Science Friday - Coronavirus Fact-Check, Poetry of Science, Social Bats. March 20, 2020, Part 2

Episode Date: March 21, 2020

As new cases of coronavirus pop up across the United States, and as millions of people must self-isolate from family and friends at home, one place many are turning to for comfort and information is their news feed. But our regular media diet of politics, sports, and entertainment has been replaced by 24/7 coverage of the novel coronavirus pandemic. Nearly every outlet is covering the pandemic in some way—celebrities live streaming their self-quarantine, restaurants rolling out new health practices and food delivery options, educators and parents finding ways to teach kids at home. There’s an overwhelming number of ways the media has covered the virus. But on top of that, there’s also blatant misinformation about the virus distracting us from the useful facts. It’s all appearing in one big blur on Facebook or Twitter feeds. And it doesn’t help that nearly every few hours we’re getting important, and often urgent, updates to the evolving story. This week, guest host John Dankosky speaks with two scientists who can help fact-check your news feed. Angela Rasmussen, assistant research scientist and virologist at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, and Akiko Iwasaki, professor of immunology at the Yale University School of Medicine give us a clearer picture of the coronavirus news this week. Poet Jane Hirshfield calls these “unaccountable” times. Crises in the biosphere—climate change, extinctions—collide with crises in human life. And in her new book Ledger she says she has tried to do the accounting of where we, human beings, are as a result. As a poet whose work touches on the Hubble telescope, the proteins of itch, and the silencing of climate researchers, Hirshfield talks with John Dankosky about the particular observational capacity of language, and why scientists and poets can share similar awe. Hirshfield is also the founder of Poets for Science, which continues a project to create a global community poem started after 2017’s March for Science. “When we introduced them in isolated pairs they formed relationships much faster, like college students in a dorm room,” Carter said to Science Friday earlier this week. “And when we introduced a bat into a group of three, that was faster than when we just put two larger groups together.” Carter has also studied how illness changes social relationships within a vampire bat roost. He found that if a baby bat gets sick, for instance, the mom won’t stop grooming or sharing food with their offspring. But that same bat will stop participating in some social behavior with a close roost-mate that isn’t family. Carter joins Science Friday guest host John Dankosky to talk about researching vampire bats, and what their response to illness tells us about our own time social distancing during the coronavirus outbreak. See more photos and video of social bat behavior below. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski, sitting in for Ira Flato, and I just want to note here, Ira is fine. He's just spending this week at home, like most of you. He had planned to go to spring training to see some baseball, and as they used to say about the Brooklyn Dodgers, you're going to have to wait until next year. But you will not have to wait for Ira that long. He's going to be back next week. Later this hour, our experts will weigh in on this week's coronavirus news stories, plus a little science poetry to cleanse the palate. But first since we're, missing a lot of social contact these days. Let's talk about what we've learned from other social mammals. Take vampire bats, for instance. Sometimes they get along and sometimes they fight. When bats have strong bonds, they'll do things like groom each other and share food by regurgitating blood into each other's mouths, which sounds gross unless you're a bat. But when a vampire bat gets sick, it changes the way other bats interact with them. In fact, the way they act is similar in some ways to how humans have reacted to COVID-19. Jerry Carter is an assistant professor and behavioral ecologist at Ohio State University. Jerry, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for being here.

Hi, yeah, thanks for inviting me. So before we get started on connections to coronavirus, maybe you can give us an idea of just how social vampire bats are. Yeah, so they have this food sharing behavior, which seems to be something that is an extension of parental care. So all the mothers regurgitate food, blood to their offspring, but they also do this for other adults, including unrelated adults. When you study these vampire bats, you're just studying the females, right? Yeah, we really focus on the females because the females have these long-term social relationships with each other.

The males tend to set up territories and then fight with other males over these territories, and they don't seem to form very stable relationships with females or with other males. Oh, that's really interesting. So you might find something entirely different if you just studied male vampire bats. Yeah, it seems to be that the males are spending a lot of their time trying to gain access to different territories where the females aggregate. But the females are moving between different territories. So these can be, for instance, a location in a cave or a hollow tree. And the males don't seem to be able to guard the females in any way. In fact, the females are a little larger than the males. Okay. Okay, so let's get to this idea. Vampire bats and coronavirus, not exactly things I would normally think about in the same sentence. How do these tie together? Well, there's this social distancing that we're all doing right now, which is really trying to change our social networks before we get sick. But when individuals do get sick, their social network also changes just as a byproduct of being lethargic. So you move around less, you encounter fewer individuals. And so that sickness behavior has to be a good. And so that sickness behavior has.

an effect on social network structure itself. And so this is something that we were looking at in the vampire bats and other people have looked at it in mice and we've also looked at how the kind of relationship that the bats have changes how the sickness of behavior affects their social ties. So the individuals that have stronger relationships, those relationships are going to be more robust than individuals that are spending a lot of time together but don't necessarily have, for instance, a family relationship. Okay, so just like right now, you're spending a lot of time with your family, but your

coworkers you're not hardly spending any time with, and you're really distant from a sick coworker. That's what you're finding in vampire bats, too. Yeah, exactly. So the way that we typically would measure network ties is, for instance, the amount of time that you're spending with other individuals. So you could be spending, say, some certain amount of time with your coworkers. in some certain amount of time with your kids, but that doesn't mean that those relationships are

equivalent, even though the amount of time you spend is the same. When you're sick, you could be spending even more time with your kids or the same amount of time and much less time with coworkers. And so this is something we were trying to show with vampire bats that it's not just the amount of time that defines the relationship, but also kind of you can think about it as a robustness, so how much the relationship changes when the individuals are feeling lethargic. So tell us more about the changes in behavior. about grooming and food sharing, different types of closeness. Tell us about some of the differences here, depending on the behaviors. So we actually did a series of studies on this.

We basically injected the bats with something called lipopolysaccharide, which is on the cell wall of bacteria, and so it triggers their immune system. They get a fever, and they mount an immune response. They become lethargic, and they just sleep more and are less active. But there's no live pathogen. So there's no passage in the same way that, for instance, rabies would manipulate their behavior. This is just the bats having sickness behavior.

We saw how this changed their grooming and their social grooming, and then we sort of put them in different cages to control how much time they're forced to be around each other. So we did this when they were in small cages, and then we also did this with in a flight cage where they could choose to associate with different bats.

And now we're doing it in the wild. So we have bats out in the field and we've put little proximity sensors on them. We can actually see minute by minute, hour by hour, how the bats behaviors is changing in the wild. But we haven't published that last study yet. This food sharing behavior is important because it's not just like a nice thing that bats do for each other, but this is a real lifesaver too. This is important for survival for some bats.

Yeah, it's interesting because it's a pretty rare thing to see in the animal world that animals are really paying a cost to cooperate with another individual. And so there's some risk entailed in that. That's one of the reasons that we're interested in vampire bats is that it's a really costly form of cooperation that would apply to some models that are interesting because we want to figure out why, it is that animals make a costly investment in another. If there's no immediate, there's no immediate benefit to them, how do they sort of prevent themselves from being exploited? And they start to warm up to this behavior, right? I mean, you've talked about this a little bit, but there's the grooming behavior that would

precede any food sharing behavior. So it's almost like these bats are getting to know each other a little bit more before they trust. I don't know, is trust a word I can use? Yeah. I think you can think about it as a kind of trust. We were testing this model that people often call raising the stakes or testing the waters. And this is a game theory model, which is describing a situation, just like I had said,

where cooperation is risky and entails a cost. So if you make a cooperative investment in another individual, and that individual doesn't cooperate with you, then you might be even worse off than if you had never engaged with that partner at all. So you can imagine all the different scenarios in which that's the case. And one strategy to minimize risk is instead of putting all of your cooperation in one big pot, giving it up into lots of little small investments. So starting out with something really small. So maybe you just see if you're tolerated by another individual and then you grim a little bit.

And then if that goes well, you grim a little bit more. And so you're gradually testing the waters and escalating these investments. So it's conditionally on how you're received. And this allows you to, yeah, build up this trust before you start making larger investments, larger more risky investments. I guess I'm wondering what you think all this means to vampire bats writ large if the females are doing this sort of behavior where they're assessing risk and they're thinking about what sort of relationship they want to have. And meanwhile, the males are just fighting over territory. I mean, what does that say about the species overall that that's the dynamic there?

Yeah, well, the females make a really large investment in their offspring, so they have much longer period of parental care than, for instance, other bats. They have a gestation period of seven months, which is really long time for a small animal like that. They only have one offspring at a time. And so there's really this big reproductive costs that they're paying to just maintain the energy and to produce milk. And so the males are really spending most of their time trying to just gain access to females. Whereas for females, staying healthy and staying alive and keeping their offspring alive is really the key to their reproduction and their evolutionary fitness. So there's a lot of animals that are social in different ways. What is it you think about vampire bats that makes their social behavior more similar to humans than, say, I don't know,

Vampire bats have a kind of social complexity that's similar to the kind of social complexity seeing many primates or dolphins and whales or ravens and crows, elephants, animals that have these very individualized relationships where there's a mix of cooperation and conflict. And that's quite different from a truly youth social society like ants or bees where each individual is just living only for the colony. So individual ants or individual bees don't really care about their own survival. They're only trying to gather food for the brood in their colony. And of course, humans are not like that, and vampire bats are not like that.

They have very differentiated relationships on individuals they get along with and other ones they don't. And so they're really kind of navigating this complex social environment, trying to have mutually beneficial interactions, but also avoid, costly interactions, and also competing with each other in subtle ways as well. And one of the things you found that's so interesting is if you had a bat from one place and a bat from another place, you put them together and they're strangers, they might learn to get along, but if you put a whole bunch of bats from one place next to a whole bunch of bats from another place, just like humans, they'd get into clicks or groups of some sort.

Yeah, the outside options really matter. So bats that don't have. familiar partners that they could be associated with and are only presented with another stranger, they're more likely to start interacting with that stranger and then form a relationship because of that. So this is something that we're starting to think about more and more is the sort of market of possible partners that are available to you when you're making decisions about what kinds of relationships you're going to form. Really quickly, why did you start studying vampire bats in the first place? So I've actually been really fascinated by bats ever since I was a little kid.

It's one of my youngest memories is seeing a bat. And, yeah, as I got interested in animal behavior and cooperation, it just made sense to combine my interest in cooperation with my interest in bats. Well, and I'm glad you were able to bring us a little social science that helps us in this very anti-social times. It seems Jerry Carter studies the social lives of vampire bats at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. Jerry, thanks so much for joining us. I really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me. When we come back, are you feeling swamped in coronavirus news, having a hard time telling what's real and what is, well, speculation? We've got a few experts here to help you fact-check your news feed. It's coming up right after this. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dengoski.

It is pretty overwhelming right now. All of my social media feeds, all my news alerts, all of my casual conversations are all about coronavirus. And they're all funneling me a constant stream of stories and theories and charts and graphs and speculation. Even right now, we're getting reports that Illinois is about to issue a shelter and place order for the entire state effect of this Saturday. This is way too much to keep straight.

And I'm sure you're probably experiencing something like this, too, and you're feeling the information overload. Like Laura on Twitter, who said to us, I feel like the real fake news proclamations are giving me whiplash, is there really evidence to support avoiding ibuprofen with this? Thanks for tweeting at us, Lauren. We'll answer that and a few other questions from our listeners this hour. And we want to let you know that over the next few weeks on Science Friday, we've talked to a lot of experts about coronavirus. And we've compiled all their tips and advice for staying healthy and a handy guide on our website,

Science Friday.com slash coronavirus facts. This is a place for answers to some of the questions our listeners have been asking. to help you figure out what to trust, what not to trust, and what we don't know enough about yet. Well, we've invited two experts to talk to us through some of these biggest headlines. Kiko Iwasaki is Professor of Immunology at Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. Iwasaki, welcome back to Science Friday. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me.

And Angela Rasmussen is Assistant Research Scientist and virologist at the Columbia Malman School of Public Health. Welcome, Dr. Rasmussen. Thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me. And again, you can tweet at us at SciFry if you've got some questions. And I've got so many questions here for our guests. Dr. Asmussen, I'll start with you. As I mentioned in the intro, almost every news outlet is covering coronavirus right now exclusively,

even ones that don't normally cover science or health. What is your general impression about the way the media is covering this pandemic? Are they sensationalizing it? Are they getting most of the stuff right? I think that it really depends on who is covering it. There are a number of excellent science journalists who have made a living, communicating information about this pandemic as well as other public health crises very effectively in a way that the public can access and understand. I think the problem comes down to either media outlets that tend to sensationalize news or just don't have very much experience talking about things like viral infections. Our field of study is filled with jargon.

and sometimes some of the facts and charts and figures that come out can be easily misinterpreted. And I think that much of the misinterpretation that has occurred is just the fact that people aren't accustomed to looking at epidemiological data or virological data or clinical data. And sometimes miscommunications happen. Well, and even with all of these studies coming out right now, a lot of them are small, many of them haven't been peer-reviewed. I mean, how should we judge some of these studies that are coming out, even the ones that seemingly are reputable? So that's one thing that has been both wonderful and difficult about this pandemic. One thing that we have now that we didn't have, for example, during the 2014-216 Ebola epidemic, are these pre-print servers. And pre-print servers are a great way for scientists to get their manuscripts and their data out to the public prior to undergoing peer review, which can be a lengthy process.

The problem with that is that so many papers are being posted on preprint servers that it's very difficult to know which of those papers are good quality science and which of them need some more work or are just generally bad. And there have been several examples of that. For example, the study that suggested that this coronavirus emerged from snakes was based on a very flawed analysis. But because it was posted on a preprint server, it had the appearance of a legitimate scientific manuscript, and that is one of the troubles of people who are not as experienced with reporting

on scientific issues, being able to distinguish papers such as that one from other really excellent papers that have come out on preprint servers. And I know it's hard to tell, but is there any basic guideline you can give people on what to pay attention to and what not to, because it is so hard to determine? Well, of course, people should pay attention to the CDC and the WHO, but also, So when people are looking through Twitter, for example, or they're reading articles, look to see who's being interviewed. Look to see what their experiences. You can Google them and find a list of their scientific papers.

If you Google me, you can find out that I've worked on Merse coronavirus and Ebola and so forth. You can see that I have an appointment at Columbia University. Therefore, I might be a more trusted source to ask about virology than somebody who has a different area of subject matter expertise. East. So let's walk through some of these studies and news headlines that have come out recently and some things that have been in the news. Maybe you can help us understand some context. Dr. Iwasaki, John McDonald, on Twitter, says we're hearing lots of different stories about the virus surviving on surfaces, even in the air. Should I be sanitizing all the mail that arrives in my mailbox? Well, there's a good question. There was a study in the New England Journal of Medicine that looked at that this week. Could you tell us a bit more about what the study actually showed? Yes. So there was a very informative study that was published by Vincent Monster's group at the NIH, where they actually compared the stability of the virus on different surfaces as well as in the air. So they compared the ability of the virus to stay viable, meaning that they're still infectious. And on stainless steel and plastic, the half-life, which means the time that it takes for half the virus to stay viable, meaning that they're still infectious. and on stainless steel and plastic, the half-life, which means the time that it takes for half the virus just to go away, was about five to six hours, whereas on cardboard was about 3.5 hours, and copper was less than an hour.

And these were done to examine how much of the virus that's on the surface can stay viable for these time periods. And one kind of surprising or, you know, potentially threatening aspect that they found was that even in the aerosol, these small particles that the viruses can survive in the air, they found about half a left of one hour, meaning that the virus can stay in the air, suspended for an hour. half the viruses that are still alive and infectious. And just to add a little more context to this, the humidity and the temperature of these experiments are critical. So they did these experiments on the surface at 40% relative humidity, whereas the one for the aerosol was done at 65% humidity,

which is quite high, I especially considering the winter months, which means that these air particles, that contain the viruses can stay alive for at least an hour at such a high humidity. But in our households right now, the humidity of the air is quite low, around 20% relative humidity. So it's expected that these viral particles that are in the air can survive for even a longer time period than an hour. What about, I mean, you talk about humidity. As I was driving into New York City today, it was raining. If it's raining, does that cut down on the possibility that the droplets or the airborne particles are going to stay in the air longer?

That's correct. So the higher the humidity, less stable these viruses become. And also they accumulate water droplet on the surface, and they tend to kind of drop down on the surfaces. So the air stability really depends on the amount of humidity. in the air. Dr. Smeson, can we take these numbers that we just heard 24 hours on cardboard, three days on plastic or steel? And is that fact right now? Is that something we should sort of take to the bank? Well, it is and it isn't. It's completely dependent on the conditions that those experiments were done in. So as Dr. Iwasaki was just saying, those apply to specific temperature

and humidity conditions. What we don't know right now is how other temperature or humidity conditions would affect those things. Okay, so let's move on to another study covered in the news this week about viral shedding. One example headline says coronavirus can live in patients for five weeks after contagion, suggesting people are still infectious even after they've recovered. Dr. Usmussen, is that true? So it's a very complicated thing to explain to the public that the test does not actually test for infectious virus. It tests for the virus's genetic material. And so what that means is that those patients who've tested positive repeatedly after recovering from their symptoms have the virus's genetic material in their cells, but that does not mean that they are producing infectious virus.

So right now, as far as I'm aware, it has not been studied whether those patients are actually shedding infectious virus that could infect another person, be transmitting. And so, to other people. Could you just explain the term shedding just so we understand exactly what it means? Sure. Shetting is when you, through mucus or saliva or respiratory droplets, are putting out into the environment infectious virus that could be transmitted to another person. Why do you think public health professionals aren't testing to see if people are really still infectious or not? I mean, what are the barriers there? Obviously, we've found quite a few in the public health realm, but it seems pretty important to know.

It is very important to know, but unfortunately, those tests take a lot longer. We look for infectious virus in the lab by doing something called a plaque assay or a T-CID-50 assay. And what that means is we take a sample. We put it on cells in culture, and we wait to see if those cells become infected, produce more virus, and die. That process usually takes a couple days. It also requires requires work in a lab that has higher bioc containment standards than most clinical diagnostic laboratories and hospitals. So you need to do that work in a BSL3 lab where there are specific requirements for personal protective equipment, as well as engineered controls to make sure that the virus stays in the lab where it's supposed to be and doesn't infect any of the people working with it.

So as important as that is, I mean, if we're having trouble with more basic tests, that seems like a test that's far too complicated, far too complex to be doing at a large scale right now. Correct. That's why those types of tests are not used for clinical diagnostics. The quantitative RTPCR test that is used is much safer and it's much faster and it's much easier to distribute to a wide variety of clinical laboratories. Dr. Ewasaki, we saw a lot of news reports covering the UK's herd immunity strategy for dealing with COVID-19. Some scientists there expressed outrage over that plan. Can you remind us about what herd immunity is and how it's been used to control viral outbreaks in the past? Oh, yeah, sure.

So herd immunity describes an indirect protection from an infectious disease when sufficient percentage of the people within a community is immune to the pathogen. So imagine if 90% of the people are already immune to a particular virus. Even an unimmunized person can become protected because the virus transmission is, halted by the immune population. So it's very important to achieve herd immunity to prevent the spread of infectious disease. And this is usually done by vaccination. Even though infectious agents can cause herd immunity, the safest way is to achieve herd immunity is through vaccination. But this strategy that the UK was considering, at least, would be with a live virus, not a vaccine,

and that is substantially different, right? Yeah, I was pretty strong. when I first heard about this strategy because trying to achieve herd immunity using a live and deadly infectious agent in this case is a very dangerous proposition because even if you were to quarantine the high-risk individual, the so-called low-risk individuals

who are more younger population, some of them will become critically ill and end up dying of this disease. So I think they are kind of modifying this strategy to make sure that people are actually staying home and, you know, practicing social distancing. I'm John Dankoski, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. We're fact-checking some coronavirus news with Aikiko Iwasaki from Yale University School of Medicine

and Angela Rasmussen from Columbia Mailman School of Public Health. There's another report from the UK this week, a study from Imperial College London. Heather on Twitter says there's been a lot of. of debate about this report and reports on this report, what's true and how much does it matter? The conclusion, basically, Dr. Rasmussen, is we may need to isolate for something like 18 months. Can you give us your take on that? Yes, so that conclusion is based on not having any interventions at all. If we did nothing and allowed the virus to spread freely throughout the population,

then we would have 2.2 million deaths in the United States, according to that study, The caveat is that it's a model, and it's using the available data that we have to predict what the outcome would be. According to that model, the only way to minimize the number of deaths and severe cases in the United States, also deaths that would be caused by overwhelming the hospital system, so severely ill patients that would not necessarily die. But in this case, they're dying because they don't have access to the type of care, such as ventilators, and we've heard a lot about those shortages in the news. 18 months is the time frame in which we would be able to develop a vaccine. And that report suggests that the only way we have now with what we know now

is to continue doing this social distancing except a more extreme version with much more limited mobility and travel for the next 18 months, which personally I don't think is actually sustainable for our society or our economy. One thing that could change that is the development of an effective antiviral. If we had a way to treat patients prior to them becoming severely ill in particular, that would reduce some of the load on the health care system and the hospital system, and that would change the predictions that that model is making. So there's a lot more stories we want to get to.

We're running low on time. So Dr. Iwasaki, I want to ask you, some news outlets are reporting that coronavirus might go away as the temperature warms up. Are we expecting this to be seasonal in some way? Well, so the other kinds of coronaviruses that usually circulate in humans that cause common cold, they are usually seasonal, and they only occur during the winter months. And so, however, this new COVID-19 virus is just newly emerging, And it's really hard to predict whether it would also follow this seasonal pattern. However, our research has shown that raising the humidity to about 40 to 60% will allow the clearance of the virus from the respiratory tract better than if we were at a 20% humidity. So I think there is an intervention that we can do, which is to humidify homes or offices or hospitals in order to reduce the impact of the disease.

within the human population. Very quickly, if this is a seasonal virus, does it come back next year, maybe in a different strain? Is that possible? Yeah, it's entirely possible. We'll have to see what happens next year, but it's possible.

My goodness. So much more to talk about. We'll have to continue this conversation. Aikiko Iwasaku is Professor of Immunology at the Yale University School of Medicine. Angela Rusmussen is assistant research scientist and virologist at the Columbia. be a mailman's school of public health.

This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. And now we're going to turn, as many of us do in times of stress or uncertainty, to poetry. Poet Jane Hirschfield has a long relationship with science, from her 2004 poem, Global Warming, to her many works about the natural world, physics, even proteins in the human body. And her newest book, Ledger, is no different, from the International Space Station's view of global warming to the small size and smaller cares of an ant. She examines crises in the biosphere and brings them to human lives.

Here to talk about what it means to bring science into poetry, how poetry can be a tool for observation just as much as science can, and hopefully how poetry can help us find balance in this crisis. Poet, essayist, and translator Jane Hirschfield, her latest book is called Ledger. She lives in the Bay Area and joins us by phone.

Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much. And thanks so much for this book. It's beautiful. I appreciate that. Your book came out last week, and when we scheduled this interview, it was a little bit of a different world. We were thinking about talking about climate change. I want you to read your poem, Cataclysm, and then maybe we can talk a bit about this idea of how the world has changed right after we hear it.

Absolutely. So this is the first time I've spoken today because I'm sheltering in place, so my voice is a little hoarse, I notice. Okay. cataclysm. It begins subtly. The magpie withdraws an inch from the birch tree. The porcupine wants nothing to do with the skink. Fish unschool.

Sheep unflocked to separately graze. Clouds, meanwhile, declare to the sky, they have nothing to do with the sky, which is not visible as they are, nor knows the trick of turning into infant, tumbling, pterodactyl. The turtles in moonlight, their long arrangement is over. As for the humans, let us not speak of the humans, let us speak of their language.

The first person singular condemns the second person plural for betrayals, neither has words left to name. The fed consider the hungry and stay silent. So when I read this poem for the first time, last week in the midst of all this, it kicked me directly in the stomach because of how prescient it seems to be about where we are right now. How do you think of this poem differently as you're sheltered in place today? Well, it absolutely startled me to realize that what began as a description of ecological unraveling became in its metaphorical way a fairly accurate description of social distancing. That's just peculiar. But it also, as the whole book does,

is a poem that was trying to take some account of what feels to me absolutely unaccountable and figure out as art does, you know, how can we navigate? How can we open our eyes the next day? and in that way, you know, the crises, the larger crisis of environmental, close to catastrophe is not at all disconnected from the current catastrophe and crisis, which is simply making a great deal more instantly visible, undeniable, and unpostponable, the fact that there are no borders between us, that we live in a world of shared faith. And I think it just draws to my attention the tragedy of us pulling apart from one another being forced to. I mean, you don't think of the fish unschooling.

And when you do, it's a sad and scary thought, isn't it? Yes, it is. Yes, it is. And I think that one of the reasons I'm very glad to have art be part of the conversation, as now that we're all settling in a tiny bit, it's beginning more and more to be, is because art is a way that allows you, even in solitude, to partake of community and to recognize that you're not alone, that everything you've experienced, another human being has experienced, and lived not only to survive, but to leave witness.

You call these unaccountable times. You said this already. Tell me more about what you mean for that. Well, I'm a child of the late 60s, early 70s. I remember the first Earth Day 50 years ago. And everything we knew then 50 years ago, everything we hoped. And to me, it is unfathomable that so little has been done. That here I am a lifetime from that young woman.

and the sheer grief of all of the undone, the unaddressed, the ignored, the turned away from, the failure, not of knowledge, but of taking knowledge seriously, that became very acute to me over the years that I was writing this book and these poems. and so it permeates it. And when something is unfathomable, what does a human being do? I think the first thing you need to do is feel simply that to break through the superficiality or the exhaustion or the distraction of our regular lives. And to say, no, I am going to respond to this. and when you respond to something, you begin to take responsibility for it. Why did you call the book Ledger?

Well, there's a great deal of accounting in it. There's the numbers of species as they vanish. There's the height of a five-foot island threatened by sea rise. And there is the attempt to balance my grief and my despair with praise, with appreciation, with gladness that I can still wake up in the morning. And there is my local mountain, and there are the cedar wax wings at last winter's berries, still on the cattoniaster.

And finding that balance is the way you keep opening your eyes every day. We're talking with the poet Jane Hirschfield, and I'm wondering if you could read your poem, My Debt, for us. Yes. So this is the last poem in the book, and in a way this is the poem in which I did find that balance, that I realized I had been writing so much into the darkness of our current unraveling, you know, social and unraveling of justice and unraveling of compassion as well as biological. And I suddenly was shaken by the realization that, no, it is rude.

It is simply rude not to praise the beauty of the world, which is still all around us. So here's my debt. Like all who believe in the senses, I was an accountant, copyist, statistician, not a registrar, witness, permitted to touch the leaf of a thistle, the trembling work of a spider, to ponder the Hubble's recordings. It did not matter if I believed in the party of particle or of wave as I carried no weapon. It did not matter if I believed. I weighed ashes, actions, cities that glittered like rubies on the scales I was given,

calibrated in units of fear and amazement. I wrote the word it, the word is. I entered the dead. that is owed to the real. Forgive spine-covered leaf, soft-bodied spider, octopus lifting, one curious tentacle back toward the hand of the diver, that in such black ink I set down your flammable colors.

We asked our listeners what some of their favorite poems about science were, and we had this response from Rissy, in Milwaukee. Let's listen. My favorite poem was read to me as a child by my mother and it introduced me to the beauties of nature and the wisdom of animals. It's called Something Told the Wild Geese by Rachel Field.

Something told the wild geese it was time to go. Though the fields lay golden, something whispered snow. Something told the wild geese, it was time to fly. Summer sun was on their wings, winter in their cry.

That's beautiful. Beautiful. What do you think poetry about the natural world speaks to in us? I think it speaks to the absolute indelible connection that even those of us who grew up in cities, as I did on East 20th Street in Manhattan, we recognize in that the world we evolved to be in. And we recognize in beauty, everything. that evolution set inside of us for survival of heart and spirit and mind as well as the body. I have a theory that the reason we like shiny things is because in nature it indicates very often water.

And thirsty people will find shiny things beautiful. I think one of the things also that many of your poems do, and some of my favorite poems about nature do, is they describe the creatures that inhabit this world with us animals in a way that I feel is so much more real than the way popular culture has depicted them. I feel as though so often popular culture takes animals and ascribes human characteristics to them. But in your poems or the poems of Mary Oliver, which I love so much about birds, there's a way in which you describe the birdiness of something, right, that is just observation of what it is. I'm wondering if you talk about that, because in some ways you have a very scientific view of animals.

Well, the first thing that comes to mind is we are animals, and I think the simple recognition of that solidarity of existence really matters that as we are mammals of a certain era, and we recognize that we are not the center of the universe when we look at all of the others, the insects, the fishes, the birds, and octopi those gloriously intelligent creatures who evolved their intelligence so differently than we did. And we feel in a way, for me, I know this strikes some people as odd,

but for me it is a great relief not to feel myself. self the center of things. I am much happier when I can recognize my human existence as continuous with all of these other existences pursuing their own gloriously evolved lives in fascinating detail. And this goes down to the levels of molecules and atoms, not just animals. It is such an an extraordinary panoply existence. And if I think I'm the center of it, what burden that is. I'm John Dankowski, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Jane Hirschfeld, why does science keep making its way into your work?

Well, I have a long relationship to it, which I can't really explain where that comes from. I was a curious child, but the earliest of my poems that I still have a working relationship to was written in 1982, and it has the strong forces and weak forces of physics in it. Where did that come from? I wasn't a physicist, but it was a vocabulary that allowed me both to appreciate it for its own fascination and also to think about other things. I've been a poet in residence for an experimental forest in Oregon, the H.J. Andrews, and for a neuroscience program at UCSSF, I ended up getting involved with the March for Science and starting an organization called Poets for Science, which people can find out about online at Poets for Science.org. They can participate in a global community poem, which is hosted on that website.

site at Kent State's WIC Poetry Center. So it's just been a continuous conversation for me, which I think is in some ways the byproduct of parallel curiosities. You know, science is an investigative art. Poetry is an investigative technology and science. And how do you work then science into your work? When you learn something new that inspires you, do you devour everything you can about it? Do you ask a friend who's an expert in that field?

How do you work through it in your work? Well, it's a little bit the other way around in that I simply listen to everything. A great many of my friends are research scientists, and I also read the Science Time section and listen to Science Friday. and those bright, shiny objects are something that the magpie poet will then, sometimes many years later, suddenly need, and it will come into a poem because I need it to think about what that poem is. So one example of it is the Science Times had an article about the protein of itch and another article about the microbiome. And I was thinking, I began writing about that simply because it was so interesting. But it became a poem exploring where does self begin and end.

you know, what is the self when our microbiome says the self, you know, what is us? Which part of us is us? Which part of us is not us? And, you know, this is the same question that any child who eats a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and wonders, when does it stop being the sandwich and start being me? We all ask these things. But as a poet, I occasionally try to put it into relatively few words, trying to work their way through something and arrive at a conclusion or a discovery or a feeling or an emotional response that didn't quite exist before. Jane Hirschfeld, this has been wonderful, and I thank you so much for spending some time with this, especially at this time in which it feels as though we need poetry more than ever.

Thank you for being with us here on Science Friday. Thank you so much for having me on. The new book is called Ledger. You can read some of her poems on our website. It's at sciencefriday.com slash poems. If you missed any part of this program or I'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Every day is Science Friday these days.

And on the Science Friday VoxPop app, are you a health care worker caring for people during this coronavirus crisis? How are you protecting yourself? Leave us a message and let us know. That's on the Science Friday Vox Pop app, wherever you get your apps. Say hi to us on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or email us. The email address, SciFry at Science Friday.com. Send feedback. Tell us what you'd like us to cover too. Ira is back next week. Stay safe, everyone. In New York. I'm John Dinkoski.