most important scientists of our time. But even on the way out the door, Collins made news, predicting that the U.S. would soon see more than one million cases of COVID a day in an interview with NPR. That's twice as many as the worst case scenario many scientists have predicted. Dr. Collins joined us back in October shortly after he announced his retirement.

Here is that timely interview as a fitting way to end this year. Welcome back to Science Friday. Hey, Ira, it's great to be with you. So what are your first thoughts on leaving the job? What do you say to yourself about where do I go now, considering what I've done during my career? Well, it's been an incredible privilege to have the chance to lead NIH, the largest supporter of biomedical research in the world over this 12-plus year period, serving three presidents, going through a wide variety of scientific experiences. and of course over the last 22 months being focused intensively on dealing with COVID-19, which has been all-consuming and exhausting,

and where I think science has really risen to the challenge in remarkable ways, even though we still have faced some issues about whether the public is ready to embrace all of the things that science has produced. And that's been a bit frustrating. But I've just been so fortunate to work in this area with incredible people, because the NIH director really has the chance to look across the entire landscape of biomedical research, which meant my horizons had to get really expanded. And as a scientist, that's something you really like to do, learning about new things every day. That is absolutely part of the job,

and it's a wonderful part of the job. And any specific reason for you stepping down besides, well, you know, it's time to retire. Well, you could argue what the shelf life of an NIH director should be, and I may have exceeded my, no previous NIH director appointed by a president has stayed on for more than one president. And here I am on the third of those. And 12 years is a long time. It's really good for a scientific organization to have new vision, new leadership now and then. And this just seems like the time. And frankly, I, if I'm going not to stick it out for another three years, I need to give the president a chance to find the next director, nominate that person and get confirmation through the Senate before the term gets too late because it gets harder as you go along.

So it seemed like the right time. I hear you. Now, being in the job for 12 years longer than anyone else has it, what do you recommend if the president asks you or if someone like me asks you, what qualities does the director of the NIH need to have? Well, first of all, this person needs to be a scientist of the highest order who really has themselves. contributed to science, who has the respect of the scientific community, they're going to trust this person is really going to be able to understand what they're doing and why. So gravitas in a scientific sense. But the person also needs to be a visionary who really is able to look and see across this wide variety of scientific opportunities, where are we going? And what could

NIH do to speed up the process of making progress? Person needs to be a good communication. needs to be able to get other people to share that kind of vision, needs to be very good in terms of answering the long list of questions that come at us every day from stakeholders and from the Congress and building that kind of trust that the organization really is founded on principles of getting evidence and applying them as quickly as possible to advancing human health. All of those things, it would be great. I think if the next NIH director also maybe represent presented the diversity a bit better than has been the case. We've only had one NIH director who was a woman. That was Bernadine Healy. All the rest of us have been white guys like me.

I would love to see as that search goes on, a real focus on trying to enhance the diversity of our leadership. And that would be something I think the president would resonate with. Who do you think should be the next director? Ira, I'm not going to go there. I don't want to tip the odds here. Just between you and me. No one else is listening, right? Nobody else is listening, right? I have sitting in front of me and my computer, a little piece of paper where I've been writing down names, but I'm not going to tell you what's on there. We're going to see how this plays out. Let's talk about some of the accomplishments and some of the projects that you have worked on. There was the brain project, which aimed to identify all cell types in the brain. You also helped launch the All of Us Precision Medicine Project.

Looking back, how do you gauge the success of these projects? And do you have a favorite one? You're asking me to pick amongst my children. Always. The ones you just mentioned, all of us now enrolling a million. million participants in the most ambitious, most consequential long-term longitudinal cohort study is just phenomenal in terms of what it's going to offer us, both in terms of how to manage illness, but also how to prevent it by really moving into a precision medicine approach.

The Brain Initiative, just now this month, having come out with remarkable set of new observations about the cell census of what's going on in the motor cortex of both the mouse and the human And it's breathtaking and it's on the way to even more to come. And I guess I have to mention what we've done with COVID over the last couple of years, not something I planned, but once given the challenge, the ability to develop vaccines in 11 months to run through more than 20 therapeutic agents with rigorous clinical trials and to develop tests, which are now making it possible for you to go to the drugstore and buy a home testing kit for COVID-19.

those are all things I'm really proud of. Involved a lot of collaborations with academia, with industry, but moved science forward in remarkable ways. Yeah, because, you know, I don't think people really know what NIH does, right? You know, they know that you're there and in this magnificent glass tower in Bethesda. You get your own parking space out front. Do people understand, like, for example, that you help develop the modernity, vaccine for COVID? I mean, how do these things happen? Well, there's a good question, Ira, and people think they just sort of happen overnight. And a really important message about everything

that we do is how it has to build upon decades of investment in basic science. And that's another thing I really am proud of is that we've been able to keep our basic science enterprise flourishing over the course of the last six years now with help from the Congress. The budget for NIH has gone up by 43%. And half of that goes to basic science where investigators come to us with their new and great ideas and we put them through the most rigorous peer review system in the world and fund the ones that are most promising. And things were pretty tough six or seven years ago. The success rate for getting your grant funded was down around 12, 13 percent. Now we're up above 20, which is still not as high as it should be, but it's a lot better. And the basic science is flourishing.

So yeah, coming back to MRNA vaccines in Moderna, that didn't just happen because somebody had an idea on January 10th, 2020, when the sequence of the virus was released. That had already been worked on by people like Barney Graham and Kizmiki Corbett at the Vaccine Research Center because we were worried about coronaviruses after SARS and MERS and trying to figure out, is there a way that you could make a vaccine much more quickly than the traditional. approaches. And MRNA was under intense study and work had been done over more than 10 years. People like Catalina Carico and Drew Weissman at the University of Pennsylvania, who I think eventually will win the Nobel Prize for their work on this, had set the whole foundation in place so that when the moment arrived where that sequence was there and you could see this is going to be a big threat to the world, that vaccine was designed in the vaccine research center working with Moderna in about 24 hours. And 63 days later, the first individual volunteer was getting

injected with that vaccine as part of a phase one trial, which is about 10 times faster than has ever happened before. One thing I've always found interesting about you, Dr. Collins, is that you're a very religious man, but also a man of science. Was it ever difficult for you to balance your religion with your career in science? You know, it never has been. I think people are still a little surprised that this isn't an issue that you don't run into areas of conflict. I just haven't. I was not raised as a person of faith.

I became a believer in my late 20s as part of my experience being a medical student and a resident. And I have found it's enormously satisfying to have the ability to incorporate faith perspectives and science perspectives in a typical day. You have to be careful, of course, about which kind of question you're addressing. If it's a question about how nature works, well, science is going to be the way you get those answers and you better be really rigorous about that and not fool yourself. But if it's a larger question about why am I here and what exactly is the nature of morality and what is like the foundation for making ethical decisions and what happens after you die and why is there something instead of nothing and why is there something instead of nothing and why? Why does beauty matter? I mean, all those questions, to me, I want to be able to address those, too. And science falls short in being able to give answers there. Faith is where I go when I'm looking for that kind of question. And in medicine and in health, they're all kind of wrapped up together.

And it seems to me to be able to utilize all of those worldviews when you need them. I want to talk about someone who works for you. You're his boss, Dr. Anthony Fauci. I think people see Francis Collins and they say, oh, it's Dr. Fauci's boss. That's who he is, right? What's it like working with Dr. Fauci? And how did you two coordinate your messaging and your research aims and goals, especially around COVID? Yeah, it's been wonderful working with Tony. He is the most knowledgeable, most highly respected infectious disease expert in the world. and he is in exactly the place where we need him at this moment of global crisis from this pandemic, steering his own institute, one of the 27 institutes at NIH in a way that has made it possible for all of these advances to happen.

And he stays deeply and closely engaged with all the details of that research with remarkable staff in his institute that he's recruited and trained. So it's actually one of those things that I didn't see coming because I didn't. know the pandemic was coming. I've worked with Tony and other areas now for 30 years, but boy, over the last 22 months, we have been joined at the hip. I talked to him probably a couple times a day and almost every evening sort of checking in about where we are trying to decide about strategy. And of course, a lot of that right now is also about the communication issues. It is really, I think, very sad and unforgivable to see the ways in which some people have decided to attack Tony because they don't like what he's saying. They don't like hearing the truth

about what's happening with the pandemic. And he even has to have 24-7 security because some of this has gotten so nasty. That's not a pretty picture. That's a bad commentary on our society that you could take a public servant of this remarkable sort who's simply there to tell you the truth and turn him somehow into an enemy that you have to attack. That's one of the sad, and shameful aspects of what's happened with COVID-19. But Tony is a person of great integrity. He simply lets all that roll off and keeps doing what he has to do, leading the science and trying to educate everybody around him about what it says. Let's conclude the last few minutes we have talking about your future. Are you going fishing or something? Or are you going to

still be around doing work? I wouldn't know how. And I don't intend to to spend a lot of time in golf carts either. No, I'm not sure, Ira, what's the next chapter? What am I supposed to do when I grow up? My plan is, and I'm really looking forward to this, is to step back in a much more visible way into my own research laboratory, which has been actually very successfully working since I got to NIH over 28 years on type 2 diabetes, on this rare form of premature aging called progeria, where we are on. the track, I think, to potentially some pretty dramatic therapeutic steps using gene editing. I'm looking forward to that. It'll give me a chance to reflect, to do some more reading about

other areas of science I'm interested in, to do some writing, and to contemplate what is the next chapter, what's the next calling, maybe even to get some sleep. That would be nice, too. That would be nice. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Dr. Francis Collins, outgoing director of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Are you satisfied with the progress that the genetics has come along during your tenure? Yeah, I think I am. You know, there is always this tendency when there's a breakthrough in basic science, and I think you could call the genome project that kind of breakthrough, to overestimate the immediate consequences and then underestimate the long-term consequences.

That's called the first law of technology, by the way. I think that's been true here. There were some bold statements probably made, hopefully not by me, that genomics was going to transform the practice of medicine overnight. Well, that didn't happen overnight, but boy, it's happening now. I mean, look at the way in which cancer has been completely revised as far as our understanding and our management by the ability to find out in every individual tumor, what's driving that malignancy. And also, you can see how genome sequencing and the newborn nursery has become quite transformative, providing answers and mysteries that otherwise didn't get answered sometimes for months or years.

So I think it, and certainly would have to say, if you walk into any research laboratory that's working in human biology, everybody is using genomics and almost everything they're doing. It's transformed the way in which we approach scientific questions. So I'm pretty gratified. That's terrific. Do you have a message for other researchers? that you'd like to leave with them following all of the years of experience that you have doing research. So two messages. First of all, we must continue to deeply value basic science.

There's maybe a little too much emphasis now about targeted research that's going to focus on a specific disease. And we need that. But if we don't also fund the efforts that just build this foundation of understanding how life works, then we are going to be sorry in the longer term. Second message, if we want to really move things forward in areas where opportunity arises, we need to come up with new approaches to do that more efficiently and quickly. And this is why I'm excited about the new program called ARPA-H, the Advanced Research Project Agency for Health, which takes a page out of the DARPA book that has done this sort of thing for defense and gave us things like the Internet. And we could do that for health.

and I'm hoping with congressional approval, looking likely, that we'll be able to launch ARPAH at NIH in the next few months. And that will be a really exciting opportunity to bring use-driven projects forward and be able to move quickly and in a way that's not averse to risk to fill in some of those gaps between scientific developments and clinical benefits. That's going to be a big deal. Watch that space. We will be watching and thank you for taking time and thank you for all that you've done for us, Dr. Collins. Oh, Ira, it's nice to talk to you. It has been a privilege. I am a lucky guy and never dreamed that this would be part of my life experience. That was our conversation with Dr. Francis Collins from back in October. Dr. Collins stepped down as director of the National Institutes of Health last week after 12 years in that role.

And that's about all the time we have. Have a safe and happy new year. I'm Ira Plato.