Science Friday - Coronavirus Update, Genuine Fakes, Neanderthal News. Feb. 21, 2020, Part 2

Episode Date: February 21, 2020

What Is Real And Fake? There are two ways to grow a diamond. You can dig one up from the Earth—a product of billions of years of pressure and heat placed on carbon. Or you can make one in a lab—by applying lots of that same heat and pressure to tiny starter crystals—and get it made much faster.  Put these two objects under a microscope and they look exactly the same. But is the lab-grown diamond real or fake? The answer lies somewhere in between. The same goes for many other things, like artificial flavors or our favorite nature documentaries that put a sensational spin on an otherwise unvarnished look at wildlife.  Writer and historian Lydia Pyne would call them “genuine fakes” and she explores some of them in her latest book Genuine Fakes: How Phony Things Teach Us About Real Stuff. She joins Ira to talk about the vast gray area between real and fake when it comes to science.  How Are COVID-19 Numbers Counted? This week, the death toll attributed to the new coronavirus outbreak passed 2,000 people. And while that number is solid, many of the other numbers involved with this disease, including the total number infected and the degree of transmissibility of the virus, change from day to day. Those shifting numbers are in part due to changes in how countries, such as China, are diagnosing patients and defining who is “infected.”   It can be difficult to know what information deserves attention, especially when information on possible transmission routes and timelines for vaccine development shift constantly. Helen Branswell, senior reporter on infection diseases at STAT, joins Ira for an update on COVID-19 and a conversation about evaluating medical information in the midst of a developing story. An Ancient Burial In A Famous Cave Recently, modern archaeologists returned to Shanidar Cave, located in what is now Kurdistan, and found more Neanderthal remains, including a partial “articulated” skeleton that appears to have been deliberately positioned in a trench near the earlier discoveries.  Emma Pomeroy, a lecturer in the department of archeology at Cambridge University, was the osteologist on the recent archeological team. She says the new find could provide insights into how Neanderthals viewed their dead, their sense of self, and more.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A bit later in the hour, a look at some newly unearthed Neanderthal bones, and we ponder whether synthetic diamonds could be genuine and fake at the same time. But first, this week, the death toll from the new coronavirus outbreak passed 2000. And while that number is good for now, many of the other numbers we're hearing. How many cases? How fast is it spreading? That number those numbers seem to change day to day. And joining me now to help sort of out the shifting status of COVID-19 is Helen Brandswell, a senior reporter covering infectious disease and public health for stat in Boston. She joins us via Skype. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. Thanks for having me. Cases keep going up all the time. Yes, they are going up and they're coming from different parts of the world as well. It's not just China anymore. For example. Well, very interestingly, cases have spiked in South Korea. They started out the week with 30 cases. They ended the week with 204.

The virus seems to be spreading in a religious community there and spreading very nicely. As well, Iran on Wednesday announced that it had found two cases and people who had already died. And by today, that was 18 cases for deaths. And Iran has actually exported two cases, one to Canada and one to Lebanon. So that's a new hot spot. So are we seeing more cases because there's better diagnosis of the disease? We're just catching more of it as it spreads? Well, certainly more testing will find more cases.

That's true. And more countries are coming online with the ability to be able to test. But I think we're seeing more cases because there are more cases. Yeah. Yeah, and I was interested to see a report this week from the Chinese, their centers for disease control. that stool samples had tested positive for live virus in it? I didn't see that one.

Is it live virus? That would be interesting. Okay, I'd seen PCR, you know, viral fragments, which would be interesting. Well, I may be having it wrong. I know there were viruses, but you're saying maybe they're not live viruses. I don't know. Your information may be better than mine, but it would be important to note because, obviously, if it's viral particles, that doesn't necessarily mean it's potentially.

potentially infectious. If it's live virus that can be cultured, then conceivably you could have a sort of fecal-oral root, although, you know, this is a respiratory virus, and people don't typically get too near other people's stool. So it seems much more likely that, you know, coughing and sneezing and maybe touching contaminated surfaces and then touching our faces is going to be more the route that one would get infected by. Yeah, people are also very interested in the estimates of how easily the disease is transmitted, or often at least to death and infect the persons. But those numbers are very dependent on the initial estimates of how many people are infected, correct? Yeah, yeah, we still don't really have a good picture of that. I mean, we know as of today that about 77,000 people have been confirmed to have had the virus. but it's likely that there are lots of people that have had infection and haven't been detected because in a lot of places the protocol requires you or has required in the past

a person to have had pneumonia before they would even get tested. And so that would automatically rule out anybody who has mild infection and, you know, maybe just has what looks like a common cold. Are there reports I've heard? There are reports of people who have the virus but don't show any symptoms. of it. Yeah, there have been several small case studies that report on a few people who seem to be completely symptom-free, and yet still have, you know, about the same amount of virus in their upper respiratory track as people who have symptoms, which is worrying because obviously it could

mean that they could be contributing to the spread. Are the numbers that the Chinese are giving us, Are they dependable numbers? Because they seem to be changing dramatically back and forth. Yeah. So initially they were only releasing lab-confirmed cases and acknowledging to the World Health Organization that they had, you know, a bit of a problem dealing with a backlog of cases. And then at a point last week they said, all right,

we're going to include cases that have, CT scan evidence of pneumonia and symptoms of the disease. And if the people live in Hubei province, which is where the epicenter of the outbreak is, but these people haven't had a positive test. And so after that happened, the numbers spiked up. One day they reported 15,000 cases. And then this week they said, okay, we're going back to the old way of testing. We're not going to use a clinical diagnosis.

It's only lab-confirmed cases, and the cases plunged. The other night, they reported fewer than 400 cases, which is the first time in weeks that it's been in triple digits. Are they reliable? You know, I don't think anybody thinks they're catching all of the cases, because, as I mentioned before, you know, it's pretty clear from the cases that have come out of China that there's a lot of mild infection,

and it's very hard to find mild infection when you're responding to an outbreak like this. So that's probably being missed. You know, that's about as much as I can tell you. Yeah. Do we know how easy it is to catch the virus from one person to another? It seems pretty transmissible. You know, there have been different estimates of the reproductive number, the R-not, as your listeners probably know, you know, the number of people each person is likely to infect.

If anything is below one, an outbreak can't sustain itself, and anything above two, things get kind of brisk. The R-not for this has been estimated at something like two, two and a half to almost five, which is a pretty, you know, brisk level of transmission. it just sounds like people, this virus is very efficient at spreading from person to person. There was a report out of a company in Texas this week that claims to have invented a vaccine for this. Have you seen that report? I didn't see that one. There have been others. There's certainly a lab in Hong Kong announced two or three weeks ago that they probably, that they thought they had a vaccine.

But, I mean, when anybody is talking about a vaccine at this point, they're talking about a prototype or effectively a recipe for a vaccine. They're not actually talking about something you or I could get. You know, why do you say that? You mean because it takes a lot more time once you get the recipe to then go out and test it and get it to the market? Yeah, exactly. I mean, you have to make sure that your idea actually works. You have to test it in animals. And in fact, right now there's not even an established animal model for this disease yet.

So that has to be done before you can do the animal testing. You have to test it in people to see if it's safe. And then you have to test it in more people to see if it works. And then you have to make it. And, you know, it's not like you can commandeer company X's vaccine production line to make vaccine. You have to figure out, you know, where it's going to be pretty. and all of that takes time. People don't like to hear that, but, you know, earlier this week, Sanofi, which is a major

vaccine manufacturer, said that they were going to try to make a coronavirus vaccine, and they estimated that if they could get it done in three to four years, that that would be about as fast as it, as was possible. I think that's probably a more realistic timeline than people like to hear. Because we heard the federal government say they could have one within a year. Well, I've heard Dr. I was actually moderating a panel last week that Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was the head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he was on it.

And his institute is partnering with a biotech company to, produce a vaccine and he believes they could have a prototype within sort of 16 weeks of the start of the work so maybe at this point two and a half months from now or something but but then you still have to test it and he was saying he thought that they might be able to do phase one testing and people and have results sort of by the end of the year but they don't actually have anybody to make that vaccine yet. Why is that? Because there's no money to be made in the vaccine. Drug companies want to make billions on something they make, and that's not the scale we're talking about? Well, here's the thing. No one knows what's going to happen with this virus. It looks right now like

it's going to be bad, and we're going to be dealing with it for a while, in which case there would be a market for vaccine. But there have been so many instances in the past, couple of decades where a new virus emerged, the world demanded a vaccine immediately, and all of the major manufacturers stepped forward and tried to make a vaccine. You can think about West Nile virus arriving in the United States or chicken guinea or Ebola, the big Ebola outbreak. That did lead to a vaccine, but that one had been in the works for about 15 years before that. Zika, a few years ago, people wanted it.

vaccine and then the threat seemed to dissipate and with it went the market. You know, vaccine manufacturers are companies. They have to make a profit and it's, you know, time and again they have tried to make vaccines for these kinds of emerging threats only to lose time, money, opportunity costs and not end up with a product. So this time around they've been more cautious about getting into it. So it's a question of number of deaths before we see some action. I think it's more about sort of a sense of certainty that this is established,

that it's establishing itself and going to be around and a problem that people are going to want addressed. You know, China has been trying to contain it at the source, put it out within China. You know, they've taken these extraordinary steps to, quarantine cities were, you know, tens of millions of people. Yeah, we've been following that. Right.

And if they were to manage to do that, then, you know, the demand for a vaccine would go away. It seems frankly hard to believe with 77,000 cases globally that that could be done. But, um, I got, I guess, I will, Helen, we'll pick it up when we can later on. Thank you for taking time to be with us. Okay. Helen Brownsville, Senior Reporter, a stat in Boston. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about Nandethals in a burial site that's raised some interesting new questions.

Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, archaeologists explored a site known as Shannadar Cave, located in what is now Kurdistan. Among the finds were Neanderthal bones, and mixed among the bones of one individual, known as Shanadar IV, was a quantity of pollen. And when you find pollen, what does that mean? Perhaps the remains were intentionally buried with flowers.

That assumption by some archaeologists sparked an ongoing controversy among them. Did the pollen get there via contamination by people or animals? Or was it a significant burial behavior? we never knew Neanderthals had. Recent modern archaeologists returned to the cave and found even more Neanderthal remains, which of course provided some answers and

raised more questions. Don't me now to discuss the find is Dr. Emma Pomeroy, a lecturer in the Department of Archaeology at Cambridge University in the UK. She's an osteologist and was on the team at Shannadar Cave. Dr. Pomeroy was also one of the

authors of the paper published in the journal Antiquity that reported the find. Welcome to the program, Dr. Pomeroy. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Can you set the scene for us here? Where is this cave and why is it so significant? So the cave itself is in northern Iraqi Kurdistan. It's just in the foothills of the Baradoff mountains. So there's quite marked relief in the geology. It looks quite mountainous. And you have a number of these natural caves in the region. And the cave where we've been working, Shanadar Cave, is actually quite a large cave.

And as you mentioned, it was first excavated by an American archaeologist, actually, Ralph Selecki, between 1951 and 1960. And he found these remains of 10 Neanderthals, and it's been essential to debate about Neanderthals ever since. But unfortunately, he was never able to go back and continue. his excavations because of the political situation. So in the last few years, we've been really lucky to be able to go there and start re-excavating the site and continue some of his work.

And your team was invited by the government, correct, to take a second look? Yes. Yes, that's right. So they initially approached Professor Graham Barker in the Department of Archaeology at Cambridge, who had previously excavated similar sites in other parts of the world. and they asked him whether he would be interested in excavating Shanada. And as he sort of says, he absolutely jumped at the chance because it's such a famous and such an important site.

So, yes, the team tried to start excavations in 2014, but there was some security issues, but since 2015, the excavations have been ongoing. And that's when I joined the project, when they started to find Neanderthal remains and needed a specialist in human bones. And you as a specialist, I'm thinking now it's what, 60 years since the cave people were in the cave looking at it? We must have new technology to examine the bones now.

Exactly. And that's exactly why the Kurdish regional government were keen, actually, the excavation started again, because obviously, you know, any field has moved on immensely in those 60 years. and archaeology is no less one of those fields. So we have a whole host of techniques that we can use not only to study the bones themselves, but actually to better understand what we call the context, so the sediments that they lie in and the soils, and to look for the kinds of clues that give us more detailed information

about perhaps how they lived, and when we find a skeleton like this, perhaps what happens, to that individual once they had died. So it's a really exciting opportunity. And we're so grateful to the Kurdish General and Director of Antiquities and their Zion Office for both the opportunity and actually the support and the collaboration we have with them. It's really an amazing site.

Well, tell me why it's so amazing. Why are you so excited about this new partial skeleton that you found? Well, to put it in context, so I mentioned before that Ralph Dellecki and his team found there are partial remains, or some fairly complete, of 10 Neanderthal individuals in the cave. These have been important, so there's one, Shanadar 4 that you mentioned, who they found clusters of pollen near the bones, and that was interpreted as an intentional burial with flowers put in the grave. But other individuals there have been really important in shaping our understanding of

Neanderthal behaviour, too. So, for example, Shanadar 1 was found to have had quite a severe head injury, which probably left him blind in one eye. His right arm was completely paralysed, and he probably lost it just above the elbow. He had severe arthritis in his feet. He'd suffered fractures to bones in his feet. He had an infection in one of his collar bones. And yet he survived a long time, you know, into his probably to about the age of 50. which is at a good age at that time.

So the implication is that he must have had some help and support from his group because he wouldn't have been able to survive too well on his own. I should have mentioned as well that he was also going deaf. We can see bony growths in his ear canals. So that's been used as an example of or to argue for the fact that Neanderthals probably were capable of compassion and of caring for one another. And then one of the other individuals there, Shadar 3, actually has evidence of a projectile injury,

so probably a spear injury or similar, in his ribs. And it didn't kill him immediately, but he survived weeks to months because there's some healing around it. So again, that suggests both violence, interpersonal violence, and some people have said maybe that was modern humans, because the kind of tool was probably the sort of tools that are species. is used rather than theirs, but also again, suggesting some care that allowed him to survive some time with that injury and potentially with a punctured lung as a result. So when you see the evidence that these two individuals were taking care of, there was

compassion shown to them, possibly help in their whatever medicines or whatever bindings they could help in their injuries, is that the kinds of things that lead you to think, well, if people were passionate, so passionate to keep these people alive, and I call them people, and Adathals, alive, then they might, then the flowers might have been some sort of burial, ceremonial, something like that. Yeah, so that contributes to the overall picture, because obviously Neanderthals have had somewhat of a bad press, especially in the earlier 20th century, and were kind of your archetypal caveman, if you like, quite unintelligent, uncaring, brutal.

And so that combination of evidence, you know, for caring and compassion, and perhaps we might extend it to caring and compassion for the dead as well as the living, certainly starts to build a picture of a very different kind of person, if you like, than that kind of old stereotype. Tell me about the bones themselves, how they were found and what conditions And I understand there's a, I'm going to say an amusing story about how they were excavated and brought back to, back for study. Yeah. So I don't know if you're talking about the ones that were excavated in 1960 because they have more of a story behind them. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

Okay. So these were the remains of Chandra Four, which then became dubbed the flower burial. Now when they exposed the skeleton at first It was sort of lying on its side But the bones were very fragile And so the decision was taken to remove the skeleton What we call it on block So actually you cut out a whole block of sediment Intact with the skeleton in it

And so it's quite difficult You have to cut all the way around the edges You shore it up with boards Put plaster of Paris over the skeleton itself Then try and dig underneath to get another board underneath and lift the whole thing out. And so that's what they did. They then had to get it up to the top of the trench.

So these remains are about seven and a half metres from the surface of the cave, all the way down the side of the cave. And then perhaps the bit that did in the lease favours, part of the way it was taken back to the museum in Baghdad was strapped to the roof of a taxi. and as you can imagine that probably was not an easy ride for this, especially considering that the roads were even more difficult than they are today back in 1960. So what they didn't realize, as they were cutting that block, a few extra bones started trickling down,

and they knew that they must be from a different Neanderthal. but they didn't have time to investigate further. So when they actually investigated these remains back in the Baghdad Museum and finished excavating that block, they actually found there were the partial remains of two more adults plus the partial remains of a baby in that block, two. Now, the new remains are directly next to where they took that block out. and the new individual which we've for the moment called Shanadal Zed

because it may well be part of some of those original individuals from 1960 it was actually cut through at the waist where they had removed this block so it seems to indicate that the legs of this individual were actually in that block of sediment that was removed in 1960 and the rest of Shanazal Zed is probably still down in the Baghdad museum. So we hope to do more work in the future where we can actually look at the remains from the 1960 excavations and see if we can figure out who's who in conjunction with the new remains as well. So are you going to try to unite the two top and bottom of the individual? We'll have a go. I mean, the remains are all quite delicate and fragmentary. And obviously where

they cut that block out, they would have damaged the bits that join them up, if you see what I mean. Yeah. So it was already a quite complex jigsaw puzzle, and it's just got a bit more complex, but we'll certainly give it a go, because it'll be very interesting just to see who's who and how the individuals relate to each other. So tell me what, we talked about there being a 60-year gap between the two days. What kind of new technology is at your disposal now to study the new remains that you didn't have, and what can it do for you?

So one of the things we've done, for example, that we report in the paper is a technique called soil micromorphology. Now, what this involves is taking a block of sediment from the wall of the excavation intact. So it's quite a tricky thing to do, but then what we do is impregnate it with resin and slice it very, very, thinly so that you can look at the structure of the soils under a microscope. And that can be really informative. So what we've been able to say about the new individual that we found is that there seems to be evidence that the depression the body was in was actually intentionally dug. So if you imagine when you dig a hole in the ground, whatever you're using to dig, you sort of

push down on the soil underneath that you don't actually remove and compress it a bit. and we can actually see that in the layer of sediment directly under the one with the bones in. What we can also see in the sediment that contains the bones is two really important things. That sediment seems to have accumulated pretty quickly compared to the rest in other areas. So that suggests maybe the body was actually intentionally covered up with soil at the time. But also we've got mineralised, so ancient plant remains within that, sediment that surrounds the bones. And that's really significant when we come back to the question of the flower burial, because

as you mentioned in your intro, some people have suggested, oh, it's just modern contamination and so forth. But this is some evidence that actually we are getting ancient plant remains. So that's just one example. But I mean, for the bones themselves, there's all other kinds of techniques we can apply in the lab as well, looking at sort of diet from the chemical composition of the bones and perhaps even getting some ancient DNA, although it may be a bit of a long shot. Talking with Dr. Emma Pomeroy of Cambridge University in the UK on Science Friday

from WNYC Studios. As interesting in that, interested in that digging technique, see that the compression of the soil tells you that the depression that bones were in or were purposely dug there to put someone in? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, exactly. Because, as I said, if you imagine when you're digging, you do actually push down on the soil as you're trying to remove, take soil out. The soil is just below what you dig out gets pushed down a bit. And we can actually see by looking at the microscopic structure of the soil that that had actually happened.

Wow. Wow. You know, there's not really any other ways we can account for that. Exciting. Yeah, no, it's amazing stuff. You must, I can see from your excitement, you must be excited about how famous this site is, right? And you're digging there. It's, oh, it's absolutely.

incredible. When I was an undergraduate student, I learned about Chandar Cave and about the various Neanderthals, and I never imagined in a million years that I would ever go there, let alone be there and be the one that's excavating new Neanderthal remains. And I still stand at the bottom of the hill before we walk up to the cave every morning and just think, wow, how does this happen? You know, this is such an incredible opportunity and such a privilege. The site is, famous amongst archaeologists, but it's also so culturally important to the Kurdish people. And it's such a privilege to be able to excavate and contribute to some of their heritage and their history. It's great fun on a Friday because we get busloads of Kurdish tourists turn up to come visit the site. And so there's music blaring and families having picnics,

and yeah, it's really special to be able to be working a site that's so important to the people there. Is it near a war zone at all, or is there access to it? Yes, so it's not too difficult to access. And the site itself is actually guarded because of its cultural importance. It has its own Peshmerga guards all the time. And the roads between Bill, which is the main city and Chandar Cave are well guarded and have a number of roadblocks.

So, yeah, you know, there is a risk, but it's so exciting. It's minimal as it can be, I think. Yeah, and it's just incredible to be there. It's an amazing place. How long do you have access to it? So we have, we just found a permit last year for another five years of excavations, which is really exciting. And, yep, lots more work to do.

we are in the process of applying for funding to make sure that we can actually get back out there and do the excavation. You know, coming 60 years later, is there part of you that says let's not touch some of it because 60 years from now, someone will come here with better technology than I have? Oh, absolutely. And that's actually a really important point about archaeology. So basically what we've done, Ralph Sellecki back in sort of the 1950s, dug quite a large trench. but it was just in the middle of the cave. So it's probably not even sort of 10% of the whole of what's in the cave. And in our work, what we've been doing is actually going back

and not opening up big areas like that. Oh, we're lost. No, I'm still here. We've run out of time, but I'll make you deal. Let's meet back here in 60 years, okay? And we'll talk about your next thing. It sounds very, very exciting. Thank you for taking time to be with us today.

No problem at all. Good luck to you, Dr. Emma Pomeroy, Department of Archaeology at Cambridge University in the UK. We're going to take a break and come back about, talk about fake stuff, from real to fake, how to know the difference. Stay with this. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. There are two ways to grow a diamond. You can dig one up from the earth, the product of billions of years of pressure and heat on carbon. or you can make one in a lab by applying heat and pressure to tiny starter crystals, producing a diamond in the blink of a geological eye.

But put those two objects under a microscope, you know, they look exactly the same. Gemologists cannot tell the difference between the two. So is the lab-grown diamond real or fake? It's the old quack-like-a-duck question. Well, the answer is something in between. And the same goes for lots of other things. artificial flavors that have the same chemical structure as the real thing,

or our favorite nature documentaries that put a narrative spin on a more verity look at life. When science gets a boost from the artificial, what do we call it? My next guest has a lot to say about genuine fakes. It's the title of her latest book. Lydia Pyle is a writer and historian of science and author of the book Genuine Fakes, how phony things teach us about real stuff. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you.

Is that an oxymoron, genuine fakes? I like to think of it as a really attention-grabbing title. It sort of came to me while I was working on the project, and I just couldn't let it go. You didn't. Lydia Pine, how did you decide what made it onto your list of genuine fakes? That's a really good question. And I think at one point in this project,

there was a list of about 25 or 30, and my editor took one look at it and just said, Oh, no, no, no, we've got to trim this thing down. And so when I was looking at what to include in genuine fakes, I really wanted to get at this question of what kinds of objects occupy this in-between space, between what we think about as real and what we think about as fake, and what sorts of objects, artifacts, things start to explore that kind of in-between space. So to do that, I really tried to find objects that piqued my curiosity.

once that I felt like didn't have simple stories or very clear narrative. So to that end, I really cast my net very widely. I looked at art. I looked at rare book nanny scripts. But as you pointed out in your introduction, I also looked at nature documentaries and live streaming of nature cameras like bear cam and walrus cam. I looked at laboratory-grown diamonds, replicas of famous archaeological sites. And so I felt like it was an opportunity to really cast my name.

net to a very, very broad material world. And you did that very well, and you came up with lots of interesting little facts, and I was really struck by this chapter on the lab-grown diamonds. You said, as someone from mid-century, we did use the term synthetic a lot back then. They do look exactly like the diamonds you dig up from Earth, as you say, but they're grown in the lab, so are they still real? Right. It sort of is this question of, well, what do we make of them? And what criteria do we use to evaluate what makes a diamond, quote-unquote, real? Materially, they're the same, but it's the historical legacy. It's the sort of historical contingency that we might call it that sort of sets them apart.

And one of the things that I thought was so interesting about the story with laboratory-grown diamonds is here we have the possibility. We have the science and technology to make a diamond out of the same sort of matured, chemical material stuff that we see with natural diamonds, but we're able to sort of walk around the legacy of conflict diamonds or environmental impacts of mining or things that sort of raise ethical flags with a lot of consumers. And so here in the 21st century, I think, that we're seeing this as an alternative,

that what was really dismissed, the laboratory-grown diamonds were really dismissed within the diamond. industry and within the jewelry industry in the mid to late 20th century, they're sort of getting a second look here. And I think that that's really fascinating, that it sort of takes the historical narrative and the cultural legacy of these and sort of turns it on its ear. That is interesting. You say, let me give out our phone number 8447, 248, 255. Because you're saying that, are you saying now that people are looking for the fake diamonds as

opposed to the ones that come out of the ground? So I guess that there are sort of two points that I'd sort of follow up with that. One, I think that there is a very growing market for laboratory-grown diamonds in jewelry. And you see this in the example of DeFier's lightbox line. You see it also in companies like the diamond foundry. They're explicitly offering laboratory-grown diamonds to consumers as a ethical alternative or as an alternative to natural diamonds. And there are plenty of examples where people,

are purposefully choosing this. And I think that it's a really interesting twist because for so much of the history of gemology and so much for the history of diamonds, anything that wasn't mine, that didn't come from the ground, was a fake. And so I think the part of what laboratory-grown diamonds are grappling with here in the 21st century is being able to say, okay, just because it didn't come from the ground

doesn't mean that it's fake, doesn't mean that it's bad, doesn't have that kind of moral connotation and label to it. And I think that that's a really interesting historical emergence that we're seeing here in the 21st century with laboratory grown diamonds. So if I go to the mall, if they still exist, and I go to the jewelry store, can I say I want a laboratory grown diamond? And how would you know the difference? So personally, I don't think I would. I would have to take it on the sort of trust that, okay, what you're presenting me with is a laboratory grown diamond. But as I say, there are specific companies and jewelry lines that are targeting that that cachet, that a laboratory grown diamond has to offer.

I think that lightbox is tagline with something like science with a sparkle. And so there really is the sort of embracing the laboratory net of it. You tell us great story, the whole story, the circular story, if I may, of De Beers, who wanted to disown laboratory diamonds and now we're embracing it as their own? Yeah, I think that in the 1950s, when the president of De Beers is presented, his scientists and his engineers come and say, look, we really, you know, we really ought to be looking at pursuing this kind of research. He sort of famously declares, only gods can make a diamond. And, you know, sort of three years later, our general electric, you know, makes the first diamond in the laboratory.

And so there's this great sort of juxtaposition with what De Beers is doing with that. Another instance where there's a lack of transparency is the realm of nature documentaries. You talk about how some of what we expect to see in them is actually shot on wildlife preserves or in captivity. someone like myself who's done a lot of television, I don't really believe a lot of reality television. It's sort of that oxymoron, and that sort of, yeah, exactly. But there's a lot of scandal involved. I remember when there was a whole PBS series that was taken off the air

because it was found out some of it was recreated, so to speak. Yeah, or staged. I think it's sort of a other sort of way to think about that. And I think that it gets at this element of deception or artifice or trickery, and I think that that's one of the things that I found that really underscores all of the different genuine fakes that I talk about is at the point that there is that element of deception or there is that element of, hey, wait a minute, I've been had,

that that's really where the fake becomes problematic, and it is sort of morally questionable. But to sort of bring the question back to your wildlife documentaries, observation that, sure, there are lots of examples where staging is preferable even, that it's in the best interest of the animals that are being filmed, or it's in the interest of safety of the camera crew, or there's a whole host of reasons to stage things for nature documentaries, not just to sort of trick the audience or something like that.

And I think that a really interesting push that's being floated and sort of propelled by a lot of wildlife documentary makers is to be able to have, to be able to offer a transparency to their viewers, whether it's an sort of on-screen disclaimer that helps contextualize what their, what audiences are seeing. But I think that it's that feeling of sort of being tricked that makes, that makes the documentary feel like, oh, I've been let down, I've been lied to, I've been deceived or something like that.

And I think there are other, yeah, the other really interesting part, I think, of the wildlife documentary story is when we can, compare the scriptedness of a wildlife documentary. Like here it is, it's telling a story, we're going to learn about, you know, the Arctic wilderness or something, and to compare that with the unscriptedness of a nature camera, like the Explorer.org, Walrus Cam, or Bear Camp, and sort of seeing these different ways to engage with nature, one is scripted and one is not. And these, I think, raise really interesting questions of what is the more natural way to experience nature?

Would something, is there more transparency that you would advocate for in these documentaries? I think so. I think that the transparency really helps sort of invest viewers and invest audiences in the narrative and sort of feeling like, okay, I understand. I'm following along. You're explaining your methods to me. I understand what I'm seeing in a way that I'm not going to come back in six months or year or whatever, and it's not going to have this sort of, I don't know, dark reveal or something

that's going to make people feel like, oh, wait a minute, this isn't, this isn't what I thought I was seeing. Yeah. You have a great chapter where you talk about artificial flavors. Oh, yes. Oh, yeah, we know artificial banana or grape flavor. It doesn't really taste like a real banana or a grape, but you sort of know that and you go into that and say, oh, it's still what I'm looking for.

Right. And that's kind of what I would offer is, you know, that, yeah, maybe the banana flavor doesn't taste like a quote-unquote real banana. It doesn't taste the same way, you know, we peel the fruit, we eat it, and that we have that taste. But it tastes, I would argue, maybe sort of provocatively argue, it tastes like real fake banana flavor. And that if we were to alter that, that real fake banana flavor, we would experience it kind of like, hey, wait a minute, this isn't the flavor that I'm expecting. And there's this really interesting interplay between expectation and what we experience. And I think that that interplay between expectation and experience really underscores a lot of these genuine fakes, whether it's in flavor or in nature documentaries or what have you.

You know, it says on some of these labels on, it says artificial flavoring, right? Maybe you should say real fake flavoring. I would be a huge proponent of that. I'm not going to lie, that I would be pretty excited if we started. the labeling stuff with genuine fake flavoring. And you also say that the implication of gas chromatography for flavor research was immediate and far-reaching. What did that tool bring?

Right. So gas chromatography offered a way of sort of putting a chemical compound onto a flavor. That before that methodology was available, there's sort of the like, oh, it kind of tastes like it kind of evokes this sense of. But here, with the chemical compound, you're able to, scientists are able to replicate a flavor directly. I would offer that it's a very similar parallel to growing diamonds in the laboratory that materially were able to replicate this compound. And so that it offers this ability to be able to have a quote-unquote real thing, that you're able to make exactly the same thing that we would experience in the natural world. I'm Ira Plato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

Talking with Linda Pine, author of Genuine Fakes, How Fony Things Teach Us About Real Stuff. We have a couple of tweets, questions coming in. Lori from outside Cincinnati asks, can we use composite minerals to make gold things? Like take grains and turning them into nuggets. People are thinking, if you can do this with diamonds, right? You can become a new alchemist and do it with gold. I want to modify that question a little bit and say, if you can make artificial, well, real fake diamonds, why didn't the diamond market crash?

That's a really good question, actually. And I would offer that when the laboratory-grown diamonds were first sort of put out there into the market sphere, that they were targeted specifically toward industrial uses. And so we were seeing a lot of diamonds in terms of like saws and other sorts of industrial applications. And that by the 1970s, more than half of the diamonds in use were coming from laboratory-grown scenarios. And that's certainly coming from the industrial side of things. So you did mention the book that General Electric thought about getting into the diamond business, but if they became successful, they would kill their own industry because that would have

crash the price of diamonds, right? Yeah. There's this sort of feedback that's happening constantly. It's sort of this push in this pool that's happening at the same time with a market that, in some ways, artificial to begin with, and then you sort of are replicating the thing that's artificial. It sort of becomes this meta ball of genuine fakery. Before we run out of time, I want to get to this fascinating story in your book about a museum whale skeleton in British Columbia. Yeah. An attempt to assume and display a real skeleton that didn't exactly go according to plant. No. So Big Blue. Big Blue is a blue whale skeleton that's hanging in the Beatty Museum in Vancouver.

And Big Blue actually got her start. She was stranded and died along the fans of Prince Edward Island. And the locals at Prince Edward Island just said, oh, this is horrific. We want nothing to do with this. this reeks. So let's just bury the skeleton and hopefully that'll be the end of it. And the director, Andrew Trites at the Beattie Museum sort of got wind of this decade later and said, wait, this would be a fantastic specimen to be able to hang in our museum. So he takes a crew out from Vancouver to Prince Edward Island and digs up, big blue, digs up the skeleton and creates it back, which is no small feat, I want to add, because the whale hadn't actually finished decomposing at this point.

And so they have to rent these refrigerated trucks, and it's all very hectic, and it's all very confusing. And they finally dragged the skeleton with the whale's back to the museum and begin this process of decreasing, and it just goes on, and it's hectic, and it's hard, and it's not cooperating, and some of the bones actually end up disintegrating in these enzyme baths that they're using.

And so at the end of it, sort of at the end of the day, the specimen that's hanging in the Beatty Museum is a composite. That it does have the real bits of bone that were excavated. But it also had some plaster pieces that are filled into the skeleton as well. So is that real or is it fake? It's the real question. It's the real question, right? And so it sort of fills this fascinating spot of compositry.

But regardless of what we think about the material parts of it, It is doing its sort of authentic job of educating museum visitors. Yeah, and we see examples of that, certainly here in New York, at American Museum Naturalist. You're all over the place. We have to stop there. It's a fascinating book. Lydia Pine is writer and historian of science. The author of the book, Genuine Fakes, How Fony Things Teach Us About Real Stuff.

We have an excerpt on our website at ScienceFriday.com slash fakes. Good luck, Lydia, with the book. Thank you. Well, you want to remind you about our Science Friday Vox Pop app, and here's the question we're asking this week. Does climate change make you anxious or even sad? You want to hear about your feelings about living on a warming planet and even how you're coping with these feelings. That's our Science Friday Vox Pop app. Does climate change make you anxious or even sad? What are your feelings about living on, you know, changing environment? And how are you coping with those feelings and coping living in the changes? Science Friday, Vox Pop, Pop, App, wherever you get your apps. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato in New York.