Science Friday - Drugs Designed By AI, The Phosphorus Paradox, Regulating PFAS Chemicals. March 17, 2023, Part 1

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

At Long Last, More Regulations For Forever Chemicals This week, the EPA proposed the first national standards for drinking water that would set limits on the amount of PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) chemicals that would be allowed in water systems. There are thousands of different PFAS chemicals, which are often used industrially for properties such as heat, water and stain resistance—from fire-fighting foams to coatings on clothing and paper plates. They have come to be known as “forever chemicals” as they are extremely slow to break down in the environment. The chemicals have been linked to health problems, including cancer. Katherine Wu, staff writer for The Atlantic, joins Ira to talk about the proposed regulations and how such a sweeping rule might be implemented nationwide. Wu also discusses her latest article on COVID-19 origins, and genetic analysis that could tie the pandemic back to raccoon dogs in the Wuhan market. They also talk about other news from the week in science, including research hinting at active volcanoes on Venus, a study of the effects of COVID-19 on maternal health during pregnancy, and research into curing HIV with stem cells from cord blood. Plus an explosion of seaweed, and the unveiling of a new space suit design.   How AI Is Changing The Drug Development Pipeline Researching and developing new drugs is a notoriously long and expensive process, filled with a lot of trial and error. Before a new drug gets approved scientists must come up with something they think might work in the lab, test it in animals, and then if it passes those hurdles, clinical trials in humans. In an effort to smooth out some of the bumps along the road, a growing number of pharma companies are turning to new artificial intelligence tools in the hopes of making the process cheaper and faster. Ira talks with Will Douglas Heaven, senior editor for AI at MIT Technology Review about his reporting on the topic.    An Ambitious Plan To Build Back Louisiana’s Coast Louisiana will receive more than $2 billion to pay for an ambitious, first-of-its-kind plan to reconnect the Mississippi River to the degraded marshes on Plaquemines Parish’s west bank. A collective of federal and state agencies—the Louisiana Trustees Implementation Group—signed off on the multibillion-dollar Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion on Wednesday. The funding will come out of settlement dollars resulting from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Once constructed, the two-mile-long sediment diversion is expected to build up to 27 square miles of new land by 2050. In the next 50 years, as Louisiana’s coast continues to sink and global sea levels rise, the diversion is also projected to sustain one-fifth of the remaining land. “The Trustees believe that a sediment diversion is the only way to achieve a self-sustaining marsh ecosystem in the Barataria Basin,” wrote the implementation group in its decision. Read the rest at sciencefriday.com. Balancing The Good And Bad Of Phosphorus Phosphorus is critical to life as we know it. In fact, every cell in the human body contains this important element. It’s also a key component in fertilizer. But not all of that fertilizer stays on crops—much of that phosphorus flows into waterways. Therein lies the rub: the runoff fertilizes the plant life growing in the water, creating toxic algal blooms. To top it all off, the phosphorus reserves in the United States are on track to disappear in just a few decades, according to some estimates.  Ira talks about the past, present, and future of phosphorus with Dan Egan, journalist in residence at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences, and author of the new book, The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and A World out of Balance. Want to read The Devil’s Element with us? Join the SciFri Book Club and read along!   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. 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. Later in the hour, how the pharma industry is using new AI tools to develop new drugs faster and cheaper, plus our complicated relationship with phosphorus. But first, chemical news of another sort. This week, the EPA announced that it would move to tighten regulations on PFAS chemicals. Those are the so-called forever chemicals that have been linked to health problems and that are turning up all over the environment. joining me now to talk about that and other stories from the Week in Science is Catherine Wu, staff writer at the Atlantic. Welcome back. Hello, always good to be here. Nice to have you. All right, how big a deal is this EPA proposal? It is a pretty big deal. I mean, this is the first time that the EPA has really cracked down on PFS, and they are going basically as low as they can. The plan, unless it is derailed, is to basically say, you cannot have any detectable PFS in the water from now on,

or at least starting a few months from now if this goes through. Tell us what the chemical is all about. Why are they around all these things? So there's a couple things. First, if you basically check the blood of pretty much anyone, you will detect some levels of these chemicals. And part of the reason is once they get out into the environment, they pretty much stick around.

The nickname of Forever Chemicals is pretty apt, because once they head out into the environment, they really don't break down very well. So if they are being produced in factories and then running off into the water, they will be there for quite a long time. And a lot of companies have used these. These chemicals are really good at repelling oil and water. And so they're used in a lot of non-stick pans, water repellent clothing, things that are really a big part of our everyday lives. And they never go away. So what is the plan then to remove it from the water? It is going to be a massive infrastructural overhaul. I mean, certainly part and parcel of this will inevitably have to be less production with PFAS, which a lot of companies have already been moving toward in recent years because of the noted health effects, you know, since scientists have realized that they can cause all sorts of health issues, including potentially cancer to low birth weight babies, liver damage, fertility problems. A lot of companies have tried to replace them with safer alternatives.

But it is going to be in part up to water utilities. They will probably need to replace a lot of equipment and install specialized filters to remove the chemicals, which isn't as easy as just taking a breta filter in everyone's kitchen. It's going to be pretty intense. And so what happens with this rule? Do you think it's going to be challenged by industry? It sounds like it already has. Unsurprisingly, the people who are slated to have to spend the most money to adjust to these new regulations have issued some complaints. They're taking issue with some of the science, linking PFAS to different health effects.

and there will be some pushback. The regulation is sort of open to public comment for the next couple months and we will see what happens. But I personally would be surprised if this doesn't go through. There's been a lot of support coming out for it and people have been calling for this for a very long time. Yeah. Let's move on to something else. There's been a lot of talk lately about the possible origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. Was it somehow connected to a research lab? Did it make the jump to humans from wild animals in a marketplace? You have a new story. story this week about some genetic analysis that could shed light on that question. Tell us about that. Yeah. So this is a very fresh off the press's story and absolutely still developing. But exactly,

as you said, it's been really hard to nail down exactly where this pandemic started. And part of the issue is there has been a lack of really direct evidence pinpointing the virus in a highly infectious setting where it could have jumped into several people at once and then from there really spread from person to person. One of the big venues where the pandemic is thought to have started by many scientists is the Juanon wet market. But what scientists have really been missing is evidence that there were infected wild animals there in a context where they could have infected people. Now, this new evidence is not 100% of a slam dunk. We don't yet have a virus isolated from a live animal at the time the pandemic began, for example. But basically what scientists have done

is they've looked at environmental samples. So swabs taken from around the market on surfaces, carts, frasers, that kind of thing, and looked for evidence of the virus's genetic material in the same swab as genetic material from an animal. And that is a decent indication that the two were close enough for that animal to very likely be infected. And that would be a very part of simonious explanation for, hey, the virus is here. It has to have been in a living creature for it to be propagated around. And maybe that is a potential source for how people at that market got infected. Did they say what animal they think it came from? It's very difficult to say definitively, but one of the biggest animals that came out of this new analysis is the raccoon dog, which is a fox-like creature with

that kind of classic raccoonish bandit mask. And we know that these animals have been widely available at many wet markets throughout China over the years. And they are also bred for fur farming in the country. How reliable is the data? I mean, where did it come from? Who analyzed it? So this data was actually initially collected by Chinese researchers who were working very early on in the pandemic. They basically went to the Huanon market shortly after it was shut down in January of 2020 and swabbed a bunch of surfaces there, hoping to basically pick up what was happening when people were probably getting infected in December, November of 2019. and they banked those sequences.

And it was really only very recently that that raw data became available. Chinese researchers had analyzed this data before, but they hadn't previously pulled out this sort of animal data. So when researchers in the U.S. and Canada and Australia and different parts of Europe got their hands on this raw data, they reanalyzed it and were able to pull out those raccoon dog sequences as well as sequences from some other animals. But the raccoon dogs were the ones that really popped. So you have new data, some,

adding to the pile that we already have, I don't know, is that you think this will ever be really answerable to anyone's real satisfaction? That's a great question and a really good way of framing it, because, yeah, it depends on who you're asking, and it depends what they really feel like they need to satisfy it. You know, we can never go back in time and witness an animal infecting a human in real time, if that is indeed what happened. That makes this really, really difficult. I think there are some people very, very, very dug in on all sides of this, and it's hard to say what will fully convince them. There's been a lot of surprise that you are even getting new data at this point three years in, and who knows what else could turn up. Well, you gave me a great way to segue to my next story, which is all about the news this week about Venus and a lesson in not throwing away your old data.

Tell us about that. Yes, serious takeaway from this episode is going to be be a hoarder with your data. But yeah, scientists during the pandemic were pouring over old data taken from NASA's Magellan mission from the early 1990s. And they were looking at all of these images that were taken on the planet's surface between February and October of 1991. And they noticed that over the course of those eight months or so, there was this particular volcanic vent.

It started out nice and circular and very neat looking. And over time, it got warped. It doubled in. size and by the end of this, it just looked kind of wonky, a little bit messed up. And they ran a bunch of simulations trying to account for what could have caused this warping. And they concluded that, you know, really the only thing that could cause this much change in such a short time, at least on geological scales, was some sort of eruption. Lava coming out of that vent, which means Venus is still volcanically active.

Very surprising, right? Yeah, it's the first direct evidence of this. I mean, scientists had presumed that maybe the planet was still volcanically active, but it was all sort of more of the circumstantial evidence prior to this. So this is pretty exciting. Pretty cool. Back here on Earth, let's move to some other news, an advance in treating HIV, but it's a bit technical.

Can you weed us through that? The news this week is that this case report was finally published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, but it's been unfolding for quite some time. As you can imagine, when we are trying to determine if someone is cured of HIV, to declare someone cured is pretty tricky. But the idea here is this is one of only a handful of people that appears to have been cured of HIV so far. And the big difference here is two things.

The way in which this person was probably cured and the demographic of this person. This was the first mixed race woman to maybe have an HIV cure. And the way that she was cured is slightly different from some of the patients that we've maybe heard about before. You know, you've maybe heard about the Berlin patient or the London patient. Right. This is now the New York patient. And what's happened before, there are people out there who are genetically resistant to HIV. The virus can't get into their immune cells because they have a genetic mutation that makes them actually lack the receptor the virus needs to get into cells. And so if they take the person who is living with HIV, get rid of their immune cells through

chemotherapy or radiation, they can then take stem cells from the bone marrow of a donor and replace the recipient's immune system, basically by repopulating their body with fresh stem cells that will turn into immune cells that now have this genetic resistance. The catch with that is, you know, if you've ever signed up for a bone marrow registry, you probably know that it is really, really, really, really tricky to get a match between donor and recipient. They have to be really, really, really genetically close. And what scientists have found so far is that a lot of the people who have been found with this genetic resistance are white, which potentially limits the recipient pool that the bone marrow can go into. Now, what happened with this new patient is she was actually

able to get stem cells still with that genetic resistance mutation, but from umbilical cord blood. And for whatever reason, the stem cells that come from umbilical cord blood are way more tolerant of sort of donor recipient mismatches than adult own marrow. And that may just be because, you know, those freshly born cells are more flexible. Like they're newly born. They don't have any biases yet. They're chill with anything. There's a hope that approach can be more equitable. Let's look to some future-looking news. NASA is looking ahead to a planned moon landing with a new space suit. That's just what we need, right? Exactly. Got to end with some fashion forward stuff. So picture that your classic spacesuit, super white, bulky, tough to move in. People are kind of just bopping around the

moon looking like the Michelin man. We are way overdue for an upgrade on this. And it's not just about the aesthetics, right? These new spacesuits are made by a company called Axiom and they've been designed to be way more flexible. Basically at a showcase earlier this week, Axiom was showing off people modeling the suits, doing squats and doing all sorts of contortions, showing that this is not only going be easier to move in, but it's also going to be accommodating of more body types, which is really exciting because we are hoping to send people of more genders and more backgrounds and more body types to the moon. And the color, a wide range of modern runway colors, I imagine? So there is a catch here. The demos that they showed, where these really sleek, grayish black

with these kind of blue and orange accents looking very, very chic. But unfortunately, when we do take these suits to the moon, they do still have to be white because they've got to reflect the sunlight and not absorb it. So you can get any color you want as long as it's white. Thank you. Exactly. All right, Katie. Thank you for joining us. Always a pleasure to have you. Thanks so much. Always good to be here. Catherine Wu, staff writer at the Atlantic. We have to take a break and when we come back, how AI is changing the way new drugs are developed. So stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Researching and developing new drugs is a long and expensive process. It's also a process filled with a lot of trial and error. Before a new

drug gets approved, scientists must come up with something they think might work in the lab. Then they tested in animals. And then if it's past those hurdles, they tested in humans. In an effort to smooth out some of the bumps along the road, a growing number of pharma companies are turning to new artificial intelligence tools in the hopes of making the process more efficient. Yes, Yes, AI is here also. Joining me now to talk about his reporting on the topic is my guest, Will Douglas Heaven, senior editor for AI at the MIT Technology Review. He's based in London. Welcome to Science Friday. Hey, how you doing? Nice to have you. Let's talk about it. Before we get into AI and how it's changing drug development, can you give us a quick refresher on how new drugs are typically designed and developed? Yeah, so, I mean, this will be super high level. You need to identify. something in the body that your drug is going to interact with, and that's called a target,

and then you need to obviously design the drug that's going to interact with that target. And say your target is a protein in the body, then you want to design a drug molecule that will find its way to that target and either change how it functions or switch it off. And this is also typically done in the very early stages in the lab. You sort of put it in like a chemical soup and see that it does what you hope it does. and the promising ones then go down, as you mentioned, you know, further down the pipeline and get tested in animals and eventually in humans. But all of that is really slow and painstaking with loads of dead ends.

We're talking about using AI to speed up this process, right, before it gets to human testing. Exactly. I mean, so the big promise with AI is that you can cut some corners to do less of the work in the actual lab, which is expensive, takes a lot of people, a lot of expertise, and experiments are slow to run. And the idea generally is if you can do as much of this in a computer with AI-driven simulations, predicting which molecules will do what with which targets. If you can do all that in a computer and sort of, you know, avoid the dead ends before you actually then do the expensive lab work, then, you know, hopefully you can do the whole thing faster and cheaper.

Okay, let's start with something practical we can talk about. How about identifying a new target for a new medication? How are researchers using AI to improve this process? So, I mean, it's all drawing on the vast amounts of data that we've acquired over the last few years. So sophisticated computational techniques are by no means new. And one of the reasons that AI is starting to make a big impact now is that that data, there's enough of it, and it's, you know, high enough quality that you can use it to train AI algorithms that can, you know, make predictions about what this molecule might do with that target in, you know, in this sort of

biological situation. And you can run many, many, many, many of these simulations all at once searching through vast spaces of potential interactions, orders of magnitude more than anything we've ever been able to do before. And hopefully you can sort of then highlight the one in, you know, a million or billion that is promising, and then only make that and test that actually in the lab. Let's talk about how drugs work in the body, right? You have a drug, it's a molecule, and it has to fit into a certain place and a certain spot on the cells. Is that correct? Yeah, yeah. And so it's like a tinker toy. It's really a shape thing, right? A lock and a key sort of thing. and so you're looking for the right shape

or the right molecule to fit in the right spot and that seems to be like really tedious and maybe something AI can do a lot better. So if you have lots and lots of data about, you know, what kind of keys are out there, what kind of locks are out there and, you know, what they might do when they go together, then you throw all that at your machine learning system

and it will learn the sort of the patterns of locks and keys. And, you know, when you give it, you ask it a question about, you know, a particular lock, it can sort of predict whether or not this particular molecule will be, you know, a good fit for it. Can you give an example of how pharma companies are using AI image generation? I mean, one thing that you might want to do is actually take some sort of tissue sample from patients, you know, so that might be like tiny bits of cells.

And then, you know, you train your robotic camera on them and applying lots of these different potential drug candidates to those samples and see what happens. And the computer vision can monitor and find detail, the sort of changes that happen, tell whether that drug is killing the wrong cells or not doing anything at all. So it just allows you to do sort of experiments at scale. So you don't need actual human eyeballs on these experiments all the time. You can sort of run them automatically in a big robotic lab. Again, it sort of just speeds things up and does it with, you know, far more accuracy than, you know, maybe an individual human could. You also featured a company called Accentia, which uses AI to match patients with drugs that they might otherwise not have been recommended. This is like terrific.

Yeah, that's very cool. So, I mean, everything we've been talking about so far is sort of, you know, from, you know, from the bottom up, you know, we're talking about sort of how you might identify new targets and then build new drugs that would act on those. They're also looking at things from the other end, from the patient end where you might want to actually figure out exactly. which drug matches that patient. So again, you would take a tissue sample from that patient, and then in the lab with these robotic computer vision, you can then test lots of different existing drugs. Try a hundred of them on this patient cells and see which one actually works. I mean, you would never try 100 drugs on a patient. Think of someone who has to go through

chemotherapy. You know, that's an extremely unpleasant, drawn-out process. And if it doesn't work, all you're able to say is, okay, that drug we just tried wasn't any good for that patient. So let's try the next one in the list. And it might take you months or years to go down sort of half a different drugs. And if they're all not working, then, you know, then that's that's an awful thing to put a patient through. Right. And you profiled in your work and you're reporting a patient that has actually benefited from this technique. They've run a trial now on quite a few different patients.

But the first one that really gave them a sense that they were onto something was, an 82-year-old patient who had been through six failed chemotherapy sessions. So six different drugs that his doctors had tried on him hadn't worked. I mean, and that's months and months of sort of suffering through all this. So, you know, his doctors didn't really have anywhere else to turn, nothing else to lose. So they enrolled him in this new trial. They took tissue samples from the patient. They tested dozens all at the same time. And the amazing thing there is that the drug that they found that actually worked that they then gave to the patient, was it a drug that was on the market already, but its previous tests had suggested that it wouldn't be any good

for the patient they were looking at. No kidding. That's where the patient's doctors hadn't actually tried it on him, but it goes to show that like every person is different in sort of complicated, subtle different ways. So just because the tests had shown that this drug hadn't worked, you know, for most people or on average, it doesn't mean that it wouldn't work for that particular person. And in this case, it did. But they wouldn't have found it if they hadn't done this, this sort of this AI-driven robotic lab. That's amazing because that's the definition of personalized medicine right there. Exactly.

And also what you're doing is you're probably, which is something drug companies are really concerned with, and that's money. You're probably making it cheaper to be able to do this, right, using AI. Yeah, and who benefits from that in the end, right? It's us. The reason drugs are so expensive is because the cost of every successful drug has to cover the 19 or so drugs that didn't make it. Estimates slightly vary, but, you know,

one in 20 drug might actually make it all the way through from, you know, initial development all the way through sort of years of clinical trials to actually make it onto the market. One person I spoke to in the industry said that basically the business of drug discovery is about failure. I mean, you expect new drugs to fail. If you can make the process quicker by avoiding sort of dead ends to begin with, you know, throwing away all the sort of the candidates that AI predicts won't actually go anywhere, then the whole process becomes cheaper. And if you also only then submit to clinical trials, those drugs which seem to be most promising. then you'll have the highest success rate when it gets to clinical trial.

If we can make it so that the drugs that we actually make and develop and then put to clinical trials are more likely to be successful, then the cost of drugs for everyone should go down. Well, is this gone mainstream, or is it a big trend, or are these just small startups that are doing the AI work? And then the big pharma will come in when it's developed. Well, a bit of both. Most of the innovation and activity is happening sort of in the startup space,

which is typical in tech, right? right? And there's a lot of hype and a lot of money being thrown at these startups. I mean, one investor I spoke to, you reckon there were several hundred, you know, farmer startups that was emerged in the last few years, all looking at different aspects of this, or wanting a bit of the action. I mean, I expect there's going to be a correction in the next few years, where many of those won't make it, but the activity in this space is really hot. And obviously a startup can move quicker and, you try things and fail faster.

But the big existing pharma companies are, they're not blind to this. I mean, they're also trying out these techniques themselves. Well, when do we know when all of this is a success? You follow this quite well. Is this sort of a timeline? Do you see a progression when, well, maybe next year, a year from now, this will be mainstream and everybody will be using? It will probably be a few years before we see the first drugs that were designed

with the help of AI actually hit the market. The mark of success of drug development is when you start clinical trials, right? I mean, when will we see AI drugs be part of clinical trials? There are a bunch of drugs already that have been submitted as a clinical trial. So in that stage now where they're being tested in humans around about 20, I mean, there'll be more submitted sort of every few months. But let's say around about 20 drugs are now in clinical trials where they're being tested on humans. And that's up from zero in 2020. So in the last couple of years, that's the sort of one measure of how fast this is progressing. Now, in clinical trials can run for years. So it might be some time before we see the first

successful ones actually hit the market, you know, actually be allowed to, you know, for regulators to actually allow your doctor to prescribe it to you. And of course, We may find that the drugs that have been submitted in the initial round, maybe none of them work. So, you know, we might go back to scratch and then these companies will have to sort of try again and submit new drugs. But even if that happens, then this technology is not going away. I mean, the upsides in terms of speeding things up and cutting costs, I think, are too great. Yeah. And AI is here everywhere to stay. Why not in the drug industry, Will? Thank you for taking to have to be with us today.

No, it's my pleasure. Will Douglas Heaven, Senior Editor for AI at the MIT Technology Review. He is based in London. Now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO, St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. Over the decades, we have been following the massive changes happening to Louisiana's coast,

especially in the southeast, where the Mississippi River, ends. Climate change and levy systems have disconnected the river from coastal marshes, changing the ecosystem. Louisiana has now secured $2.2 billion for an ambitious plan to reconnect these waterways through sediment diversion. What is that? What can we expect of it? Joining me now to talk us through this plan is Hallie Parker, Environment Reporter for the Coastal Desk at WNO in New Orleans. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me on. Where is this money all coming from? Yeah. So if you remember back in 2010, there was a gigantic oil spill, the Deepwater Horizon or BP oil spill. And so from that settlement, that's where all of this, this gigantic sum of money is coming from to pay for this project.

Uh-huh. Yeah, who could forget that, that oil spill. Let's talk through this, the sediment diversion plan. What is that? What does it really mean? So really at its core, The sediment diversion is really all about, like you're talking about, reconnecting the muddy Mississippi River to Louisiana's dying wetlands, or at least some of them. And the hope is to do that first in one of our most degraded basins, which is located about like a 40-minute drive south of New Orleans. And the state wants to construct this like two-mile-long concrete channel, redirecting as much water as possible from the river during the flood season into these now open bays.

there used to be marsh there, but that's all disappeared for the most part. And so once that river water leaves the channel and the diversion structure, it'll end up slowing down in the mud, the silt, the sands, and the clays that are inside of that water will start to fall out and build new deltas and wetlands. And the hope is that it'll build up to 21 square miles over 50 years. Hmm. And so this is going to benefit specifically whom? Yeah. So, I mean, there are a lot of benefits to this gigantic project.

If you talk to, like, anyone in South Louisiana, especially the Southeast, everyone agrees we need more land. Right, right. So this land and the wetlands that we're going to build are super important. It provides a critical buffer against hurricanes and storm surge, the same things that seem to be getting stronger with climate change. And this land will help protect the populated areas farther up river from the diversion, like the greater New Orleans area. because as more of that land slips away, the more vulnerable we are. So we're trying to build that back up. Plus, it's not just like the sand and the mud.

It's also the freshwater itself, because as that land has been lost, the saltiness of the Gulf has actually migrated inward and inland. And that's also transformed the basin over the past century or so. And so that freshwater will help it remain a diverse estuary, benefiting things like crawfish, which we love to eat down here, Louisiana, bass, crabs.

Yeah. Well, it sounds great, but who could be against this thing? Well, there's definitely drawbacks to a huge plan like this, too. The most vocal groups against it are residents who could see more flooding and seafood fishermen. And like the state has a plan to try to deal with all that. But with the residents, there are a handful of communities that are outside of a levee system. And so they would see more flooding by having more water introduced, unfortunately. And the state's trying to help by elevating roads and sewer systems.

or offering buyouts if needed. But when it comes to the fishers, it's a little bit of a harder fix because just like how the system is transformed, this would like be an immediate shock to the system. And it would push out seafood like shrimp. It would kill oyster beds that oyster harvesters rely on just because there would be so much fresh water. And so these two groups have also just already been struggling due to other factors. And they think that this diversion could be what ends, you know, know, generations of fishermen in these families.

Well, climate change in the meantime is going to keep changing coastal areas, right? Certainly Louisiana's coast. Could this plan actually work? Could it mitigate any of those effects? Yeah. So that's what makes this project so special, or what's supposed to make it so special, is it's the only coastal restoration project in Louisiana with the ability to actually maintain land in the face of sea level rise, which is what makes it so different

and why so many advocates and scientists actually support it, the goal is really for this to be like a self-sustaining project that also helps sustain some of the other projects that they have going on in that basin. Thank you, Hallie Parker, Environment Reporter, for the Coastal Desk at WWNO in New Orleans. We have to take a break. And when we come back, the phosphorus paradox. Why is there so much phosphorus running off into waterways while we face a global shortage of this key element? Yeah, stay with us.

This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. Consider the element phosphorus number 15 in your periodic table if you're playing at home. Phosphorus is critical to life as we know it. Every cell in the human body contains phosphorus. It's a key component in fertilizer, the letter P in your NPK plant food. But not all of that fertilizer stays on crops. Much of that phosphorus flows into waterways and there lies the rub. It fertilizes the plant life growing in the water, creating toxic algae blooms.

And to top it all off, our phosphorus reserves in the U.S. are on track to disappear in just a few decades. Joining me now to give us a fuller picture about this often overlooked element is my guest. Dan Egan, author of the new book and April's Science Friday Book Club pick. The Devil's Element, Phosphorus, and a World Out of Balance. Dan is a journalist in residence at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee's School of Freshwater Sciences, based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Dan, welcome back to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. Why did you call this book The Devil's Element? Well, that's long been the term used for phosphorus, and it's for a couple of reasons.

One is it was the 13th element discovered by an alchemist in Hamburg, Germany back in 1669. And two, it's a pretty dastardly substance. I mean, it is a critical fertilizer, but it's also been a weapon of war for a very long time. It was known as Willie Peep in Vietnam, white phosphorus. It's nasty stuff. Okay, let's get into this a bit. Let's start off with phosphorus 101. Phosphorus comes from phosphates.

A raw phosphorus does not occur in nature, right? No, it doesn't. It has to be essentially conjured. And that's exactly what that alchemist did back in Hamburg, Germany, in the 1600s. He was chasing the philosopher's stone, you know, that magical substance that could turn base metals into gold. At the time, a lot of people were looking for this mythical substance in a lot of different places. And this particular alchemist, Henning Brand, he was a urine man. He believed it could be harvested from the human waste stream.

And so on his way to trying to make gold, he and, ended up making elemental phosphorus. I don't want to get into so much into the great details, but that must be a lot of urine to go around collecting. Yeah, yeah. We're talking vats. And I actually, I thought of opening this book up with trying to make my own phosphorus because this is a book about phosphorus, right?

And it's not the sexiest topic. You've got to come out of the gate hard. And so my plan was I have a turkey fryer. I got access to a lot of beer drinking friends and their urine. I had at the time a father-in-law who's since deceased, but he was a chemical engineer who spent his career working on catalysts for nitrogen production for fertilizer. And he's this cranky old English guy, and he's like, we're not going to get close, but we can have fun trying. And then I heard from a professor at Johns Hopkins University, and he made it very clear to me that, A, it was a fool's there, and you weren't going to get close to making it. And the closer you got, the closer you're going to get to really hurting yourself, because it's very combustible.

stuff. So what was the original phosphorus used for? Was it used for fertilizer? It was mostly just a curiosity. So what condensed from all this urine and from some other hocus pocus were these waxy little nuggets, maybe the size of chocolate chips. They were cool to the touch, but they cast this well, phosphorescent glow. It wasn't until the 1700s when actual chemists started getting to work and they realized what it was and where it could be found and what it could do. to a crop that it became a commodity as a fertilizer. All right, let's talk about how we got to use phosphorus as a fertilizer. Tell me how that progressed.

Well, ever since agriculture started some 10,000 years ago, people have been tinkering with the land trying to replenish the nutrients lost with the harvest of each crop. And it was a particularly acute problem in Britain because it's an island nation with limited agriculture lands. And so they were kind of pioneers and all that. And way back 100 years ago, they were throwing everything they could think of on crops, you know, blood, fabric, bones, and manure, obviously, human and animal manure.

And bones proved to be particularly effective. And so they didn't really know why at the time, but they knew they wanted bones. And so this propelled the English into some pretty grim places in their never-ending hunt for phosphorus. specifically, they went to Waterloo about six years after the battle when some 40,000 people fell in about 10 hours, along with a lot of horses. The British came back to plunder that battlefield several years later, stripped it of all of its bones, built some bone crushing mills back in England, and ground them into dust and spread them on crops and made turnips and weep grow magnificently. Well, I mean, you can't really, you know, depend on getting bones to

make phosphorus in a large amount for fertilizer, can you? No, no. I mean, the whole story of phosphorus as a fertilizer is this idea that, oh, we've found a bountiful source that is never going to play out, and it always plays out. The hunt eventually took them to the west coast of South America, to what's known as the Guano Islands off of Peru, and these islands were lousy with phosphorus, and as you mentioned earlier, nitrogen and potassium, the other two critical fertilizing elements. The situation there was, It almost never rained in this region. And there were a lot of fish eating birds, and those birds needed to nest and lay eggs, and they did it on these islands.

And under normal conditions, all the waste they would generate would be washed off the landscape back into the ocean to go into the circle of life. In this case, it just got locked up. And so the British and much of Europe, along with America, began to exploit these islands in the 1840s and 50s. And again, it was thought at the time that we found the mother load, never going to run out. And in about 40 or 50 years, those islands were pretty much played out. So the hunt went on. And now most of the phosphorus in the U.S. comes from Florida, right? In the U.S., yeah.

That's where the primary deposits are. There's some in Idaho and some in North Carolina. But we're blowing through them at a pace that, you know, there's an end of the road is coming. We don't know exactly when, some say, three or four decades, and then we're going to be on the hunt again. Most of the phosphorus rock deposits that sustain modern agriculture today are found in Western Sahara and Morocco, 80% of them, as a matter of fact. You know, think about energy security. Well, there's workarounds to oil, but there are no workarounds to phosphorus. I mean, every living cell depends on it, and nothing can substitute. Yeah, because I've been reading

about news reports talking about is heading towards something they call phosphageddon. The researchers who coined that phrase, I mean, they're really trying to get people to think about this because people haven't been thinking about it for the last century because it seems like we've had a bottomless supply, but there's a bottom there. And also, at the same time that we're blowing through the existing and limited reserves, we're overusing it in many cases to the point where we're growing food at the expense of our fresh water because, as you mentioned earlier, phosphorus doesn't lose its fertilizing properties when it washes off a cornfield or a soybean field. And a lot of it does.

And it makes its way into our waters where it is responsible for these horrible algae blooms. These are toxic blooms. It's blue-green algae, cyanobacteria. They produce toxins that can kill dogs and make people sick. They've been suspected in a couple of human deaths over the past couple of decades in the U.S., including a kid who went swimming in a golf course pond near Madison, Wisconsin. You talk about a paradox here because in one sense we're running out of phosphorus on the other sense we're just wasting it, right, as it runs off. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, phosphorus really was like the master link in the circle of life.

in simple terms, you look at a traditional dairy farm. A cow grazes in a pasture or poops. That poop fertilizes more grass. That cow eats the grass, the cow poops, and on and on and on and on. And once we figured out that we could squeeze more phosphorus from the earth than it's naturally willing to seed by mining these specific deposits of rocks, we crack that circle and turn it into a straight line where you use it once and it just gets flushed away. too often. And that's, you know, having dire consequences for our water supplies. So it is a

paradox. It's like we're running low on it and we're also overusing it. You know, in 2014, Toledo lost its drinking water supply. A half a million people couldn't safely drink their tap water for several days because of a plume of toxin produced by toxic algae got into their water supply. And you couldn't boil your way out of this problem because that would only concentrate the toxin. So they're bringing in pallets, like the National Guard had to come and bring in pallets of baby formula and tanker trucks of water. And this is a city that's on the edge of, you know, the world's largest freshwater system. And its residents could not, even with treatment, safely drink their water for a number of days. They've since got the problem fixed or the symptom has been

addressed, but the underlying problem remains. And that is Lake Erie is being overdosed with phosphorus, and that's producing toxic algae, and that's threatening humans and pets and the environment in general. So if we are running out of phosphorus, is there a substitute, or is the price of phosphorus just going to go through the sky, and there are going to be food shortages, things like that? It's like water. You know, it just keeps circulating and circulating. You may get polluted and may get locked up in a glacier or something, but the water we have is, you know, all the water will ever have and it doesn't go away. And the same thing with phosphorus,

but we're moving it so quickly from the ground, from these stable rock deposits into the living world that at some point we're going to have to restitch this circle of life. We're going to have to be smarter about reusing the stuff that we put on the fields that don't get taken up by crops. And manure is a big problem. A lot of the phosphorus making its way into waters comes from manure. and that is a critical fertilizer, but too often we look at it as just like these big, you know,

factory farms, the concentrated animal feeding operations. We look at these lagoons of manure as, you know, piles of waste. And if you think about the British mentality back in the 1800s, they would recognize it for the trove of nutrients that it is. And we've got to get back to that point and get smarter about using it. And maybe that's not just applying, you know, raw manure on the ground, but it's processed. processing it and stripping out the phosphorus, pelletizing it, and into a form that's as pure as anything that's coming out of a factory. And we can do that. We're going to have to do it at some point. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. If you're just joining us, I'm talking with

Dan Egan, author of the new book, The Devil's Element, Phosphorus and a world out of balance. And because of how easily it combusts, I mean, phosphorus burns white hot, doesn't it? It's been used as a weapon. Oh, yeah, yeah. And I did encounter a gentleman, and this is not an uncommon phenomenon. He lives north of Hamburg, Germany, and he was ambling along the Baltic Sea looking for just fossilized treasures. A lot of people up on the Baltic coast are always on the hunt for Baltic amber, because that used to be a big conifer forest. And some of the resin from those trees is today amber, and it's very valued. And nuggets of phosphorus look remarkably like amber and those nuggets are in the water because it's kind of a coincidence, but phosphorus was

discovered in Hamburg in 1669, and then Hamburg was burned to the ground by the Allies in 1943 with incendiary bombs. A lot of them were phosphorus bombs. And those globules, it looks like a firework when a phosphorus bomb explodes. And you see these like drops of glowing stuff hitting the ground. When it hits a house or a person, it's just going to burn right through when it hits water, it stabilizes. And so there's all these nuggets that are left over from, you know, the bombing of Harvard. It was seven nights in a row.

It was an ungodly amount of stuff dropped on that city. And it's still there today. And it's completely stable if it's in water. But when it's removed from water and warmed just a tick above room temperature like 80 Fahrenheit, it combusts. And so I opened the book with a guy who thought he, I think he thought he had a piece of fossilized oyster shell or something. He just put it in his pocket and he's just walking on. He's by himself and then his leg just explodes. He has to go into the sea to put it out. If he leaves,

and this is winter, he's out there shivering and shaking and screaming for help and they were going to bring in a helicopter, but they thought he'd bring down the helicopter. So they ended up with an ambulance and I think they kept the wound wet enough to keep him stable and they got him to the hospital and he survived, but today the leg that he suffered these burns, he showed it to me, and it looks like tree bark. There's been so many skin grafts. And this isn't an unusual occurrence. It's not like it's happening every day, but you can Google it, and, you know, it happens more than, more than it should, several times a year. I guess Hamburg is sort of a unifying thread through the history of phosphorus, right? It is. It is. And you were talking earlier

about how are we going to, you know, find new sources of phosphorus? Well, Germany's got some really strict rules coming as far as phosphorus discharges from human waste. And they are, I believe it's in operation now. They have a state-of-the-art wastewater treatment plant that can recover almost all the phosphorus coming through. So it really does, the story does arc from this alchemist's chamber in the 1600s to this super state-of-the-art recovery facility on the banks of the Elbe River in 2023. Interesting enough, when you write in your book about the supply problem, you're clear in saying that your book is not intended to be a book of solutions.

No, it's not. And it's also not intended to disparage the agriculture industry or anything like that. It's really to connect some dots and to paint a picture that science. scientists have seen for many years, but the public hasn't. And that's just because to date, phosphorus has been plentiful and relatively cheap. And people have just kind of learned to live with some of these algae outbreaks. But according to news reports, I think in 2021, there were like 400 stories of water bodies that had been plagued by this algae. And that was like a 25% increase over the year before. And so it may be a combination of the public just becoming more aware,

or it may be becoming more commonplace. I think it's probably a bit of both. But we have had the luxury of not having to think about phosphorus as a nutrient and a pollutant for a long time, and we're losing that now, that luxury. Dan, great book. Very interesting. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thanks for having me.

Dan Egan, the devil's element phosphorus and a world out of balance. That is his new book. Dan is a journalist in residence at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee School of freshwater sciences based in Milwaukee. If this has whetted your appetite to read the book, well, the Science Friday Book Club members will be reading the Devil's Element together

this April. And if you're interested in joining the conversation about our history with phosphorus, and we know you've been waiting for it, go to ScienceFriiday.com slash element. You can sign up for our newsletter, RSVP, for upcoming events, and even enter to win a free book. Once again, that's ScienceFriday.com slash element. And here are some of the folks who help make this show happen. De Peter Schmidt and Emma Gomez are our digital producers. Beth Ramey is our controller.

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