Science Friday - Children’s Antibiotics Shortage, Bat Vocalizations, Life’s Biggest Questions. January 20, 2023, Part 1

Episode Date: January 20, 2023

Why Are Children’s Antibiotics So Hard To Find Right Now? Mary Warlo has been extremely worried lately. Her baby Calieb, who is six months old, has sickle cell disease. In early December he went for a few days without liquid penicillin, a medication that he—and thousands of other children in the U.S.—rely on to prevent potentially life threatening infections. Warlo couldn’t easily find a pharmacy in Indianapolis that had the medicine in stock. She and her husband frantically drove around for hours, stopping at five different pharmacies before they were able to get their prescription filled. “It was extremely stressful and I am worried about what will happen the next time we need to fill his prescription two weeks from now,” she said. Pediatric sickle cell disease specialists say they are alarmed by signs that the stock of liquid penicillin is dwindling in some places. They say children’s lives depend on this medication, and a penicillin shortage could spell disaster. Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.   Bats Use Death Metal 'Growls' To Make Social Calls What do death metal vocalists and bats have in common? Both use their ventricle folds, or “false vocal cords,” to extend their vocal ranges to hit a lower register. This gives bats a huge vocal range—seven full octaves. Humans typically tap out at about three to four octaves. Even people with really impressive vocal ranges, like Mariah Carey, just can’t compete with a bat. A study recently published in the academic journal PLOS Biology examines how and why different anatomical structures might help bats achieve such extreme frequency range. Ira talks with one of the study’s authors, Coen Elemans, a professor in bioacoustics and animal behavior at the University of Southern Denmark based in Odense, Denmark.   Can Science Answer Life’s Biggest Questions? Dr. Alan Lightman has been around the block a few times. Over the past five decades, he has been a theoretical physicist, professor at MIT, and bestselling author—often at the same time. His most notable novel, Einstein’s Dreams, has been adapted into dozens of plays and musicals since its publication in 1992, becoming one of the most famous examples of mixing art and science.  Lightman’s work follows a philosophical way of thinking about life’s biggest questions, like the origins of consciousness. His new venture brings this way of thinking to the silver screen. Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science consults scientists and faith leaders to grapple with some of these theoretical quandaries. And Lightman gives a good argument for why the journey to these answers can be more impactful than the answers themselves.  Ira speaks with Alan Lightman about the new program, available to watch now online and on your local public television station.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Later in the hour, we'll learn what bats have in common with death metal vocalists. Yes. And Alan Lightman talks about his search for meaning among the cosmos. But first, a flashy development in how we handle lightning strikes. You know, they're responsible for thousands of deaths each year and billions of dollars worth of damages. But a team of researchers has a plan to redirect those lightning bolts by beaming lasers. Yes, beaming lasers into the sky. Here to fill us in on this and other cool science news of the week is Regina G. Barber, a scientist in residence at NPR's Shortwave podcast.

Regina, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. I'm super excited. And I get to talk about lasers. So let's do this. Yeah. Well, let's go right into this. This plan to use lasers to guide lightning strikes. You know, it almost sounds too sci-fi to be true. Yeah, it's really interesting. Like, this has been an idea for the last 20 years, but just recently they've gotten lasers that can pulse fast enough to basically make a conductive column of air and like a lightning rod. And it actually brings lightning to, you know, the lightning rod and it secures larger areas of land so that you can like protect airports or like wind farms. Right. Ben Franklin would have loved

this, right? I think so. So tell us how it works. You shine this very powerful laser beam up into the sky. And what does it do? Yeah. So like I say, said earlier, it has this like pulse. So this is a pulse laser. It actually pulses a thousand times a second. And that's why it's working now because we actually have lasers that can be that fast. And it's pulsing into the air and it's basically ionizing like very tall, long air columns. And it's basically making the air conductive. And we only have very, I say short lightning rods, so 10 meters, but these lasers will make them much taller. This experiment was up to 60 meters.

Wow. And the higher the lightning rod, the bigger the area you can protect from lightning strikes. So you switch these on and off then when a storm comes by. Right, right. So they did this experiment in the mountains of Switzerland, and this airport tower had been struck many, many times a year, roughly 100 times a year. So during a lightning storm, they turned it on and they saw if it worked.

And this is something, as we said, that would really be helpful. Yes, I mean, lightning storms can delay planes. They can injure people on the tarmac. It's really important to be able to divert those lightning strikes. Okay, very, very cool. Regina, I know you're an astrophysicist, so let's talk about lots of space news this week. Yes, please. Starting with exoplanets.

Yes. We just confirmed a rocky exoplanet? Yeah, so we actually know of over 5,000 exoplanets, but most of them aren't rocky. Most of them are gas giants, and this one specifically was actually not found by JWST. It was confirmed by James Webb Telescope, but it was found by something called the Tess Telescope or Test satellite. So Tess is transiting exoplanet survey satellite, and it's a small telescope. Its sole goal is to find exoplanets. and JWST basically confirmed this rocky planet that's about the size of Earth.

Why is this important that we found a rocky planet? We would really like to find planets that are rocky, that have atmospheres, and we don't know if this one has an atmosphere yet, but once we confirmed that it's there, then powerful telescopes like JWST can actually study it, see if it has an atmosphere. And you know us humans, we're egocentric. We want to find something just like Earth.

Mm-hmm. And why is this the first? Why are there not more of them? There are just fewer rocky planets. That's actually true. But this one specifically, this rocky planet is orbiting a red dwarf star. And I think that we're actually going to be able to find more of them using JWST. So JWST is an infrared telescope. And these red dwarf stars, these smaller, cooler stars than our sun, are much easier to find in the infrared. So if there are these smaller rocky planets closer to a star, this one's actually very close to day orbit. I think we'll be able to actually find or confirm more of these using JWST. Wow.

Okay. In other galactic news, I know there's a new study that's challenging what we think we know about the formation of galaxies. Tell us more about that. So we actually live in the Milky Way. It's a spiral galaxy. It's like a disc like a pancake. there's another spiral galaxy right next to us called the Indromeda Galaxy, and one day they will actually merge and most likely form kind of a spherical, bright galaxy called an elliptical

galaxy. So these are kind of the shapes that are out there. Well, we think that these disc galaxies are the ones that kind of form first, disc galaxies like Milky Way and Indromeda, but there's a couple studies that came out that show that these disc galaxies actually formed way earlier. than we thought. And why is that important? Because we have this model of how like the universe was created, that there are these stages where there's the Big Bang, there's a lot of like chaos and energy in the very beginning. And we didn't think that galaxies formed until maybe, you know, one billion years after the Big Bang. But one of these studies is, and it still needs to be confirmed with Spectra, but one of these studies thinks that they're seeing these structures at 200 and 400 million years after the Big Bang. And

bang, that might seem like a long time, but the age of the universe is like 13.7 billion years. So it's really soon. Yeah. And that would, if that was true, once it's confirmed with Spectra, that would change our whole idea of how the universe formed. Don't you just love it when we get new data that throws into doubt everything we thought we knew? Yeah, it's just exciting.

It's like when you have your whole idea changed, it's like a whole new life of astronomy. I love it. Yeah. So JWST is already helping us figure out the formation of our universe. Yes, absolutely. And how can it see so far back in time? How can you tell how young it is, I guess is what I'm asking? Like I said earlier, JWST is an infrared telescope.

And because the universe is expanding, it's actually stretching. Some of the light from the beginning of the universe also stretches. And because JWST is looking in the infrared, that's looking at wavelengths that are stretchier that are longer that Hubble couldn't really look at. So as we are looking at longer and longer wavelengths of light, we can look further in time. And it's also a very big mirror, right? So it's a very big telescope. So the bigger the mirror, the more light you can collect. That's really cool. Our next story takes us back to Earth and how our attitude affects how we process information. What's the connection there? Yeah, I saw this study and I was.

was like, oh, your bad mood is the reason you can't communicate. That was like the title. So I just assumed it was like, I'm grumpy, I won't be able to do anything. I'll be confused. Yeah. Yeah. But it's the opposite. Like, apparently when people are in a bad mood, when they are kind of grumpy, they're actually more analytical. They can find errors. They're more critical. Really? Yeah. So we should stay in a grumpy mood all the time if we want to be more analytic. Right. Like this study did a couple experiments where they gave a couple people's sentences that were actually true, but they were worded kind of funky.

And then they changed that wording and saw if they could actually see the errors. And people that were in a more negative mood actually could catch the errors. Wow. Now, I understand that this study has some limitations because it was the done only on women subjects. Yeah, it was very strange. Apparently, past studies that dealt with mood were mostly done on women. So they decided to do this study on only women. But they did suggest that in the future, it should be more gender diverse. Yeah, yeah. Our next story has to do with squirrels. And this is perfect timing because tomorrow is National Squirrel Appreciation Day, something I have

mixed feelings about since the squirrels and my... backyard, like to dig up my flowers and my veggies. So I will give them credit. They are scrappy survivors. And a new study shows exactly that. Right. It shows that these red squirrels, they kind of, they bet on the future year if it's going to be a good year or a bad year for food. I kind of was interested in the study because I didn't know what fitness meant or Darwinian fitness in biology. Apparently that just means how many young a mom has. So more babies. mean more chances to pass on your genes. So the more babies you have, the more fit you are. But these these mamas, they bet on what the future is going to be and they have more babies because they're like, this year is going to be good. Let's say that that's their bet. And what they found, what the

studies found is that they actually are overall making good bets. Sometimes they're short-term losses, but overall these squirrels are having more babies and passing on more of their genes. I'm taking them to Vegas with me. I mean, they're not only scrappy, but they're pretty good gamblers. Yeah, it's very surprising. Apparently, when you have overall good bets, that was a very big thing for these scientists. They didn't think that they'd think it would be more evened out, but it wasn't. Okay. Your last story is another really cool one. And this is one about how echidnas stay cool and alert. It involves snot, Regina. need some explanation. Well, I love snot and I love heat transfer as a physicist. So I really loved the story. Basically, you have these echidnas, which are like these big hedgehog looking things with like

dark blueish armadillo noses. They're super cute. They live in Australia. And they kind of have this shape and structure where you wouldn't understand why they can like, why they live in Australia and stay successful, right? How do they not overheat? They spit. snot out of their long armadillo-like nose, and that snot evaporates so that, you know, like how we sweat. They can't sweat. They don't pant. So this is how they lose heat. So if you have an echidna and it has a wet nose, don't think it's sick or it has a cold or something like that. Right. Or it's not blowing bubbles at you to be rude. It's just, it's just losing heat. I hear they, their spines also help. Yeah. So their spines are basically like hollowed out hair follicles.

And they're really good insulators. So at night, they're mostly nocturnal, actually. But at night, they can keep the heat in and they can kind of ball up like a hedgehog. Or if they're hot, they can kind of spread out and the spines can spread out and that will allow heat to like dissipate out of them. Well, there you have it. Snott can help critters stay cool. We always want to leave our listeners with something unique to talk about on the weekend, Regina. Yes.

And they're super cute. You've got to look up the videos. And they are. They win the cuteness thing also. Regina, thanks for joining us today. Thank you for inviting me. Regina G. Barber is the scientist in residence at Shortwave from NPR. We're going to have to take a break, and when we come back, what an antibiotic shortage means for children with sickle cell disease

and what bats have in common with death metal vocalists. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO, St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance.

Children with sickle cell disease rely on daily doses of penicillin to prevent infections. This is life-saving treatment, but it's been hard to find penicillin lately in pharmacies. And while the FDA says there isn't a shortage of the antibiotic, families and physicians are finding the opposite. Joining me today to talk about this story is Farah Ushery, health equity reporter for Side Effects Public Media, based at WFII in Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome back to Science Friday. Hi, Ira, thanks for having me.

You're welcome. Farah, just to review, remind us of what sickle cell disease is, if you will. Yeah, so sickle cell disease is a genetic disorder that mostly affects people of African descent. as many as 300,000 babies are born with it every year across the globe. That's as many as babies born with HIV worldwide, but the awareness level surrounding both diseases is hugely different, as you can imagine. In the U.S., the CDC estimates that there are nearly 100,000 people with the disease, and most of them are black. So sickle cell disease is a blood disorder.

People who have it find that their blood cells become misshapen. they turn from the typical donut shape that most of us have into the shape of a banana or a sickle, hence the name, which means that these blood cells are not able to carry oxygen as well. The blood cells also become stickier and harder to flow in vessels, and they can clump up and get jammed in some places in the body. And this could starve major organs of oxygen and could lead to strokes, organ failure, tissue damage. and the hallmark of the disease is excruciating pain, and that's typically known as pain crises. So these are episodes of extreme pain that patients need very high doses of narcotics for to be able to manage.

Why do kids with sickle cell disease rely on antibiotics? So because sickle cell disease causes all these health problems and damage to the body, one way it also affects the body is it damages the function of the spleen, that's the organ responsible for producing blood cells to fight germs in the body. So babies in general have less mature immune systems and are vulnerable to illnesses. On top of that, if a baby has sickle cell disease, their immune system is severely compromised. So an infection that could cause mild illness in the general population can cause severe illness or even death for a little kid who has sickle cell disease.

And it's not hard to see how this plays out. So as recently as the late 1970s, newly one out of every three kids with sickle cell disease died before their fifth birthday. That's a huge number. And all of this changed when a landmark clinical trial took place in the 1980s. The researchers put kids with sickle cell disease on prophylactic or preventative antibiotics, specifically penicillin. And they found stunning results. Kids were thriving. And since then, sickle cell disease moved from being considered a pediatric disease.

to a chronic illness where people are living well into adulthood. Do we know why this antibiotic shortage is happening? So antibiotic shortages are actually more common than most of us realize in the U.S., but this current shortage of some of the most widely used antibiotics like amoxicillin has been driven by a spike in demand. At least that's what experts who track these shortages and some drug makers are saying. And it's pretty unconventional compared to pretty conventional. previous years where there were shortages for other reasons. So this year it doesn't look like

there are any manufacturing hiccups at the factories, for example. There aren't any recalls of antibiotic shipments. At least that's not what's driving the shortage. So it seems that there has been a surge in infectious diseases lately. Then some manufacturers are reporting having some labor issues with drivers, shipping and delivery people who take the drugs to wholesalers and hospitals. What have you heard from people who have kids with sickle cell disease? I mean, how is this shortage impacting these families? Yeah, so kids with sickle cell disease typically rely on two daily doses of liquid penicillin. And that's between two months until at least five years of age.

Parents can put the penicillin doses in a medicine dispenser. It looks like a pacifier. The medicine is usually pink and sweet tasting for the kiddos to swallow. So right now, as you said, the FDA did not say, you know, there's an official shortage of penicillin in the U.S., but there are signs it's getting harder, and supplies, especially of liquid penicillin, might be dwindling in some places. I spoke with providers in many states and families who are finding it harder to get their hands-on liquid penicillin.

Dr. Sheethel Jacob is a pediatric chemologist at Riley Children's Hospital in Indianapolis. She says her patients have been hit by these shortages, and she worries that a widespread penicillin shortage could spell disaster for this vulnerable population. I'm worried that I'm going to be seeing more of our patients in the hospital. hospital with serious bacterial infections and obviously significantly in concern that some of them may become so ill that they would pass. And I spoke with one mother. Her name is Mary Warlow. She has a six-month-old baby boy called Caleb. He's such a cutie, you know, smiling, laughing, chubby cheeks, curly hair. He has everything going on. And he takes his penicillin doses very

peacefully. So the last time Mary went to fill her son's penicillin prescription, she had to drive for hours all across Indianapolis. And she and her husband stopped by five different pharmacies until they were finally able to get their hands on it. Here's what she had to say. It's just been really hard, I would say, trying to, there's been like a couple of days where he's gone without it because we couldn't find it. So then it's a scare that like if he doesn't get it, if that affects him in other ways. She says she is terrified of what might happen the next time she goes to Phil Caleb's prescription. And that's also been a concern for providers at big hospitals who some of them tell me their pharmacies are advising them to start looking for other

alternatives. And so what are some of the solutions that people are turning to? So one thing some providers are trying to do is to prescribe penicillin tablets, which are very inconvenient because you have to divide them and have, and then parents have to crush them and put them in their baby's formula or food and then hope the kid, you know, actually finishes the serving of food and not spit it or just throws it on the ground. you know, and so already some parents have started to do that. Then the second best option for sickle cell disease patients, if they can't take penicillin, is the antibiotic amoxicillin.

I spoke with Dr. Monica Holbert at St. Louis Children's Hospital, and she says she tried to prescribe amoxysolin for some of her patients, and that was actually unsuccessful. They couldn't find it because amoxicillin has already been in short supply according to the FDA. And so Holbert tells me there are other. other less preferable antibiotics patients can get on, but she worries about the ripple effects of this ongoing shortage. Here's what she had to say. The trick is that when one thing is unavailable, then everybody switches to the next thing, and then that also may, you know, demand may exceed supply on that too. So for now, it's uncertain penicillin shortages are not official yet, but several

providers in different states across the country have told me their hospital pharmacies notified them that they are running low and advise them to start exploring those other options. Wow. Fara, thank you for taking time to present this story that sometimes flies under the radar. Thank you so much for your time. Fara, Ussri Health Equity Reporter for Side Effects Public Media based in Indianapolis, Indiana. You know, on this show, we're always on the lookout for crossovers between music and science. But this next story might be the most surprising one yet.

Here's why. What does this performance from death metal vocalist Phil Bozeman have in common with this bat call? Now, both sounds are created nearly the same way. Both humans and bats can use their ventricle folds or false vocal cords to extend their vocal ranges to hit a lower register. But get this. When a bat does it, its vocal range expands to seven octaves. Humans typically tap out about three to four, and even people with some of the most impressive vocal ranges, talking about you, Mariah Carey, well, they just can't compete with a bat. But how and why do bats need to hit both the high and low notes? Joining me now to help answer those questions and more is my guest, Cohen Ellumannes, Professor in Bioacoustics and Animal Behavior at the University of Southern Denmark based in Odin Sa, Denmark. Dr. Elements, welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you very much. Nice to have you. Okay, let's get right into this. Bats are typically known for hitting their high notes. We all know that for using echolocation to catch and find prey in the dark. Now, you looked at both this high and low in frequencies, and how exactly do bats make such a wide range of sounds? Yeah, so we were at first interested in how bats make their echolocation calls. And it was known that they have some adaptations in their larynx, and particularly on the vocal,

They have some really thin membranes that extend up. And the idea is that they use these structures to oscillate very fast and make these very high frequency echolocation calls. Now that we set out to measure and we basically studied in an excise prep of the larynx how these structures can oscillate. And we showed that these structures actually generate these high frequencies. So we established that for the first time. We did that by really high speed videos that we could film up to a quarter million frames per second under very controlled conditions. And then we could outline the edges of these vocal membranes very nicely.

So that explains how they make these very high frequency calls. But while we were doing this, we saw there's another set of vocal folds, slightly above the normal vocal folds called the false vocal folds, as you mentioned. And we can get those oscillate very nicely, but at very low frequencies. So let's say one kilohertz. And we noted that they probably make these lower, frequency calls that pets use for communication purposes. And this is the same way that

death metal singers do it? Yeah, so ventricular folds or false vocal folds are called false vocal folds because in normal human speech, they're not used. And that's why they're called false vocal folds. But they are used in lots of musical expressions, and I've been really diving into a lot of it in the last weeks. One very predominant one is all the death metal

singers, but also two and throat singers, other local tribes are able to use ventricular folds for singing. In case I listeners missed it the first time, let's listen to an echo location call and then a low frequency call. That is amazing. Tell us why and when do bats make these low frequency calls. What are they trying to communicate with each other? So we know they make them in context of when they fly out of a colony or come back into the colony. This, what you just heard, slow down quite a lot. And the sounds are around three to four or five kilohertz. So to us, it still sounds very squeaky. But these animals are very small, right? At that way, they say 20 grams or

so. So these high frequency sounds for them are still very relatively low frequency. They make them in the context of going in and out of a roost, but what they actually mean we don't really know. it's very tempting to interpret it as some sort of annoyance call because that's how it sounds to us. But we actually don't really know if they're contact calls or indeed these more aggressive agonistic calls. So you can't really tell what they're for. I mean, are they like cats purring? No, no, no, no, really not. What we think is that cats purr by moving their vocal faults actively using muscle action in and out of the vocal tract.

And this is not. This is a passive motion of false vocal thoughts like we do when. when death metal grunting. When you say false vocal cords, why do you call them that? So in normal human speech, we don't use these sets of vocal faults, and that's why they're called false vocal folds. But in animals, we know now that these bats use them. There's also some evidence that maybe pigs use them during squealing,

but there's not been so much focus on the function of these false vocal folds. This is Science Friday from WNIC Studios. And how do you physically study these focal cord vibrations? Yeah, so this is really complicated to do in live animals that are basically the size of your thumb. So what we do is to actually study tissue, so we study the extracted larynx from these animals under the microscope. And then we can give it lots of light and we can mount cameras on top of the microscope and see in great detail how different structures are moving and oscillic. Cool. I want to talk a little more about.

echolocation, something we're more familiar with. And in order to make these high frequency sounds, would sound kind of like a series of clicks. How did they do that? How do the muscles need to move? I mean, they've got to move really fast, right? What we think is that during these very fast frequency sweeps that a lot of bats do, not all bats, but a lot of bats do. The length of the vocal fault is rapidly changing. And it basically goes typically from high frequency to low frequency. And what we think is that the vocal folds go from from very stretched to unstretched. And that generates the lower frequencies. Now, to make a call, they basically do that during muscle relaxation of the muscle that changes the frequency of the tension in these membranes. So to make calls very rapidly, what they need

to do to be able to catch prey, they need to actually move these muscles very fast. And a few years ago, we also showed that bats basically can produce these calls because they have amazingly fast muscles, the fastest we found in any mammal, but it also limits to how fast they can actually produce these skulls. And we see that brown bats that you typically have in North America can produce skulls up to about 200 times a second. Wow. I know that bats, as I say, have best at humans in terms of vocal range.

Could there be other animals who have similarly staggering vocal ranges? There are definitely animals that have such staggering vocal ranges. And I think I just haven't had those glasses on too long, For example, if you look at killer whales or so, they can also produce frequency ranges that are spectacular, from very low repetition rates during echolocation goals, up to 80 kilohertz, very similar to bats. But that's an animal that weighs tons, is 9 meters long.

So there's a completely different set of constraints and probably super interesting things going on. Never think you might study whales? Oh, we've done that, actually. Yeah? It's coming out in March. Huh. Getting back to bats.

why did you decide to study the bats to begin with? So bed allocation is interesting for many reasons. One of them is that we're interested in how these animals process these echoes, for example. So how are they able to catch prey in complete darkness? The best sonar systems we have are still outcompeted by what bats can do and what dolphins can do, for example. So there's a lot to learn in the design and also processing of these echolocation signals. I know there's been a lot of press for this study since it came out,

People are really excited. Why do you think this resonates so much with people? I think it's always interesting to demonstrate parallels between human voice and animal voices, because we use our voice all the time. It's a complete key element in our communication. And so it's very easy to relate to. It's very easy to relate how you would produce sounds because we're all able to make all these different sounds. It's just that, of course, Moriah Carey or other extreme vocalists are really good at.

is. But we can all, we all have our, we're all able to, to some extent, have a stab at it. You told me you're going to be studying whales and it's coming out in March. Can you give us a little preview? No. No hesitancy about that at all. Well, I want to thank you then. We'll have to wait and have you back when this comes out. It would be great. I would love to. All right. It's a deal. I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you very much. Dr. Cohen-Elemans, Professor in Bioacoustics and Animal Behavior at the University of Southern Denmark, based in Odinsa, Denmark. We have to take a break, and when we come back, physicist and author Alan Lightman talks about what is known and unknowable in the age of science. Stay with us.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Have you ever looked up in the sky on a clear night and just gotten lost in the stars? I know I have and it can really be an awesome and even humbling experience. It can get kind of trippy, right? You wonder where your place in the universe is. Physicist and author Alan Lightman thinks about this stuff a lot, so much so that in fact he has a new TV show all about searching for meaning among the cosmos.

It's called appropriately searching our quest for meaning in the age of science. I want to welcome Alan Lightman, physicist and bestselling author based in Concord, Massachusetts, welcome back to the program. Thank you for having me back, Aro. Nice to have you. There is so much to talk about, so let me see if I can narrow it down to just a few topics for our discussion. Your quest for meaning, as I mentioned at the beginning about my own experience, begins

with you lying down in your boat off your home in Maine, looking up in the sky at the vast array of stars, and having a moment of awe at the beauty and the magnificence of what you see, and you proceed to try to answer that question using science, having your brain scan to see where it lights up when you see photos of that sky, as if you are in search of what that awe center in your brain is. Where is that emotion located? Would that be correct the way I described it? Yes, that's correct. The series has a lot of hard science in it, but we also explore the philosophical, ethical and even theological consequences of science. So that opening scene that you described very well

is the beginning of an exploration for how do you understand how these kinds of experiences can arise just from atoms and molecules. In fact, you mentioned that a few times in the show that you are a materialist. You say that you believe that atoms and molecules make up everything in the world. Do you believe that everything unknown today can ultimately be answered by science?

I do. That's not to say that science can fill in all of the blanks. For example, I think most scientists believe that consciousness, which is the most mysterious of our human experiences, arises from the neurons and the brain. But I think filling in the gaps of how the electrical and chemical transfer, between neurons results in the sensation that we call consciousness, that's a much more difficult matter. So I think that science may have trouble filling in all the steps, although we do think that consciousness and, in fact, all human experiences are ultimately rooted in material.

Well, if science can't fill that in or have difficulty doing that, what can? Well, I'm not sure. Of course, philadelphia. philosophers and faith leaders have their own explanations for what consciousness is and, in fact, all kinds of spiritual experiences. I remain a materialist, and in fact, the whole first episode of the series shows and illustrates the scientific belief that our atoms and molecules were formed in stars, and we traced that all the way back to the Big Bang, and then the stars exploded after having made complex atoms, and those atoms condensed to form solar systems. that's sort of an accepted view among scientists. But it actually turns out that we're pretty cheap with human beings. There's a scene where I go to the supermarket and I buy all the chemical elements needed to create a human being. And it comes out to about $538 or so.

That was at the time you made the show. Now I think it might be a little more. Yes, with inflation, right. You have a question that you ask scientists throughout the first episode of your show, and that is, if you were to press a button and instantly get an answer to a big question in your field, would you press that button? And you get a wide variety of answers. Some scientists say yes, some scientists say no. And I might point out that the male scientists usually say yes, the female scientists say no. And now it's my turn to ask you. What would you do? Would you push that button? The question that we ask each scientist is if you could find the answer to the most fundamental question in your feel. So in physics, it was the ultimate particle or in astronomy, it might have been the origin of the universe. And in biology, it might have been how life originated. I would not push the button.

So I would side with the women in this series because I think that the quest for answers is really the most exciting part of science. It's not necessarily finding the answers. But I think scientists are most excited when they don't understand something, when they're puzzled. And that kind of excitement and passion, I think, is conveyed by some of our scientists, including the male scientists.

I asked Ray Weiss, who was a Nobel Prize winning physicist, who built the detector, that the detected gravitational waves in, I think, 2015 or so. I asked him what kept him going for 40 years. And he went for 40 years without knowing whether gravitational waves would ever be detected. And he said it was so much fun along the way. It was the journey. And I think it's the journey of the scientific enterprise

that is the most interesting and rewarding and fulfilling. You know, I have heard other scientists say this, and most of them, for some reason, maybe it's just coincidental. They have been physicists or cosmologists saying, you know, it's the search that's really the most fun part. I'm really disappointed sometimes when we get an answer. Yes, but I think that that's true. Yeah. One person, one of your experts interviewed on the show, says that, quote, through us, nature has self-awareness. But I would pose that it's just the opposite that's true.

Through nature, we have self-awareness. Would you agree with that? Well, I think both are true, that we have self-awareness because our brains have evolved to the state where we have this strange sensation that we call consciousness. And I think consciousness is a graded phenomenon. I think crows and dolphins probably have some level of consciousness. but also the other self-awareness of the universe of itself is we are products of nature

and we are able to observe. We are the intelligent beings and only a tiny fraction of matter in the universe is alive. A much smaller fraction is intelligent. We are the only special arrangement of atoms and molecules that can observe and record We're spectators. And that is the way that nature is aware of itself. I think if there were no intelligent living beings in the world and the universe, the universe would just come and go without any self-reflection,

without any awareness of itself. You have many experiences throughout the course of the program. You visit the CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland. You converse with a robot named Bina. You explore a cave in France where ancient humans left drawings. What points were you trying to make in sharing these experiences? Well, in the cave in France, I was trying to, and when I say I, me and the director, Jeff Hame Stiles, we were trying to show that our quest for meaning is ancient.

And with the robot, Bina 48, we were exploring the question of whether a machine can achieve consciousness. And of course, there's the famous Turing test where you put an advanced computer behind a curtain, and can you tell with a conversation, whether it's a human or a machine, this android that I had the conversation with, Bina 48 is one of the most advanced robots in the world with a huge database. And for a while, I thought it could have been a person. But ultimately, I think that AI is not yet at the point where we would think that the thing was conscious. I think we're still a long way from achieving consciousness with artificial intelligence. But the question is, is that possible in the future?

I talked to the Dalai Lama about this and showed him a video of being a 48 and asked him whether he thought that an advanced computer could ever be conscious. And he said, absolutely not. In his view, consciousness is not material that it's always existed even before the universe was created and always will exist afterwards. And I asked a rabbi, Michael Greenstein, whether he thought that being a 48 could ever be conscious or whether any future Android could be conscious. And he said something to the effect that it couldn't because it doesn't have a soul. So these are the kinds of different views that we had from different disciplines, different thinkers about what science has uncovered. what we're capable of, where science ends and maybe where something else begins. By interviewing and talking with the Dalai Lama and the rabbi and them giving you your views,

is that not an antithesis of what you believe as a materialist that we are all just atoms and molecules? Well, I don't agree with the Dalai Lama's point of view, even though I have enormous respect for him, but I do think that the consciousness, and in fact, all mental sensations are rooted in the material brain. I also have enormous respect for Rabbi Michael Greenstein, just as I have great respect for all religious beliefs. But personally, I am a materialist. But I don't think that my materialism prevents me from having amazing spiritual transcendent experiences, like feeling connected to the cosmos or feeling part of something larger than myself or admiring beauty or having a sense of awe when I look at a sunset.

I think that these experiences are all compatible with a scientific view of the world. This is Science Friday from WNIC Studios. Case is just joining us. We're talking with Alan Lightman, physicist and author, whose new program on public television is searching our quest for meaning in the age of science. Alan, you've been around a long time. You've written so many books. you have lectured, you've talked, you've researched.

How have your views about science and the quest for meaning in the age of science changed? Have you mellowed? Has your reasoning, has your thought process changed over your lifetime? That's a good question. I think that I have remained a scientist in the sense that I continue to believe that, that everything is made out of atoms and molecules. But I have become much more appreciative of the wide range of human experience. I've fallen in love a number of times, most recently, with my wife.

And I think that I've taken a bigger view of what the human brain is capable of. Interesting. Please tell me more about that. I think that I have known painters, musicians, poets, philosophers, thinkers, and I have a greater and greater admiration for what the human mind is capable of. I mean, even in science, the fact that we are these tiny creatures on a planet orbiting a small or ordinary sun and an ordinary galaxy that we have such short lifetimes, 100 years or less, and yet we're able to contemplate things that are billions of light years away and billions of years away. So that's just mind-boggling what we have been capable of doing.

I think it makes us both bigger and smaller. One of the themes of the series is, where do we human beings? fit in the grand scheme of things. Yeah, that's an age old question, is it not? It is. And it's a question that doesn't have an answer. I think all of the great, most profound questions don't have answers. And when Jeff Haynes-styles and I were conceiving this series at the very beginning, which was like three and a half years ago, we decided that we would pose questions that didn't have answers. We didn't want to wrap everything up neatly because the greatest questions don't have answers. I think that's one of the reasons why our series is titled The Quest for Meaning.

We're on a quest, and that relates to what we were talking about earlier, that is the journey of science, but not just the journey of science, a journey of arts, of everything that means to be human. You asked me, what have I learned over the years? And one of the things that I've learned is that questions without answers are just as important as questions with answers. And science, we're used to working on questions that have answers, even if it might take us 10 or 20 years to get the answer. But in the arts and humanities, there are a lot of really interesting, provocative, creative, stimulating questions that don't have answers.

like, would we be happier if we live to be a thousand years old, or what is the nature of love? All kinds of wonderful questions that don't have answers. So that's another way in which I think that I have grown as a human being, that we human beings need questions with answers, and we also need questions without answers. And you also find, it appears to me, that there is a great joy in your work and in looking for these answers, even though they may not exist yet. Yes, there is. And I think that that joy and curiosity of looking for answers

is part of what drives science. And I think in some way drives artists too, because artists do an inner exploration. They're exploring their inner self and trying to express that in their art. So I think both science and art are, explorations and part of what it means to be human. Well, Alan, thank you for your exploration and your work all these years, and good luck in your new program. Thank you, Ira. Alan Lightman, physicist and best-selling

author based in Concord, Massachusetts. His new show, Searching Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science, is online on your local television, public television station. You can find out where to watch the program at SearchingforMeaning.org. One last thing before we go, this hour, if you're looking for more ways to imagine our future through science and art, check out the Science Friday Book Club. We are reading The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson this February. It's a great speculative fiction novel about climate change, justice, public policy, and more. And you can find out more about our reading schedule, upcoming events, and how to win a free book. Oh yeah, on our website, sciencefriday.com

slash future book. Here's Rasha Aridi with some of the folks who'll help make this show happen. Thanks, Aira. Our digital producers are D. Peter Schmidt and Emma Gomez. Ariel Zich is our director of audience. Sandy Roberts is our education program manager. Annie Niro is our individual giving manager. And I'm Rasha Aridi, radio producer. Thanks for listening. Thank you, Rasha. B.J. Leiterman composed our theme music. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato.