Science Friday - COVID In Prisons, How Sperm Swim. July 31, 2020, Part 2

Episode Date: July 31, 2020

As the COVID-19 pandemic has spread, it’s become clear certain populations are particularly at risk—including those serving sentences in prisons and jails. The virus has torn through correctional and detention centers across the U.S., with more than 78,000 incarcerated people testing positive for COVID-19 as of July 28, according to the Marshall Project’s data report.  “Prisons are just the worst possible environment if we are trying to reduce infectious disease,” Zinzi Bailey told SciFri earlier this week on the phone. She is a social epidemiologist at the University of Miami and a principal investigator of the COVID Prison Project, which tracks and analyzes coronavirus data in U.S. correctional facilities. “A lot of people would argue that the conditions are inhumane.” Disease outbreaks have swept through prisons in the past, often due to poor living conditions and limited access to proper health care, Bailey explains. Hepatitis, tuberculosis, and HIV are just a few of the diseases that have historically hit inmates hard. Now, the incarcerated, correctional officers, and staff members are battling COVID-19. Detention centers are notoriously overcrowded, making it easy for the virus to spread. The cramped, dormitory-style living conditions, shared spaces, and infrequent sanitation can contribute to increased risk of exposure and infection. In Ohio, for example, the prison system is at 130% capacity, making it “basically impossible” to socially distance inmates, Paige Pfleger, health reporter at WOSU in Columbus, Ohio, told SciFri on the phone last week.  Yet incarcerated people living in these conditions have little to no access to protection. Some have resorted to making face coverings out of shirts and boxer shorts. At the beginning of the pandemic, some correctional officers in Arizona prisons were not allowed to wear masks.  “Correctional officers were originally told that if they did wear masks, it would scare inmates—that they’re going to think, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a really serious virus,’” says Jimmy Jenkins, senior field correspondent and criminal justice reporter at KJZZ in Phoenix, Arizona. “I got letters from all these inmates saying they were scared of dying.” Access to testing among the incarcerated population has also varied state to state. Ohio conducted mass tests in some of the facilities in April, but have been unable to retest in order to track community spread, says Pfleger. In Arizona, inmates are reporting that “only the sickest of the sick are actually getting tested,” says Jenkins. Coronavirus outbreaks in prisons often spill over into the rest of the community. Contract workers and correctional officers coming in and out of detention facilities can cause further spread of the virus. This is concerning, particularly in Black, Latino, and Native American communities with an already increased risk of contracting the disease. “We believe that there’s going to be a connection between the communities of color that are around prisons, and the prisons themselves,” says John Eason, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who spoke to Science Friday over the phone earlier in the week. In an ongoing study with the Dane County Criminal Justice Council, “we’re going to be able to parse that out to see the role of corrections officers.” He suspects they may find officers are “basically incubators—or vectors between communities and the prisons that they work in.” The inmates are like “guinea pigs,” says Zinzi Bailey. “It’s like an experiment, and we are letting it run its course in these prisons,” she says—but one without an ethical review. “What is being made clear through this pandemic is the United States’ reliance on incarceration makes us more vulnerable to pandemics like this.” Paige Pfleger and Jimmy Jenkins tell us more about how their states are responding to coronavirus outbreaks in prisons. Then, social epidemiologist Zinzi Bailey provides a closer look at the trends in American prisons—and what COVID-19 is revealing about public health in these systems.  We didn’t always understand the basic science of where babies come from. Theories abounded, but until the 19th century, there was little understanding of how exactly pregnancy occurred, or even how much each parent actually contributed to the reproductive process.  In 1677, a Dutch scientist named Antonie van Leeuwenhoek peered into a microscope and observed, for the first time in recorded history, the side-to-side swimming of tiny sperm cells. He wrote they looked like “an eel swimming in water.” At the time, van Leeuwenhoek thought those cells were tiny worms—maybe even parasites. It took several hundred more years before scientists understood even the crude theory of reproduction as most of us are taught: That a sperm and an egg cell combine inside the fallopian tubes. But, as it turns out, even the movement of sperm first described by van Leeuwenhoek—and corroborated ever since in two-dimensional, overhead microscope views—might be wrong. A team of scientists writing in the journal Science Advances this week report finally viewing sperm movement in three dimensions. With the help of 3D microscopy and high-speed photography, they describe a “wonky,” lopsided swimming motion that would keep sperm swimming in circles—if they didn’t also have a corkscrew-like spin that let them move forward “like playful otters.” Hermes Gadelha, a senior lecturer in mathematical and data modeling at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, talks to John Dankosky about the complexity and beauty of these swimming cells, and why understanding their movement better could lead to breakthroughs in infertility treatment—or even other kinds of medicine. 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 Irafledo. Later in the hour, we'll be updating a 300-year-old picture of how human sperm swim and why it matters for our understanding of both infertility and health issues well beyond the reproductive tract. But first, it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO, St. Louis Public Radio, K&A, Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. More than 70,000 people in U.S. prisons have tested positive for COVID-19. An experts say, it's no surprise that coronavirus is spreading in detention facilities. Incarcerated people are often crammed into tight quarters with few, if any, ways to protect themselves from disease.

Joining us today are two reporters who've been covering this issue in two parts of the country. Jimmy Jenkins is a criminal justice reporter for KJZZ in Phoenix, Arizona, and Paige Flage is health reporter for WOS. in Columbus, Ohio. Thank you both for joining us today. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Pleasure, John. Thank you.

To get us started, before we dig into how COVID is affecting prison populations, maybe you can set the scene for us. Tell us about the general prison landscape, what it looks like in the states that you cover. Jimmy, why don't you go first? In Arizona, we have one of the highest incarceration rates in the country. There are right now around 40,000 men and women in state prisons. Those prisons are divided up into state and privately operated ventures in Arizona.

Right now, we are dealing with a COVID-19 outbreak that I think has been kind of just following the rest of society, partly because it took longer to get into the prisons. And another reason is just because it's harder to get information out of the prisons. Also a lack of testing. But what we're seeing in Arizona prisons is that the way that they have been created, the way that they actually warehouse people, it's our understanding that at least 90% of the people in Arizona prisons live in dormitory style housing.

So we're seeing as COVID-19 enters into the prisons, it's really starting to spread fast throughout the population because of the way they are essentially warehoused here in Arizona. Paige, how about you? What does Ohio look like? So Ohio has one of the largest prison populations in the country. We have about 49,000 people incarcerated in state prisons. here in Ohio, many of those, because we are often referenced as the epicenter of the opioid crisis,

many of those are drug-related charges. And basically, as far as COVID-19 goes, back in April when the virus kind of started spreading inside the prisons, the ACLU of Ohio came out and said, because Ohio's prisons are so overcrowded at 130 percent capacity, the virus just spread almost completely in some of the facilities. And Ohio made news as being kind of a coronavirus hotspot because we did mass testing here in Ohio at some of our facilities. And so all of a sudden, you went from having very few cases in these rural counties that are homes to these prisons to having thousands of cases. And in one facility, the Marion Correctional Institution, there was a near total spread of COVID amongst the inmates.

What has the testing been like in Arizona prisons, Jimmy? For a long time, it was almost non-existent. Everything has been really reactionary. I'm hearing from inmates who call me, write me, and tell me that they're only testing the worst of the worst. You have to be not only symptomatic, not only have a fever, but even then you have to be really bad off, like almost need to go to the hospital. They are quarantining people, moving them into, like,

larger yards and units where they can separate some people apart. So they are separating people who are symptomatic, but as far as testing goes, it's very low. By my count, less than 14% of the entire state population has been tested. And the people I hear from, it's just heartbreaking. I know a lot of people in free society obviously want to be tested right now too, but the people in the prisons, that is their number one asks is, you know, why can't they test all this? Why can't we all be tested. And what I think is interesting is in Arizona, we have a privately contracted health care company called Centurion. And what I can't figure out is why they haven't been asked to do the testing within the state-run prisons. But it's our understanding from what we know from

the Department of Corrections that they are working with different labs, kind of on a piecemeal basis. We'll see batches of, you know, 20, 30, 50 tests at prisons with thousands. So it's really haphazard. and it kind of goes along with the way the rest of the response has gone from our Department of Corrections. Paige, just to follow up here, the prison population in Ohio is also an older population, and this is really important when it comes to COVID. Yeah, absolutely. So I had been working on a story before the pandemic struck about Ohio's aging prison population. For the first time, we have hit more than 10,000 inmates, so about a fifth of the prison population in the state. who are 50 and older. And if you look at those facilities that have a large proportion of the older inmates,

you are seeing more COVID deaths in those facilities. Jimmy, you recently spoke with Joseph Baird, who's incarcerated in an Arizona state prison, and he tested positive for COVID-19. He spent some time in the prison's medical unit where he said it was up to the sick inmates to actually clean, and we're going to play a clip from him. We're sweeping the floors. We're cleaning the shower stalls. We're scrubbing the commodes. We're mopping the floors. We're dumping trash. Jimmy, is this a normal situation where an inmate who tests positive for COVID has to do the cleaning? Well, you know, I think stories like these are becoming quite normal, as disturbing as they are.

And it just shows you the kind of desperation level that we're at. My reporting has shown for years that no matter who the privately operated contractor is, they have consistently understaffed the prisons as far as what their contractual obligations are, how many, you know, how many nurses they're supposed to have, how many doctors they're supposed to have. But judges and experts have ruled that even if we were to meet the contract benchmarks, it still wouldn't be enough. These places are just short staffed as far as medical attention goes. And so, you know, the medical is understaffed, the correctional officers way understaffed. And then you have contract workers, people who are supposed to be doing things like feeding the inmates, doing kind of

jobs like a porter or an orderly. You know, those folks have been stricken with the virus as well. Their numbers are down. So, yes, what I am hearing is that inmates' last line of defense against coronavirus, their only line of defense is themselves, the actions they can take. I've heard just really sad, pathetic tales of men and women being forced to hang, you know, towels from their bunk beds because they hope maybe that will create a barrier between them and their infected inmates before things really started going.

inmates were using their boxer shorts and other items of clothing to try to make masks. And yeah, here we have someone who has, you know, severe breathing issues was really hit hard by COVID-19. And this guy and his fellow patients are, yeah, taking out the trash and scrubbing the floors of the medical unit. Something similar happening in Ohio page? Yeah. And I think beyond just cleaning, a lot of inmates have been telling me that they're helping each other when their bunkmates get sick, older, and their bunks get sick. And if they aren't able to get medical attention, which has been a reported problem in a lot of the facilities, you're having inmates, younger inmates,

carrying older inmates to the bathroom. So people are really having to take care of themselves in there and kind of left to their own devices. And they don't have access to the things that all of us have access to when we're not feeling well. So things like aspirin, if you have a fever. And so I think, yeah, it's a very uncomfortable situation and people are really struggling. Yeah, an uncomfortable situation and scary for a lot of people. I want to play another clip, and this is from some of your reporting page. It's from a story you did about Marion Correctional Facility in Ohio. Back in April, more than 80 percent of the prison population there had contracted COVID.

This clip is from Andre Stores, who has been incarcerated since 1995. Paige, what kind of information are inmates getting in? if any at all. Yeah, so that was super complicated back when the mass testing happened. I think a lot of inmates, as you were saying, were really relieved to be able to be tested, to know whether or not they had contracted the virus. But after the tests were done, they didn't hear anything back for a long period of time, a couple of weeks. And based on what inmates have said, they were moved around within the prison within that period of time.

So before they were even given their results, they were moved to different parts of the facility. Evidently, they were being separated based on their COVID status, but they were not being told what their status was. And some people were moved into the gym and other parts of the facility to sleep there, but then other people were moved back in. And so it was kind of chaos and people really didn't know what was going on. And some of the inmates that I spoke to have said, like, if you were trying to separate you. us and keep the few people who didn't have COVID away from those that did. There was definitely a cross-contamination during that period because there was just so much confusion.

Jimmy, in Arizona, are inmates getting any sort of information? No, a lot of them are not allowed to watch even the television news. Communication has been very spotty throughout this pandemic. We've been getting lots of reports of the email system that has been going on and off for some reason between incarcerated people and their loved ones. We recently had a, our new director has radically changed the media policy here in Arizona so that not only are inmates having a hard time getting information, but they now have less avenues to communicate with reporters like me, the press. It's now no longer allowed for me to directly facilitate a phone

interview through the Department of Corrections. We have to now somehow work between an inmate's family member. So that kind of line of communication has been shut down. And I also want to say, too, I've been getting lots of reports of incarcerated people telling me that staff members are saying things to them like, you know, this is a hoax, like as in the virus is a hoax. And the incarcerated people are interpreting that to be some sort of way to try to maybe, you know, not get them to worry so much. Like, you know, don't worry. It's not going to be that big of a deal. If you get it, it's going to be asymptomatic. But, hey, we don't really think this is maybe a real thing anyway. You know, that has been common. So a lot of times the correctional officers are the main means of information

for a lot of these folks. And so it's just, no, lines of communication are down right now, I would say. And similar to what Jimmy just said about this concept that people are mostly asymptomatic, that was a line that we got from the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections several times, that the majority of the inmates who had tested positive were actually asymptomatic, and people really weren't showing that many symptoms. And I had actually gotten an email from an inmate who, in his large kind of dormitory setting, he took a survey of, I think it was upwards of like 200 of his fellow inmates and surveyed their symptoms and basically found that that claim that the majority of people were asymptomatic was just not true. We're going to have to take a break here. And when we come back,

we're going to continue our conversation about COVID-19 in U.S. prisons. We're talking with Paige Flager. She's a health reporter for WOSU in Columbus, Ohio. Jimmy Jenkins, a criminal justice reporter for KJZ in Phoenix, Arizona. When we come back, we'll be joined by an epidemiologist. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankowski. We're continuing our check-in with the state of science. This is KER News. St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance.

We're talking about COVID-19, spreading in U.S. prisons. It's a big problem. And we're talking with our guests, Jimmy Jenkins, a criminal justice reporter for KJZZZZZZE in Phoenix, Arizona, and Paige Flager, a health reporter for WOSU in Columbus, Ohio. Also joining us now is Dr. Zinze Bailey, a social epidemiologist at the University of Miami in Miami, Florida. Dr. Bailey, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you so much, John. So when did you realize that COVID was going to be a really big problem for incarcerated people? Oh, well, I joined the scores of epidemiology. epidemiologists who started tracking this from when it was concentrated in Wuhan.

When we heard those reports, we were made immediately worried. And then when we saw that first case in the United States, and we saw that there were very limited protections being put in place, quarantine, those sorts of things, travel was going forward without restriction, without investigation, I was pretty sure that there was a very community spread and that we were just waiting for the other shoe to drop. So this is one of those things from Public Health 101, where when you have an infectious disease and infectious disease of this magnitude and what we saw, we realized this could be disastrous. Especially disastrous for people who are inside prisons. Now, you're the principal investigator

are one of them for a group called the COVID Prisons Project. Maybe you can tell us a bit about some of the trends you've seen, because we've heard from the reporters some very specific reports from Ohio and Arizona. What are you seeing across the country in prisons? So I am a project investigator, along with the co-leads of Catherine Nwattney and Lauren Brinkley-Rubenstein. And along with the overall cases rising in certain states like Arizona, Florida, Texas, we're seeing corresponding rises within prison populations. I think oftentimes we think about prisons as being very separated from our communities or jails being very separated from our communities. However, they are key parts of our community and there is a necessary flow of people in and outside of those facilities. And

when something like that comes into a correctional facility, it is extremely, extremely hard to contain it without very swift and basically direct control. And even with swift and direct control, which is certainly not what we've been hearing in stories coming out of Ohio and in Arizona, it's still a much bigger problem for black and brown communities across America. I'm wondering what you can tell us about how this is specifically affecting incarcerated people of color with COVID

because it's been such a problem in the general population. So I think we can start first from the first, from the fact that our correctional facilities are disproportionately housing black and brown people, individuals, Americans. I think we have a long history of our criminal legal system, you know, over-policing in black and brown communities, and disproportionate, discriminatory sentencing for those individuals. So the people who are in most contact with these correctional facilities are black and brown people. I'm wondering, Jimmy, in Arizona, Is the state releasing some inmates to make facilities less crowded?

And how are they deciding who gets released? No, the state is not releasing people in reaction to the pandemic at all, despite calls from several different reform groups. I actually even highlighted earlier this year there were a handful of people who were on a commutation list. These are people who were facing imminent danger of death, as well as the coronavirus, who had been gone through a review process for commutation. The only thing they were waiting on was the governor's signature, and he had waited months to sign off on some of them, still hasn't signed off on others.

He and the director of the Department of Corrections say that they are not willing to release people. I've asked several times. One statement of concern, I think that was made by the director, was earlier in the pandemic. He was actually making statements saying that he felt that Arizona prisons were some of the safest places in society to be just because the virus had not entered the walls yet. So for a time when general society was experiencing a lot of COVID-19 infections, prisons were not, because they were to some extent isolated or delayed in receiving the impact. And so I think what you see is an underestimation of how bad this was going to be. Now they're kind of, it seems like, back on their heels as coronavirus numbers really rage.

We have more than 500 confirmed infections, 16 deaths as of today. So I think, unfortunately, it's going to take more grave serious. numbers for those leaders to make the decision that it's time to release people. But I will say that the medical contractor and the state have already identified several thousand people who, because of their age, because of their medical underlying conditions, could be and should be released. But the department, the state has taken no action on those names. Page in Ohio, what's happening with releasing people in the wake of COVID? Yeah. So that was, again, a big topic of conversation about trying to stop the spread, especially

because our prisons are so full here in Ohio. In the end, the governor advised the release of a couple hundred people, so a couple hundred out of 49,000. And those people were largely pregnant or elderly. And again, there was that laundry list of like, this person didn't commit a sex offense. This person didn't commit a violent offense, et cetera, et cetera. And like I said, in a state where a huge percentage, 35% of all inmates in Ohio's prisons are in there for drug-related charges, whether that be specifically drug-related or something like theft and burglary. I think a lot of people wanted to see the state take swifter action, especially nearby in Pennsylvania. There was a huge release of inmates. And so I think a lot of people and the ACLU said

if you want to do social distancing in Ohio's prisons, you have to cut the population, by half. 300 people is not that. Dr. Bailey, you want to comment on that? Absolutely. So I definitely agree with those individuals where in order to be able to enforce social distancing or physical distancing, the population needs to be cut drastically, drastically. The overcrowding is one of the key mechanisms that actually drive spread within prisons. People are on top of each literally. There is no way to not share that air. And on top of that, I would say that correctional facilities are one of the breeding grounds of infectious disease. And we've seen that before with other diseases. So for example, tuberculosis, you can say that other elements of

flu, you have hep C. But I think we have a precedent for how infectious disease is spread through crowded areas, crowded unventilated areas or with shared air. There's so much we don't know about COVID-19, including the degree to which it's aerosolized. Dr. Bailey, tell us a little bit more about what makes prisons so ripe for the spread of disease. It's obvious that people being in close physical proximity is going to be a problem, but specifically with COVID and the way that we now know that it's transmitted, what makes it so potentially deadly? So, Correctional facilities not only are crowded, but thinking about ventilation, a lot of these are older facilities that have not been repaired, aren't prioritized for repair, and there's a priority

of quote unquote safety, which may include surveillance and being able to control movement at certain times, but not necessarily to ensure help. And I would say that on top of that, I think we have an issue of very opaque information coming out of these facilities, whereby we're not necessarily seeing how health is being taken into account on a regular basis. So we see tuberculosis go through jail and prison systems regularly, routinely every year in a way that we don't think about in our communities, right, at large, our free society. So I think there's a number of different situations there. I would say on top of that, there are limited opportunities to do the basic public health prevention activities, including washing hands, having soap without restriction, not having to buy soap,

being able to have access to clean facilities, having all hard surfaces wiped down, and having clean ventilation possible. I just wanted to say with respect to ventilation and air quality, it's been my understanding from the conversations I've had with incarcerated people and from reviewing their medical records and from watching court trials about the health care conditions that respiratory conditions are just rampant in Arizona prisons. There's a lot of speculation for why that is.

A lot of people I talk with, number one concern they have, is mold in their living spaces. The infrastructure in the prisons here in Arizona is just decades old, and we have these things here. I know this isn't just specific to Arizona, but they employ the use of these things called swamp coolers. where you have men and women who are living in cells that temperatures can be recorded in 90s, sometimes more than 100 degrees in the places where they're incarcerated.

And the only thing they have to kind of move the air around are either fans that they can purchase themselves or these swamp coolers, which is just, again, a fan just blowing stale air over water. And so it creates just this, like a swamp-like atmosphere is really what they tell me. And so, you know, you have this virus coming in already when you have this huge susceptible population. already when there's just terrible conditions, making it right for respiratory problems. I want to play a clip now from Dr. John Eason. He's an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He's part of a group that's studying this issue of COVID-in-prisons.

We believe there's going to be a connection between the communities that are around prisons and the prisons themselves. We're going to be able to parse some of that out to see the role of corrections officers. as it relates to being basically incubators or vectors between communities and the prisons that they work in. Dr. Bailey, is this something we should keep an eye on spread from prisons to communities and vice versa through correctional officers? That's absolutely something that we should be concerned with and we should be actively monitoring. I think from the very beginning of this pandemic, most public health officials who have been asked or involved have highlighted,

correctional facility is not a separate entity. There is a lot of flow in and out, especially from correctional officers. Correctional officers are going back to their communities every day, right? When there were visits, people were visiting with their family and going back to their communities every day. I think that there's a number of vendors and other individuals. who are coming in and out, which is in addition to those correctional officers. Furthermore, those who are in a correctional facility are not there forever. There is a sentence and a lot of them

are actually going to be released, right? So I think that's a false dichotomy between a correctional facility in our communities. And some of the initial data, especially out of Cook County, looking at their jail system, they're actually accounting for a very large percentage of their COVID cases actually being attributable to the cycling through the Cook County Jail. That's Cook County in Illinois, where Chicago is. Jimmy? With regard to contract workers, my reporting has shown that several employees of the Trinity Service Group, which they're responsible for things like food services, like they can come in and help you run your prison kitchen. They can also help package the meals and distribute

them. Several of those employees back in May tested positive for COVID-19. And, And this is the example of a company that operates in all 50 states. Sometimes we think about how a prison is isolated. It's maybe out in some rural area like Yuma, Arizona. But like you're talking about, it's operated by people who live in the surrounding communities. And so it's not just the correctional officers, of which, of course, there are thousands in Arizona, but it's also the contract workers, the doctors, the administrative staff. And yes, we're already seeing it having a huge impact on the local communities through vectors just like that through contract workers.

Paige, what about in Ohio? Yeah, so in Ohio, we've definitely seen corrections officers be impacted. Nearly a thousand staff members have tested positive for COVID. Five correctional officers have died since the outbreak began. And you are seeing, especially in Ohio, like Jimmy was saying, you have all these rural counties that house these prisons. And overnight, when these, the mass testing results can. back. These counties went from having relatively few cases to having thousands of cases. We're talking about COVID-19 in prisons here on Science Friday. We're talking with Jimmy Jenkins,

criminal justice reporter for KJZZ in Phoenix, Arizona, Paige Flager, a health reporter for WOSU in Columbus, Ohio, and Dr. Zinzie Bailey, a social epidemiologist at the University of Miami. In Miami, Florida, I'm John Dankowski. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. So Dr. Bailey, I know you're an epidemiologist, but maybe I can ask you to put on an architect's hat. I mean, how would you shift the design of modern prisons to better handle the spread of disease? I would say, number one, I would be considering how many people actually need to be incarcerated and thinking about whether we need to have pretrial detention, which has been shown not to be very effective. And I would say, to begin with, an over-incarceration will put us at a greater degree of risk as a society for this pandemic and future pandemics.

So I'd start there. If I were going to design a facility then for limited occupancy, I would say that it would need to be something that was very ventilated, something that perhaps not sharing spaces as much, being able to limit contact between, being correctional officers and folks who are inside. And I would also have better medical facilities. So currently, there are very few correctional facilities that have negative pressure rooms, which would be necessary to really contain the spread of infectious diseases like COVID-19. However, I think the importance is for us to be thinking about what elements are driving people to be incarcerated in the first place. And how can we?

we minimize that being our resort for a variety of people? Do you ever get the sense that prison inmates are being used as guinea pigs in a big experiment to try to figure out how COVID actually spreads? It seems as though we've designed a system that's just about as difficult for people to live in around the pandemic as any could possibly be. Essentially, in epidemiology and economics, a lot of times people, use what's called a natural experiment. I would say that this is not so much a natural experiment, but a human-created experiment where essentially by letting the disease run in its course,

we're essentially using people who are incarcerated as skinny pigs for seeing how this disease can play out. In that sense, when people are sentenced, that's not what they signed up for. They didn't sign up to be part of a study. And as we go forward and we're looking at the data of what happens in our facilities, we're going to see that this was a huge experiment where people did not consent to be a part of it. That's all the time we have for our conversation. And I really want to thank our guest, Dr. Zinzie Bailey, a social epidemiologist at the University of Miami in Miami, Florida. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thanks to Paige Flager, a health reporter for WOSU in Columbus, Ohio. Thanks, Paige. Thanks, John. And thanks to Jimmy Jenkins, criminal justice reporter for KJZZ in Phoenix,

Thank you, Jimmy. My pleasure, John. Thank you. You can read some of Jimmy and Page's reporting on this issue on our website, ScienceFriiday.com slash state of science. Now, when we come back, it's been 300 years since scientists first observed the side-to-side swimming motion of human sperm. Now a research team says it's even more complicated than we thought. We'll be right back after the short break. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankowski, sitting in for Ira Flato this week. The question, where do babies come from, can be one of those delicate moments in parenting.

Maybe you fall back on the birds and the bees, or maybe you're a bit more direct, but sooner or later, as we know, you've just got to explain how one of millions of sperm cells somehow meets an egg. But as strange as it sounds, there was a time when scientists didn't know about any of the components of reproduction, or how much either parent was even involved in the creation of life. In 1677, though, a Dutch scientist named Antony Van U.S. Leewenhoek, peered into a microscope and observed for the first time in recorded history, the side-to-side swimming of tiny sperm cells, like eels in water, as he wrote. At the time, he thought those cells were tiny worms, maybe parasites.

It took hundreds more years before scientists understood even the crude theory of reproduction, as most of us are taught in school. But let's go back to Van Leeuwenhook and his description of how sperm move. That's symmetrical side-to-side eel-like radio. that's what we see in two dimensions from above in microscopes even to this day. But new research published in science advances this week shows us a different view of the swimming of sperm, and the picture they describe in three dimensions is infinitely more complex, and maybe it's fair to say even beautiful.

Let me welcome my guest to explain. Dr. Hermes Gedea is a senior lecturer in mathematical and data modeling at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. He's co-author of this new research. Welcome to Science Friday, Doctor. Thank you very much, John. It's my pleasure to be here with you today. Let's start with this previous idea of how sperm moved,

like fish or like eels, with a tail swishing symmetrically from one side of the other and causing the cell to move forward. You saw something different. What's going on when you look in three dimensions? When you look in three dimensions, you unveil a whole universe, basically, that you're not prepared before.

nature basically tells us that there is more than one way to go forward. So you can go forward by basically going side to side, but also you can go forward by being asymmetric, by just beating or wiggling your tail with swimming strokes to just one side. That motion that you describe, maybe you can give us a little bit more detail so that we can understand exactly how it's moving. It's absolutely crazy.

So what we discovered is that spum swimming, like playful otters, coaxcrewing into the fluid. So it's almost like, because you have this asymmetric swimming stroke, as the sperm swims, it also rotates around the swimming axis. And these rotations basically balances out the asymmetry in such a way that when you look from the top, it looks like the sperm is just from side to side. But this never happened. The sperm was just beat into one side all the time. So why would we, from above, as we've always seen sperm move, why would we see a side-to-side motion that looks like a fish or an eel,

but in reality it's something entirely different? So when you look at the sperm swimming in the microscope, exactly when you look from the top, it looks like the sperm is swimming from side to side. But that's not the true movement of the sperm. Do you really understand how the sperm swims? you have to move and swim with the sperm. So it's almost like you had to make a miniaturized version of a GoPro.

If you could, glue into the sperm head and look at the tail, how the tail is beating, how this tail is swimming. And this is what we could do with mathematical analysis with these 3D observations. So the 3D observations are basically just the description of how the tail moves in space. but this doesn't tell us how exactly the sperm is moving. You still need the mathematics. You said like a playful otter. I love that description. Tell me how you came up with that, because that certainly is evocative.

Well, it's because I love otters because of their spirit. They are very playful, they are very clever. And one of the most, I think, freeing sensations that you can have is if you're in a swimming pool or on the beach or on a river, if you dive and you try to corkscrew, you feel the rotation and at the same time you go forward and this gives a sense of lightness if you wish. This all seems like a pretty complicated way to do something. I mean, when we thought about the sperm for hundreds of years

moving in this side-to-side swimming motion, it seemed as though that's a fairly efficient way to get where something is trying to go. Why this corkscrew pattern, near as you can tell? That's a very difficult question, John. is almost like you're asking me to try to read nature's mind. And this is a very difficult game to play because nature is trying to do several things at the same time.

So the sperm is not just trying to swim. He's trying to find chemical cues, I said. It's trying to swim upstream. When the sperm reached the egg and you have the development of the embryo, the egg is responsible for rectifying any problem that this sperm has in the DNA. And once you have the growing embryo, this embryo goes all the way to the uterus,

and you will only have implantation if there is nothing strange with this development. So these decisions are being made by the reproductive track and the sperm all the time. And ask a question, is this efficient? Then I ask another question, from which perspective? Because this is a multi-problem to solve. This is the mystery of the infinite complexity that we see in nature. So that's why it's so beautiful. But that's what's so interesting about it.

It seems as though they're able to make decisions in the way that they move. They don't have an intelligence in the way that we see intelligence with a brain. But there is a natural intelligence encoded in their bodies. They are able to do calculations and to make decisions without the brain. It's all encoded in the shape of the tail. And these decisions are very complicated. But yet, they are microscopic structures. We're talking about something that is so small,

is if you touch your hair's breath, it would be about half of your hair's breath. So this is how big the length of the sperm is. And also they beat incredibly fast. So we're talking about between 20 to 30 swimming strokes in less than one second. That's incredibly fast. And within this environment, they are diminutive creatures, so very small creatures,

they have to swim in the reproductive track, pass through a number of different selection process, and find the egg, find chemical cues that they can respond to that. So I think it's fair to say that there is a lot of intelligence in the reproductive system as a whole. So I think a big issue, a lot of people would want to hear from you is what exactly does this mean for infertility treatments? I mean, is there any way in which learning how sperm move can actually help people who are trying to conceive?

That's a very good question. So as a mathematician, what we could see is that this explains how sperm can move forward. One particular aspect that has been missed so far is the rolling motion of the sperm, is the corkscrew in motion. And let's say in clinics or if you have to do some kind of semen analysis, the first thing that the clinics will, ask you to do is to do a motility essay, a motility test. And basically, a computer will calculate how your sperm is moving around. And a critical parameter, a critical measurement, has been missed until now, which is how sperm rotates, because this role in motion is important to move forward. We see this result as new avenues for research. I don't believe that this will have an impact

in fertility any soon. We need to do more research. We need to work more because, as I mentioned before, nature is infinitely more complex. So we need to get more people involved, more people interested, and also to test these different hypotheses. Are there any other parts of biology outside of reproduction that you think that this new understanding might impact? So human sperm is one example of a flagellated cell. So a cell that has a flagellum, has a tail that can locomote, can move fluid and propel itself, so move and swim forward. There are many cells that also do like that, many microorganisms, and they all share a common

structure inside the tail. And not only that, the sperm flagellum is a cousin of, or the cilia's in your body. Cilia is a kind of cell appendage that helps you to clear the airflow in your lungs and the flows in your brain and your eyes. And any time that this cilia, for example, is not working well, this can lead to some conditions. We call these celiopaties, which is the umbrella of conditions that are caused by defective cilia.

infertility is one example of these umbrella of different conditions that can help. So understanding sperm can actually help also understanding all the cilias in your body and vice versa. When we saw your research, I think a lot of us had the immediate reaction of why on earth did it take us until 2020 to get a 3D picture of the way a sperm moves? I mean, why is it that we've been looking at it the wrong way all this time? So since 1700, what we had in our disposal was a 2D microscopy, and we only looked at sperm in 2D. At the same time, these view of how sperm moves, that is very symmetric, became part of our belief system.

You see the experiment, and the sperm goes forward and is front side to side, is all logical. Why would question that? The second reason is the technological leap. So until 1950s, we only had basically 2D microscopy. Between 1980s and 90s, we had the computer playing a role. Only in 2007, 2008, I apologize, our collaborators in Mexico that pioneered the 3D microscopy for human sperm. And even from 2008 until now took a long time.

Why? Because it's not just a question of looking at data. Data in itself is just data. You need to interpret the data. It's what we do all the time. When you look at the light coming before your eyes, it's just data. And what we've done in here was to use mathematics, which is another way to make sense of data and bring the understanding.

So we had many pieces of these puzzle completely scattered and just took a very long time to put all this together. Explain a bit for us how exactly the math works as much as you can without completely confusing me. No, it's actually very simple. The question we ask is a question of a point of reference, is a perspective point. So you have this path moving in 3D from the fixed frame of reference. when you look from outside, and then you use mathematical changes in coordinate systems. So you change from one referential to another that mimics that you're swimming together with the sperm. It's almost like you put the GoPro on the top of the head. So this action is a mathematical

transformation that we do in the system. I'm John Dankosky, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. And we're talking about a really interesting new study. It's a study looking at something we thought we knew about, how sperm move. You said earlier that humans are very good at believing what they see with their eyes. Can you take me back to that moment, if you would, when you realized that the thing that you believed to be true wasn't true anymore? So, as a mathematician, I also work in data modeling, but also mathematical modeling. And part of the mathematical modeling that I do is to create a sperm in a computer. And, and, and, and, and do simulations.

So these are numerical simulations I do. And part of these numerical simulations is a very big assumption I always used in the body of my work for over a decade, which is the symmetry. So to me, once nature proves that you're wrong and you look back in your whole, let's say, your whole research and say, well, things are not

as I thought is very, very, hard. It's not something easy. But this is not a battle between the individual in nature. It's a battle. It's not even a battle. We are trying to understand nature and it's always going to be infinitely complex in that sense. So you have to be very humble. And with our honesty, when we started doing this project many years ago, we didn't know what we were going to find. and it took us a completely surprise because I was expecting to see this pump beating symmetrically. At no moment, this was something that I was expecting.

And that's why it took so long to even understand where this comes from. And now we will understand much better. And usually I say today, we're always wrong, basically. We're always wrong. But we're less wrong than before. And we're definitely more wrong than tomorrow. I understand that you actually have an audio clip of what sperm sound like when they're swimming. And let's take a listen.

So two questions for you, doctor. First of all, maybe you could describe what you hear when you hear a sperm swimming. And secondly, how did you record this in the first place? Like if I use a tiny microphone and go very close. A small microphone, yes. So usually when I listen to that, it reminds me of the heartbeat. And it reminds me that everything in nature, including our body, is driven by oscillations. It's like a pendulum going back and forth, back and forth.

This pendulum can be very slow, like the day and night. Well, it can be very fast, like the sperm beat. So this is basically what represents to me. is this beautiful oscillatory behavior that you see across different systems, across different scales. So in the microscopic world, and also when you zoom out, and you go to the galaxies and you see that. To record that, basically you have to, you look at sperm under the microscope,

and you see how the sperm beat. this pump beat has a frequency and has an amplitude. What that is is the size of this oscillation. And then with these two pieces of information, I can try to reconstruct these as these were sound waves. So these are not real sound waves that are coming from this pump. This is a mathematical reconstruction, or if you wish, an artistic, let's say,

visualization, oh no, not, you shouldn't say visualization, a soundalization or something like that of the sperm. Interesting. Well, it sounds very interesting, and the research itself is fascinating. That's all the time we have. I want to thank our guest, Dr. Hermes Agadea is a senior lecturer in mathematical and data modeling at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. Doctor, thank you so much for joining us.

I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, John. It has been a pleasure to have this chat with you. If you missed any part of our program or you'd like to hear it again, please subscribe to our podcasts, or you can ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. You know, every day is now Science Friday. And on the Science Friday Voxpop app, what questions do you have about the fate of the universe? Tell us your theories about the end of the cosmos. That's on the Science Friday Voxpop app, wherever you get your apps.

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