Science Friday - Fire Of Love Film, Accessible Tech, Vagina Book. July 29, 2022, Part 2

Episode Date: July 29, 2022

For The Love Of Volcanoes A new documentary, “Fire of Love,” tells the story of French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft. The married couple spent two decades chasing volcanic eruptions across the world. Katia was a geochemist and Maurice a geologist. Together, they studied the science of volcanoes and produced films showcasing their power. That is, until their deaths in 1991, when they were killed by the very thing they loved so much. Guest host Sophie Bushwick talks with Sara Dosa, director of the documentary “Fire of Love,” which is in theaters nationwide, and will be available on Disney+ later this year.   A Blind Researcher Making A More Accessible World Joshua Miele has spent his career trying to make the world more accessible for blind and visually impaired people. As a blind person, his lived experiences have shaped the way he thinks about technology and how it can be used to better serve disabled people. He’s invented products like YouDescribe—a tool that adds audio description to YouTube videos—and Tactile Maps Automated Production, a software that creates tactile maps for people to feel. Although adaptive technologies try to help disabled people access information, it isn’t always driven by the input and needs of disabled people. There needs to be more disabled designers, engineers, and researchers spearheading this work, Miele says. Now, he works as a principal accessibility researcher at Amazon’s Lab126, where he helps make products like the Echo and Fire tablets more accessible. Guest host Sophie Bushwick speaks with Miele about how his own experiences shape his work, and the importance of disability inclusion in designing new technologies.   What You Might Not Have Known About The Vagina When it comes to researching human genitals and the organs called, in simple terms, “reproductive,” the penis has long been the star of the show. “It doesn’t help to only look at one or the other. Only by zooming out can we see them in their full range of variation and possibility,” writes science journalist Rachel E. Gross in her book, Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage, which tells the long history of neglected research into the vagina and its companion organs—the uterus, clitoris, Fallopian tubes, and ovaries. The book takes readers through myths, mysteries, and the legacy of shame around sexuality. It also introduces researchers who are finally making breakthroughs in our understanding of fertility, pleasure, and even immune health that’s been linked to these organs. The book interviews doctors who are using that knowledge to make life better for everyone—including cancer patients and older people going through menopause, transgender women who want their own vaginas, people with endometriosis, and those, including intersex people, looking to regain pleasure and agency after childhood genital cutting. Producer Christie Taylor interviews Gross about our growing understanding of clitoral anatomy, the long-misunderstood egg cell, the uterus’ ability to heal, and more. Plus, why these organs are important for whole-body health, and why everyone needs to understand them better. To read an excerpt from Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage by Rachel E. Gross, visit sciencefriday.com.   Transcripts for each segment will be available a week after the show airs at 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 Sophie Bushwick. Fire of Love tells the story of French volcanologists Katja and Maurice Kraft. The married couple spent two decades chasing volcanic eruptions across the world. Katya was a geochemist and Maurice, a geologist. Together, they studied the science of volcanoes and produced films showcasing their power. That is, until their deaths in 1991, when they were killed by the very thing they loved so much. They will leave behind hundreds of hours of footage, thousands of photos, and a million questions. They could only dream of volcanoes.

Together, they can reach them. The love story between Maurice and Katya and the volcanoes they documented is at the heart of the new documentary Fire of Love. Joining me now is the film's director, Sarah Dosa. Sarah, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much, Sophie. It's great to be here. What initially drew you to the story of Katya and Maurice Craft?

So I first met Katia and Maurice Craft, actually, when I was researching images for the last film I directed, a film called The Sierra and the Unseen. That film was shot entirely in Iceland, which is actually a volcanic island. And we were looking for old images of erupting volcanoes in Iceland for one specific scene. Once you start researching erupting volcanoes, archives, Iceland, you learn about Katya and Marie's craft. My team and I, we were immediately struck by just these spectacular images, but it was really once we started to learn about them, you know, as individuals, these philosophical and playful, hilarious and brilliant scientists, but also as a couple, the fact that they were married. So we really thought that there could be a unique story here. And the film is a love triangle between Katia Maurice and volcanoes. but this is Science Friday.

So how did you decide how much science you were going to put into the story? So we really see Fire of Love as a collage, both in terms of the archival material that we used to edit it together. But it's also a collage film thematically. We really wanted the film to be a love story, a science story, a character portrait, and also a kind of Sagan-esque meditation on humanity's place. But it was very difficult to do all of those things without the film becoming, you know, volcano movie soup.

But we really realized that a science story and a love story and the character story can all kind of cohere through the lens of seeking understanding amid the unknown, pursuing understanding of these mysteries, you know, the grand mystery that are these powerful forces of volcanoes as well as the mystery of the human heart. Katya and Maurice are after the strange alchemy of elements, the combination of mineral, heat, gas, and time that incites. an eruption. What is it, they ask, that makes the Earth's heartbeat. It's blood flow. They study, examine, and question. Kacha and Maurice begin to learn the secrets of the planet that few others know. Understanding is love's other name. There are so many mesmerizing shots of volcanoes in the film. We see lava eruptions, rivers of lava, these bubbling close-ups. You went through over 200 hours of footage from the Crafts Archive and then 50 additional hours of TV interviews and appearances. How did you decide which of these images

to use for the film? Yeah, well, first, I had a phenomenal team. We kind of very much tackled this together. It was so challenging to whittle down all of this footage into 93 minutes. But we really used kind of the prism of a love story to guide us first and foremost. There was no footage of Katyn Marie's kissing or holding hands or any shots of their romantic life together. They were so focused on filming volcanoes that kind of intimate personal life, it did not show up in their visual record. But we very much realized that images of volcanoes was actually their love language. And so to tell a love story using their own footage, we started to kind of love. look for how that could kind of show up in their imagery itself.

For example, at the beginning of their relationship, we used images of, you know, kind of bubbling lava and sparks flying, things that can kind of help to communicate the early, exciting, catalytic phase of a relationship. Then as the love story kind of bloomed and blossomed, we, you know, get more explosive, more dreamy with our imagery. Of course, there's twists and turns and conflicts and darkness that comes also in the process falling in love and really understanding your lover, be it a human or your love being a volcano. In an interview included in the film, a young Maurice rejects classification systems.

But eventually he does go on to talk about two different types of volcanoes, red volcanoes and gray volcanoes. So what's the difference between these? And how did these two types of volcanoes shape the trajectory of Katia and Maurice's careers? Yeah, I always love that about Katia and Maria. So they very much rejected labels and really did seek to understand, in their words, kind of the personalities and the moods, the individual characteristics of volcanoes. But yeah, loosely red and gray, otherwise known as effusive or explosive volcanoes, came to kind of characterize these two loose categories of volcanoes that they studied. Very

briefly, kind of effusive or red volcanoes are the iconic, magmatic volcanoes of the beautiful orange lava flows that come down and cascade like waterfalls from oftentimes cones or shield volcanoes. So gray volcanoes or explosive volcanoes are also known as killer volcanoes because they're known to be some of the most powerful and deadly forces on the planet. Mount St. Helens, for example, is an explosive volcano. And in 1980, during that eruption, it was thought to be about 25,000 times the energy release of that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. So it's really an extraordinary power. For Katia and Maurice, they began their career just totally in love with all volcanoes, but particularly enchanted by red volcanoes. First and

foremost, you know, they really thought red volcanoes create new land. And that was something that was so enchanting to them to really see life come forth from this spectacle. However, over the course of their life, they sought deeper and deeper understanding. They wanted to go towards the unknown and towards the danger. They were driven kind of by the thrill of it, but also there was a real need to study this beguiling, awesome force. In 1985, the Nevada del Ruiz volcano in Columbia erupted and very tragically killed over 22,000 people. Some reports have it as 25,000 people died in that eruption. And that was because even though this volcano was predicted to erupt, warning systems were not properly implemented and evacuations did not take place.

I believe Katia and Maurice actually contributed to the report that warned authorities that they had to do it, a report that was ignored. Yes, yeah. Katia and Maurice were very much part of a chorus of scientists that were calling for these warning systems to be implemented. However, they really were not taken seriously, largely due to political economic complexity in Columbia at the time. That really echoes what we've seen today with a lot of big issues. You know, climate change, the COVID pandemic.

Scientists warn that there's a big problem, but governments fail to act. Do you see a parallel there? Absolutely. That was something our team really thought a lot about as we were making fire of love. The fact that all these scientists and also people who lived in relationship with the volcano, aside from volcanologists, people who really had lived experience in a relationship with the land, their voices were very much ignored because largely economic interests were taking priority. And that's something we're absolutely seeing right now with our climate crisis.

We really hoped that that storyline could resonate in today's world, even though we're telling this story 30 years ago. I mean, one of the reasons that Katya and Maurice were focusing on film was that they hoped to use that to communicate some of the risks about volcanoes that were ignored. in in 1985. Do you think that there's value to science communication today, to the use of film or to other techniques to communicate clearly where just a written report wouldn't work?

Yeah, absolutely. That was something Katte and Maurice really gravitated towards, especially towards the end of their career. They really noticed how people responded to the power of their imagery. And specifically, Katia and Maurice's imagery, they were willing to get so close to this totally dangerous, phenomenon to capture their imagery. They really thought that if they could kind of create these portraits of these dangerous forces that would move, you know, decision makers, politicians,

and helped inspire them to create warning systems and various evacuation plans to save lives. I think that there's a long history of the power of imagery in terms of environmental movements. For example, the image of Earthrise is really, is always credited as a meaningful one that kind of showed in 1968 this powerful image of Earth from space, really helping to galvanize this idea of this shared home, the power, the sentience and the aliveness of our planet at a time when we really need stories like that. And now there are drones that can get really close to volcanoes, but that doesn't really have the intimacy or the danger of standing so close the way the crafts did. So do you think that their work was a moment in his?

history that can never be replicated? Yeah, it's fascinating. I do feel like Katyn Maris occupy this sliver of time between never done before and will never be done again in the same way. Katte and Maurice are very much some of the first people to document volcanoes at that close range. And specifically, with the kind of technology that they use, they're using 16 millimeter cameras, mostly, which is extremely cumbersome, difficult equipment. But you're right. You can get up, up close. And for Katta and Maris, too, that was part of the appeal was that proximity, was literally feeling that heat. It's funny, one of Marisa's friends has said that he thinks that Maurice would absolutely adore drones if you were around today. And I could totally see him

being, you know, a quote-unquote gearhead. But at the same time, I have to believe that they would still continue to go up to erupting craters if they were still with us today. But drone technology has contributed volumes to the study of volcanoes and geoscience in general. But it has completely kind of changed the relationship and the scope and, of course, the imagery captured. So, yeah, I'll just say they were pioneers and I feel like their work is almost kind of a time capsule of that moment. And that's all the time we have. Sarah, thank you so much for being here. Oh, thank you so much, Sophie. It was such a joy to speak with you. Sarah Dosa is the director of the documentary.

film Fire of Love. It's currently in theaters nationwide, and it will be streaming on Disney Plus later this year. I'm Sophie Bushwick, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. About 43 million people in the world are blind, and nearly 300 million more have moderate or severe visual impairment. To help make information more accessible to more people, the tech industry has really taken off in trying to design adaptive technologies, like screen readers, for example. But many ideas for adaptive tech are based on the assumptions of sighted people instead of the actual needs of blind and visually impaired folks. Josh Mealy is an inventor and accessibility researcher at Amazon, as well as a MacArthur Genius Grant winner. He's been blind for nearly his entire life, and now he helps invent tools to make

the world more accessible for others, too. He joins me now from Berkeley, California. Welcome, Josh. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be on Science Friday. Let's start with the basics. What is adaptive tech? Accessibility is really just designed for people with disabilities. So there are examples of accessibility and adaptive technology everywhere in our lives from curb ramps that help us get from the sidewalk into the street without having to go down a step to elevators that have braille labels to screen readers, as you mentioned. that allow people to read what's on their computer screens without being able to see. It's everywhere, and it's not always a technology that only supports people with disabilities. Very often, the best accessibility technologies or adaptive solutions support everyone and are particularly useful for people with disabilities.

And did you always want to design adaptive technology? I grew up as a little blind kid not wanting to. anything to do with blindness or disability. I wanted to be a space scientist. I wanted to send rockets to the planets and to the moons of Saturn and stuff like that. And while I was an undergrad at Berkeley studying physics, I met a community of blind people at Berkeley

that really were instrumental in helping me understand that I was not alone in the world of blindness. There were lots of cool blind people out there doing important stuff and that in fact, we needed blind people in the accessibility industry so that we could build the tools we needed, not the tools that cited people thought we needed. It was then that I realized that my creativity, my skills, and my thinking would be of great benefit to not only myself

as a blind person who needed the tools to be good and meaningful, but for lots of other blind people in the world. So I really shifted from trying not to be involved, in blindness at all to really embracing blindness as an identity and as a career. What's your process like when you're thinking up a new invention? My process is very organic because usually thinking up a new invention is basically addressing a need that I already know that I and my blind colleagues and community are facing an accessibility need that is unaddressed. And the first thing I usually think is, why hasn't

anybody dealt with this before. And then I get down to thinking about what the solution would be. And, you know, I always try to find simple, off-the-shelf solutions. That's one of the things that I really need to emphasize. You know, expensive solutions are not appropriate for most people with disabilities. People with disabilities are deeply underemployed in the U.S. as well as globally. And so low-cost solutions are really important. If you want to be able to make an impact on people's lives, the solutions need to be within economic reach. I don't consider myself to be the source of all information. I'm blind.

I live in a world where I connect with lots of people with disabilities, lots of blind people, but my experience is a unique one. I'm just one person. And so to make sure that any technology works for everyone, it's essential to incorporate other people into the design phase, the testing phase. So I check my ideas at every stage. I talk to others, whether it's formal or informal research. I understand what the various and wide-ranging needs are before I go too far down the road of invention.

Because once you go too far down that road, it's too late. You've closed doors that should not have been gone through. or you will find that you're addressing the wrong problem. And are there ever times where you hear about a new product meant for blind people to use, but you're like, who is this actually supposed to be helpful for? Yes, that happens all the time. I've got a Google Alert set for, you know, a bunch of keywords, blindness, technology, invention. And it's just amazing how often I get these articles that are talking about tools for wayfinding,

for crossing streets, for doing all kinds of things that, in fact, there are much simpler solutions for, and that if the inventors had stopped and really understood what solutions were already available and how blind or disabled people would be using these inventions, they would have done something quite different and probably much more useful. But the enemy is always lack of information. The solution is always to learn and be curious. Find out more about what your customers need before you do the inventing so that you can actually solve the problem.

Can you tell me about an invention that stemmed from your own experience? I think all of them done a lot of work in tactile maps where, so I created a system called T-Map that is now available from the San Francisco Lighthouse, and anybody anywhere can order a street map of any location they want that is accessible in Braille. large print and raised lines. That's a way for blind people to be able to understand the street networks around where they live, around where they go to school, etc. I'm extremely proud of that and the fact that tactile accessible street maps are now widely available to anyone who needs them. I also have done a lot of work in audio description, the technology that allows videos to be accessible for blind people in much the same way that people probably are

familiar with captions that are an accommodation for deaf folks to be able to know what's being said. Audio description is the converse. It allows blind people to know what's going on on the screen through a set of very brief and succinct narration. And so I created some technology that allows people to add audio description to any YouTube video that's called Udescribe. and it's available at youdescribe.org. Those are two things that I'm super proud of and feel like were generated from my own frustration with the lack of available information in those areas.

I've also done a lot of work in STEM and science education for blind children and adults. I started a thing called the Blind Arduino Project, which is a volunteer grassroots effort to help teach teachers and children about how blind people work with hobby robotics tools and electronics. So blind people can solder, blind people can build robots, blind people can program computers, and it's just a matter of making sure that everybody knows what techniques are necessary to do that.

So that's very rewarding as well. The work I do is part technology and in much larger part, social activism, and trying to explain to the world that, blindness and disability simply mean that some activities are done differently, but almost all activities are possible. It opens up not only more educational possibilities for students with visual impairments, but also career opportunities. And as I mentioned earlier, employment is still a huge problem for folks with disabilities. So education is the key to that, I think. And it sounds like with making the maker movement and DIY more accessible through

your work with this Arduino project, you're possibly helping to foster the next visually impaired inventor. That's exactly it. And so the Blind Arduino project is not only about teaching electronics, but it's teaching kids, blind kids and sighted kids and adults, about how to build and invent for themselves. I do a lot of teaching about accessibility and accessibility design, because for the first time, folks can actually build what they need. You can't really. You can't really buy an accessible voltmeter or multimeter or oscilloscope online. They're just not available. So you need to build it yourself. And the beauty and empowerment of being able to build tools like

that for oneself and to design it in a way that makes sense for what your needs are as a person with a disability is extraordinary. The empowerment and the learning possible is really one of the most exciting and satisfying things I do in my career. And it's important to point out, again, that it's not just blind kids that need to learn these lessons. The sighted children and adults that are learning alongside the blind kids, they're just as much in need of understanding that disability and accessibility, they're part of life. And if we design the world properly, it's not actually that big of a deal. You're at Amazon now, and you help make their products more accessible for everyone.

So let's say you walk into a lab, you get to try out a device for the first time. How do you go about evaluating it? The first time I put my hands on a device, I'm looking at the physical aspects of the device. I'm looking at, does it have buttons? Does it have buttons that you can feel? Does it have a touchscreen? How many ports or jacks are there on the back of it? Are they easy to distinguish by touch?

So I'm looking at this for blindness accessibility, but for example, if you can't feel where a button is on a device, that's going to make it hard for a blind person to operate. It's also going to be hard for someone can see who doesn't have the lights turned on. You look at the physical aspects of the device first, and you think about all the use cases that we know about, which are many. Who needs to use this? In what situations do they need to use it? and how can we make simple, easy changes so that it improves the experience for people with disabilities and for everyone else? And the same process, you do the same process

on whatever digital experience there might be, whether you turn the device on, is there, you know, how do you know if it's on or off? Is there a way to know? Is there a way to interact with it? Is there an app that needs to get paired with it? Is that app going to work well with a single switch, software and magnifiers and screen readers. So there's a whole, there's a whole world of questions

to ask about new devices when you encounter them. And usually the best approaches to making them accessible are the simplest, but it's essential. You can't pick up a device that's been produced and figure out how to make it accessible. It's too late. Once it's a device that has accessibility barriers, it's too late. It's really essential to get into that lab, not to check out a device, but to talk to the designers, to talk to the engineers, to talk to the testers, to really connect with the people that are going to be building that device and make sure that they understand who's going to be using it. I'm Sophie Bushwick. This is Science Friday from WNYC. I'm talking with accessibility research.

researcher Josh Mealy. Do you have an example of a time where you were able to go through that problem solving process? Yeah, so show and tell is a great feature that's available on all of Amazon's multimodal devices, the Alexa devices that have screens. And those devices also have cameras. And the show and tell feature allows you to hold up a product like a box of cereal or a can of something or a jar and say, what am I holding? And the team that was working on it before I got to Amazon were very disappointed in what they were able to do because they weren't able to get the accuracy that they wanted. They wanted to be able to get the system to identify what they were holding up with a high degree of reliability. And they

were very disappointed that things weren't as reliable as they needed to be. And one of the things that I helped them understand was that if you're in this situation, if you're in the position of saying, what am I holding? You don't need necessarily an exact match. You just need information about what you've got chances are. You already know that it's cereal, but you'd sure like to know whether it's, you know, Captain Crunch and Rice Krispies before you open the box. The system, it may not be able to provide you a 100% accurate response about what you're holding, but what you can do is provide all sorts of additional information. about what it sees. So it may see branding, may see text on the box that says Captain Crunch or

some other words on the label. So the idea of providing any information as opposed to exact information was not on their radar. So I helped them understand that really what they needed to do was provide some information about what was being held, not exhaustive, perfect information about what was being held. And in so doing, we created a product that is really unique because not only does it try to do an exact match, and if it finds one, it lets you know exactly what you're holding, but if it can't find an exact match, it's also in the process of looking for brand logos and looking for text on the box. And it'll give you whatever it finds, whether that's a perfect 100% exact match, or just text that it read on the label. And any of that is helpful, and we consider that

successful. So I really helped the team understand what their success criteria was. They didn't really understand how this was going to be used by real blind people in the real world. And as helpful as adaptive technology can be, it can't solve every accessibility issue, right? Yeah, accessibility, I often say that accessibility is the technical side of disability inclusion. It's relatively easy to build technologies that allow people with disabilities to participate. Accessibility as a technical field is creative and exciting, but it's not where the biggest problems lie. Generally, I would say that the societal issues around disability discrimination, ableism,

and sort of the long-term assumptions that people have about disability, about their fear of disability, their fear of people of saying the wrong thing, the barriers that there are for people with disabilities to have access to equal employment, equal education, access to entertainment. There are technical problems, but there are the bigger problems and the more pervasive ones are really social problems and the assumptions that non-disabled people have about people with disabilities and even people with disabilities often hold those limiting beliefs as well about themselves. And it's hard to shift to society. You know, as I mentioned earlier, I work on the technical parts of the problem because they're fun and easy, relatively speaking, but I consider

myself an activist more than, more than anything else. And to create societal change in all of our assumptions about disability is the main mission. It's the bigger mission that, you know, everyone can really contribute to by becoming more educated, becoming more aware of disability, accessibility, and, you know, learning about what ableism is and how to avoid it. What an important note to end on. Josh, thank you so much for joining us. It was my pleasure. I really enjoyed our conversation. Josh Mealy is an inventor and accessibility researcher at Amazon. based in Berkeley, California.

This is Science Friday, and I'm Sophie Bushwick. There's an important part of human anatomy that tends to be excluded from even the most candid discussions, the vagina. If this is something you feel uncomfortable talking about or hearing on the radio, I get it. Female anatomy has been treated in popular culture as mysterious and shameful, which is the perfect recipe for harmful misinformation. Science Friday's Christy Taylor talked to an author of a book that delves into the science of the vagina and its vital companion organs, the ovaries, the uterus, and the clitoris. Christy, welcome back.

Hey there, Sophie. So tell us all about this book. Yeah, the book is Vigina Obscura, an anatomical voyage. It's by Rachel Egros, and it has all sorts of amazing facts from this very neglected field of research. Like how uteruses are the only human organ that can heal. wounds without a single scar. And that's every single time someone menstruates. And this isn't even a book just about human anatomy. For instance, did you know that for many animals such as ducks, the vagina has actually evolved to allow the female to choose which sperm and therefore which duck

fertilizes her eggs? That is super cool. What got Rachel investigating this topic in the first place? Yeah, Rachel is a science journalist and an editor. She has spent a lot of time with the stories of scientists who are asking big questions. But she also noticed some things about whose questions and about what actually got explored thoroughly. Whenever we would profile a female scientist who had unique question, sometimes about female bodies and how the body works, we would see the ways in which she faced these systematic challenges and often didn't get to make those questions part of the canon. So I began to realize that the mystery surrounding the female body and really the lack of research on the female body was very intimately connected to a lack of women in science

asking the questions. Let's actually pause a moment and talk about terminology then, because while this is definitely a book about vaginas and ovaries and uteruses, it would be inaccurate to say that this is the female reproductive system necessarily, right? So, How do we talk about these things without leaving out trans men, non-binary people, and anyone else who's invested in this biology? So it's really about how science and medicine have imagined those organs, the uterus, ovaries, vagina, clitoris. And in the past, it was very common for scientists to make this connection that anyone with those organs, particularly those of the uterus, were women. And today, obviously, we know that we are also talking about intersex people and trans men and non-binary folks. And so I wanted to both be able to say, this is how historically medicine decided to define women.

And here are the effects of everyone it left out. And it often turns out that, say, trans men with endometriosis are really overlooked and get a lot worse treatment. and doctors don't know how to handle them or ask the right questions to figure out what they're going through because they just haven't considered these bodies being associated with what they think of as a reproductive disease. You know, when you say research has neglected these organs, you really mean neglected. There was even a long period where we didn't think women had eggs or contributed any material to babies, even after the invention of the microscope. Tell me more about that.

Yeah, that was wild for me to learn. So until the 1600s, we called ovaries. female testicles because we didn't really know what they did. And we got microscopes in the 1600s. We had this Dutch microscopist named Anthony von Lewin-Hook. And the last thing he looked at was ejaculate. He eventually said that he actually saw in each sperm an entire folded up human being. And so he surmised that this human being merely unfolded in the female body. And so the male contributed the seed and the female was the soil. And this was sort of an extension of the Pramina idea that had existed for centuries. But now it had the backing of someone who had

a microscope and was a scientist. Well, and, you know, one of the recurring themes of this book is this assumption of female passivity. And in this case, I'm talking about like the organs themselves. The egg is perceived as passively waiting for sperm. The vagina is perceived as this passive tunnel for copulation. But neither of these things is actually like that. And I want to start with something that seems to be like every biology nerds favorite story, which is duck vaginas. Can you unpack that for me? I think really this started with a fascination with duck penises. I remember like on YouTube all these horrifying videos, corkscrew penises that kind of explode into the female. In the book, I ended up talking to Patty Brennan, who is a biologist. And she basically,

asked, if this is happening on the male side, then what's happening on the female side? There was an assumption that there was just nothing interesting happening in the female. She ended up doing a really intricate, like, hours-long dissection. And she realized that the female duck was really its own biological miracle. So it was this quitted, turning kind of labyrinth. And there were pockets and dead ends where sperm go to die. and it looked like she might be able to exert some sort of physical autonomy over what sperm ended up fertilizing her eggs or not. In this case, you had, again, this assumption that there was like this passive female organ that's real purpose was to interact with the male.

And once you look closer, you saw this super dynamic, complex, and totally unexpected labyrinth that was really doing a lot for the female duck and doing things that we couldn't even have imagined. And similarly, when we start to look at bodies and genitals as why do they exist in their own right, not just why do they exist for male bodies, we start to realize that there's so much more going on. Yeah. Similarly, we found out that eggs are not just passively waiting for sperm to arrive, like their knights in shining armor is kind of the textbook metaphor that we see. But it's actually the process of fertilization is a much more active chemical. dialogue between the sperm and the egg. The traditional story in many text books says that sperm are like nuclear warheads, and they know exactly where they're going, and they're very purposeful, and they seek out the egg,

and they penetrate it. And really, there's a lot more going on. For one, the fluids in the female body, so in the vagina and the tubes, they allow the sperm to capacitate, which makes it able to follow the chemical signals that the egg is releasing. And that's the other thing. So the egg, we don't fully understand it yet, but it's putting out a call telling the sperm where it is. And without that call, the sperm would have no idea, which is keep bumbling about and would probably never get there. And the egg has parts in this, like it has kind of these little tiny pentacles on its surface that help grab the sperm and pull it in. This is a dialogue with two halves. I want to move on to talking about pleasure.

You mentioned the clitoris, which it has all these nicknames throughout history about how small it is. It's like a nub, it's a button, et cetera. Now we know it has this vast internal structure with comparable erectile capacity to the penis. But how did researchers finally figure this out? People like to say that the clitoris was fully discovered in, like, 2005. And that's not quite true. It was kind of discovered and rediscovered many times over the past millennium. So you can find drawings from the 1800s by German anatomists.

that show with pretty incredible detail these erectile bodies. So there's two kind of like tulip bulbs that hug the vagina, and then there's two flaring arms that go back into the pelvis, and they're each made of different types of erectile tissue. But what happened was that understanding of a clitoris is not what went mainstream and what caught on. So there was an Australian urologist, Helen O'Connell. She's actually the first female urologist in all of Australia.

and when she was going through medical school, she was seeing these kind of textbooks that didn't have anything about the clitoris or if they did, they would use this derogatory language, like this failure to develop or the poor homologue of the penis, stuff like that. So she wanted to figure out like what was the truth that lay between these feminist interpretations and her textbooks. And the way she did that was by dissecting a lot of clitorises and using the newer tools that were available to her.

like MRI imaging, microdissection. And when she pieced it together, she did find that there was this kind of underground kingdom, these roots of the clitoris that made it 10 times bigger than what most people tended to think. And one really important innovation that she had was those bulbs that I mentioned that kind of hug the vagina and can fill with blood. They'd been called all sorts of things. They've been called like bulbs of the vagina, bulbs of the bestible. And a lot of male anonymous were like, Oh, yeah, because they're supposed to hug the penis and it's supposed to give pleasure to the man. Looking at their anatomy, they were clearly part of the clitoris. So by looking at this as one unified whole and not a bunch of disparate parts, it made it clear that this was a much larger organ that had a very important purpose to give pleasure to the person who it was in.

And that it just looked very unlike what everyone was thinking. You write about researchers who want to prevent early menopause and cancer patients. surgeons who are working to restore pleasure for women who were subjected to genital cutting or intersex people whose genitalia were altered at birth, Dr. Marcy Bowers, the first transgender woman to perform gender affirmation surgeries. Andy write that she's someone who's really working hard to change the conversation for what trans women might want from their new vaginas. Can you say more about that? So trans women are really central to this book for a variety of reasons. Like one, there,

women who have been especially misunderstood by medicine and science. Two, those misunderstandings reveal a lot about what science thinks about women and what women are for. And three, some of this work that people like Dr. Bowers are doing to create vaginas and vulvas are really showing how remarkable these organs are and also how similar they are to what we think of as, like, operas. opposite sex genitalia. But Dr. Bowers likes to talk about kind of the beginnings of gender affirmation surgery.

Just the entire approach in these early days was incredibly male-centric. It assumed that any trans woman was heterosexual, wanted to be in relationship with a man, usually married. And a common boast by surgeons at the time was that

your husband won't even know the difference. So you can see, like, who's being centered and, like, who this vagina was for. And I was really struck talking to Dr. Bowers, and when she describes the surgery that she performs, she says, first, ecliterus is central. It's not an afterthought like it used to be. By the time you're done, you should have sensitivity, experience, pleasure, and experience orgasm. She basically has taken this from being like an afterthought to really centering the patient themselves and how they feel in their embodied self.

And the whole reason that she's able to create sensitive functional clitorises like this capacity is how similar male and female bodies are. So just going back to all of those identical erectile tissues and identical structures that surgeons can utilize to turn vaginas and clarises into penises and testicles and vice versa. Just in case you just joined us, I'm Christy Taylor, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. talking to Rachel E. Gross, author of the book Vigina Obscura, An Anatomical Voyage. It feels like we're in a moment where bodily autonomy around anything perceived to be sexual or gender-related is really under attack. Trans kids and teens are seeing their options for affirming health care shrink.

Dozens of states no longer allow abortion, and there's this cascade of possible other health care that is also harder to access now, too. where should this in-depth research inform the lawmakers who are outlawing some very basic freedoms at this point? Yeah, it's a dark time. What I've been thinking about a lot watching these kind of headlines is that this fundamental oversimplification that bodies with uteruses are to reproduce and that reproduction is kind of the sole focus of this constellation of organ. is really blinding a lot of people to the full capacity of our bodies. So the kind of researchers that I was following around for this book are saying, what else are these organs doing for your health as a whole?

How are they really deeply involved in immunity and regeneration and resilience? And how are they all interconnected in supporting your health? If you think about what happens when you take out, like say the ovaries, you lose this powerful system of hormone production that supports your brain, your bones, your heart. Those organs aren't just there to create a baby and to work for nine months and then just sit around. And venting people from accessing the help care they need for these organs will ultimately affect their entire bodies and their entire lifelong help.

So I think we need to take a much water lens as to the importance of what we think of as reproductive organs and really value people's sexuality and experience of their own sexuality, as well as all the ways these organs are interconnected and contribute to overall health. What mysteries still remain for us to understand about the vagina and its companions? Oh my gosh. So many. The uterus is no pun intended. Really fertile ground for really fertile ground. research that has nothing to do with reproduction. So I have a whole chapter looking at how researchers have misunderstood endometriosis, which is a super common painful disease when cells that are similar to those of the uterine lining, kind of escape into other parts of the pelvis or even as far as like the brain. And they kind of recapitulate this really dynamic cycle of growth and shedding that usually happens within the uterus. And it really has a lot to teach us about just universal processes of

regeneration and scarless wound healing because when the uterus heals itself after every period of menstruation, it's this really neat process that we haven't looked at as closely as we could. Similarly, we are still learning a lot about the vaginal microbiome, and we're also learning that it has a big import and a lot to say about the penile microbiome, and that that's actually important too for protection and disease transmission. It's not just that. we have this huge gap in female health and our understanding about bodies of those to call women. There's this larger dialogue, what we understand about all bodies, and we're missing a huge chunk, and therefore our whole understanding is skewed. So it's like we've only heard one side of a telephone

conversation. How can we think that the science of the human body is complete that way? Rachel, I look forward to reading your next book about all of these mysteries. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me, Christy. Rachel E. Gross is a science journalist and author of the book, Vagina Obscura, an anatomical voyage. She joined me from New York. And one more thing before we go.

Maybe you're ready to pick up Rachel's book right now, but you can't think of someone in your life who you can talk about vaginas with. Maybe you just don't have a place to share your questions or mull over your thoughts as you're reading. We have you covered, readers. The SciFRI Book Club will be reading Vagina Obscura together this September. You can find out how to be. to join our online community, read an excerpt, and even enter to win a free book. Yes, on our website,

sciencefriiday.com slash vagina. That is sciencefriiday.com slash vagina. I'm Christy Taylor.