Science Friday - Experiencing Pain, Grief and the Cosmos, Ivory-Billed Controversy. May 26, 2023, Part 2

Episode Date: May 26, 2023

The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Debate Keeps Pecking Away Every so often, there’s a claim that the ivory-billed woodpecker is back from the dead. Pixelated videos go viral, blurry photos make the front page, and birders flock to the woods to get a glimpse of the ghost bird. Last week, a controversial paper claimed there’s reason to believe that the lost bird lives. The authors say they have evidence, including video footage, that the bird still flies. The paper is ruffling feathers among the birding and research community. This debate has been going on for decades, but the American Birding Association categorizes the bird as “probably or actually extinct,” and its last verified sighting was in 1944. So is it any different this time? And what do we make of the claims that keep cropping up? Guest host Flora Lichtman talks all things ivory-billed with Michael Retter, editor of the magazines North American Birds and Special Issues of Birding, from the American Birding Association.   Tracking Pain In Your Brain When you stub your toe, that pain is registered by the peripheral nervous system. It shoots off signals that travel up your spinal cord and to your brain, where the signals tell you, “Hey, your toe hurts. Take care of it.” But chronic pain—defined as lasting three months or more—is processed differently, and your nerves are constantly firing pain signals to your brain. Chronic pain is complex, and a lot of its basics are still unknown. But a new study from this week discovered another piece of the pain puzzle: the brain signals that cause chronic pain and the region they are processed in. Researchers hope that this is the first step in developing a brain stimulation therapy that can intercept those chronic pain signals and bring relief to patients. Guest host and SciFri director Charles Bergquist talks with lead author Dr. Prasad Shirvalkar, neurologist and associate professor at the University of California San Francisco, about this new paper.   What Can We Learn From A Woman Who Feels No Pain? There are a select few humans that can’t feel any pain. Really. One of those people is Jo Cameron, who didn’t experience any pain during childbirth or need any painkillers after a hip replacement. She’s also never been anxious or afraid. Researchers have been studying Jo Cameron and her brain in an effort to better understand her sensory experience. This week, researchers published a new study that looks at the genes and mutations responsible for Jo’s pain free existence. They hope to use what they learn to come up with better pain management treatments for the rest of us. Guest host and Science Friday Senior Producer Charles Berquist talks with Andrei Okorokov, associate professor at the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research at the University of College London, about this fascinating new research.   Turning To Space While Processing Grief When astronomers Michelle Thaller and Andrew Booth met, it was love at first sight. The couple married in 1994, becoming a power couple in the world of space and physics research. In 2019, the couple received shocking news: Booth was diagnosed with cancer in the brain. He passed away within a year of his diagnosis. The death of a partner is one of the most devastating things a person can go through. Thaller felt unmoored, and like Earth was not her planet anymore. To help her move forward, Thaller turned to the universe for solace. Thaller speaks with guest host Flora Lichtman about how the mysteries of the universe have made processing grief a little easier, and taking space and time with a grain of salt.   To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters. 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 Charles Bergquist. I'm a producer here at SciFri. And I'm Flora Lickman, host and managing editor at Gimlet Media. And today we are filling in for Ira Flato. Later in the hour, scientists are trying to crack the code of what causes chronic pain and how it's processed in the brain. And they've made exciting progress. Plus, finding solace and grief by looking to the stars. But first, bird drama. Is the ivory-billed woodpecker alive? This giant woodpecker has been classified by the American Birding Association as probably or actually extinct. Its last verified citing was in 1944. But last week, a controversial new paper claimed there's reason for hope.

The authors say they have evidence the bird still flies, including a new video. And the paper is ruffling feathers, because there have been claims like this in the past. The ivory bill's resurrection is an amazing story. We just saw an ivory bill together, the first people in over 60 years. The ivory-billed woodpecker was reportedly cited in a federal wildlife refuge. Our viewer sent in this video of an ivory-billed woodpecker. That bird can be here. Fixilated videos go viral, blurry photos make the front page, and birders flock to the woods to get a glimpse of the ghost bird.

And then, nothing. Is it any different this time? Here with the lowdown is Michael Redder, editor of the magazine's North American Birds and Special Issues of Birding from the American Birding Association. He's based in Fort Worth, Texas. Michael, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Flora. Thanks for having me. Okay, Michael, you're a birder. You've got 3,000 bird species on your life list. You've written several books about birds. I want your hot take. Do you think the ivory billed woodpecker is alive? Unfortunately, I don't think so, no. All right, before we get into all that

drama. I want to just hear a little bit about the bird, so tell me about the ivory-billed woodpecker. Okay. So it was the largest species of woodpecker that lived in North America. This large, mostly black bird with big white patches on the wing and a white stripe up the side of the neck. The male had a big red crest, and the female had a kind of cool black crest that curled forwards. And they both had a big pale yellow bill and pale eye, very striking bird, very loud. They banged on, you know, um, dead empty trees so they would echo across the land. And they've also had loud calls, vocal calls that they would use. So very loud, conspicuous birds. Can you give me your best impersonation?

Oh, gosh. Well, the striking on the tree, the double tap is characteristic of birds in that genus, which still exist in Latin America. So I've heard them, and it's just a loud bang, bang on a tree. But they also have a vocal call that sound, if you've ever heard an orchestra warming up or a child learning to play the clarinet, there's kind of this squeaky sound that a clarinet can make. Delightful. And they sounded kind of like that. So majestic. Yes. And where did the bird live?

So ivory bobble bookpickers were restricted to kind of bottom land, swampy forests in the southeast of United States and also in Cuba. Okay. And what happened to the population? Well, people happened. People hunted them. Scientists collected them to put them in drawers and universities. And we cut down all the trees that they depended on to live. So this new paper includes photos and videos from researchers that they say is evidence that the bird is alive. What do you see in those images? I see either things that are not identifiable or I see the superficially similar piliated woodpecker. What is the difference between the ivory build and the pillated woodpecker? The pillated woodpecker is mostly black. And it has a white patch in the wing when it spreads the wing, kind of out towards the

tip, and it has white under the wing when it flies. And it has a shorter dark bill. Ivory woodpecker, when it's perched, when it's not flying, when it's hanging on the side of a tree, has big white patches on top of the wing and white stripes that go up the back and up the side of the head and it has the big pale yellow almost white bill and a white eye. And ivory woodpecker is also much larger. What would compelling evidence look like to you? It would look like a decent photo or video.

And those are so easy to get these days because everybody has a camera in their pocket. And this is a, this is not a bird that hides. It's not only loud and conspicuous and flashy, but it lives in forests that don't have leaves on them for half of the year. You know, scientists are going into primary rainforest on two-week treks and they're finding tiny brown birds that hide and don't like to come out. And they're coming back with, you know, incredible photos and videos of these things. And it's just, it's incredibly improbable that this big flashy bird that lives in the United

States that we somehow can't get a good photo of it, it just defies reason to me. You know, the thing that strikes me is that this is a peer review. paper, right? Like, these are, you know, reputable ornithologists making these claims. What is happening? In general, I would say that most ornithologists are not experts on bird identification. They are experts in, you know, their very narrow particular field of study. To give you an instance, my husband is an expert on the genetics and genomics of a couple species of salmon. But if you put them in front of him on a table, he wouldn't know what they were. And in my experience, a lot of ornithologists, not all, are like that with birds. You know, they might

know how many eggs on average a house ren tends to lay in its nest. But if a female Red Wing Blackbird landed in front of them, they might not know what it was just because they haven't studied that. And there's nothing wrong with that. But ornithologist doesn't automatically mean bird identification expert. Well, why do you think it got through peer review? I don't know. I can't tell you, but I would be surprised if there were many bird identification experts as the reviewers, if any. When you saw this news, what was your reaction? Oh, okay, here we go again. And then I went on about my day and was hoping that I wouldn't hear about it again. I mean, and this has happened before, right? There have been other claims. Yeah, it's happened before.

most spectacularly in 2005 when it was announced with the Department of the Interior. And then shortly thereafter, there was a paper released, I want to say in the same journal by David Sibley and some other authors that debunked the claims of the first paper. The famous bird identification book author, David Sibley. Right, right. And I don't know if we'll see that again. I mean, I think at this point the people who, the people who are convinced it doesn't exist, they don't in some ways they don't think it's worth their time to rebut it because it's been done and it's been done and it's this is it's it's almost becoming like bigfoot or the

locknose monster do you think there's any harm in people keeping keeping the hope um on a like a personal human level perhaps not i mean i hope too i really want this to be true it would be so amazing both for those of us who would like to experience the bird, but also the bird itself and its ecosystem, because it played an important role in it. But there is a harm to other ecosystems and other birds. When we funnel money into the protection of a species that's already extinct, then we're neglecting the protection of species that aren't yet extinct because money is finite. So even though many bird organizations say the ivory-billed woodpecker is extinct, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lists the bird as critically endangered. And if that agency

declares that the bird is extinct, which it's expected to do, that would remove federal protections and funding. So I've heard that some folks are like, well, why not just, you know, on the off chance the bird is alive, like, why take away hope? Because we don't want to lose that protection and funding. What do you make of that? I think that removing protection for something that doesn't exist isn't very consequential. But, you know, if there's one out there, yes, having protection for it would be helpful, but the funding is problematic. Funding the protection of something that is extinct means that we're not funding protection of things that aren't yet extinct, but we'll go extinct because we're not funding them. But on the other hand,

And I mean, if the U.S. government removes protection for my rebuilt woodpecker and one appears, I have to believe that it would gain protection again in the blink of an eye. Is there another woodpecker that is facing extinction? Well, there's a woodpecker right here in the United States in the southeast called the red cockated woodpecker that is, I don't remember if it's still endangered, but it definitely needs our help because it depends on pine trees in the southeast. the kind of natural ecological regimen, which is frequent fires and not cutting down dead and disease trees because those are the trees that it uses to nest. So without our help, the red cockated woodpecker would be in some trouble. Tell me about this woodpecker. Where does it live? What does it look like? It lives in the southeastern United States in pine forests, in open pine forests. And it's black and white, black and white bars. And the male has a tiny,

little red patch on the head that is maybe just a couple feathers and is extremely hard to see. That's the cockade and the red cockaded woodpecker. And it nests in colonies, which is weird for a woodpecker. So you might have 10 or 12 pairs in an area. And they only build their nests in the trees in the diseased trees that are oozing sap. And it's thought that the sap that covers the trees helps protect them from predators trying to get into the nest. This seems like something that people could put on their life list. Oh, absolutely.

I would love to see one of those woodpeckers. Yeah, and for birders, one of the things that makes them maybe a little easier to find than they ought to be is that since they are rare and we're trying to manage and protect them, usually there are white rings spray painted around the trees that they have nests in. So when you're in their habitat and you see a tree with a white ring on it, there's probably a recocated woodpecker nest in it. or nearby. I can't let you go without asking you for your favorite woodpecker fun fact. They have incredibly long tongues that they roll up in a spiral kind of like around their brains.

Come on. And surrounding that, their brain is encased in like in liquid so that when they, you know, hit a tree with all that force, their brain is suspended in liquid and doesn't get banged into their skull. So their heads are pretty remarkable. Whoa. And the tongue is for grabbing whatever is in the hole that they just drilled? Yeah, that's exactly right. This is what I'm going to think about the next time I see a downy woodpecker at my feeder. That's great. Michael, thank you so much for joining me.

It's been my pleasure. Thank you for having me. Michael Redder, editor of the magazine's North American Birds and Special Issues of Birding from the American Birding Association. He's based in Fort Worth, Texas. After the break, Charles learns about decoding the pain in your brain, how chronic pain is processed and what scientists are learning about it. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichten. And I'm Charles Bergquist. When you go to the emergency room, one of the first questions someone usually asks is rate your pain on a scale from zero to 10. That helps doctors decide how to treat you.

But how do I know that my eight, for example, is the same as your age? Pain is subjective, and it can vary, maybe some days or less painful than others. A team of doctors set out to actually put a number on pain, to see if there's an objective way in the brain to measure and diagnose it, especially chronic pain, which by definition lasts three or more months and can be debilitating. Here to talk about this study is lead author Dr. Prasad Shavalkar, neurologist and associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Charles. It's great to be here.

So great to have you. First of all, what's the difference between my brain registering pain when I do something like quack my elbow or spray in my wrist versus the chronic pain that we're talking about? Yeah, so chronic pain I think of as truly a separate disease than an acute or short-lasting pain like whacking your elbow or stopping your toe. when you have immediate acute pain, what happens is your peripheral nerve endings, signal, electrical signals to your spinal cord, which ultimately reach your brain. And they create this perception of alert or threat. It's inherently unpleasant, right? But what's a big mystery and the study that we published helps, I think, provide the first

clues to unravel this mystery a little bit, is over the three months that chronic pain develops from acute pain. We don't really understand what changes take place in the spinal cord or the brain in the real world. And so something happened where there's rewiring between brain regions, between circuits in the spinal cord, and even in the peripheral nerves, where chronic pain reflects a reorganization, where acute pain signals, we think of as primarily living in the peripheral nerves in the spinal cord, undergo some kind of transition where chronic pain, these signals are more represented in the brain in unique ways. Where in the brain they're represented and how they're distributed across the brain, it's still puzzling. But it's clear that chronic pain involves

a much greater emotional component. We call it the affective component than acute pain or than some kind of transient pain. Chronic pain also is associated with much more significant suffering. It bleeds into people's relationships, you know, and their moods from a day-to-day basis. often makes it really hard to focus attention, which is actually an unfortunate paradox. Because, you know, one of the coping mechanisms people use for chronic pain is to actually try to shift their attention away from their pain and onto other things to try to distract themselves. And chronic pain is actually associated with a host of brain changes, but also changes in, you know, someone's social life, in their personal psychology.

And so it really infuses into, I think, every aspect. of an individual's waking life, as opposed to acute pain, which we hope time will heal. Right. I mean, as you say, it seems hard to quantify. How do I know that my sense of the color blue is the same as your sense of the color blue? But you're trying to put a number on this. Tell me how you did that. Yes.

So it's absolutely hard to compare between individuals. And you're right. Your blue is probably different than my blue. And I don't even know if that's knowables. Nonetheless, the study is absolutely. we did is part of a larger clinical trial aimed at developing new personalized brain stimulation therapy for chronic pain. So as part of this trial, we surgically implanted electrodes to target two brain regions that we think are involved in pain. That's the anterior cingulate

cortex and the orbital frontal cortex. These electrodes were implanted surgically in four patients who were suffering from chronic pain for many years. And so we, used a novel research-grade device connected to these electrodes that allowed not only stimulation of electricity, but sensing. We could record electrical signals from the brain out in the real world. So over many months, patients were asked to answer surveys related to the severity and the quality of their pain symptoms multiple times a day. What we did is we used just the brain signals in certain machine learning models to try to predict what these pain's chronic pain score reports, the symptom report the patient provided. We were essentially using brain activity as an

input into a model to predict zero to 10 scores, pain quality scores, and other aspects of the patient's kind of lived experience that they were reporting to us. And did all four patients respond And similarly? We actually found that there was one feature in common across all of patients that actually predicted high pain states in the real world. And that was actually a low-frequency vibration signal in the orbital frontal cortex. So even though these four patients have different experiences of pain, by looking for this low-frequency signal in the specific part of the brain, you can tell they are experiencing pain. That's exactly right. So, This low-frequency signal was the common signal across patients that actually seems to track

when patients would enter a high pain state. So you link the chronic pain experience to the specific brain part, the orbital frontal cortex. Is that significant in some way? Like, what else does that get involved with in the brain? So the orbital frontal cortex was pretty novel finding from this study, because it's not a brain region that's typically associated with chronic pain. In fact, the most common functions that have been attributed to the overdo frontal cortex are actually those important for decision-making,

knowing when a task, or knowing when you need to shift your attention from one task to another. And research from one of my mentor's labs, Dr. Eddie Chang, showed that the overt frontal cortex actually harbors signals that allow us to predict whether a patient is going to be depressed or, happy at any given time. And so it's interesting that this brain region that's typically been associated with emotional regulation as well as decision making seemed to play a huge role in chronic pain states. So you've found this common signal that could serve as some kind of biomarker of these people are experiencing pain. Is there some way that you could short-circuit it

or preempt it somehow? That's the goal. So as part of the larger clinical file that these patients are in, our primary goal is to try to relieve their suffering. The biomarkers that we detected, they were kind of the first part of the study. And the goal is to take their individual biomarkers for each patient and integrate them into an algorithm that can provide personalized brain stimulation. Hopefully, by using the biomarkers as a kind of sensing signal for their chronic pain state, we could decide when to turn the stimulator on and off. So I think of it as we're trying to build a thermostat to treat chronic pain where the individual biomarkers for each patient can be tuned, such that the stimulator is providing therapy when that patient individually needs it.

So I assume, A, it's going to take a long time for any kind of brain stimulating implant to be approved. And some people probably aren't going to even want you to be sticking things in their head. does this research point to any ways outside of a surgical treatment that could help people with chronic pain? Yes, yes. We would not want to insert electrodes into patient's brain unless it was really a therapy or option of last resort, which was the case for the patients in this study. These signals we detected were using direct cortical recordings, right? So electrical signals directly from inside the brain, which is actually probably not feasible for treatment or

diagnosis of the vast majority of people. The fact that we've detected signals directly inside the brain now gives us hope that we might be able to use certain non-invasive techniques to try to detect them, such as EEG using near infrared spectroscopy or other kinds of sensors that obviously aren't surgically implanted. You know, it remains to be seen, but I think this is going to be a really important obstacle that my lab is working on. How many people could this potentially help? Chronic pain is staggeringly common. There's a new study published last week in JAMA that demonstrates that chronic pain is more common than depression, more common than diabetes, even more common than high blood pressure.

One out of five people in the U.S. suffers from chronic pain. While the brain stimulation therapy that we use is reserved for the most severe refractory chronic pain cases, hopefully the results from this study shown biomarkers where we can and objectives and track subjective states of chronic pain can be validated and generalized to a much larger population. Well, this is fascinating. Wishing you good luck with your future research. Dr. Prasad Chavalkar is a neurologist, an associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco.

Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me today. Thank you. I enjoyed our conversation. There's an expression. Someone is feeling no pain. but there are a select few humans who really can't feel pain. One of those people is Joe Cameron. Here she is in a New York Times interview from 2019.

I was going through childbirth, and I kept thinking, as soon as I feel pain, I'll ask for it, I'll ask for it. And before I realized, I've had the children. She's also never been anxious or afraid. Researchers have been studying Joe Cameron and her brain in an effort to better understand her sensory experience. And this week, researchers published a new study that looks at the genes and mutations responsible for Joe's pain-free existence. They hope to use what they learn to come up with better pain management treatments.

Joining me now to talk more about this research is my guest. Andrea Korakov, Associate Professor at the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research at University College London. Welcome to Science Friday. Hello, and thank you for having me on the show. It's great to have you. You've been working with Joe Cameron for about 10 years now. What is it about her condition that makes her so fascinating to study? I think it's a very rare condition when not only we have a lack of pain sensation, but we have other benefits of a mutation she has that allows her to be never having anxiety or depression.

and also she's healing much faster than other people, about 20, 30% faster. All this together is essentially a goldmine for researchers to try and to find a connection between mutation and what's genes I involved in terms. And so we can try to develop new therapies. So all of these seeming advantages, the pain management, the mood, the anxiety, nervousness, all of this gets traced back to one gene mutation? That is correct. Amazingly enough, the mutation that she has affects the system that is an endoconaminoid system

and the small fatty molecules endocinoids take part in signaling between different cells in our bodies and in our brains. And they signal about pain, about immune response, about appetite, and other movements. and other mood conditions. The first signs of that we might be dealing with something like that, Joe was treated with morphine at one of her surgeries, and she was really sick after that. And that tells us that people usually have problems with morphine treatments

when they have mutations or changes with their endicinidina system. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. So in 2019, you found, this original mutation that seems responsible for all of this cascade of effects, where have you gone from there? What do you better understand now about her condition? I had this analogy with the Vordal Game that back for years, we had only one letter in a word which we knew in a position of it. So now we have all five, and we know the position. So we know the word. But we still have to put this word and all this pathways between genes,

in the big context of our human body and make sure that whenever we go and try targeting this in terms of working on potential treatments, we do not affect something very vital and important. So you mentioned that it's not just that these genes are completely off. They're dialed down. Why is that important for you to be able to understand? Some of the genes are dialed down,

especially the first one, the main original gene where it's all starts. Why it's important for us? Well, there was some unsuccessful trials before with the chemical drugs developed to inhibit this particular enzyme, and those molecules were aimed to inhibit it completely, and side effects were drastic and very unpleasant. Therefore, some trials were stopped. So now knowing that we can regulate this enzyme

without targeting it with small molecules, or even going back, looking again and all the cell libraries of molecule compounds being tried and picking up those which are not inhibiting it completely, not having any side effects. But also can target this area of mutation, which is producing a small molecule called RNA, ribonucleic acid, and it's a long non-coding RNA. It doesn't make protein, but it does regulate activity of the main gene. Therefore, we can target somewhere else, and we don't have to, you know, drive a body or organ or tissue or brain into the undesirable side effects. So we all experience pain differently.

Do we know what's going on with, quote-unquote, normal people that feel less pain as opposed to no pain? Oh, it's a very good question. There are over 200 genes which are connected to pain circuits. And it really depends which gene is affected by mutation. For example, we had a family from Italy with the Marseilli family, that's called Marseley syndrome, with one of the proteins being mutated. And that rendered them to a condition where they would feel the initial impact of injury. But then it will be very quickly going away.

So they wouldn't have any chronic pain after that. So it really depends on what a mutation people carry. So on one level, it sounds great not to be able to feel pain and not to have anxiety, not to be afraid. Are there any downsides to this? I think the downsides come when you're a child, when you develop, because pain is our cognitive protector. It protects us from a behavior which may lead to injury. So essentially, it's very useful for kids to have some level of paris sensation, of course. So what's next for the 10 years ahead in studying this?

Or recruit more funding, of course. The more funds we have, the more we can work on it. Start looking into other things like anxiety, depression, and fear, because we were primarily focusing on pain. Also look more into this long-known cordon RNA and what used to be treated as a junk DNA 20 or years ago. Now is something that makes very important regulatory molecules. So there is a massive part of an iceberg we didn't look at yet.

So that's probably more than 10 years from now on, but definitely enough things to do for a... quite considerable future. Well, I wish you and Joe Cameron, best of luck in your future research. Thank you so much. Andrea Korakov is an associate professor at the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research at University College London, based in London, England. We have to take a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about how turning to the universe can help with the experience of grief. Stay with us.

This is Science Friday. I'm Charles Bergquist. And I'm Flora Lichten. How do you cope with the grief of losing a partner? Astronomer Michelle Thaler faced this much earlier than she hoped. Her husband, astronomer Andrew Booth, died from cancer at the age of 64 in 2020. I know Michelle pretty well. She's a friend of mine. I met her almost 10 years ago for a story I was reporting.

She told me her husband Andrew knew me for my work on Science Friday. He was a big fan of this show. I got to know Andrew too. He was unusually wonderful, just like Michelle. And when he was diagnosed, it was a shock. I saw Michelle look for solace in the universe. That's what we're talking about today. Michelle joins me to talk about astrophysics and grief

and why we should take space and time with a grain of salt. Dr. Michelle Thaler is an astronomer at NASA based in Greenbelt, Maryland. Welcome back to Science Friday, Michelle. Oh, it's great to be here, Flora. I absolutely love that intro too. Wonderful. I'm so glad. I think we should start with Andrew.

Tell us about Andrew. When did you meet and give us a sense of him? Yeah. I had the privilege of being married to an absolutely astounding person. Andrew Booth was an astrophysicist. He was from England. And when I was doing my doctoral research, I was having to observe objects in the southern sky. There are some stars that are much easier to see when you're in the Southern Hemisphere, some you actually can't see from the North.

And so I was spending a lot of time, wherever I could get telescope time as a graduate student in the Southern Hemisphere. And the Australian telescopes had some good opportunities. And so I had applied for time on telescopes in Australia and gotten it. And Andrew was a professor at the University of Sydney. And we had a common friend. I didn't know Andrew, but I had a friend who was an astronomer from Australia who used to be one of Andrew's students, one of his graduate students. And so this person basically called Andrew and said, hey, you know, I'm sending down now one of my graduate student friends. And, you know, would you be able to meet them at the airport, get them settled in Sydney, you know, before they move into the interior to go to the telescopes?

Andrew said, absolutely not. You know, you guys are always calling on me to do this because I live near the airport. And I'm sick at picking up graduate students at the airport. airport. But my friend said, come on, kind of twisted his arm. And I think you'll enjoy meeting this person. I had just been on my first trans-Pacific flight. I'm kind of holding my eyes open. You know, it was very, very groggy. And I still remember this kind of beautiful man walking around the airport. It was love at first sight for both of us. Really? Yes. It does happen. And we were together for 25 years. When was Andrew diagnosed with cancer?

Andrew was diagnosed with cancer. It was November 11th. It's amazing how that date just kind of stays in my head. November 11th, 2019. We were just starting to wonder if there was going to be some kind of health emergency. At the time, we didn't realize at all what the scale of COVID would be. It unfortunately was what everybody fears. And he was watching a football game. And he said, you know, I just feel a little tingly in my head. You know, one side of the one side of my face just feels kind of numb. And he said, you know, I think it's nothing. You know, I don't think this is anything that, you know, I need to worry about. And I just said, let's, let's just go to make sure. Let me just drive you to the emergency room. Let's just see. And it was, it was on the weekend. It was during a day. And I dropped him off. And then I said, oh, he, I'm going to go pick up some groceries for us later. And I actually went to the grocery store. And then, you know, when I came back and I finally picked up Andrew, you know, it's coming out. with a strange, you know, look on his face, of course, and said, you know, well, so they did an MRI to make sure that it wasn't a stroke happening.

And, you know, at this point, I kind of forget the exact words, but the phrase I remember is tumor's too numerous account in his brain. And he never felt better from that moment. He never recovered. And he, despite two rounds of chemo and two experimental treatments at the National Institute, of health, you know, immunotherapy, all of that. He was gone in nine months from that time. In that period, do you feel like your relationship with the universe was tested? I mean, I know this is a cliche, but did you find yourself sort of turning to the universe and asking why? You know, it's funny. We never really asked the question why. Because as two scientists that were not

religious people. We were well aware and even kind of, in some ways, deeply accepting of the idea that these things just happen. You know, I mean, cancer is just a bit of your own DNA that goes haywire. You know, I mean, sometimes because, you know, a chemical is in your body that causes mutations, like if you smoke, you know, or, I mean, you could just be hit by a cosmic rate. I mean, quite literally, there are high energy particles from space that hit our DNA and can cause it to reproduce wrong.

And it wasn't so much a question of why. But he had a type of cancer that just really isn't treatable. He had small cell carcinoma, for those of you that are cancer fans. So, you know, it, there really wasn't anything we could do except try to slow it, and it just didn't slow. And so there were two things that happened. One was, I felt this isolation. from the world.

I mean, the phrase was in my head that this didn't feel like my planet anymore. Everything felt removed. You know, I felt sort of like a ghost in the planet. I just wasn't connecting to, you know, to anything.

It was a very, very, I'd never felt anything like that. And the other one was this realization that the time we had left, no matter how unpleasant and painful it might be, this was time where we would never get back. You know, this was time together that we still had. And we approached every part of the cancer treatment and the consequences of the cancer treatment as a team and with as much humor and love as we could. So, you know, there wasn't a lot of fighting for us in terms of, you know, why is this happening to? You know, why is this

happening to us, you know, this is so unfair because, I mean, this is something that is a natural part of the universe. I mean, we're such complicated beings, our bodies, you know, and we just sort of hold together barely, you know, chemically. That's amazing. We live as long as we do because all these molecules can reproduce in the wrong way or, you know, some little chemical can go wrong. And, you know, that's what we're up against. Did you turn to, your knowledge of astrophysics as a source of solace? Yes. And, you know, this was something that we absolutely shared.

And so that was, you know, one of the things that made the partnership so good is being professional astrophysicists, you know, we were both astounded by the beauty of the universe. We felt awe. We felt so privileged and so lucky. to spend our lives immersed in that idea. I mean, being an astronomer working at NASA, I mean, 80% of it is the same as most other jobs.

You've got a lot of meetings and budgets and paperwork. And, you know, that's what we spend most of our time on. But then, you know, there is like 20% just absolute fantastic joy, the joy of discovery. Or Andrew could make instruments work that really shouldn't have been able to work. I mean, he was just a wizard when it came to working with light and the quantum mechanical properties of light. He did stuff that basically proved. I mean, I'll use that word, that, you know, that space and time are certainly not as simple as we perceive.

I mean, I mean, it's always a hard thing to think about because it's not that our perception of space and time is an illusion, but it's not complete. and Andrew's instruments, these were optical interferometers, they really only worked if space and time don't really match our perception. He was one of the world's leaders in teasing particles of light to appear in many different places at the same time. And in that technique that we call interferometry, you can then sort of trick many different telescopes all around the world to think that they're one big telescope. They all have to catch the same particle of light at the same time, literally the same particle. So this is where like my brain is just like, roop. I know. So this is the thing.

So, you know, the crazy thing is it works. It's an experimental result. and Andrew's telescopes would actually pick the same particle. And I mean that. I mean, just think about a star that's, say, thousands of light years away. You know, that light has been traveling for thousands of years. It hits Andrews, plural. And he's set them so accurately to more accurate than a billionth of a meter.

And he's able to tease the light out into appearing in different positions. in space and time all at once, that same particle. That's really what's happening. And until you catch the same particle, like if you catch the particle that was emitted by the star a millionth of a second later, the instrument doesn't work. But if you catch the same particle

in all those telescopes, bang, it works. And you can actually get incredibly high-resolution measurements of the sky. So Andrew and I knew, I loved how you put it in the introduction. You take space and time with a grain of salt. Space and time has a reality that we don't experience. When you look at death as a scientist and you look at human brains, you know, it's pretty obvious what happens. I mean, this is all around us every day. You know, biologically active beings, they decay.

You know, our neurons stop carrying electrical current. our memories have no way to be stored. That's it for us, I think. But the question is, how much do we really understand space and time? And a lot of scientists wonder, and this goes back to Einstein, this is nothing new, that the universe may be some kind of a whole thing, space and time and perhaps different versions of space and time, all existing at once. We don't know that.

What we do know is it's not as simple as we perceive. You know, if anybody knew that it was Andrew. His instruments didn't work if space and time were as simple as that. So what we would say to each other is that, you know, I'm still with Andrew, but in the part of the universe, I call the past. And there may even be different versions of the universe. I don't know that. But if the universe could possibly be some kind of whole thing. then we kept saying to each other over and over, when the universe began, I was right here holding your hand.

And when the universe ends, whatever that means, I'm still right here holding your hand. And incredibly, that could be literally true. You know, it could be that all points in space and time exist as much as any other point. You know, I'm already dead. I've been dead for billions of years. You know, that the sun hasn't formed yet. You know, Andrew and I are still enjoying our, you know, our wedding in the castle. You know, all of that happens in some kind of a big now that our brains filter.

Our brains just can't perceive. And, you know, that's an interesting idea. I don't know if it's, that's literally true. But that's how we decided to try to understand life and death. I'm Flora Lickman, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. There are still so many unsolved mysteries of the universe. Does that give you peace or does that stressful for you? Oh, you know, it's funny. I love it.

You know, I, there's so many things that we do know. I think people forget about that. You know, the idea, for example, that our atoms come from the stars, that the universe, At the very least, you can say the universe used to be a lot hotter and denser than it is now. That much is established observational fact. We can take pictures of that. That's not anything that the universe has changed. Do we know exactly how the Big Bang worked yet?

No, I doubt it. But the evidence that the universe was once very different, the very, very strong evidence that space and time are not just the way we perceive them. this this this this both thrills me and makes me feel peaceful so it's a it's a neat feeling i gotta we should think of a word for that one it's it's both peaceful and thrilling it's a vulnerable feeling you know i mean i don't think the universe in a sense you know cares for us individually or has any sense of you know human morality uh you know or fairness but it's a beautiful system incredible complex the the scale of of the galaxy we belong to, you know, the cycles of, you know, creating elements, the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the salt that maybe anything that we know will someday be called into question or looked at from a

different perspective. You know, I, when you think about how the universe seems to have this change from a big bang to perhaps a very large, cold thing, you know, I'm always reminded of, when I was taking physics, one of my professors said, you know, it's possible, it's, again, it's all just one big thing that we're looking at from different perspectives. And that's what we call time or what we call space. You know, if you, the example was if you watch an elephant walk by and you're looking out a tiny little slat of a window where you can only see a little strip of the elephant at once, you know, you've got the first thing you see is the trunk coming by and then that gets bigger, you know, and bigger, oh, there's its ear and its leg, and now there's this big body, and then it walks by, you're down to this little tiny tail again. And you can come up with a system of physics where the trunk causes the tail.

Right, right. But it doesn't. It's not. It's all one whole thing. And the implication he was saying is that that may be what the universe is a whole thing. You know, one event even doesn't cause another. You know, we perceive little slices at a time and think of it as causality, space and time. And it may be much deeper than that and much larger than that.

and even wonderful and horrible events in life are just a shape of something that we're almost kind of seeing the shadow of. You know, we don't see the whole thing. Michelle, I feel so privileged to know you and to have gotten the opportunity to talk to you today. Thank you. It's wonderful. And thank you for asking the question, Flora. Dr. Michelle Thaller is an astronomer at NASA based in Greenbelt, Maryland. If you missed any part of this program or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts

or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Every day now is Science Friday. Say hi to us on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or email us the address, SciFri at Science Friday.com. Send us feedback. Tell us what you'd like us to cover. I'm Charles Bergquist. And I'm Flora Lichtman. Have a great weekend.