Science Friday - Dung Beetles, Exomoon, Poison Squad. Oct 5, 2018, Part 2

Episode Date: October 5, 2018

Before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was formed in 1906, you might have been more weary of pouring milk over your morning cereal. Milk could be spiked with formaldehyde, while pepper could contain coconut shells, charred rope or floor sweepings. In 1883, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, who was appointed chief chemist of the Federal Agriculture Department, began to investigate how manufacturers used additives and unhealthy practices in food—and pulled together “The Poison Squad.” Author Deborah Blum talks about how Wiley along with other scientists, journalists, and advocates fought for the health and safety of the general public.  In the past few years, the field of exoplanet discovery has really taken off. But this week, astronomers writing in the journal Science Advances up the ante—describing the possible discovery not of an exoplanet, but of a Neptune-sized moon orbiting an exoplanet. Alex Teachey, co-author of the paper and a graduate student in astronomy at Columbia University, joins Ira to talk about how the observations were performed, and the challenges of the hunt for exomoons. Plus, did you know that some dung beetles carry parasites on their genital—and it may not necessarily be a bad thing? While dung beetles put up with a lot of crap, it’s hard to imagine what good could come from a relationship with a parasite. Cristina Ledón-Rettig, Assistant Research Scientist at Indiana University, joins Ira to discuss her work. 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 Irafledo. I've had a good idea. A weekend's here. Let's talk about nematodes and dung beetles. Why not? They interact a lot in nature. The small worm-like parasites like to hitch a ride on their insect partners as they fly from one dung patty to another. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal for the nematode, right? But perhaps not so much for the dung beetle. See, the nematodes actually ride on the beetle's genitals, where they can be past.

on to their offspring or mates like an STD. Now, Dung beetles put up with a lot of dung, but what do they stand to gain from this relationship? My next guest says, as icky as it sounds, there might be a very good reason for letting those parasites climb aboard. Dr. Christina Ledunredig is Assistant Research Scientist in the Department of Biology at Indiana University in Bloomington. Welcome to Science Friday.

Hi, Ira. So tell me about this ride-sharing arrangement between the dung beetle and the nematode. How do these two organisms interact? Gladly. Well, when a dung beetle is ready to reproduce, they tunnel underneath a dung patty, and they create these developmental chambers out of dung that we call a brood ball. And in each of those brood balls, they place a single egg. And from being an egg to an adult beetle, that developing beetle depends on this developmental chain.

for its nutrients, for its shelter and protection. And nematodes ride along on these beetles. They're small worms. And they end up in these developmental chambers along with the developing beetles. And we didn't know before whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. But we did know that this association existed.

And so this was something that we wanted to investigate more to understand the consequences of that interaction. So tell me, tell me, what did you learn? Well, we looked on all different parts of the beetle for nematodes, and we found them on various parts, but we were particularly interested in this really high concentration of nematodes that's found on the genitalia. It's a good place for nematodes to hide,

but also it's a really compelling venue for getting to the next generation because it's involved in reproduction. And so what we found was not only are these nematodes passed, males and females, but they're also passed off to the offspring. And the offspring that develop alongside these nematodes actually grow faster and larger than their counterparts that don't have these nematodes. And so there's actually a fitness benefit to having this.

I wouldn't even call it a parasite because under any conditions that we tested, we didn't find that the nematode was actually bad for the developing beetle. In the conditions under which we tested this, we always found that it was a good thing to have along. So it's more of a mutualist, really. Yeah, I was wondering about that. Usually a parasite is something that sucks away the life of its host, right? But this is not what's happening here. No.

And that was, nematodes are almost infamous for being parasites. There are parasites of humans, of cattle, of plants. And a lot of our attention is directed towards that sort of negative interaction. But less investigated

is ways in which they can be either neutral or even beneficial to their hosts. So how can you tell all this is going on, especially when it's taking place inside a dung paddy? That's right. So it's actually taking place underground. So the mother's tunnel underground, take that dung into these tunnels. So it would be very hard to assess that under natural conditions.

But fortunately, in the lab, we have a culture system where we can make little replicas of these brood balls and transfer eggs into them. And the power of this is that we can create conditions that we can either, you know, include or exclude nematodes. And that allows us to understand what the consequences of these nemitodes really are. Were you surprised by anything you found? Yeah. Well, we didn't really know what to find because there hadn't been this type of system where you could so easily manipulate nematode presence before. On one hand, we were surprised, but on the other hand, you know, people have kind of suspected this for several years because nematodes are so widespread on insects.

You know, there was definitely the possibility that these close interactions during development could be beneficial. But what thwarted our understanding of whether those, you know, consequences were good was actually having a system that we could bring into the lab and watch the development and interaction between. these two species more closely. Now, these nematose live on other insects, too, right? That's correct. They're found on certain species of bees, termites, a lot of other beetles, and they're not the same species of nematodes. There's lots of different species of nematodes.

But as idiosyncratic as it seems, genitalia worms are not a rare thing in the insect world. Do we know why they chose that, how shall they put it, part of the anatomy to attach to? We don't know precisely why, but the consequences of being on the genitalia are kind of twofold. I mean, it's a nice place to be because nematodes like moisture and they're protected as they are in transit between different dung pads. but I think more importantly in this case is that it's a very surefire way to get passed between individuals. For instance, if you're on a male, that's not a great place to be because you might die there. But if you get transmitted to a female, then you have the potential to be passed on to the next generation with the eggs. And that's a good thing for the nematode.

So it's helpful, healthful for the dung beetle to have the nematodes around. They are healthier, they grow bigger, they contribute to their life. style, so to speak? Yeah, that's correct. It seems to contribute to better health. And we search for a mechanism for why that is so. And what we looked into was the ways in which they influence the microbiomes, so the microorganisms that are also in these developmental chambers. And we found that nematodes are actually really good at engineering the bacterian fungi that are in these developmental chambers, in ways that we're hypothesizing are good for the developing beetles. What do they, is it healthier?

Do they give them nutrients in the dung? I mean, they produce the stuff that the dung beetles eat? Possibly. So what we think is happening is that, you know, some bacteria are bad for beetles, but some are good in the sense that they have this. arsenal of metabolism that could be useful in breaking down plant material. And plant material is not particularly easy diet for any organism to eat, but bacteria are really good at breaking down plant material.

And so the beetles secondarily benefit from that because the beneficial bacteria are breaking down the plant material that then the beetle can feed on. Not all dung beetles have nematose. Correct? Not all species have them. From our own studies, we found that some species have them, some species don't have them. The species that have them have them at different levels and different populations. So the incidence of a population that I found in North Carolina, the beetles there, many more of them have these worms than, for instance, the beetles in Indiana.

People can get worms. Have you looked in ways these worms could help people? Not personally, but there's actually a lot of really exciting science that's coming out about how worms do benefit people. So they've been finding that in many cases, because obviously worms have some bad effects on people as well. But in cases where they're not killing people and people are actually tolerating worms, those populations, tend to have a lower incidence of autoimmune diseases. And they're actually starting to suss out the mechanisms behind this. In order to not be ejected from humans, worms have evolved a way to suppress our immune systems.

And so people who are predisposed to having autoimmune disorders like multiple sclerosis or Crohn's disease or type 1 diabetes actually benefit from this suppression of their immune system. So in other words, saying people in societies where people have these parasites in their system are getting less sick from these other diseases. That's correct. So we're not saying go out and get a, you know. No, no. So definitely these worms also have bad effects too. But what scientists have been trying to do is find the certain chemicals or proteins that the worms are providing to these hosts to suppress their immune systems and just give. patients, those chemicals or proteins instead of the whole worm.

Did you always have this interest in dung needles or do you follow them as a kid, you know, on the ground? I kind of follow all organisms that I can find or catch or see. And it wasn't until I started talking to my nematologist friends that I realized that these organisms that are a little harder to see are actually really interesting and can be found all over the place. And we're just starting to scratch the surface of why they're important to human health and ecology in general. So where do you go with your research from here? That's a great question. We are definitely in the process of finding how widespread this phenomenon is

by looking at other species of insects. But likewise, we're really interested in how they're engineering the microbiome, and whether it's because they're eating certain bacteria, allowing other bacteria to grow, or if they're emitting chemicals that suppress the growth of certain bad bacteria, or enhance the growth of good bacteria, that's a little bit of a black box that we don't really understand yet. Oh, we wish you good luck. Well, thank you. And do you have a lab that's full of dung beetles?

I mean, they're very surprisingly easy to keep. Are you recommending we at home? because we've got 2 million people listening, should they go out and get some dung needles? Sure. Yeah? If there's a farm nearby, you probably can find a dung beetle

if you're willing to sift through a little bit of cow poop. I can't top that for an ending to this segment. Because we have done a show on dung beetles. We have some video up on our website, so we're very happy to talk about dung beetles. They are fascinating creatures, are they not? They are incredibly diverse, and amazing, I think. All right.

Well, we think your research is amazing. Dr. Christina LaDunredeg, assistant research scientist in the Department of Biology at Indiana University in Bloomington. Have a great weekend. Thank you. Well, we're going to take a break.

We're going to come back and talk about the search for a distant moon on an exoplanet. So it's some interesting new findings that you spacecakes will really like someone. We'll get into the weeds on it. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break.

This is science. Friday, I'm Irap Flato. In the past few years, the field of exoplanet discovery has really taken off. Instruments like Kepler and the newer tests have been racking up the planet count. But this week, astronomers writing in the journal Science Advances brought the whole thing to a new level, describing the possible discovery not of an exoplanet, but of a moon orbiting an exoplanet. To be specific, Kepler 16-20. 25-B. That is some 4,000 light years away. How do they do that? Well, joining me now to talk about the research is Alex T. Chi. He's an NSF graduate research fellow in the Department of Astronomy right here in New York at Columbia University. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you very much for having me. First, what moon is this? Where is it? Give us a little thumbnail description.

Sure, yeah. So it's a moon. As far as we can tell, we're not quite claiming it as a discovery yet. There's still some lingering uncertainties. But as far as we can tell, it's this. there, a large moon about the size of Neptune, actually, which is sort of strange, orbiting this planet called Kepler 1625B, and it's about 8,000 light years away as far as we can tell. So what is the relationship of the size of the moon to the size of the planet? So the size of the planet is about the same size as Jupiter. It's a little more massive as far as we can tell. And then the moon is, like I say, about the size and the mass of Neptune. But isn't that pretty unusual?

to have a moon that big? Well, it's certainly unexpected, right? If you look at the moons in our solar system, we've got a lot of them. They're all significantly smaller than the Earth. So when we spotted this, we said, you know, this is what it looks like about the size of Neptune. That sort of raises new questions for people. How do you get something that big? It's a little premature to say how common or how rare something like this might be

because this is potentially the first, so we don't have any sort of population statistics on these. things. But, you know, you could argue that because it is the largest, you know, because it is so large, it's sort of the lowest hanging fruit. So maybe it's not entirely surprising that the first one we see is so large. You know, because when we think of our moon, we think of another body hitting Earth and knocking out a piece of it, right? Doesn't look like that in this case. Yeah, as far as, you know, so there's basically three mechanisms that we think we get moons from an impactor scenario, like how we got Earth's moon, moons coalescing out of a disk of materials swirling around the planet in the early days of the planetary system,

like the way we get the moons out of Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus, and then finally a capture scenario like Neptune's largest moon Triton, as far as we can tell that, was captured from the Kuiper Belt. So this is sort of the first question that everybody thought of when we announced this large moon. How do you get something like that? It's not necessarily ruled out by known mechanisms, but it certainly has the theorists scratching their heads a little bit.

Yeah, yeah, we like it. when they scratch their head. How do you detect a moon? I know the theory about detecting the exoplanet is it, well, you tell us how. Sure, yeah. There's a variety of ways to go about looking for planets, but the most popular, the most successful way so far is using this thing called the transit method when the planet passes in front of the star from our point of view.

It blocks out just a little bit of the starlight that we're observing. So if you're monitoring the brightness of the star over time, you see a little dip in the intensity of the starlight. If there's a moon around that planet, then we would expect a big dip from the planet and then a smaller dip as the moon blocks out some of the light as well. In addition to that, we try to see gravitational influence of the moon on the planet. The planet, of course, is pulling on the moon,

but the moon is pulling on the planet. And so that makes the planet wobble around a bit as it orbits the star. And so sometimes that planetary transit comes in early, other time it comes in late. And so those are really the two lines of evidence that we see for this exo moon, not just this depth, this transit of the moon, but also something pulling on this planet that we're attributing to the moon. And that's the point I want to pick up on because when you came in and talked about it, you said, well, this is the evidence, but we're not totally sure. Right. What is the doubt that might be it?

Well, so it's an extraordinary claim, and as the famous saying goes, extraordinary claims is one of my favorites. extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So we've done what we think is a pretty thorough and rigorous job trying to rule out other possible explanations for this signal. The question naturally comes out, is there something weird going on with the telescope? Is this maybe something happening on the surface of the star? Could there be another planet in the system

that's pulling on this planet and making it wobble around? Those are all plausible explanations, but we've done our best to rule out those alternative. explanations. And as far as we can tell, you know, the numbers are saying the moon's there, but because it is such an incredible claim, maybe incredible is not quite the right word. It's an extraordinary claim. And so we really think additional observations of this system are needed to really confirm it. Well, it was so unusual. I'm reading from my notes here that you were able to get viewing time on the Hubble for this, which is very hard to get. So you

must, other people must want to know about this. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. You know, so we, had observed three transits of the planet in the Kepler data. This was a phenomenal mission that lasted about four and a half years. We saw three transits with Kepler. They looked tantalizing, but it wasn't enough to make a claim. So we really thought at that time we needed to follow up and observe this thing again. Hubble was really the only game in town. It's a very long duration event.

We observed this system for about 40 hours altogether. So if you think about it, you know, the Earth is turning, And so you can't observe this system with any single telescope from the surface of the Earth. So you'd have to stitch together multiple data sets from multiple telescopes to make this observation, and that would be very challenging. So you really have to go to space, and obviously we made a convincing enough case that they gave us the time. Well, they're talking about once the Hubble is gone, I don't know why it should be, but that's not for me to determine.

It's going to be used up. The Webb Telescope. Is that better for you guys who are looking at exoplanet? Tell us why. Tell us why. What's different about it? It's going to be a spectacular instrument. It's a very, very large mirror. Whereas Hubble orbits the Earth, when we perform this observation, you can imagine Hubble's staring at this target, but then the Earth gets in the way for about 45 minutes every single orbit.

Hubble takes 96 minutes or so to go around. Half of that orbit is just totally blocked out. James JWST won't have that problem, and like I say, the mirror is going to be really spectacular. So that data is going to be phenomenal. The bigger problem is that these observations, as I mentioned before, are so long that you need a lot of time to perform them, and this telescope is going to be highly oversubscribed. Many more people want to use it than they can possibly award the time, so we're going to have to have a very good case. to make an absolute observation.

Absolute is the wrong word, but everything is always obsolete by the time it gets built, whether it's a highway or something else. It takes so long. You say we should have made it twice as big, whatever, you know. Sure, yeah, you know, so there's other telescopes coming down the pike. There are people bidding right now to, well, we've talked about W-First, and then there's a telescope called Louvoire. The Louvoire?

Louvoire. Yeah, that's... French? I don't know who's working on it, but it's... ultraviolet and infrared and optical. That's L-U-V-I-O-I-R, yeah. So they come up with great names for these things. So there's going to be some fantastic instruments.

J-V-V-S-T will definitely be an improvement on Hubble. But, you know, Hubble is over 25 years old now, and it's still top-of-the-line instrument to use. It's really amazing. It is. All right. So if this is a strange star planet situation, can it tell us anything about our common origin?

ordinary solar system planet situation. That's a great question. One of the things that I'm always saying to people is, you know, they always come with the question, why do we care about these moons, what's interesting about these things? And, you know, I think a big part of it is that every time we look out at these exoplanetary systems, we are learning, by extension, more about our own solar system. And the question is very much still open. How common are we?

Is the things going on here happened in a billion, 100 billion other places across the Milky Way, or it's a very uncommon chain of events that led to us here? And that, of course, speaks directly to the question about the origin of life, for example. So particularly since this moon is raising new questions about how you get something like this, it's opening up some new questions about the dynamical histories of these planetary systems and this speaks directly to that question. And the more exoplanets you discover, the way, thousands of them? Yeah, about 4,000 confirmed planets, I think, at this point.

The more questions you're going to open rather than get answers possible. Well, you know, that's a good enough number into that network. We're now really filling in some nice statistics, but there have been surprises along the way. We found these things called hot Jupiters, you know, planets about the size of Jupiter, but very, very close to their star. Nobody really expected to see these things at all. and even 20-some years after their first discovery,

the theorists are still debating how you make these things. I saw a story today just in passing. I don't have any details about a new exoplanet that's too big. You shouldn't be as big as it should be, right? Sure, yeah. I may have missed that one. I've had a busy week, but, yeah. Sometimes they're very inflated, yeah.

They're very inflated. Well, thank you very much, Alex. Thank you very much. Alex Tichi is an NSF graduate research fellow in the Department of Astronomy at Columbia University. If I'll probably eat in a bag of chips and flipped it over, right? You want to read the ingredients as you munch away, or you may have heard the FDA warning last month about a salmonella outbreak linked to that famous cereal honey smacks.

Well, these are always to keep consumers in the know about what is in their food. But it wasn't always this way. What if we didn't have anybody telling us what was inside our food? Well, back in the early 20th century during the Industrial Revolution, the FDA had not been formed yet. There were hardly any regulations about food safety. Pepper and coffee companies were padding their products with coconut shells, even floor sweepings.

Milk producers were dousing their dairy with water, formaldehyde, and even a squirt of calf brains for color. One government chemist named Harvey Washington Wiley saw what was happening, and he fought for food safety regulations. and to inform the general public about what was going on and going into their food. My next guest chronicles that battle in her new book, The Poison Squad, won chemist's single-minded crusade for food safety at the turn of the century. Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and director of the Knight Science Journalism Program.

In MIT, you can read an excerpt of her new book at our website at Science Friday.com slash Poison Squad. Deborah, always so great to have you join us. Thanks so much, Ira. It's great to be here. Good to have you. And it's not a book club this time. Let's talk about a new book. You are involved in poison all the time. I want to get into that.

All your latest books have been about poisoning. What is the fascination with that? Well, I know it makes me sound a little creepy, but I really am fascinated by and often love poisons, actually. They've just got such an interesting dynamic chemistry. If you think about the world we live in where we are constantly inhaling or drinking or eating chemicals or exposed to them, most of them do not do us any harm. So the ones that do are very clever and very devious and very interesting to me. And I think I'm just kind of hooked on chasing them down and figuring out how they work. Let me let our audience in.

844-724-8255-8-4-4-7-24-8-255. if you'd like to call us, you can also tweet us at SciFri. Let's talk about Wiley. He was appointed to the chief of the Bureau of Chemistry in 1883. This was the Industrial Revolution, right? Can you give us an overview of what was happening then and what food processing was like back then? Yeah, and that was one of the things that was really startling to me

when I started doing research on the book is that I think I'd had this very romantic, everyone was pink-cheeked and happy and, you know, eating creamy fresh milk and wonderful produce in the 19th century. And the more I looked, the more I realized that was completely not true. And you really have two things going on. You have, as you say, the rise of the industrial revolution and with an almost tidal wave of industrial chemistry, all kinds of new and creative, different compounds that you can add into food and drink and just about anything. And then you also have this amazing wild west of food and drink because there's no regulation and no requirement to label.

And it's in that period that you see really food, fakery and fraud and the kind of profligate use of really dangerous compounds be permissible. And so businesses who were cutting corners are trying to make a little extra money, as you say, would put all kinds of really odd. unexpected things into food, but they just didn't have to tell you. Wow. And that's where Wiley came in. Amira Flato, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Deborah Blum, author of the new book, The Poison Squad. Okay, so Wiley comes in, and what does he do?

Well, as you say, there's no consumer protection legislation whatsoever ever at the federal level, and there's no FDA. So this tiny laboratory at the USDA, the Bureau of Chemistry, is actually the only laboratory in the United States government that's assigned to look at food safety and food quality. And Wiley had come from Indiana, he was the first professor of chemistry at Purdue, with a real sense of mission about the integrity of food and drink. He had studied Faye Kani in Indiana. Honey that he said had never even seen, you know, a bee fly over it, right? He had a nice way with words, really. And so this was, you know, corn syrup dyed yellow with a little fake.

Honeycomb crumbled into it. And he brought that kind of sense of outrage. He was very moral about science. It had to be science in the service of good. And so when he came to the federal government, he just started that laboratory on investigating food. It was the first time the government had done that. And he starts piling up these investigations of dairy products, of canned vegetables, of spices and cocoa and coffee. And when you read them, they're called Bulletin 13.

They're really a food and drink horror story. And they horrified consumers when they saw them, but they really horrified businesses because they've been able to do this without anyone knowing. And now you have a troublemaker in the government. And you know, this is also the era of what, Upton Sinclair's famous, The Jungle? Right? Was it about the same time? That's exactly right. So there's the title of my book is The Poison Squad, and it's really about this very wild experiment that Wiley did in the early 20th century,

in which he gets so frustrated about the lack of regulation that he persuades the government to let him test preservatives and other bad things on young government employees. And that's about a couple years before Upton Sinclair writes a novel called The Jungle that is about the way we produce meat. And he was, I think people forget it. You know, we think of the jungle as this incredibly influential novel, but what made it so influential was that Upton Sinclair was also an investigative journalist. He hung out with what Teddy Roosevelt used to call muckrakers. And so when he was working on that novel, he didn't just invent food processing. He went to Chicago and lived in the Chicago stockyards. And because he was a writer and he was so poor, literally the people running the companies could not tell him from their underpaid workers.

He was just as shabby and ratty looking. And so I'm going to interrupt you because we have to take a break, but I want to come back and revisit Upton Sinclair. and also Wiley in your book. We're talking with Deborah Blum, author of The Poison Squad. We'll be back after this break. Our number 844-8255. Stay with us. We'll be right back.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking with author Deborah Blum about how food safety protections came to be, the topic of her new book, The Poison Squad, One Chemist's Single-minded Crusade for Food Safety at the turn of the 20th century. on number 844-724-8255. Let's turn the clock back to that time period, Deborah. You have an entire chapter on ketchup.

What was going into that private? I read it, I know why, but why devote the, tell our listeners an entire chapter on ketchup. So this is, ketchup, it's just an amazing story at this point. for a couple of reasons. One is we have this very 21st idea, 24th century idea of ketchup, which is kind of a thick tomato-based condiment. But in the 19th, again,

it tended to be a kind of thin, nasty sauce with a lot of vegetable waste in it. People would put pumpkin rinds. People would put tomatoes, but they might be rotting. They would dye them sometimes with caltar dyes. and then because the whole mess of it tended to kind of be rotten anyway, they don't preserve it in it like sodium benz-o-ate, which is actually still with us today.

And so this ketchup becomes this kind of battleground of food safety, just as meat did with Upton Sinclair. And in this case, I really love the story because it makes a point that, you know, not every business is evil. Henry J. Hines, the Heinz food manufacturing company, took it upon himself to get preservatives out of his products. He reinvented ketchup, so the ketchup we know today was really created by Heinz. And he did it so there was a lot of tomato and acid that kept the bacterial countdown. And then he really went to war.

I mean, this was a battle between business and advocates and good. business-friendly government. And Heinz, although he was a big believer in profit, really pushed for safer products and actually sent his, some of the people who worked with him to meet with Roosevelt and say, you have got to regulate food safety.

The things that we make are not being trusted because consumers are afraid of food. They're afraid of meat. They're afraid of preservatives. I want you to do something. And ketchup kind of catches all of that. Plus, you know, there was major combat over the preservatives and ketchup, and that was pretty fascinating. Let's talk about Harvey, Washington, Wiley, a little bit more, the focus of your book and The Poison Squad.

He actually started, were people volunteering to eat stuff for him to test out the food safety? You ever tell us about that? It's not one of the most. It did. It was amazing. It's just crazy. I mean, when you read this experiment, the first thing you think is you could. never do this today, right? You would never get it past all of our controls. But what happened was he had been working really since, for about 20 years, trying to get food safety, trying to get

labels, you know, completely not able to move this forward politically. And he finally said, okay, well, let's just have some better evidence. And I'm going to skip those, you know, less important other species. I'm not going to do any animal safety testing at all. I'm just going to dump these things into human beings. And so that's the amazing part of it. And so he came up with this experiment in which he persuaded young government employees, mostly young men in their 20s, to basically dine very dangerously. And the deal was they would eat three free meals a day, seven days a week,

and it would be beautifully cooked by a professional chef and all kinds of wonderful ingredients. but half of this group at any given time had to be adding capsules of the compound that he was testing at various doses from very low to very high. And so during the Poison Squad experiments, he looked at formaldehyde in food, he looked at borax, which is a cleaning product, he looked at salicylic acid, which is a fever reducer, you know, a medicine. And he kept rotating these through these tests. And what he said was he hadn't expected the young men to get as sick as they did.

But they almost immediately started having all kinds of gastrointestinal problems and other problems. And because this study had caught the attention of American newspapers, it was the Washington Post that nicknamed it the Poison Squad. This is front page news all across the country. Your food is poisonous. And now you start seeing this kind of rise of public. outrage, which then was amplified by the Sinclair book. Wow.

So did he have some experience in his own life that motivated him to want to, you know, create this poison squad or get to the bottom of the food safety? You know, that's a great question. I think he was kind of a holy roller chemist, right? His dad had been a preacher, a farmer, but also an itinerant preacher, and a conductor on the Underground Railroad during the Civil War, and he had imbued his kids with this kind of sense of higher calling. And what was interesting about him was that he took on this issue of food safety, which the USDA

had never really been interested in from the very beginning. And then he just starts peeling it apart. He's peeling the layers of it apart. And the more he realizes how at risk people are, the more. the more he becomes really increasingly irate. And you'll hear him saying, I'll say, okay, I'm testing these on young healthy people. But what about children? What about the elderly?

What about the sick? And so he has this sense that the role of the government, hang on, travel cough. Take a drink of water. There you go. There you go. He has this very early sense of the role of the government. When we say in the Constitution promote the general welfare, this is kind of how I see it. He really means promote the general welfare in your everyday life, that part of what we do is that we stand up for the citizens.

I think he became perceived as an advocate as much as a scientist, and that's probably right. but he wanted to use this position to make a difference, and he actually did. That's the thing that one of the things I love about this story. It's a story of a single person who drives a conversation right for 30-something years, but changes the conversation and the way we think about food safety. So did he actually, were there laws created because of his crusade, did Congress actually put teeth in the FDA and things like that? it, the ingredients.

Yeah. So after, you know, he's like battling away, stymied by, eventually in 1906, two laws passed, and one was the Meat Inspection Act, and that was a direct result of Upton Sinclair's the Jungle, and its expose of the horrors. And then about a week later, the Food and Drug Act of 1906 passed. Somewhat carried by that kind of tidal wave of fury that brought us the Meat Inspection Act. And that was, and we've forgotten this, but that was the first great consumer protection law ever passed by the federal government. And so it was the moment in which we all agree as a society that the government's job is in part to protect the average citizen from harm and to stand up in that way. If you asked Wiley, he would say, okay, that was a start,

but the law was immediately weakened by business interactions, which it was, to the point that he ended up extremely frustrated. I don't think he ever fully gave himself credit for what he accomplished. And eventually that law led to a law in the 1930s that created the modern FDA. So a lot of people still call him the father of the FDA, even though he died before it was created. Now, you have said, though, that you disagree with some of his tactics. You know, he was, as I say, kind of a holy roller, and he became very rigid. I think some of that was that he was under attack, constant attack, both in government and out of it for 30 years. And he kind of ossified to some extent in a perpetual defensive position. but also he just couldn't bend on even the little details. So he would like spend his political capital. This is my personal opinion.

I'm sure he'd appreciate it. He'd spent, as I second guess him a hundred years later, but he would like obsessed about you've made a vinegar and it's a fake vinegar and you should not be allowed to even put the image of a grape leaf on your label. because somehow that might make someone think that you were really grapes. And so he would spend a lot of capital on these very tiny details. I'm the kind of writer. I'm a nonfiction writer, but the people I write about are really real to me.

So I'd be talking back to him, like yelling at my laptop. No, Harvey, let those grape leaves go, move on to something else. But you also talk about there are times that manufacturers need while he's help. but I'm thinking of the Anheuser-Busch incident tried to make beer-flavored soft drink. That's right. And so even though I'm calling him an advocate, he was a very meticulous chemist.

And there was a point when, and really it's in the years that are kind of rolling up to prohibition, that Anheuser-Busch was making, I mean, it would be something like a near-bear, but it was a soft drink that had a little bit of the, you know, tasted kind of like alcohol, but it wasn't. and it was immediately banned, and Anheuser-Busch wrote to him, they said, you know, help us out here. This really isn't alcohol.

And so he put his chemist to work and ran that analysis. And sure enough, it wasn't. And they were able to take that on the market. And he did a lot of, I mean, he was a really good chemist. So he led his laboratory to do these very meticulous analyses of food. And when you look at these bulletins, it's not just. just that he's saying, you know, for instance, well, gee, this cocoa has really dyed sawdust, right, and you think you're getting, you know, beautiful orange cheddar,

but that's because of the red lead and the cheese and all of the things that he found. They're full of instructions. Hey, you want to try to understand this? Here's how you can do it. Here's the instruments you need. And he even, because he thought the public needed to know this, actually produced a bulletin, which was full of instructions for how. wives, right? Is your milk safe? Is your meat really meat? Here's how you can do chemistry tests at home.

I absolutely love that. Talking with author Deborah Blum, author of The Poison Squad, One Chemist's Single-minded Crusade for Food Safety at the turn of the century on Science Friday from WNYC Studios. What would the Poison Squad and what would he say today if he were around seeing the state of our food and regulation? I mean, at some level, that's a really interesting question because you've reminded me that I think he would argue for another poison squad. He wouldn't get it. Not today.

But he would still say, gosh, we're eating a lot of food which have ingredients that aren't fully tested. But wouldn't he like the, you know, the throwback now we're having to, you know, local farming, things like that? Would you think that's a positive thing? He would totally be for that. He really believed in, you know, the same, I can't get that sentence out, the food that was produced locally on smaller farms, with, you know, with all the control that you have

was safer and better. He would really like that. I think he would be dissatisfied with labels, which are still not as transparent as they should be. And I think going back to the big ketchup fight, right? The preservative that he wanted to get out was a preservative called sodium benzodiaate. And he didn't get that out. In fact, his hostile boss censored his or did his best to censor his report on that preservative.

Well, you'll still find that preservative. I can imagine him, you know, him rolling in his grave over the fact that we're still eating sodium benzodia. But, yeah, he would love some of the directions we're going. he would disagree with some of the, you know, moves by our current administration, for instance, arguing that, you know, some of the control of food should be taken away from the FDA and go back to agriculture, right? And I think he'd be horrified by that. But he'd like the Michael Pollens of the world, things like that, who, you know, eat what your grandmother ate. Up to a point, you know, I mean, one of my cases is the stuff your grandmother was eating wasn't all that great. That's what you're saying in your book.

Yes. I think he would see that as a little romantic. But the principle of it, you know, eat local, grow your back your own vegetables, don't eat too much processed food, the Michael Pollan kind of message to the rest of it. Yeah, he'd totally go for that. And it was an interesting part in your book about Fannie Farmer. We just think of her as, you know, writing cookbooks, but she was very active. She was.

I actually love that Fannie Farmer story. And it's part of this period where it's very hard for women to get science education, right, right, about the late 19th and early 20th. So she was the principal of the Boston School of Cooking, and she used that to teach science, right? She taught all of her, I always imagine them as being slightly stunned students' principles of chemistry. She put chemistry in her cookbooks, right? She walks through all. And then, and this tells you something about how bad things were back then. She did whole sections in her cookbooks about fake food and about the dangers of some of the foods like milk.

She wrote a cookbook, which was cooking for, you know, people who were ill in 1904. And she put in this whole section saying, yeah, but if you're going to make like a milk toast or a milk gravy for your invalid, you better be really careful about that milk, right? It could be poisonous. she actually included, she tried to get people to pasteurize their milk at home even, right? And I think this is part of, you never get change unless there's a conversation, right? So women like Fannie Farmer, who were doing a kind of subversive education for women, they're really important in this time period. And Wiley acknowledged that, that he could not have gotten his, what was called Dr. Wiley's Law,

the 1906 Food and Drug Law was called Dr. Wiley's Law. It wouldn't have happened without the help of women's groups. And it's all documented beautifully in Deborah Blum's new book, The Poison Squad, One Chemist's Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the turn of the 20th century. Always a pleasure, Deborah, and good luck with the book. I'm sure it'll be a great hit. Thank you so much. It's always great to be here, Ira.

You too, and you can read an excerpt of her new book at Science Friday.com slash Poison Squad. But before we go, heads up, STEM educators. If you're looking for a place to find cool science activities, maybe you want to chat with your fellow science teachers. Okay, I want you to come hang out in the Science Friday STEM Educators Lounge, our new education Facebook group. You can join it at ScienceFriiday.com slash lounge. That's science friday.com slash lounge.

I don't know if we have any coffee or cookies in there, but you're going to have a lot of fun and learn a lot, science Friday.com slash lounge. BJ Leherman compose our theme music, and if you missed any part of the program, well, you can hear it on a subscribe to our podcast and social media. You know, you can ask your smart

speaker to play Science Friday whenever you want to. Every day now is Science Friday. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato in New York.