Science Friday - Eco-Death Care, Brain Memory Prosthetic, Space Food. Oct 14, 2022, Part 2

Episode Date: October 14, 2022

Burying Green: Eco-Friendly Death Care On The Rise Dying, it turns out, isn’t carbon neutral. Like many of the choices we make in our lifetimes, the choice to cremate or preserve our bodies after death comes with tradeoffs as well. With preservation and burial, there’s the carbon cost of cemetery space, the materials to make a coffin, and the chemicals required to prevent decay. With cremation, the body’s carbon is released into the atmosphere through the burning of natural gas. This is one of the reasons why companies are starting to offer more eco-friendly options, such as water-assisted cremation. Composting human bodies is another option, allowing our carbon to be sequestered in the soil, and providing nutrients for ecosystems or gardens. But in the United States, these lower-carbon funereal options are often against the law. Now, that’s slowly changing, with pressure from people who wish to use those options for themselves when the time comes. Producer Kathleen Davis discusses these issues and more with mortician Caitlin Doughty and Katrina Spade, founder of Recompose, a company that has pioneered the practice of human composting. Plus, the relationship between grief, ritual, and the choices we have for our mortal remains.   This Brain Prosthesis Could Improve Memory Loss When people hear the word “prosthetic,” they’ll probably think of an arm or a leg. But what about a prosthetic for the brain? A team of neuroscientists is designing a device that could “zap” the brain into remembering information better, and it’s targeted for people with memory loss. They’re doing so by studying the electrical patterns involved in memory, then mimicking them with electrodes implanted in the brain. Ira speaks with Dr. Robert Hampson, neuroscientist at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who is working on the implant.     Making a Meal Fit For An Astronaut Life on the International Space Station throws some wrenches into how food and eating work. There’s very little gravity, after all. And there are big differences between nutritional needs on Earth and in space. Astronauts must exercise two hours each day on the International Space Station to prevent bone and muscle loss, meaning daily caloric intake needs to be somewhere between 2,500 and 3,500 calories. Sodium must also be reduced, as an astronaut’s body sheds less of it in space. Astronauts also have an increased need for Vitamin D, as their skin isn’t able to create it from sunlight as people on Earth do. So, how do all these limitations affect the food astronauts eat? Joining guest host Kathleen Davis to answer these gustatory questions is Xulei Wu, food systems manager for the International Space Station in Houston, Texas. 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. And I'm Kathleen Davis. If you're anything like me, food is an important part of your life. One of my favorite things to do is to get together with friends and family and have a big delicious meal. And that's good because with the holiday season coming up, there will be lots of that. But what do you do if you find yourself up in space, let's say, residing on the International Space Station? You know, back in the day, early astronauts squeeze food out of a tube, or they sucked in an orange-flavored breakfast drink. Yes, not the most appetizing idea.

And life on the International Space Station does throw some wrenches into how food and eating work. But Ira, today, dining in space is actually quite different. Is it? Tell us about it. Well, to answer some of my gustatory questions is my guest, Shulay Wu, food systems manager for the International Space Station. She's joining us from Houston, Texas. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much, Kasseling.

happy to be here. We are happy to have you. So I want to start with a quick clarification. Is nutrition and what your body needs different in space than it is when you are on the ground here on Earth? Actually, the terrestrial nutritional recommendation on Earth are typically used by us as a starting point for spaceflight requirement. But several nutritional requirements, they do change in space due to the nature of space travel. For example, the microgravity has negative impacts to astronauts on their bones, muscles, and cardiovascular system. So as a countermeasure to mitigate those effects, on average,

astronauts need to spend at least two hours per day to exercise on ISS. Not sure how they come to you or our listeners, but that's definitely more exercise than I would do on daily basis. and of course more exercise means higher caloric needs. And another example is vitamin D. On Earth, our skin can synthesis vitamin D when we're exposed to the UVB radiation in the sunlight. However, astronauts are protected from sunlight exposure during space flight. So the requirement of vitamin D is also higher.

Can you explain to me what kind of foods are actually available to astronauts that are prepared in your lab. I mean, what might an astronaut's daily menu, I guess, look like? Yeah, so we actually offer a standard menu to astronauts. We call standard menu. It doesn't mean that they have to follow the menu, but more like a pantry stacked up with 200 different food and beverage items with a quantity between one to three for each item, for crew member to pick and choose what they want to eat each day. so that they can eat the same meals but they don't have to or they can chew to eat different meals and they don't have to.

And we often hear crew members say that food is one of the few things crew members have total control over on ISS unless their fly surgeon noticed something out of whack from their food intake tracking data. And those standard menu foods account for about 80% of their food intake other than those 80% standard menu foods, they also get personal preference food accounting for the remaining 20% of their total food consumption. And I have to mention all those food are definitely packaged and stowed at Johnson Space Center

here in Houston to prepare for International Space Station. Are there any meals or snacks that seem to be extra popular for the astronauts? That's actually hard to say, but we do notice a trend. Any new food item we add to the standard menu, they tend to be healthier and also more popular among crew members. One example, like mango salad, that's a product developed by our food scientist recently. We add to the standard menu and it become a very popular product. So a big part of what you do is food packaging. So can you tell me a little bit of, little bit about how gravity, I would imagine that's a big factor in something that would impact how you would package foods. How does that change how you work with packaging?

Right. Totally. It's actually difficult to mix solid with liquid in the microgravity environment. So what we do, we have different strategies. One thing like the drink, the coffee, we get with crew member before they fly and they find out what's our preference on. the coffee. If they prefer black coffee with cream and sugar, then we add those pre-mix dry powder together in the beverage pouch and send up in the dehydrated form so that all crew member need to do on ISS is add the water back, then they get their coffee with cream and sugar. So that's one strategy. And another strategy, like condiments. On ground, we like to use salt and the pepper to flavor our food. And for astronauts in microgravity environments,

they cannot really shake the salt bottle out. What we do is we dissolve the salt in water so that they can apply the liquid salt onto their food for flavoring. Is the reason why you can't have the granular salt because it may just go everywhere and just float around? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, we're definitely trying to avoid any crumb. in the microgravity environment, because when we had crumbs on Earth, they fall onto the table, fall onto the floor. In microgravity, they can go anywhere. So I'm imagining no potato chips. Yes, that's correct. No potato chips.

Okay. And even Cracker, you know, our scientists really does a great job, identifies a cracker that can withhold this transportation process, and also identifies the right amount of vacuum we can apply to package the cracker, to hold the cracker in place without cracking it. So we're talking about how these foods are prepared before they go into space. But once they're actually on the International Space Station and the astronauts have this package in their hands, how do they actually prepare their food to make sure that it is ready to eat?

Yeah, that's a good question. So with the challenge of microgravity, astronauts, they actually cannot cook the food yet, cook on their own. And also, they are very busy human beings. So most of the food we provide are ready to eat. All Cremember needs to do is depend on the food type, if it's we call thermostabilized or irradiated food, those are basically ready to eat food. The thermostabilized food can be compared as like the canned foods you can find in grocery store, except way package those in a flexible pouch so that they're less in weight and also consume less volume after consumption. For those crew members just need to put into a food warmer.

The food warmer on ISS, they can heat out food to about 185 fan high, and they have those clamps inside the food warmer to hold the food packages in place and heat out the food by conduction. And for free-drive food, crew member will need to add water first, as I mentioned earlier. And on ISS, they can choose either cold water or hot water to hydrate the food before they cut open the package and eat from the package. So I want to talk a little bit about shelf-stable technology, which I'm sure is a huge part of what you do, because you don't want astronauts to get food poisoning. I mean, how do you avoid astronauts getting sick from the food? Yeah, that is a big part of what we do here at the Johnson Space Center.

We need to make the food shelf-stable because ISIS food system is a shelf-stable food system. This is due to the logistic lead time to have the food prepared till the point they can be consumed on ISS. It could be ranging between one to three years. Therefore, the food we provide has to have a minimum three-year shelf life for ISS. And to make the food shelf stable, we have several processing technologies we apply to achieve this goal. One example is freeze drying. that is a process to freeze the food first, and because food are made of water,

like a beef steak, that could be about 80% of water. If we talk about salad, that would be even more. And free drying is this process to first freeze the food, convert all the water, liquid water, into solid ice, and then we pull a vacuum to the food to allow the ice, the solid ice to sublimate into vapor without going through the liquid phase. The end product become a very dry, very dry cake that shelf stable. Yeah, without water, food become very stable.

Another technology is thermal stabilizing. That's a process we apply heat to the food to deactivate the bacteria and some of the spores in order to make the food shelf stable, just like the canned food. foods we can find in grocery store. And the third technology is irradiation. NASA actually have the federal approval to apply certain amount of dosage, irradiation dosage, to achieve commercial sterality of food so that they don't need to be refrigerated or kept frozen and still be good for three years. So I have been camping before. I have had dehydrated food before. It's not always delicious.

How does your lab make sure that the food that goes through all these processes to become shelf-stable actually tastes good? That's actually quite a challenging. Going through those processes and also going through those healing steps to making sure the food is safe to eat. At the same time, we also need to meet the nutritional requirements. Our scientists normally play with different flavors. For example, we can add some spicy kick to the food if we have to take the salt out. So just trying to be very creative and make sure the food still tastes good. Food and the active eating can really be such an important part of life for a lot of people.

And people across cultures, too. How is this recreated in space? Yes, so first of all, we try to provide as diverse standard menu as possible, trying to accommodate astronauts with different background and culture. At the same time, we also work very closely with our international partners, like a Japanese space agency, ESA space agency, etc. Normally, when they have their crew member flying, they will be sending some specialty food as well. to allow crew member to share those unique food on ISS.

Shulewoo is Food Systems Manager for the International Space Station. She's joining us from Houston, Texas. Thank you so much for joining us. This was a great conversation. My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. We have to take a break. And when we come back, implanting brain electrodes to restore memory and damaged brains.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. And I'm SciFri producer Kathleen Davis. When you hear the word prosthetic, you might think of an arm or a leg, right? But what about a prosthetic for your brain? Yeah, your brain. A device that can kind of zap the brain into remembering information better, like for people with memory loss. Well, there are people working on that.

And here to tell us more is a leader in this brain prosthetic research. Dr. Robert Hampson, neuroscientist at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston, in Salem, North Carolina. Welcome to Science Friday. Oh, thank you, Ira. I'm very happy to be here. Nice to have you. Let's start with the basics. Why can't people with the generative brain disease or brain injuries remember things? What's going wrong in the brain? There are generally two things that go wrong in the brain. One is the ability to recall information. That's to access a memory that's already stored. The second thing that goes wrong is the inability to create those memories in the first place. And it's this latter part that I've been working with. The issue is that when we store memory,

we have to create a code for it. We have to lay down a pattern in the brain that says this is something to be remembered. And in particular, it's that function which is impaired in period in people who have memory loss. You mean, so the code is bad? Is that working? That's correct. The code is bad. We had the idea to strengthen the code that the brain is creating. A lot of times what we find is that it's either weak or incomplete. That's interesting. So how do you figure out the code? That goes back to a development by several colleagues of mine that we've been working on this for about 20 years. Doctors Ted Berger and Basilis Marmorellis and Dong Song at University of Southern California came up with some mathematical models of how a particular part of the brain works

when it's creating these codes for memory. That part of the brain is the hippocampus. We use their model to determine what codes are being generated when a subject is actively creating and laying down new memory. And you published your research that tested the memories of people with the prosthetic. How did you do that? What we do is to have a subject sitting in front of a computer screen and looking at pictures. We generally show them one picture at a time, and then after a short delay, we show them eight different pictures and say, okay, touch the one that you just saw.

then we also ask the patient to say, how familiar are these pictures? Do you recognize and do you remember them? And we're recording from the hippocampus. We're recording the neural activity while they see the pictures, they make their initial response, and then later when they're doing the recall and recognition function. The model was designed to discriminate between those times when the person correctly remembered and those times when they did not correctly remember. They may have said, oh, I recognize this picture, and it's one they had never seen before.

So we first made that distinction. Then we created the mathematical model. And then as we were testing the patient on some of the instances where they first see a picture, we would turn on stimulation that was based on that model. So that what was happening is, as the brain was processing the information, we were saying, okay, let's take this prediction of the model into a pattern of electrical stimulation that we can apply. Up to half of the trials would get stimulation and half the trials would not.

And then we would test it later to say, okay, now in the recognition phase, which ones were remembered better, the stimulated or the non-stimulated trials. And what did you find after you stimulated the patient's brains? The first time we demonstrated this, we saw about a 35% improvement in how well they did. We've also very recently published another study with more patients in which we also looked at whether there were some other factors affecting memory. And we have seen improvements of up to 55%. Wow. Now, just to be clear, you did not implant this prosthetic in people, correct? They already had this brain implant in them already.

These are epilepsy patients who are undergoing a study to localize their seizures. So they do have electrodes placed in areas where the doctors can monitor their seizure activity. We don't implant the electrodes. At present, we don't have a fully implantable memory prosthetic device. We use a number of computers. hooked up to those electrodes. Our initial target will be to see if we can, if not reverse, at least slow down the degradation that is seen with Alzheimer's disease. So that's our very first target is what can we do for patients with Alzheimer's disease? We also are looking at,

will this be effective in cases of traumatic brain injury, stroke, epilepsy, of course, disease, any of the brain conditions in which memory starts to fail. This whole concept is amazing. Where did you get the idea for a brain prosthetic? A lot of this stems from about 40 years of research into how the hippocampus actually is involved in memory research. But as far as making this a prosthetic, I'm a big fan of science fiction, and I was heavily inspired by the $6 million man.

So I like to say that science fiction inspired me to do science, and the science I do is an awful lot like science fiction. That's cool. Let's just wrap up by trying to understand when this might be available for the public. We all hear this stuff. We say I would like to, I know somebody who could use this, but we're talking many years away, aren't we? We are, although some of the initial trials will probably start within a year. and but it's like any other development that we say it's five years out, it's 10 years out, it's 20 years out. I like to think that the first implementations are within five years. Is that right?

And how would you then choose who gets this? Oh, that is actually a very good question. Number one, these would have to be volunteers. And number two, we would be looking at probably Alzheimer's, patients and those who are just in the early stages of losing their memory. When the memory function gets very bad, we don't yet know how well this is going to work. But if we can slow down the progress, then those would be the patients we would work with first. All right. I want to thank you very much for taking time to be with us today. And thank you, Ira. I'm very happy to be here.

Dr. Robert Hampson is a Neuroscientist at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston, Salem, North Carolina. And now we're going to talk about death and what happens to our bodies when we die. So a content warning if you're sensitive to the topic. Ira, let's get real for a moment. Have you thought about what your plans are for what to do with your body after you die? You know, I am giving it some thought, what I want to happen to my body, and I'm thinking about the time I went to a body farm where people donate their bodies for forensic research. And I I watch scientists watch how the body decays naturally in the ground. And, you know, that struck me as an interesting way to leave your legacy.

Well, that's why I brought it up. There's this growing movement in the funeral industry towards something called eco-friendly death care, ways of making what happens to us after we die better for the earth. Because traditional burial and cremation, they really do have an ecological toll. So joining me to talk about green death care are my guests, Caitlin Doty, mortician and author based in Southern California, and Katrina Spade, founder and CEO of Recompose, based in Seattle, Washington.

Welcome back, Caitlin, and welcome Katrina to Science Friday. Thank you for having us. Thank you. So, Caitlin, as I mentioned, traditional burial and cremation are wildly popular in the U.S. Can you put into perspective just how popular these options are? Well, wildly popular sort of indicates that, like, it's because people love them.

They're like chocolate. But I think if you actually look at it, what they are is just available. At the turn of the 20th century, a commercial funeral industry began to develop where people felt they had to go to a funeral home to have their bodies cared for and buried after they died. And so with that, developed a system of it's really what the funeral homes want to offer you that you get to choose. And especially for the last 20 or 30 years, it's basically been only this sort of traditional burial, meaning the full embalming, the preservation of the body, the fancy casket made of hardwood or metal,

the big metal or concrete vault in the ground and this kind of fort knocks under the earth where your body goes, or the counterpoint to that, which is cremation. Yes, it's less expensive. It's considered more ecologically friendly. but as you said, there is still a real environmental toll there. So it's not that these things are popular. It's just the kind of the two options. It's when you go in the funeral home, it's do you want burial or cremation? And most people think that is all that's available. So as you just kind of hinted, I was always under the impression that cremation would be a more eco-friendly option in contrast to traditional burial. Can you explain just how much of an ecological impact? you know, traditional burial and cremation actually have. A metaphor I like to use is comparing traditional burial to like a Hummer or a big SUV,

comparing a cremation to say a Prius, an electric car, and comparing eco-friendly burial or something like composting to a bike. In the sense that they all have varying environmental tolls, we just, you might, your values might align more with one or the other of those machines of how you get around. I think we can understand sort of rationally why a more traditional burial where you're using formaldehyde in the body and you're putting these metals and hardwoods into the ground just by sheer material resource. I think it's easier to understand than cremation, which again was always sort of promoted, especially since the 1960s, as this thing that is so much better for the environment. But cremation is natural gas. It's large amounts of natural gas about the equivalent of a five

hundred-mile car trip when you have a cremation. And so, yeah, it is one time. And I would never shame anyone for getting a cremation, especially since it's the less expensive option, by a large margin. But at the same time, it also spews mercury into the atmosphere. It causes issues with carbon release. So at the same time, if you are looking for something really aligned with your values environmentally, you might be looking not directly at cremation anymore. I'm Kathleen Davis, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. We're talking about green death care, including human composting, with my guests, Caitlin Doty, mortician and author based in Southern California, and Katrina Spade, founder and CEO

of Recompose based in Seattle, Washington. So Katrina, I want to talk a little bit about the work that you do. So your company Recompose makes human compost. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Sure. I actually started the work because I was looking at those two options of conventional burial and cremation. And let's just talk about cremation for a minute. It struck me that it was like a little bit wasteful.

Like surely I'd have something left in my body when I died, something to give back. Even if, God willing, I'm like a really old lady kind of with. and not much left, I still would like to give back to the earth that supported me my whole life. And cremation just felt like, oh, I'd be destroying those nutrients. Why? Like a little bit like such a shame. So I started thinking about other options for our bodies when we died, specifically could I design something that was an ecological process that was meant for our urban centers. So something that we could set up in our cities that would give us back to the earth. While I was mulling all this over, a friend of mine knew I was thinking

about this stuff and she called me and she said, Katrina, did you know that farmers have been composting whole cows for a long time? And it was definitely an epiphany and definitely that lightball moment. Well, if you can compost a cow, surely you can compost a human being. I started working on refining that process of composting livestock and turning it into a human focused system where we would compost human beings and turn them into soil after they die. Can you walk me through the process of how it actually works? Yes. So composting, as most people who've tried it before probably know, is the mix of carbon materials and nitrogen materials. Those are your greens and your browns and your backyard compost pile.

We've taken that concept and we refine it and we control it even more than your backyard compost pile. And what that means is we have a mixture of plant material that have the perfect balance of carbon and nitrogen materials. In our case, in Recompose's case, we use wood chips, alfalfa, and straw. And we have a composting vessel. We lay the body onto a mixture of woodchips, alfalfa, and straw, and cover it with more of the same. And then over the next month, the body is decomposing naturally inside of that vessel. And it's doing so thanks to the work of microbes that are naturally occurring. They're on us all. right now as we speak. They're on the wood chips and they're on the body that has died. And as long

as we can provide the right mixture and recipe of that plant material and the right amount of oxygen during that month, the microbes are quite happy and they break everything down. What is the idea behind turning yourself into human compost? I mean, do you foresee that people are going to be using their remains to help grow a tree, for example? We've had clients who've grown an orchard with their person's soil. We've had folks bring the soil back to their neighborhood and give it out to neighbors. So this person's soil went all over the neighborhood to different gardens. Wow. And we've had people say, like, I love roses. I want to be on my rose garden that I've been tending my whole life. You know, a lot of times people with ashes from

cremation, you take those ashes to a special place and you spread them. Maybe it's a forest. Maybe it's at the ocean, this is the same idea except you really get to be productive after you've died. You're really going to actually make a difference, a positive difference on that earth and in that soil. This is a really good point because cremation, it's not just the fact that the cremation process and the big cremation machine uses the resources that it does. It's also kind of existentially what is left at the end of the process. Because during the cremation in that incredibly high heat environment, all the organic material burns away. It's gone.

And what you're left with is inorganic bone fragments. So you can scatter those inorganic bone fragments underneath a tree or in a river, and that's quite a beautiful ceremony. But your bone fragments from a cremation aren't really going out to do the work that human composted material is. How many people have you actually composted at recompose? at this point. We've composted 185 people so far. Trailblazers. Trailblazers, all of them. Actually, that's a great, that's a great name for them too. Blazing a trail. Yeah.

We have to take a break. And when we come back, more on human composting and other green ways of sending off our loved ones. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. And I'm Kathleen Davis. We're continuing our conversation about eco-friendly death care, alternative of ways of treating our bodies when we die. I'm joined by my guests, Caitlin Doty, mortician and author based in Southern California, and Katrina Spade, founder and CEO of Recompose based in Seattle, Washington. Now, is human-based compost any better, let's say, or more nutrient-rich than, say, the compost that you would make from your kitchen scraps? I love this question because I had the same, Well, I actually had the assumption about five years ago.

I was like, clearly human compost is of higher quality than any other compost. And I asked my soil scientist, Dr. Lynn Carpenter Boggs, that very question, she was like, no, no, it's going to be really good compost. That's it. We could even call it decent. And so we've actually, you know, I like the idea of becoming really decent compost. Like it's, you know, we kind of like let go. the hubris of being human and just say, yeah, I'm going to go back to nature.

I don't, that pine needle over there is pretty good. And so, so am I. Like, it kind of releases a little bit of the pressure of being perfect or even sacred forever. I mean, think about it. In the United States, the way that we do forever graves when you're buried is very different to most of the rest of the world. In most of the rest of the world, you rent a grave. You don't own a grave forever and eternity. But here in the United States, we have something called perpetual care, where the assumption is you will be there forever. And in the ecological movement, there's a lot of, whether you're going to be composted, whether you're going to be buried at a conservation land, whether you're going to have your body be eaten by animals at a human body farm, all of these

things address the fundamental issue of hubris and address the idea that like, you know what, I guess my body is not better than banana compost or, you know, dead cow compost or whatever it is. Like, we're all organic material and at the end of the life isn't what we're supposed to do. Just give that back to the cycle. There is something very lovely about that idea, I think. And so we have been talking about human composting under this umbrella of eco-friendly death care. When you stack this up against, say, traditional burial, cremation, is it? it really a more green option? Yes, I'm very pleased to say that we are not greenwashing in this case.

We've had lifecycle assessments done on the process and looking at cremation, conventional burial, and then human composting, also sometimes called natural organic reduction. And there's two pieces to it. One is, what are we avoiding in terms of toxic practices or pollution in terms of the carbon footprint with not choosing cremation and conventional burial. Interestingly, cremation and conventional burial have the same carbon output. Just about, I think it's 540 pounds carbon, if I'm not mistaken. It's not tremendous. I mean, you know, it is like a 500 mile car drive, right, Caitlin? But it's significant. And they're on par because you've got on the one hand the burning of fossil gas and the emitting of carbon that way.

On the other hand, you've got the manufacturing transport of caskets and graveliners and then the upkeep of that cemetery forever. That adds up to approximately the same carbon output. So if you issue those choices and you avoid that carbon footprint, and then also with human composting, you're sequestering carbon in the soil. And so combined with the avoidance and the sequestering, we have about, just over a metric ton of carbon saved if you compost yourself as opposed to the other two options. Wow. It's not bad. Not bad at all. I want to zoom out a little bit. Caitlin, what other technologies

or processes in this green death care arena do you think are really promising right now that that could become more popularized? Well, as far as technology, I think you're really looking at natural organic reduction, human composting, and something called aquamation, which is much closer to what we think of as cremation or more basic cremation, but it's essentially water cremation. Instead of going into a chamber that burns you down to inorganic ash, it's going into a chamber that uses high heat water and base chemicals and pressure to bring you down to basically the same bones at the end. And Aquamation is legal in about 20 states. It's always in flux. But it is, if you're looking for a cremation, if you're looking for a way to have something in an urban environment that's less expensive, it is a technology that really would be beneficial to you. It's better for the environment. And I think some people, depending on where you're coming from, sort of in the grand scheme of things, do prefer the idea of water as your final disposition rather than heat and flames. So I think it's, As far as technology, those are really our two golden hopes as we look into the future right now,

although I hope people out there are already scheming on additional ways that we can help the funeral industry. But then there's always green burial, which is you dig a hole in the ground and you put the body in, which of course they used to just call burial. Right. But since we put all the bells and whistles and things that the funeral industry sells you into it, Now it's green burial or natural burial. But really, you know, that is always available to us just a hole in the ground. But even that isn't as wildly available as it should be.

So I think the combination of all of these things working together helps to get people excited, not about dying, but excited about the kind of contribution that they can make when they die and really how to die in line with their values. I want to stay on this topic of legality and policy for a little bit because there's clearly a lot to this side of the conversation. Katrina, what is the current legal status in the U.S. of human composting? Human composting was not legal in any state when I started thinking about, could I bring it to the public? So I started working with some legal experts to figure out how we could do that. And it turns out it was fairly straightforward in that we had.

had to find legislators who believed in what we were doing, and they wrote bills to legalize an entirely new death care process. We started in Washington State, and we legalized natural organic reduction, aka human composting, in 2019. And my company, Recompose, led that, and celebrated very hard when that bill got signed by the governor. It was exciting. There were a lot of huge smiles in the picture of the signature, considering we were there

to talk about and sign a bill about death. It's a very like, like big smiles, you know, kids in the picture, and there we are signing a bill about death care. In the years following that success, Vermont, Oregon, and just very recently, California have passed bills into law that legalize human composting. And there's currently a bill in New York State. Do you think that more states will follow suit? We'll see other states following because it's been proven that this works and that the operation of a facility can go very well and it's all been proven. But it's been a lot of work, to be honest. And it's taken a lot of people who care to write in their letters and call their legislators and say, can you hurry up and get this done? I actually have a one friend was 96.

She was living at a senior living facility and she called her legislator and she was like, look, I don't have very long. Like get it together. Make it happen. Legalize human composting. Is part of the issue here that not just lawmakers, but the general public, don't necessarily want to talk about death and maybe, you know, grossed out by the idea of having conversations about how we think about death care? When it comes to recompose and human composting, when I talk to people about it, I think that there's a mixture of, God, a general grief about the state of the climate and the state. of the planet makes you think about your own mortality in a different way and makes you really think about that last gesture you'll make and could you somehow connect the threads there. And then I think also we've got, you know, young people coming into this kind of unstable world in a lot of ways with the pandemic and climate change and all the things together.

And they're just, I don't know, they're ready to think, think about this now. for the older generation, like let's say my parents age in their 70s and 80s, first of all, it's a large generation, as we all know, the baby boomers, right? And a lot of those folks have watched their parents die. And I think have looked at that whole occurrence from the nursing home through the hospital and then onto the funeral home. And I think looked at that and said, like, wow, that was not awesome. Can't we do better? And so a lot of, My job and recomposes job is to say, like, here's another way. Whether or not you even care about the environment or you even care about composting, we think you might appreciate a different approach to death, to the end of life. That is just not your conventional, traditional funeral home. So a lot of it is just wanting something new, I think. And funeral directors, and they know I feel this way,

I don't think have done a good enough job of meeting our public and humanity where they are and what they want as far as what happens to their body when they die, both ritually and, you know, as we say, body disposal-wise, which is what we're talking about today. And I agree with Katrina. I think that people do want to talk about this. And I think the very rapid adoption, both by legislatures and by the general public of these ideas, show that there is absolutely a desire to talk about it and engage it. And to have something, you know, if we know that the planet is in trouble and we know that society is in some ways in trouble, we think about what does the end look like? and if we can bring people just a little bit of comfort that at least their end will match how they see their lives in some way and will be comforting whether they're old or young, there's really something to that.

And people come to our movement all the time who say, you know, they think about this stuff and it really worried them and they go, is anybody else thinking about it? And then they look around and they find us and we're like, hello, it's what we do all day. Welcome. Rest assured. Yeah, and I think it, rest assured. That's our new end of life company. I do think that it brings people some comfort to know that there are people out there who care about this and are working hard at it and who want to make this better for them.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm talking about death care and eco-friendly ways of giving our loved ones their final resting place like human compost with my guests, Caitlin Doty, mortician and author based in Southern California, and Katrina Spade, founder and CEO of Recompose based in Seattle, Washington. One thing that I think I have experienced, I'm sure many people who are listening have experienced, is that when somebody dies, it is not just a very emotional experience, it can actually be very expensive and it can be a financial burden. And surprisingly so, I think. I mean, can green options maybe be a little bit less expensive for people? Is there a financial aspect to this as well?

Well, cremation, as Caitlin pointed out, is definitely and probably always going to be the cheapest option. It's worth noting that the carbon cost is not calculated into a cremation. So if you're the kind of person who thinks about that, it's, you know, worth noting that the cost of the thousand dollars, would probably cost you to be cremated. It doesn't include the carbon impact. Conventional burial, traditional burial is the most expensive. And I think in a city like New York, I'm not even sure you can find a plot anymore, but it's going to start it, I don't know, 30 grand and up.

Like, good luck. And it can be, I think, you know, 12,000 is maybe the kind of like baseline for a traditional burial. Because there's casket and graveliner and all the work that goes into the cemetery. our process for human composting is $7,000. That includes the pickup of the body, the paperwork around the death like the death certificate, our staff guiding the friends and family through the whole process, and we're tending to this person's body as they compost for about a month, a month and a half.

And so there is this, you know, there's this aspect of the work that the, and the time that we are taking to tend this process. It's not cremation. it doesn't take four hours. So Recompose also has a community fund that we build that is there to subsidize the cost for people that can't otherwise afford it, and we take that very seriously,

and we're constantly thinking of ways to build that fund. The process of grieving somebody who has died is a very personal experience. It's often incredibly emotional. It can be full of ritual. How do green death care options, say like, turning yourself into human compost, how does that change the grieving process? I would argue that it sets you up. You know, nothing helps you skip over the grieving process,

but by choosing something that is more engaged and confronting of reality. Same thing that I say about sitting with your mom's dead body after she passes just until you feel something shift in you, knowing that her body is breaking down, that it's, that's in that vessel for a month and that it's then going to another purpose as organic material. You have to be on that journey with her. There's no option to just have the hospital, let her out in the middle of the night, be taken to the crematory, and be returned to you in a box. There's no option for tamping it down and ignoring it as the reality of what's happening. So can these options help you skip over the hard work of grieving? No, alas, nothing can really do that. The only way

out is through. But I do believe that it sets you up for this journey in a realistic and quite loving way. For my clients that took the soil and got on, you know, gathered in this field and dug these holes for these small seedlings that would then grow to be an orchard someday that work. I mean, I can only imagine that work and how it helped set them up for the grieving. process. Katrina, I was hoping that you could send us off with maybe some feedback that you have received from families who have gone through this process of composting a loved one. I mean, what do you hear from people who go through this process?

I think people are a little bit surprised when they step into our facility and they see the images of the forest where they may have chosen to donate their person's soil where it will be going after they've been composted. And they just realize that, like, this is a very tangible thing to do with a person's body after death. You know, it's real and it's analog, and it's in some ways as simple as can be. Well, there we have it. I would love to thank my guests. Caitlin Doty is mortician and author based in Southern California.

and Katrina Spade, founder and CEO of Recompose, based in Seattle, Washington. Thank you both for joining me today. Thank you so much. Thank you, Kathleen. And that's about all the time we have for this hour. If you missed any part of the program or you would like to hear it again, yes, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Of course, you can say hi to us on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,

or email us the old-fashioned way, SciFri at SciFri. Science Friday.com. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato. And I'm Kathleen Davis. We'll see you next week.