Science Friday - Hawai'i's Volcanic Eruption, Science Of Chemistry Nobel, What Is ‘Swing’ In Jazz? Dec 2, 2022, Part 1

Episode Date: December 2, 2022

Hawai’i’s Mauna Loa Volcanic Eruption Sparing Homes For Now Hawai’i’s famed Mauna Loa volcano began to erupt this past weekend, after weeks of increasing small earthquakes. So far the flow of lava is posing no risk to homes in nearby Hilo, though that could change rapidly. But in the meantime, an important climate research lab is without power and unable to make measurements. And as lava flows and cools into new rock formations, one unusual product, called Pele’s Hair, looks uniquely soft and straw-like—while being dangerously sharp. Ira talks to FiveThirtyEight’s Maggie Koerth about the less high profile side effects of a major volcanic eruption. Plus, a new analysis of the magma under Yellowstone National Park, the leadership potential for wolves infected with a cat parasite, and other research stories.   A Nobel Prize For Chemistry Work ‘Totally Separate From Biology’ This year, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Carolyn Bertozzi of Stanford University, Morten Meldal of the University of Copenhagen, and K. Barry Sharpless of the Scripps Research Institute “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry.” In “click chemistry,” molecular building blocks snap together quickly and efficiently to let chemists build more complicated molecules. But bioorthogonal chemistry takes that work one step farther, allowing the technique to be used within living organisms without damaging cells. “When someone is thinking outside the box, or in a very different way, we like to think of that as orthogonal thinking,” Dr. Bertozzi explained. “So biorthogonal means not interacting with biology. Totally separate from biology.” Her research began with an interest in developing ways to see specific sugar molecules on the surface of cells. But it has developed into an approach that can be used for advanced drug delivery in fields such as chemotherapy. Bertozzi joins Ira Flatow for a wide-ranging conversation about her research, chemistry education, her early music career, and the importance of diversity in the field of chemistry.   Scientists Discover What Makes Jazz Music Swing Swing is a propulsive, groovy feeling that makes you want to move with the music. It’s hard to put into words, but if you listen to jazz, you’ve probably felt it yourself. Now, researchers have arrived at a better understanding of what generates that feeling: Their work, published in Communications Physics, focuses on timing differences between a group’s soloist and its rhythm section. Joining Ira to discuss the new findings are Theo Geisel, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Göttingen and the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self Organization, and Javier Arau, a saxophonist and the founder and executive director of the New York Jazz Academy.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, a conversation with Nobel Prize-winning chemist Carolyn Bertotsi. But first, lots of volcano news. Hawaii's Manaloa volcano woke up this fall and began erupting in earnest late last weekend. So far, and this can always change, residents of the Big Island City of Hilo haven't had to worry about their homes. But when one of the world's largest and most famous volcanoes goes off, you know there's going to be interesting, stuff going on. And here with some of that, very technical, interesting stuff, is Maggie Kerth, senior science writer for 538. She joins us from Minneapolis. Welcome back, Maggie. Hi, thanks for having me. It has been a week for volcanoes, hasn't it? It sure has. Montaloa is the largest active volcano on Earth. And this is the first time that it has erupted in almost 40 years. So there's a lot of kind of fascinating

stuff going on with this. And one of the things that I thought was really interesting were the warnings that were going out about something called the hair of palais, which is the what? The hair of palais. Don't touch the hair of palais. It's something that like has been warnings that have been going out to people in Hawaii. Hair of palae, which is named after Hawaii's volcano goddess, is this stuff that looks like human hair or it looks like maybe like a, bunch of straw and you find it like wrapped around telephone poles or gutters or like the corners of houses. It's almost like a tumbleweed, but it's actually threads of glass and it can cut you if you try to pick it up. Wow. Wow. Yeah. So like it's formed when bubbles on the surface of a

lava flow burst open and they stretch the bits of lava into these long filaments that kind of cool in the glass threads. It's almost sort of like, if you imagine a cotton candy machine and how that sort of melts the sugar and stretches it out, it's kind of similar to that. And it's so light that it just floats away on the breeze and then collects in these piles on whatever objects it runs into. You said that people were seeing the hair of Palais as sort of a warning sign. Is that a warning sign for scientists also who study volcanoes? Well, the hair of play is something that the scientist or warning people about. But there is a way where the volcano is affecting science right now also because it has shut

down one of the world's most important climate monitoring stations. No kidding. Yeah, yeah. It took out the power lines, basically. Like the lava took out the power lines to this place that has been monitoring CO2 levels since the 1950s. So it's one of the places where we get our, you know, when you find out how much parts per million of CO2 is in the atmosphere on Earth, a lot of that data is coming from this

monitoring station in Hawaii. And right now, it cannot do its job because the power has been knocked out. But the site itself is still intact. There's actually, as of the 29th, Washington Post was reporting that there were still scientists at the site and that they were safe. They just couldn't do their jobs. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about other volcano news. I mean, there's news about the famous magma under Yellowstone National Park. Right. So there's twice as much magma in that Yellowstone Super volcano as previously thought. Now, for those who are unaware or those of us who have purposely forgotten, there is a really massive volcano underneath of Yellowstone. And its previous eruptions, which were hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago, have been some of the

biggest eruptions in the history of planet Earth. And this volcano is still alive. down there. But scientists monitor it really closely. And the data that comes in, including this newest study, it just continues to be good news. That's because, you know, even with twice as much magma as we thought there was, it still doesn't have enough liquid down there to be a serious explosion risk. So they're not fencing off the park or anything like that just to let people know. No, no. Yeah, like the study, what these results, they don't represent the volcano changing. What they represent is our skill at measurement changing. And it says that about 16 to 20 percent of that magma chamber is molten liquid. But as the studies authors told the New York Times, you know,

the rule of thumb is that reservoirs can't really produce eruptions until they're around 35 percent to 50 percent molten. All right. I'm going to put that off to the side on my worry list, so I don't have to worry about. Good news. Everyone. Let's move to a completely different kind of story. from Yellowstone. It's wolves who turns out have parasites. Bad news, I would think. Well, I mean, maybe not for the wolves. So this is like everybody's favorite cat parasite, the toxoplasma gondi. And it turns out it's now available in canine form. It's famous for infecting mice and messing with their brains in ways that make them bold and careless and more likely to be eaten by cats, but there's also evidence that this same parasite can infect the

brains of creatures who are not typically being eaten by house cats. That includes us. We humans who are infected with toxoplasma gondi seem to have higher levels of testosterone and dopamine, and are more likely to take risks. But gray wolves are also infected with toxoplasma gondi. And Yellowstone gives you a really great place to study that because the researchers there have years of data where they have wolf blood samples, they have those samples connected to life histories and detailed notes about social status and behavior.

And this study found that the infected wolves kind of become more cool. The wolves become more cool once they get infected. Yeah, like it's good for them. Like they're 11 times more likely than uninfected wolves to leave home to start a new pack, and 46 times more likely to become pack leaders, which is a status that often means that they're the only wolves in the pack that are breeding. Huh, and how do the wolves get this cat parasite in the first place?

Well, you know how dogs really like to eat poop? Unfortunately, yes. One of the ways that they can become infected is by eating, cougar poop or by stealing prey from cougars. So at least that's kind of the idea of like where that might be coming from. You know, I'd love to go to a business seminar where they just encourage you to get a parasite to boost your leadership potential. Yeah, I don't really know how well that works for us, but it seems to be working for the wolves. You know, the researchers think that maybe at one point in the distant past, it was less good for the wolves because there used to be this whole species of extinct

American lions that maybe the wolves were prey for when they had this parasite. But, you know, they aren't really cougar prey. They're something that can kind of fight off cougars. So it doesn't really put them at risk of being eaten by cats. All right. Let's move on to a more sobering note where we're learning more about the risks of PFS, you know, one of those so-called forever chemicals, what the risks pose for human health, even as more and more of them seem to be in our water supply. Give us the latest here, if you will. Yeah.

So Melbourne Newsom at Science News has a really interesting piece out this week that's kind of looking at the big picture of this evidence that's been building up over a long period of time. This is a family of chemicals called PIFAS, and they're found in everything from sunscreen and makeup to carpet and fast food packaging. And it's also the same stuff you've probably

probably heard about before with the Teflon pans. You know, that's the same issue. So these things are so ubiquitous. You know, you can't really avoid them. Even if you can, they're also in your drinking water at this point. And they've been the subject of study for years, but this past summer, the National Academy has released a report that set the first clinical guidelines for PTHS blood concentrations. And it identified four disorders that have sufficient evidence to link them to PTHAS exposure. So that's now poor antibody response to vaccination, abnormally high cholesterol levels, decreased infant in fetal growth, and kidney cancer. And on top of that, there's a whole bunch of other illnesses and disorders.

There were some evidence is linking them to PFS. This is not good news. No. It absolutely is not. I mean, these things have been around since the 40s. They're really widely used because they're really good at repelling oil and water and reducing friction. But we know now that these things are interfering with hormones in the body. And even the newer ones that were pitched as safer alternatives probably aren't. And this whole thing really just exposes some serious problems in the way our regulatory systems approach risks from industrial chemicals. You know, it's really a try it and let's see what goes wrong kind of system. And these are

still legal. Any good news about getting rid of them? How we might do that? Well, the EPA has set some new limits this year on how much can be in your public drinking water, and you can get your well tested, and you can also request information from your city water provider about the testing that they're doing. All right. One last hopefully more fun, cool thing story for us.

I'm just going to say two words, because that's all I've got, aunt and milk. I mean, what? Ant milk. Excuse my French. What the heck's going on here? Well, you know, milk is the thing that defines mammals, right? We all make it. But the logic is, you know, all mammals make milk, but maybe not everything that makes milk is a mammal.

So this new study is showing that ant pupae, which are this stage of development where an ant is basically inert, they are secreting and nutrient-rich fluid. that newborn larval ants depend on for survival. So milk? Whoa. Is it really milk? I mean, what is it? I mean, it is. Did they drink it?

How do they use it? Well, they consume it. They eat it. The baby ants use it to grow. Adult ants also drink it, though. And one way that it is different than milk, at least as mammals understand it, is that if the babies and the adult aunts didn't drink the milk,

the milk, I'm using air quotes here, you can't see, then the pupae that secrete it would actually be in danger because it can cause fungal growth if it builds up too much. And also they can literally drown in it. Wow. How did we, I mean, we've been studying, not me, but we've been talking to scientists for decades who study ants? How did we not notice this before? It's not all ants that do this, but each of the five

biggest sub-families have species that do. And it's just like, it's this very tiny detail in ant development that, you know, there's a lot of things that we don't know about insects yet, man. Yeah. Maggie, Maggie Kerth, always a pleasure to have you. Happy holidays to you. Yeah, to you as well. Maggie Kerth, Senior Science Writer for 538 based in Minneapolis. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, how do you make a chemical or drug or the reacts only with what you wanted to, even inside a living thing? Nobel chemist Carolyn Bertotsie talks about orthogonal thinking. Stay with us.

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Once again, that link is ScienceFriday.com slash support. And thanks. This is Science Friday. I am I Refleto. If you think about it, your body is a bit like a crowded party. Yeah, it's packed with sugars and proteins, ions, nucleic acids, and a whole lot more, all mingling in the same place. And that poses a big challenge for biology researchers, because if you create a drug whose molecules mingle with the wrong guests at the party, that could cause a harmful side effect. To combat the issue, scientists have invented a whole new class of chemical reactions called bio-orthogonal chemistry. These reactions involve two chemicals that can bond with each other, even in an environment as complicated as the human body. And they don't interfere with the normal chemical reactions

in the body. Today, bio-orthogonal chemicals. chemistry is a staple in biological research and a promising tool for medicine. It's been so impactful this year, its pioneer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her research. Let me bring her on now. Dr. Carolyn Bertotsi, 22 Nobel Prize laureate and Professor of Chemistry at Stanford in Palo Alto, California. Congratulations and welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much. It's really wonderful to be here. Nice to have you. Okay, let's start with the basics. What does it mean for chemistry to be bio-orthogonal. Pretty big word there. Yes, it's a bit of a mouthful, but you can break it down into its two parts. So the word orthogonal is one that we usually use when we're trying to describe

two things that don't interact with each other. When someone is really thinking outside the box or in a very different way, we like to think of that as orthogonal thinking. So bio-orthogonal means not interacting with biology, totally separate from biology. And we invented that concept because we had ideas for how such a chemistry could be useful in biology and medicine, as you so nicely put in your introduction. Well, I just gave an overview. Give me your idea of how useful it is. Well, it started with a very specific application in mind. And what the backstory is, is that I have...

had a long-standing interest in the biology of complex carbohydrates. And people might think of that term as having to do with food that you eat, but there's a whole different world of biology of complex carbohydrates, which is that they're basically like a forest that decorates the entire surface of every cell in your body. And we wanted to be able to study those complex carbohydrates, and we wanted to image them. We wanted to be able to see them in microscopes or see them in a magnetic resonance imaging scan or a PET scan. And there was no way to see them. So the very early genesis of bioorthogonal chemistry was as a tool to be able to study and to visualize those cell surface sugar molecules.

And why do you want to know so much about how the sugar molecules are working on the cell surface? Well, even back in the 1990s, which is when I started this whole area of research, people knew that the structures of cell surface sugars change during diseases. And the area in which this had been studied most extensively was in cancer. So people knew that if you looked at the surface of cancer cells, the sugars had changed compared to the normal cells around them. And anytime there's a change in molecules between healthy tissue and cancerous tissue, you might be able to exploit that as a means to visualize those disease cells and to detect the disease. But the problem was, at that time, the only way to study those sugars was on cells and tissues

that you took out of the body and ground up into bits and pieces and destroyed. And there was really no way to look at the sugars on the cells when they were. they were alive and in the body. And that's what you need to do if you want to be able to detect these changes for cancer detection or cancer diagnosis. And so how does looking at sugars connect to the idea of this orthogonal model? How did you apply it? Well, you know, it's funny because science usually has a backstory of accidents and serendipity. And this story has an element of that. So way back when I was a postdoctoral fellow, and so this is before I was a professor. Instead, I was a researcher in someone else's lab at the time. And I was

thinking about the sugars and frustrated that there was no way to visualize them. And other molecules, like proteins and DNA and RNA, other stuff that you find in cells and animals and humans, there were actually some really nice technologies to look at those other molecules, but there was just a gap. There was nothing for the sugars. And then I happened to go to a conference in Southampton, in England, of all places, as a postdoctoral fellow, and I heard a lecture from a German biochemist named Werner Reuter. And in that lecture, he talked about the fact that you could feed cells chemically altered versions of very simple sugars. And as long as the alterations were very subtle, not too dramatic, those altered sugars would get metabolized by the cells and they would be

incorporated into the cell surface complex carbohydrates. So you could actually make the cells turn into what they eat. You've heard the phrase you are what you eat, right? And these cells actually were putting altered sugars on the surface just because they were eating the little simple precursors. And so that gave me an idea for how you could sneak a little bit of chemistry into cell surface sugars and then use the chemistry to attach probe molecules for imaging. And it was a very simple idea at the time, but there was a huge problem with the idea because you would need the simple chemistry to be what we later termed bio-orthogonal.

And there really wasn't a chemistry that existed at that time that would allow you to do such a thing. So that was where the motivation came from. And if I hadn't seen that lecture by Professor Reuter, I'm not sure I would have had this idea anytime soon. Well, how do you guarantee that your bioorthogonal chemistry is only going to react with the one specific thing you wanted to? Well, that is the central challenge in the whole area, is to find these, you know, magical chemistries that even though there's thousands of other chemicals in your body, that somehow they're willing to ignore all of that and yet still react with something else that's biorethogonal.

And we spent many years engineering the chemical groups so that they would have exactly this sort of thread the needle capability. And you have to do a lot of experimentation. So when we made new functional groups, which is what we call chemical groups, well, we would test them. We would test them in cells in a dish, first and foremost. And we would do a lot of experiments to see whether they were attaching themselves unwittingly to some of the biological molecules. And if they did, we threw them in the garbage can and went back and try a different type of chemical. And once we got them to be very clean in cells, then we would test them in animals. And enough of that has now transpired over the last 25 years that we now are very confident that we have a toolkit of bio-orthogonal chemistries that are so safe that some of them are now being tested in human clinical trials.

They're inside the body of human patients. Well, that brings me to the meat of my next question, so to speak. Give me some ideas of how you might apply this chemistry. Well, right now, the two leading applications have to do with drug delivery, right? So, especially for cancer. And we all know that the types of medicines people are traditionally treated with for cancer, which we call chemotherapies, they can be really toxic and heart. to handle. And the way that those medicines work is they kill cancer cells, but they also kill

some of your healthy cells at the same time. And that's why people on chemo have these side effects, like losing their hair and being very nauseated, and sometimes having organ damage. And on a bad day, the drug might do more harm than good to a cancer patient. So one of the challenges is to figure out how do you send that toxic drug to the cancer cell specifically, like a guided missile and keep it away from all the other cells in the body. And bioorthogonal chemistry has turned out to be useful for this. And so as a case in point, there is a biotech company here in the Bay Area outside San Francisco that I am an advisor for. And they have a protocol to treat patients with soft tissue sarcoma.

That's a particular type of cancer in bones. And the way they do this is they, They inject into the tumor area a material. It's a hydrogel polymer, and it's actually quite similar to the same material that's injected cosmetically for people who want filler. If you've ever heard of cosmetic fillers, there's literally a polymer that gets injected into the face where a person wants to fill a wrinkle, for example. Yeah, we're not talking Botox here, right? No, not Botox.

This is a different substance. It's harmless. It just kind of puffs up your skin, okay? So what this company has done is they have modified that same material with a bio-orthogonal chemical. And they inject that material into the tumor. And it does nothing but fill up space. It's harmless.

That bio-orthogonal chemical has no interaction with the human body, just sitting there. But then the next day, they inject the chemotherapy drug systemically. They put it, you know, in the typical way in an IV bag. So the patient sits there and they have an IV infusion of chemotherapy. But the chemotherapy is rendered harmless by attachment of another bioorthogonal chemical. And it floats throughout the body, throughout circulation, doing nothing. It's totally harmless. But when it encounters that material that was injected on the previous day, the two biorethogonal chemicals see each other and they react.

And that reaction releases the active chemotherapy right there. locally in the environment of the tumor. So you get this burst of toxic drug only in the tumor and nowhere else in the body and it kills the tumor without these toxic side effects. And they are now performing this procedure on patients in what's called a phase one clinical trial. So they're looking to make sure that it's safe and to figure out what are the right doses of the two components. And if everything goes well, they'll start a next phase where they look for reduction of the tumor burden and benefit to the patient. Yeah, so this is for solid tumors then so far. That's right. Soft tissue sarcoma is an example of a solid tumor that is right now very difficult to treat.

There are not good medicines for that type of cancer, and this could be a real breakthrough. Well, are there other drug applications or other diseases, tumors, you name it, that this might work with? Yes, there's another group in New York that is gearing up for a, a clinical trial to target radioisotopes to cancers. And these are like nuclear particles that release radiation that's damaging to the tumor. Also, it's a way of basically delivering the radiation very specifically to the tumor and keeping the damage away from other tissues. And it's kind of a similar strategy. They put one molecule in first and it's actually an antibody that's armed with a bio-orthogonal chemical. And that antibody is like a heat-seeking missile, which goes to the tumor

and latches onto it. And then in a second step, they add the radioactive particle, which has the other biorethogonal partner on it. And it will then find that antibody and do the reaction, and now that radioactive particle is also concentrated in the tumor. So that's, it's kind of a similar approach, but instead of a chemotherapy drug, it's a radioactive particle. And instead of a polymer, that gets injected, it's an antibody that finds its way. But I think that theme is one that you'll find being tested again and again and again, and it's something you really couldn't even conceive of doing without the availability of bioorthogonal chemistries. Yeah. You talk about a heat-seeking missile. Back in the day, we used to call it a silver bullet. Yeah, that's right. Paul Erlich, right? The magic

bullet. It's a hundred-year-old concept. And finally, it's having a huge impact in the way that we design medicines. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you're just joining us, I'm talking with Nobel Prize laureate Carolyn Bertotsie about chemistry in living cells. I've heard the work your co-nobilis did called Click Chemistry. Is this kind of a Click Chemistry you're talking about? Yes, you know, there are many overlapping concepts between bio-orthogonal and Click Chemistry. And that's why I think the Nobel Foundation kind of put us together into this one prize. The clique chemistry term was coined by Barry Sharpless. And he shares the prize with myself and another chemist named Morton Meldall.

Barry was interested in reactions that have the property that they're very reliable. They form products in very high yield. And they do so without interference by other functional groups on the same. molecules. So you can see how that's a similar, you know, challenge to our own thinking about bio-orthogonal chemistry. The big difference is that when Barry was conceiving of click chemistries, he was thinking about them as tools for the synthesis of complex molecules, which is another big challenge in the chemical sciences. And Morton Meldall had a similar motivation. You know, both he and Barry are synthetic chemists. They like to make big, complicated

molecules, and having these click chemistries can get you to those big complicated molecules much more easily. For bio-orthogonal chemistry, there's a separate challenge, which is you want the chemistry to be able to go in live cells, live animals, live human beings. So there are some other challenges that we had to overcome that are not so relevant when you're synthesizing complicated molecules with click chemistry. But there definitely are overlapping concepts. And so when we invented a bioorthogonal chemistry that was kind of based on some of the same chemistries that Morton and Barry were developing, we took one of our bioorthogonal chemistries and we branded it copper-free click chemistry because it was kind of similar to one of

their clique chemisties that had a copper catalyst in it. So we kind of borrowed on their branding, but the bio-orthogonal mandate has some different challenges that you don't have to worry about if you're making molecules in the reaction flask, right, in the chemistry lab and not in the human being. So let's talk about extending your work out further. What would you want your work, your chemicals to be able to do that they can't do now or you can do with them? Well, that's a great question. Right now, the only bio-orthogonal chemistry that has kind of risen to the level where you could think about doing it inside humans is a reaction called the tetrazine ligation. And that is the chemistry that's being used right now in these clinical studies. And that's a great chemistry, but it would be

nice to have, you know, an expanded toolbox of chemistries that you could do in humans. We need more than one. And there are other bio-orthogonal reactions that we and others developed and have used in animals, in cells in a dish, you know, in lots of other settings. But to actually do the chemistry in the human body is a whole other layer. And right now we only have one chemistry that is really good enough for that. So I think inventing new chemistries that really push the envelope that you could do in people is something that's still, you know, an open challenge. And then there are applications beyond, you know, these clinical applications for cancer

drug targeting, molecular imaging in humans is still, you know, a challenge that has yet to be reached, and we continue to work on that. And then there are lots of applications outside of biomedicine, for example, in material science. And I think the iceberg's tip is just being explored in that area as well. We need to take a break. And when we come back, our conversation with Nobel laureate chemist Carolyn Bertotzi continues. Stay with us. This is, Science Friday. I'm Irafledo. We're talking this hour with Dr. Carolyn Britozzi, 2022 Nobel Prize laureate and professor of chemistry at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. I'd like to broaden our conversation a bit from your specialty work to chemistry in general.

You know, people say chemistry is so boring, right? People are wrong. Well, this is a great example of that. What sort of advice would you give people coming to you, you know, for future scientists? Would you, I'm sure you would point them in your direction, because as we say, chemistry is a lot less boring than you think it is. That's correct. I think the misconception of chemistry being boring might be our own fault because I think chemists teach students, and usually the first exposure is somewhere in high school.

I think we teach those high school students in a kind of boring way. You think? I think so. And I say that as someone who took chemistry in high school, I can tell you that's the truth. It was true for me too, I hate to say. I took chemistry in high school and I don't know that I hated it, but I didn't like it. Yeah. It was boring.

It was boring. And it didn't seem relevant to me or the world at all. And then I went to college. And I was, at first, I was a pre-med. And so you have to take some chemistry classes if you're destined for medical school. So I did. Not because I wanted to, but because I had to. And even in freshman chemistry, I was not interested.

Again, it didn't seem all that relevant or interesting to me. So, you know, I'm just like you in that regard. And if I had not taken organic chemistry, I think I probably wouldn't have discovered the field as an exciting field. But organic chemistry turned things around for me. And that's when I realized that chemistry is so central in biology and biomedicine. And if you want to understand disease, you know, human disease and figure out how to treat diseases, you really need to be a chemist. So I'm really glad that I stuck with it long enough to discover organic chemistry because that sealed it for me.

But I think if we did a better job teaching in the early stages, people wouldn't have this bias against chemistry. It's fascinating. And there's so much we don't know. and so many discoveries yet to be made, the field I think of as still very young. Interesting. Okay. So now you have this huge stage as a Nobel winner. You're in the spotlight.

Are there things you want to use that power or visibility to try to do that maybe you couldn't just as a chemist? This is a really interesting question. And it's only been a few weeks that I qualify as a Nobel laureate. So I don't think I fully understand yet what new power I might have unbeknownst to me. But even in the last few weeks, I have noticed that people are now paying more attention to things that I say. And I've been saying the same things all along, but now suddenly they have more gravity, I think, because of my status as a Nobel laureate.

So that's great because, you know, I certainly have philosophies that I would like people to think about and maybe even embrace, having to do with the diversity of scientists needing some enhancement in order for us to do the best science we can do, especially in the physical sciences like chemistry. There are many different, you know, underrepresented groups who have been historically excluded from the field and whose talent we haven't been able to avail ourselves of, which limits progress. Hopefully now people will pay attention to the importance of diversifying the chemical workforce so that we can take advantage of all the talent. That's one thing I would like to convey. And, you know, the interesting thing is lots of chemists, including

myself, have been advocating for greater diversity among our ranks. But if you are awarded a Nobel prize and your strategy for success has been to have the most diverse lab that you can have, I think that that gives some validation to the idea that diversity breeds success. That's a very Nobel, Nobel and noble thing to pursue. Yeah, thank you. I'm not going to let you go yet because I've heard you have a hidden talent outside the lab, and that is music. You were in a band called Board of Education with Tom Arello.

of rage against the machine? How did that happen? And I mean, now are you as famous as he is? That is correct. First of all, yes. I had the great privilege way back in college in the mid-1980s of playing in that band with Tom. It was his band. He was a Harvard student as well, about two years ahead of me. And he recruited me to join the band, and I got to play with him. And we played 80s pop music in, you know, frat parties and so on, but he also had original compositions that I played with him, and it was amazing.

So, you know, we discovered each other because we were in college together, and I am not as famous as him. And I don't know that I ever will be, but he was kind enough after I won the Nobel Prize to tweet a congratulations. And I think that that tweet brought more attention to me

than any other social media engagement I've ever had. So thank you, Tom. Well, I think Morello obviously is a rock star, but I think winning the Nobel Prize must feel at least a little bit like stardom, though. I mean, for a scientist, that's about as much stardom as you could imagine ever achieving. Well, I'm going to leave it right there. Great story of your life and of your research. And thank you for taking time to join with us today. Thank you so much for having me. Dr. Carolyn Bertotzi is Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University in Palo Alto and 2022 winner of the Nobel Prize. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

What is this thing called swing? What is this thing called swing? Is it jazz and drag time, futuristic ragtime? What is this thing called swing? Louis Armstrong's 1930s rendition of what is this thing called swing echoes a question that has mystified jazz musicians for a century. Just what is this thing called swing? Well, you might say that swing is a propulsive, groovy feeling

that makes you want to move with the music. It's hard to put into words, but if you listen to jazz, you've probably felt it yourself. And now scientists are trying to arrive at a more exact definition of swing, and in research published in Nature Communications Physics, they have concluded that a key ingredient may be, tiny timing differences between a group soloist and its rhythm section. Downbeat delays, they say, are a key component of swing jazz. Here with an upbeat explanation of the downbeat is one of the

scientists who studied jazz. Theo Giselle, professor of theoretical physics at the University of Göttingen and the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-organization in Göttingen, Germany. Dr. Giselle studies the physics of synchronization. His background as a jazz musician sparked an interest in how timing affects musical perception. Also joining me is Javier Arrau, a saxophonist and the founder and executive director of the New York Jazz Academy based here in New York City. Theo Javier, welcome to Science Friday. Ira, thank you for having me. Thanks. It's a pleasure. Javier, how do you define swing? Is it definable? Is it definable? I think this is sort of the holy grail. And the idea of tying this into science is something that really

thrills me. Swing is very enigmatic and it's very, very personal. So I do feel that people find swing in different ways, but I will agree, when you hear it, you know it. How does swing make you feel? You say when you hear it, you know it? I'm going to say swing makes me happy. It really is something when the music is swinging, it's something very deeply satisfying. And from there, it can become almost cathartic, I think. It's something that no matter if it's Lewis Armstrong or Charlie Parker or modern players, everyone is reaching the highest quality swing we can in jazz. And swing, by the way, transcends jazz. You can find swing in all sorts of music. It's definitely an attitude and a confidence, not just the way that the beat relates in the music.

Okay, I'm going to play two brief clips from the same song. And after hearing both of them, I want both of you to tell me which one you think swings more. Let's hear the first clip. Okay, now the second clip. Hmm, Javier, what do you think? Oh, oh, okay, the pressure's on. I'm going to put in, I'm going to put in my vote for number two. Why is that? Goodness. So look, I'm coming at this knot from a science angle, just as a saxophonist.

And I felt like number two, the downbeats really connected a bit more strongly. I felt like there was more, you mentioned propulsion at the beginning. I think that's a great word. I would also say the right propulsion can lead to more momentum. And momentum is one of the things that makes jazz, to me, really, really thrilling. So I sensed the second one, the pianists' downbeats were a little more connected to where the bassist and drummer were connecting. Now, just so I'm understanding, the bass and drums, it sounded like perhaps that was a computer. recording, or like a MIDI performance and then the pianist was live? Is that what I was hearing?

Yes, because these are actually clips theory that you used in your research, right? Yes. What's the difference between them? Now, give us the answer. We manipulated the timing in media recordings in various ways and had professional and semi-professional jazz musicians rate how much swinging these different manipulations, these different recordings were. In the recording you just played, we had one version without any delays. One version were only the downbeats were delayed. The offbeats were synchronized with the rhythm section.

Delaying the downbeats, what did that do? Did that enhance the swing feel? Yes, well, that's what we found. First, I should say there are, of course, several ingredients, several components that contribute to swing. And the most obvious one that everybody can hear is the so-called swing ratio, or it's the ratio between downbeats and offbeats. Some people even believe that this is swing, and that's all. But jazz musicians know that this is not the case.

more to it, as Javier just explained. And you found that delaying the downbeat, I'm reading from your paper, made it seven and a half times more likely, that a jazz musician would rate the recording as swinging, right? That's it. Exactly. But only delaying the downbeats, if we delay both downbeats and offbeats, then it doesn't make a difference. it doesn't increase or enhance the swing field. How do you react to that, Javier?

Do you notice yourself doing this when you play? You know, anecdotally, I think back to when I was first learning jazz. You know, I'm thinking back when I was 13, 14 years old. I was a very excited player. And I had so many mentors who would hear me play and say, I'm here, you got to just calm down. You've got to relax when you play. So, you know, I'm hearing this and it makes perfect sense to me because I do feel as jazz musicians, we're maintaining a certain awareness that's very high. Yet at the same time, we really have to approach the music in a really relaxed state. That's hard to achieve because so much in music performance takes a critical ear, very quick. thinking. I think a next step reasonably is to include, say, a live bassist to play that walking baseline, to play those downbeats, because ultimately the beat is alive. It's a very human element.

And just the way two musicians interact, maybe that is the next step. I'm curious what happens after these studies, you know? I fully agree. It would be worthwhile having several musicians play simultaneously, but that's very difficult because the bass has so low frequencies, it is much more difficult to determine the tone onset of the bass. What about vocalists? Do they do the same thing?

Well, we could do that, But as I said, it's much more complicated determining the tone onsets with vocalists and especially with bass. It's much more complicated. It's very tedious and not as accurate. Yeah, I can imagine because piano, it's essentially a percussion instrument. So you have in MIDI terms, key on, key off, you can measure that. But if I think about any vocalists, there are aspirations, there's diction, you know, what is the actual note? When does it start? It's the same thing for us on saxophone. How do we know exactly where that

beat starts? It's hard to say. Havier, do these new findings change how you might teach jazz to your students? What I love is that it's quantified a bit. And that's always helpful, I think, in teaching to be able to point students in the direction of this scientific research. And I think it's fortunate that it does support what jazz musicians have been saying for a long time. I mean, I've never met a jazz musician who says, oh, no, no, no, no, play ahead of the beat. You know, that's not something that's really common. And this goes back, you know, for decades and decades. Gentlemen, I have run out of time. I want to thank both of you, Theo and Javier, for taking time to talk with us today. Excellent discussion. Well, it's been such a pleasure. Thank you for having us,

Trevor. Well, it was a pleasure for me, too. Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Guttengan and the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Guttengan, Germany. Javier Arrau, a saxophonist and the founder and executive director of the New York Jazz Academy based in New York City. If you like that jazz piece or the conversation with Carolyn Brutzi this hour, you can thank our former NSF fellow, Jason Dinn, whose hard work made them possible. Here's Kathleen Davis with some of the other folks who helped make this show happen.

Thanks, Ira. Nahima Ahmed is our manager of Impact Strategy. Melissa Mayors is our office manager. Annie Niro is our individual giving manager. Charles Berkwist is our radio director. And I'm Kathleen Davis, radio producer. Thanks for listening. BJ Leatherman composed our theme music.

And if you missed any part of the program or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato. Papa do da the dog Papa say for the sunsid lo the best of I said don't me