Science Friday - CRISPR, Colors, Narwhals. June 15, 2018, Part 2

Episode Date: June 15, 2018

Over less than a decade, the gene-editing technique known as CRISPR-Cas9 has taken the biology world by storm. But two new studies indicate that there could be a downside to the CRISPR approach. Did you know a blue jay’s feathers and a butterfly’s wings aren’t actually blue? Neither are your blue eyes. From the colors we see in flowers and birds, to the hues we use in art and decoration, there’s more than one way to make a rainbow—and it all starts with molecules and structures that are too small to see. The elusive narwhal has captured the imaginations of many people. Now, scientists have outfitted a group of narwhals with audio tags that allowed them to capture their echolocation and communication sounds.  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, coming to you today from the studios of WBEZ in Chicago. Later this hour, the chemistry and light tricks that bring us the rainbow, the science of colors. But first, one of the scientific advances that's taken the biology world by storm is the gene editing technique known as CRISPR. It allows researchers to fairly easily make edits to genes, snipping out one sequence, inserting another in its place, but it appears there could be a downside to the technique. Joining me now to talk about it is Sharon Begley, she's senior science writer at Stat News based in Boston and author of an article this week about new research findings in the CRISPR world. Welcome back to the program, Sharon.

Thank you for having me, Ira. So tell us about this. What exactly did these research papers find? These were two papers published earlier this week in the journal Nature Medicine, and they both converged on a similar conclusion. Both used CRISPR, which as you described, as the latest genome editing technique, to alter cells. One group used stem cells, the other group used eye cells, both human.

And they found that it was much easier to CRISPR the cells, but we're now using CRISPR as a verb, if those cells lacked a key anti-cancer gene, an anti-cancer pathway. So to flip that around, if cells are successfully edited, if their genomes are successfully edited with CRISPR, that raises a concern that maybe there's something wrong with those cells, i.e. that they lack a crucial anti-cancer pathway. So that's all that the studies did.

They didn't find that anybody was going to get cancer from CRISPR, but they raised this as a red flag. So does that give CRISPR sort of a black eye then? Well, you know, a lot of people on Wall Street thought so. After the story and the research papers came out, the stocks of the three pure CRISPR companies took a dive in the sort of 8%, 13% range. So that got a lot of people upset. But it is absolutely not the case that CRISPR is toast. This is only a preliminary finding. But it's an important one.

I mean, you know, look at this. This is a very new technology. It has surged ahead, as you described, because it's so, so, so easy to use and hold so much promise. So this is like a little bit of a go-slow sign that the two groups of researchers, and I want to emphasize that, the two independent teams of scientists, one at Novartis, the drug company, the other at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden,

again, both converging on the same conclusion, holding up a go-slow sign, and they both reached a very similar recommendation, namely as scientists, as companies, continue to develop CRISPR to use, to treat diseases. You know what? You better start looking at those cells to see if they might have lost their anti-cancer mechanisms. And now, I know this study involves one variant called CRISPR Kastine, which is the one most of us have heard about.

Now, there are other CRISPR variants, correct? Have those been studied? and would we expect the same results? There are more CRISPR variants than there are flavors of cupcakes at your local bakery. So there are other crisper variants, indeed. I love cupcakes. Well, there you go, and I suppose you like many flavors of cupcakes, as do I. So that's where we are in CRISPR land at the moment.

Anyway, Cass 9 is one of the cutting enzymes. It cuts out sequences of DNA. But, yes, just as you said, there are other. cutting enzymes, but more crucially, there's a form of CRISPR that was developed about two years ago out of a Harvard lab, which doesn't cut the double-stranded DNA. Instead of cutting it and then inserting a repair gene, which is the sort of common idea for many of the CRISPR therapeutic companies, this form of CRISPR, which is called base editing, makes just a single change in the DNA. and it has been likened to, instead of using scissors,

using a pencil, an eraser and a pencil, changing one of the DNA letters to another. And in many cases, just that single base pair, that single nucleotide is the reason for a devastating genetic disease. So again, this is called base editing. A company, of course, has been just launched to develop it. So, yes, there are many forms of CRISPR, and the two studies that we're talking about

looked at only the traditional, original CRISPR-Cast9 version. Since I was sort of talking about engineering here, I mean, could you not think that, well, maybe we can make a form of CRISPR that would skip a cell with the bad gene P53 in it? And look forward and say, I'm not going to skip it, you know. Yes, and that's what the two teams of scientists called for. They said both screen yourselves to be sure that their P53 mechanism is intact. Once you have successfully edited their genomes with CRISPR or really with anything else, screen them again to be sure that there is no problem there.

But, you know, Ira, there's another thing to consider here. For many of the diseases that scientists, both in academia and an industry, are thinking about, hoping to use CRISPR to treat, those are devastating diseases that are going to kill people in, you know, in many cases, in just a few years. Cancer typically takes decades, even 20 years, 30 years to develop. So even if this turns out to be a real problem, it could very well be that the, you know, risk-benefit calculation says, you know what, help these people today because they will live for another few decades.

And then if they get cancer, they will at least have had those years of life. and, you know, many forms of cancer are treatable. It's sort of like, you know, little children who get cancer. They're treated with radiation. They're treated with very powerful therapies. And unfortunately, many of them develop cancer when they are adults, but those children have lived for another 20 or 30 years. Worst case, that's what will happen with CRISPR,

but it will still be hugely valuable to many patients. And who knows what might be, you know, invented in those years to cure the cancers or stuff that might get decades from now? Exactly. Yeah. So how different, let's talk about CRISPR a bit. How different is this from quote-unquote traditional gene therapy that might have been done in the 1990s? In fact, that was done in 1990.

That was the first gene therapy experiment in this country. So traditional gene therapy takes a so-called vector, usually a virus, which is just a delivery vehicle. It packs the healthy gene into that virus, and it sends the virus into cells, either inside a patient or cells that have been taken out of a patient to be returned to the patient eventually. And the idea is that when a patient has lots of copies of the healthy gene, that healthy gene will cure whatever the disease happens to be. The 1990 gene therapy trial was in so-called bubble boy disease, ADA deficiency.

And the reason that was so difficult, and, you know, 1990 was a long time ago. and since then we have had only a single gene therapy approved by the FDA, is that packing genes into viruses is a very hard thing to do. Genes are big. Many of them are hundreds, if not thousands, of base pairs long. Where the virus goes inside the cell, inside the cell's genome, is a flip of the coin. In fact, in one gene therapy trial in France, unfortunately, the virus has landed next to a cancer-promoting gene,

and those children developed leukemia. Where CRISPR has it all over, the traditional gene therapy, it doesn't pack the entire gene into the vector, into the virus. All it does is include the molecular scissors that we talked about earlier, that cuts the genome, usually a little repair part, but it's only a few letters long. You're not replacing the entire gene. You're only replacing the part that is misspelled.

And that's what makes it so much easier, And that's why all of the hopes are as high as they are. It's easier to use. It's more precise. It's more controllable. And, you know, people just are, you know, think the sky's the limit. Speaking of that, are we still, though, in a, is CRISPR still a lab curiosity? Or are there companies actively using it?

And are, is it in trial? Trial is anyone? There are, indeed, three main companies that formed publicly traded companies that formed to develop CRISPR-based their people. Editas Medicine, CRISPR therapeutics, and Intelia. And the furthest along in terms of clinical trials is Editas Medicine. It has announced that this year, 2018, it will launch a clinical trial using CRISPR to treat a form of congenital inherited blindness.

It's called Lieber's Congenital Blindness. So it's really moving along. And remember, Ira, that the key steps in making CRISPR workable, as a genome editor, was in early 2013. So this is just rocketed from a lab's curiosity, at least a lab development, into human clinical trials this year. And as you say, even though the stock company, the stock and these companies have suffered, this is probably just a temporary setback.

And as you said, it's not something that seems impossible to engineer around. It could be that the therapy, even if there is a cancer risk, is still of such great benefit to patients that, you know, the cancer risk down the road is something that they will deal with. But crucially, because there are other forms of CRISPR than the traditional CRISPR, CAS 9, this seems more like, you know, a bump in the road, something that researchers are going to have to pay attention to, but in no way is it, you know, shutting down the entire prospects. So as you're saying, they're like CRISPR gas 13 or whatever, and now it could get a boost for research. Well, see, now you are tiptoeing into the very fraught topic of the patent landscape around CRISPR. It's always patents, isn't it? We will avoid. But, you know, there are all sorts of different entities who hold patents on the different CRISPR enzymes, various permutations and combinations of how they are used.

So how all that shakes out very much remains to be seen. So it's always all about the money, isn't it, when we talk about medicine. But I know I followed your career for almost as long as I've been doing, probably longer, and you really do focus on the business side of medicine a lot. I know that. Well, because, you know, say what one will about pharma or biotech, these therapies are not going anywhere. They're not leaving, you know, mice and sea elegance and prosopause.

unless some company decides that there's a profit motive to be made here. So as long as we live in that kind of system, yes, that's how it works. And I'm glad to have you around, Sharon, to keep us straight on. You're welcome. Sharon Begley, senior science writer at the Stat News, based in Boston, Massachusetts. We're going to take a break and come back and talk about color. Everything you ever wanted to know about color. Surprising stuff.

You thought you knew about color, but we're wrong. we'll be right when we come back. Stay with us. We'll talk everything about it. You can also give us a call 844-724-8255 if you're wondering about color. Stay with us. We'll be right back. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato.

I promised you before the break we would talk about color and things you thought you knew about color. All right, here's the first stuff that we're going to throw at you. Peacock feathers, blue morpho butterflies, and blue human eyes. Besides their color, they have one thing. thing in common, what is that? They are not actually blue. That is, they don't contain any blue pigment. Molecules that reflect blue light the way a paint or a dye works. Did you know that? Well, now you do. How do we look at them and see blue then? It's a trick. It's a trick. Tiny shapes, too small to see, bounce and bend white light, they break it up and send back only the blue.

Okay, here's another one for you. Red pigment. Did you know? It's harder than you think and usually either less stable or requires toxic chemical elements to achieve the perfect hue for, say, painting a Ferrari. And throughout history, artists and chemists have worked hard to make pigments that pop and can stand the test of time. But what gives us that hue in the first place? Pure physics, the jumping of electrons, the absorption and emission of energy, and the arrangement of atoms inside molecules that makes all of this happen.

And that's what we're going to talk about. everything you wanted to know about color. Here to talk about color and the invisible processes that bring it out to your eyeballs are my guess. Let me introduce you to Masu Bramonian, Professor of Material Science at Oregon State University. He joins us by Skype from Corvallis. Welcome to Science Friday. Good afternoon, I, rather. Thanks for having me on the program.

It's our pleasure. Andrew Parker, Research Fellow at Oxford University's Green Templeton College, and author of Seven Deadly Colors. He joins us from London. Welcome to Science Friday. Hello, thanks for having me on. You're welcome. Maas, let me start with you.

I'll start with a simple question, though. Maybe the answer isn't so simple. How do we look at a painting? We see all those different colors. What is going on between what's in the paint? The matter of the paint and our eyes? A pigment or a dye, which is used in the painting, is a color and material that actually,

reflect the light, part of the light which is not absorbed in the visible range. So in the way you see a color, they all come from selective wavelength absorption. So you're saying that if white light, let's say, falls on the painting, it absorbs all the colors of that white light except, let's say, if it's red on the paint, and that's what reflects to our eyes? Exactly. Huh. And Andrew, but not every color we see in the comes from a pigment, right? Especially blue. What's happening for example? Give us an example

with a blue jace feathers, blue eyes or butterfly wings. Those are not pigments, right? That's right. Actually, some of the brightest colors that exist in nature, but they are made from completely transparent materials. So these are materials that have structured to them. Well, microscopic structure. When you look at them in an electron microscope, you can see that there are all sorts of architectures in there, almost like tiny buildings, and light comes in and bounces, and again, some of the wavelengths pass through, and so you don't actually see those, and other wavelengths are actually reflected. You get constructive interference for those, and so that's the color you see. And why is blue involved in so many of these things? Yeah, that's a good question. We've been working on that for a while. The one interesting thing is that a structural, color, these colors made from structures, they tend to be quite a large range of wavelengths with a

peak in the middle, and quite often you see the color of that peak plus the bits either side of it. Well, blue is actually next to ultraviolet in the spectrum. So you can actually have your range of wavelengths in the ultraviolet and the blue. So you only see blue and ultraviolet, well, we don't see ultraviolet, so we just get the blue. If you did that in the green, for example, you'd also get a bit of yellow and a bit of blue. So it doesn't quite work as well for other colors. So blue is the handiest. But also, there's an option to make reds, greens, and yellows from pigments,

much more than there is for blues in nature. Interesting. Moss, I know that 10 years ago you were looking for semiconductors, and then it found a brand new blue pigment instead. How does that happen? Well, in 2009, we are doing some research that focused on the discovery of some exotic material that we thought will be useful in electronics, such as computers. In fact, the project was nothing to do with the discovery of a color pigment.

So we made a series of compounds, which are oxides, of three elements, etrium, endium, and manganese, and we heated high temperatures and studied their magnetic properties. Next day, when I was in the lab, the student picked out a sample, it all came brilliantly blue. It is very, very vivid blue, just like what we see in morpho butterflies. I was really shocked because these elements are not supposed to make a blue pigment or blue materials because manganese oxides normally form black or brown. So I was, in the beginning, I thought we made some mistakes, and then we repeated the experiment, and then we could reproduce it.

Then after studying the crystal structure of this material, we found this manganese is situated in a very unusual surroundings or coordination that seems to act as a chromophore and absorbs in the orange region giving rise to this vivid blue color. So I, and it was very stable because we heated this to very high temperatures like 1,200 degrees Celsius or about 2,200 degree. So it definitely is very stable, and also it is very stable to water, oil, or acid, and alkali. So then I thought immediately that it can be a very good blue pigment. I know it's hard to make. Speaking of hard to make, I know that you're looking for red now. Why is red so difficult? Well, historically, the red pigments always contain some toxic.

elements like cadmium, you know, you know the cadmium sulfide, which forms what we call solid solution, which creates the cadmium red pigments. And they are not very stable to high temperatures, and also they have the toxicity issues, which cadmium is toxic, it's a carcinogen. Same thing with the mercury sulfide, which we call vermilion, which contain mercury and sulfur, which also gives raised a very vivid red color, but unfortunately, Mercury is toxic. So if you look at all these materials, they are all color come from electronic structure of the material

and they are semiconductors. But so... Well, my question, I can go, you know, I can get my crayons or I can go to the paint store and tell them, hey, make me red. They don't have any problem with that. Why is you surprised that you can or find such difficulty in making red? Because most of the red pigments are dyes used in crayons or in paints

are mostly based on organics. And they are not as stable as the inorganic pigments like the one I discussed about. So if I can make a very highly stable red pigment, which is durable and very stable, non-toxic, there is a lot of other applications like outside outdoor paintings. You don't see that much red painting outdoors because they can really can fade under the UV light or under the sun. So there is always a lot of demand for highly stable, durable, inorganic pigment in the painting. That's why it's why the car people want it. They're going to be sitting out in the sun all the time.

Let's go to the phones. Let's go to Pittsburgh. Let's go to Austin and Pittsburgh. Hi. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having me. Hi, go ahead. So I had a question about if you had a piece of paper that had red ink versus black ink,

what is it about the molecules in the ink that allow them to absorb certain wavelengths versus reflecting certain wavelengths? And do those wavelengths that get absorbed and reflected, correspond to molecular vibrations at the atomic level. Andrew, can you answer that? Well, actually, so this is really a question of pigments, and it's about the amount of energy that can be absorbed. When it comes from the light, it causes electrons to jump around the molecule.

So it leaps from atom to atom around the outside of the molecule. And as it does, it loses a little bit of energy. of heat and eventually gets eaten up. So it's just the characteristic of those particular molecules and the atomic and molecular arrangement that allows some to eat up quite a lot of energy and some a little less so. Mars? Yeah. In the case of the red, for example, the pigment, which is maybe organic, maybe due to the

what you call charge transfer, a charge transfer from one molecule to the other molecules in the organic compound. Same thing can happen inorganic too. Same thing with black. A black pigment is made when all the wavelength get absorbed. It's just opposite to white, which reflects all the colors. So the color in any pigment come from various mechanisms. It can be a semiconductor mechanism, just like in the red pigment,

or it can be a charge transfer, or it can be what you call as electron transitions in a transition metal elements like nickel, copper, manganese. So there are several mechanisms. That's why it is very difficult to predict the color of the compound you make it in the lab. You can't design a color. It's very hard to design a material which will have particular color because there are so many different ways the color can happen. and also so many different ways the color can be destroyed because you may have a defects, non-stachioometry, and so on. Let's talk about one of my favorite subjects, and that is rainbows.

The light's refracted and bent and bent and let's talk about how light enters at a sunlight enters, the raindrops that it has to be a certain angle, refracted, bent out. Andrew, tell us how a rainbow is able to produce all those colors. Okay. Well, you see a rainbow when the sun is behind you and you're looking into light enters the surface and comes back out towards. But the refractive index of water is slightly different to air, and it causes the white light to... So if I'm standing 20 feet away from a person, I'm seeing the light coming from different raindrops than that other person is. So am I, in effect, seeing a different rainbow?

Yes, that's right. The rainbow is in a slightly different position. So we each have our own rainbow that we're looking at. Yeah, absolutely, which means there's no end to it. Well, actually, so if you see a rainbow from an airplane, which I have seen, it's circular, it doesn't end anywhere. That's true, yes, absolutely, because then you are, you're looking onto a race. Let's go to the phones to Richard in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. Hi, Richard. Hello, Iris. Thank you for taking my call. I go ahead.

I have a quick question. I'm basing this on a Wikipedia article I read a while back. The article said or seemed to suggest that purple is a manufactured color, but violet isn't. It's a natural color. And that violet can't be manufactured. Can Andrew explain that? Well, okay.

Let me remind everybody, first, Andrew, that, if you might, if I might interrupt this, to Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Yeah, go ahead. What about this? Is it true that violet cannot be manufactured, Andrew? Well, so violet is one of the colors in the spectrum, one of the colors, whichever you prefer. And so it can't be broken down any further. You sometimes get this occurring.

have what you get a primary spectrum being reflected, and then you'll also get secondary spectrum of each of those spectra can sometimes overlap, so you can get blue and violet over. And you do see this in nature. You do see, you do see, force by that overlapping. Moss, let me ask you about something I mentioned earlier on, and that was interesting news or interesting ideas about gemstones. Aren't rubies very closely related to a transparent, colorless crystal?

Yes. the ruby is made by substituting small amount of chromium in a quorum structure which is nothing but aluminum oxide. So when you put small amount of chromium, it creates the electronic transitions, the electronic jump from one level to the other level. Then you create this absorption in the blue region and gives rise to this brilliant red color. and the interesting thing about the emerald, even if you have a chromium, it never always produces red color. In the case of emerald, for example,

when you substitute chromium in another structure, which is similar to corandum, you get a green color. So it is very hard to tell always the chromium will give rise to the blue color or a red color, or sometimes just a green color. So that's why it's different.

to predict the color of the compound, you make it in the lab, and test the crystal structure and see where the color come from. Is it true that I heard that water is slightly blue? I mean, natural, we went about the deep blue sea, but water has a blue tinge to it? Yes, it is very true. Unlike sky, which comes from the scattering, like a rally scattering, water is inherently blue. When water in small quantities, it appears to be very,

quantities, it appears colorless to the human eye. It is easy to see a blueness of the water in sufficiently deep versions or lakes like a crater lake in Oregon or in glaciers. The blueness of the water is not due to the reflection from the sky, as we always think about. It is actually due to the vibrations of water molecules because water is a bent molecule. They undergo three kinds of vibrations. And these vibrations create what you call overtones, just like in music. So that absorbs near the red region, giving right to this pale blue color to the water. But if you have a, instead of a normal water, if you have a heavy water, like a D2O,

or the two reum substituted for the hydrogen, the water becomes colorless because now it absorbs in the in the far infrared region. That's fascinating. I got to interrupt. Well, Hank, save it for the break, because we have to take a break, and you sound like you have something great you want to tell us. We're going to take a break and come back and talk lots more about colors.

On number 844-724-8255. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday. We're talking about colors and all the different things you didn't know about colors, which I certainly do.

We're talking with Maso Brahmanian, Professor of Material Science at Oregon State University, Andrew Parker Research Fellow at Oxford University's Green Templeton College, author of Seven Deadly Colors. He's in London. And before I rudely interrupted you, Mas, you were going to tell us something fantastic. Well, what I want to say was when the water didn't have any hydrogen bonding, that is the bonding between hydrogen and oxygen, from one molecule to the other molecule, the water will be even more intense blue.

So we'll be drinking blue water and taking showers with blue water. Because of this hydrogen bonding, we shift the absorption towards more towards near-infrared so that makes the blue color more paler and difficult to see. Does that mean we could find water that's different than hydrogen bonding? It's harder to do. Because whenever you have an hydrogen and oxygen, because one has got a highly negative, other one is called electropositive, they try to form a bond, which creates what you call it a weak bond. That weak bond is called hydrogen bond. So it's very hard to do it.

But somehow I feel like maybe it will exist in the future, but right now I don't have any example. It shows like a water which can show a deep blue color, actually. Let me go to the phones 8404-724-8255. Let's go to Orlando. Kathy, welcome to Science Friday. Hi. Hi there. Go ahead.

Hey, I wanted to give a fact about vision, and that's that several types of animals, including birds and some insects, can see ultraviolet, and therefore they see, like, millions more colors than we can see. Yes, that is true. Andrew, what do you say about that? Yeah, no, absolutely. No, there's, we have quite a good range of vision, actually, going from violet to red. That's 400 to 700 nanometers. But just beyond the violet, you've got a range of ultraviolet from about 360 to 400 nanometers. And lots of animals do see that.

In fact, most insects, even a lot of fish and amphibians. So there is a part of the world that we just don't know what's going on. there's insects are finding flowers and birds are finding insects, and we have absolutely no idea how they're doing it because we can't see those private ultraviolet signals that are all around us. You know, can I add something to it? Sure, sure. You know, I'm sure Andrew knows about this.

There is a crustaceans called Mattis shrimp, which has got a, I heard about 11 or 13 cones, where we only have three cones in our eyes. So it can see more wavelength than humans can do. So definitely there are animals which exist, which can see better than us or more than us. That's right. Well, the mantis shrimp can distinguish colors more accurately than us. But interestingly, that's a marine animal.

And in the sea, we've just been talking about blue, and blue is the color that transmitting. its best through water. And as such, eyes evolved in the deeper sea to see only blue light. And in fact, some animals, like mammals, they, in evolutionary history, light exists. All the other colors don't make it that far. And so they evolved eyes that only see blue. And when they came back up to the, they couldn't re-evolve those other receptors, effectively black and white vision. That's fascinating.

But there's also a other interesting thing about that deep sea, because it's only blue, most animals there live right, so anything that's red will be to be. So a dragonfish evolves. So it goes around now, shining red lights all around the deep sea, and catches out all those animals that are free for all effectively. You can just see everything. That's really fascinating. That's fascinating. Didn't know that. In a short time I have left, I want to ask you this.

You were talking about the difficulty of making certain pigments without toxic. chemicals before. Why can't artificial intelligence help us predict which combinations might get some of these sought-after pigments? You know, we use them for all these things. Isn't there a computer model that will say, yes, this color will pop out if you mix this stuff? Well, that is a interesting question. In fact, there are lots of computer scientists have tried to model how to create compound with their desired properties, just like a color or electronic properties and so on. It is not easy to do it because sometimes they create materials which are stable only in computers, not in furnaces. So it's very hard to make them in the lab. That's why the N-min blue

was never predicted before, although the companies are looking for a new blue pigment for hundreds of years. The last blue pigment discovered was cobalt blue, which was 1802. So it's not easy to predict them, but you can try to rationalize them and say some intuitively or some chemistry principles. You can try to, kind of trial and error is still important in creating these, making the discoveries. That's why most of the pigments were discovered by accident, just like a Prussian blue, is another

example. All right. That's a great way to end. I can't think of a better way to end our segment. I want to thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Master Brahmannian is a professor of material science at Oregon State University, and he joined us by Skype and Andrew Parker Research Fellow at Oxford University's Green Templeton College, an author of Seven Deadly Colors.

And you can see photos of some of the phenomena we discussed on our website at Science Friday Dobcom slash color. Thank you, gentlemen, for taking time to be with us today. Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. Okay, want you to listen carefully. Can you ID this sound? No, that's not the clock from 60 minutes at the beginning of this show. This is the sound of a narwhal. The ocean is filled with fascinating sea creatures, and the norwal is one that seems to capture the imagination of a lot of people. It kind of looks like a beluga whale, but it has that long horn. And Norwells are pretty elusive. There aren't any in captivity, and not much is known about the whale. Let's let people's imagination run while. Boy, they call them Unicorns of the Sea

because they think they are when they see one. Scientists are interested in them, too, and a team of researchers tag six Norwalks with acoustic tags to create a sort of Norwal audio diary. And the results were published this week in the journal Plus One. My next guest is one of the authors on that study. Susanna Blackwell is a biologist, senior scientist at Greenridge Sciences based in,

in Santa Barbara. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. Now, is it true that Norwals live only in the Arctic? Yes, not in the Antarctic, as many people ask me. Oh, so we know that that area is rapidly changing. Is that mean the Norwells are going to be affected also? Well, that's what we're trying to figure out. We know that right now they have a couple of potential issues facing them. One is the fact that the waters are getting warmer. There's less ice in the summer. And so their environment is, you know, their environment is changing. The other is that because of that change, because of the lack of ice in the summer,

there is potential human activities that may come and take place. So there's going to be a change in the sound of their environment too. So what do they depend on to live in in the Arctic? Is it the ice that's there? Well, it's not really well known. They seem to be very linked to the pack ice. Like in the winter, you would think, well, maybe they could go south where there is no pack ice. Yet all winter long, they remain in the pack ice and very dense ice where they dive to great depths and, you know, forage for fish and stuff.

I know you attach tags that can record audio to six different Norwalks to get a sense of what kind of sounds they're making. And we have some of those sounds here. Let's hear some of the sounds you recorded. Let's play this clip first. Wow. Wow. Sounds almost like Weddell Seals at some point. It sounds like all kinds of diving sounds.

Tell us what we were listening to. Yeah. So that's actually one of my favorite clips. It occurred very close to the surface, and it involved several narwhals. We don't really know how many, but we definitely know there were more than just the animal that was carrying the tag. I wish I spoke, Narwhal. I wish I knew what they were saying, and you listen to the clip. You can hear all kinds of different sounds, whistles, and burst pulses and squeaky sounds and such.

So it's a form of communication. We think that much is for sure, but what they're saying, we don't know. Yeah, and after the Norval's were tagged and released, they didn't make any sounds for almost up to a full day, right? Yeah, that's right. I think they were frazzled by, you know, to instrument them, we have to catch them in a net, and they are actually animals that are hunted in the Arctic by the natives. so they may have thought their last moment had come, I don't know. In any event, we remove them from the net and put the tags on and then release them.

So it's interesting to see that they don't just go straight back to behaving normally. They actually were silent for anything between nine and 35 hours or so, 23 hours on average, before they started echolocating and seemingly behaving normally. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Susanna Blackwell about our Norval research, and we have a really interesting question on phones. So let's go to the phones. Let's go to Berkeley. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi there. I'm very interested in ocean issues and ocean subjects.

A lot has come out about narwhal's tusks and how they're used in perceiving the world around them. And I was wondering if there was any correlation between their horn and sound production and reception. Well, in these first six animals that we instrumented, only one of them was a male. And at this point, we have not looked at any of those questions. So that may be something for the future. I'm not sure. But, you know, there are several thoughts on what the task is for. And I think our group tends to believe that it's secondary sexual characteristics, more than an environment-sensing organ.

And one reason for that is that if it was important for survival, then why do the girls not have it, right? The female laurel seemed to do just fine without the tusk. What is the tusk part of? It's not like a horn, is it? No, it's actually one of the front teeth, one of the front teeth, sorry. It's the left one. In fact, in the skull, you can find the right one, which is small and just remains inside the skull. And the left one at some point in male starts to erupt.

Although I have to say sometimes there are females with tusks, and sometimes there are males without. So it's not, you know, it's not completely absolute. But we actually use the tusk to determine whether it's a male or a female. otherwise we'd have to flip the whale upside down and whatnot. We don't want to do that. So we just say if it has a task, it's a boy. If it does not, it's a girl. Yeah, I hate it when that happens.

You have to flip upside down. So what's the next step in your study? You've now tagged them. What would you really want to know? What is the bottom line that you want to know? Well, this first paper was really sort of just one step in the way. What we really are interested in is the effects of air gun pulses on the animals. and aeron pulses are used in seismic exploration to look for oil and gas,

and they are a fairly high amplitude sounds. And there's a lot of interest by various oil companies in prospecting around Greenland. And east and west of Greenland is basically where most of the norwals of the world hang out. And, of course, we feel like it's really important to know what the effects of these sounds are on this animal, which is really pretty poorly known. Yeah, so you see, the big question, big picture question is how the Norwals might be affected by human-made sound. Yes, yes. Do you have any preliminary data that, how do you think they might respond?

Well, we only know that when people do vessel-based surveys, you know, when they go out and count the marine mammals, narwhals are very rarely seen, even when those vessels go through areas where aerial surveys have shown that there are thousands of whales. And so they are very sensitive. They seem to be very sensitive to underwater sound. I have only about a minute left, so I'm sorry to interrupt, but I'm always interested in how scientists get into their line of work and what motivates you. How did you get interested in Norwhals, of all things?

Well, you know, I actually never thought I would be working on Norval. It's sort of this quasi-missible animal, even for marine mammal biologists, but I worked on bowheads for many years and studied the effects of argon pulses on bowheads. And then I just happened to be at the right place at the right time. And, you know, a team of Danes had been doing work for many years in Greenland, and they needed somebody who understood acoustics, and I'd worked on the effects of airborne pulses, and so there you go. This just happened.

Isn't life like that a lot? You happen to be in the right place at the right time? Yeah, it is. Yeah. And so you're going to stick with this for a while, I'm hoping. As long as I can. Right. And as long as you get new information, we're always happy to have you back, Dr. Blackwell.

Oh, thank you very much. Come back and talk to Susanna Blackwell is a biologist and senior scientist at the Greenridge Science is based in Santa Barbara. And you can hear more of those Norwal sounds. They're really fascinating at our website at Science Friday.com slash Norwal. BJ Leiderman composed our theme music. And if you missed any part of the show, you'd like to hear you. hear it again, you know, you can always subscribe to our podcast, take your podcast of, you know, player of choice. And you can always ask you a smart speaker now to add, I won't say the name of the

speaker, to play Science Friday whenever you want. So, you know, every day now is Science Friday. And we're on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all over the place. We want to thank the folks at WBEZ again for hosting us this week on Science Friday. We'll be back in New York next week. And hope to see you then. I'm Ira Flato in Chicago. Chicago.