Science Friday - How Grief Rewires The Brain, New Cancer Therapy, Olympic Battery-Heated Skiing Shorts. Feb 11, 2022, Part 2

Episode Date: February 11, 2022

How Grief Rewires The Brain Being a human can be a wonderful thing. We’re social creatures, craving strong bonds with family and friends. Those relationships can be the most rewarding parts of life. But having strong relationships also means the possibility of experiencing loss. Grief is one of the hardest things people go through in life. Those who have lost a loved one know the feeling of overwhelming sadness and heartache that seems to well up from the very depths of the body. To understand why we feel the way we do when we grieve, the logical place to turn is to the source of our emotions: the brain. A new book explores the neuroscience behind this profound human experience. Ira speaks to Mary-Frances O’Connor, author of The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss, a neuroscientist, about adjusting to life after loss.   One Step Closer To Curing Cancer Two cancer patients treated with gene therapy a decade ago are still in remission. Thousands of patients have undergone this type of immunotherapy, called CAR-T Cell therapy, since then. But these are the first patients that doctors say have been cured by the treatment. The findings were recently published in the academic journal Nature. Ira talks to Dr. Carl June, co-author of the study, and director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.   Team USA’s Skiers Are Using Battery-Heated Shorts At The Olympics Team USA’s Alpine Ski Team is wearing custom-designed heated shorts to stay warm on the freezing slopes at the Beijing Olympics. But these aren’t your average shorts. They use a lithium-ion battery, and the thread they’re sewn with serves as the heat conductor. Ira talks with Josh Daniel and Lauren Samuels, graduate students at the University of Oregon’s sports product management program, who came up with the cutting-edge design.   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. Being a human can be a wonderful thing. We're social creatures. We crave strong bonds with family and friends. Those relationships can be the most rewarding part of life. But having strong relationships also means experiencing loss. Grief is one of the hardest things we go through in life. If you've lost a loved one, you know that feeling. It can be an overwhelming sadness and heartache that

reaches deeply into the very core of your being. To understand why we feel the way we do when we grieve, the logical place to turn to is our brain. A new book explores the neuroscience angle to this profound human experience. The author is my guest. Mary Frances O'Connor, Ph.D., author of the grieving brain, based in Tucson, Arizona. Welcome to Science Friday. It's so nice to be here, Ira. It's so nice to have you. Let's start with some. of the wordplay here, if I might. I'm inclined to use the words grief and grieving interchangeably, but they're actually different experiences, correct? That's right. I have found this to be really helpful in studying grief and grieving. Grief is that wave that just knocks you off your feet,

where grieving is how the feeling of grief changes over time without ever going away. So what I mean by that is that grief is a natural response to loss. And if I, you know, open a drawer, I come across my mom's signature, say, for example, 20 years after she's died, I may still dissolve into tears on that day. And yet, I know that that feeling of grief is maybe more familiar. And so it's not the same as it was 20 years earlier. But if we're expecting that we're not going to feel grief anymore, we may start to wonder if we're actually getting any better or if we're adapting the way people are expecting us to. You said when you study grief, how long have you been studying grief? And what do you mean by studying grief? I have been studying grief for a good

22 years now. I started in graduate school because, you know, fMRI technology was brand new back then, and I was absolutely intrigued. So after my dissertation, we brought people back and put them in the neuroimaging scanner for the very first study of grief from a neuroscience perspective. So this was groundbreaking stuff then. Yes, the American Journal of Psychiatry thought it was, at least. Well, when you put them in the scanner, what do you ask of them? We really struggled with, you know, how do you evoke something as deeply intense and personal as grief in such a, you know, sterile sort of hospital-like environment? And what we came up with was what people do pretty naturally.

If they're going to tell you about someone who has been, you know, the love of their life, they often open a photo album and show you photos. And so we scanned photos, individuals brought us and took words from the stories they told us about their loss and projected those onto goggles that people were wearing in the scanner. So we literally had images of, what their brain was reacting to when they were each looking at individual photos of their loved lost one, which was a little unusual at the time. Usually we try to have standardized, you know, stimuli across everyone, but it is such a personal experience that felt important.

Please, can you share with us what you've learned? Tell us what is going on in the brain when you look at those pictures or when we lose a loved one? You know, one of the things we realized is that grief is really complex. So it actually involves a bunch of different things that the brain is doing all at the same time. And those include things you might expect like memory and even things like being able to take someone else's perspective. So encoding of sort of the self and the other. But other things as well, even things like, even things like, like, you know, regulating our heart rate and so forth. You've just described how you show pictures to people who are getting their brain scan, and that must dredge up memories, correct? What's going on in their brain about these memories? Well, one of the interesting things is the brain is very complex,

and we can actually be using two streams of information at the same time. So you're absolutely right. One aspect is memory. We're thinking about times we spent with the love. one, maybe even seeing the loved one decline over time or being there when they passed away or getting that phone call to tell us that they have died. But interestingly, we also have to think about the bond. So in the human brain, there is a bond created when we, you know, come to be a parent or we become a spouse. That bond is very strong and comes along with. And we come to be a parent. And

comes along with some beliefs. And one of these beliefs we have is that person is going to be there for us. No matter what, that person is there. What that leads to is these two streams of information. On the one hand, you know that they're gone, but on the other hand, it sort of feels like they're going to walk through the door again. And so that can be very confusing for people. I think it takes a long time for the brain to be able to predict. No, I'm not really going to see this person again and all the emotions and what that means that comes along with it. So does that mean that in the brain, the brain cells have to physically rewire themselves for the new reality? That's exactly right. So even in simple things, say in a mouse, if you put him in a box every day and he sees

you know, some blue Lego item, after a number of days, if you take the Lego out and you put him back in the box, there is still a ghost trace of that block. Because the rat is expecting it, there are neurons that fire when he is in the area where that block should be. Now, this persists for a number of days. But imagine for a life that is so intersected with another person. Everything we do and think and plan is involved with this other person, the brain literally has to create new wiring to understand what's happening. And that takes time. It does take time. It turns out that time is one of the most important things, but actually experience is another important thing. Something we sometimes see is that people have a lot of difficulty with grief and start avoiding situations or conversations or even people that remind them of the loved one because it's quite painful.

But it turns out that kind of avoiding doesn't give our brain a chance to learn the new reality. Yeah. Grief can feel like such a physical event. Yeah. Can't it? It really can. I think it is a physical event, in part because it's physically happening in your brain. Right. Usually when we say that, of course, we're referring to the bodily feelings. But really, those changes, for example, some work by Zoe Donaldson and University of Colorado Boulder

shows that there are specific neurons in rodents that pair bond. Some of you will have heard of them called voles. There are specific neurons that are activated just when that vol is approaching their one and only. And the number of neurons increases as that bond gets stronger. And so if you think about then all the things that have to happen in order to be able to predict this person isn't going to be back and understand what that means, it's pretty complicated and really is a physical process. Yeah. Yeah. You talk on your book also about how grief can actually cause physical ailments. Well, the term the broken heart phenomena is something we think of as a metaphor or we think about that in terms of sort of a poetic way to put what we're feeling. But we actually know from epidemiological research that it is true that when a person has lost their spouse, their own risk of mortality goes up.

for men it goes up twice as high than their married counterpart for the first six months. And it goes up in women as well, not quite as high. And so we know that that connection is a lot about physiological regulation. We really, you know, being with our loved ones is extremely rewarding and it feels safe. And so our physiology really has to live in what feels like an unsafe world for a while and try and figure out how to come back to homeostasis. Yeah, because we know that losing a loved one can be very traumatic. Yes. Do trauma and grief overlap? We used to think that grief and depression were the same thing. And sometimes we even thought grief and PTSD might be the same thing depending on how the loved one died. But some work by Richard Bryan at University of New South Wales

in Australia, did neuroimaging scans of people who had a severe form of grieving. And it actually looked different from PTSD and from major depressive disorder in the brain, recruiting different parts of the brain, recruiting the orbital frontal cortex when people who had this severe grief looked at pictures of people with sad faces. So knowing that there are some biological differences or neurobiological differences really reinforces what we see clinically that PTSD and grief, they are different. That is interesting. You say in your book that many people who lose a loved one turn to religion to help

them understand what has happened and where their loved one may have gone. Is there science that backs up this connection? I think, you know, as a neuroscientist, it isn't so much that I'm trying to figure out if religious beliefs are true, but rather, what does it do for us if we have religious beliefs? So on the one hand, we know, you know, often being a religious person comes along with having a religious community. And we know social support is really important. And we can see that in studies. The other thing that sometimes happens for folks, though, is that they get into a lot of concerns about guilt, sometimes even feeling that they are being punished for what has happened. And this can be really problematic for people in trying to understand the meaning of what they're going through. We have to take a break. But when we come back, more about how our brain processes grief with author Mary Francis O'Connor. This is Science Friday. I am Ira Flato. A brief programming note, the spring season of the Science Friday Book Club is about to begin. Starting February 25th, we're reading Sarah Stewart-Johnson's The Sirens of Mars. It's all about the search for life on the red planet. If you want to read with us, go to sciencefriiday.com slash book club. You can sign up for our newsletter, join our community space, and even read an excerpt of the book. That's

science friday.com slash book club. If you're just joining us, I'm speaking with author and neuroscientist Mary Frances O'Connor about how our brains process grief. Her new book, The Grieving Brain, is out now. Are there medications designed to alleviate or help people cope with grief? This is a very important question. And I would say that at this point, we do not have medications. In fact, one of the things that we know is that, as I said before, major depressive disorder and even severe forms of grieving are different things. This was really neatly, sort of elegantly explored in a study by Kathy Shear at Columbia University, where they did treatment for a severe type of grieving called prolonged grief disorder. And they also looked to see if they had major grief.

depressive disorder. So in one case, they were given just psychotherapy, targeted for grief, and then they were either given an antidepressant or not given an antidepressant. What they discovered was antidepressants were very helpful if the person had comorbid depression. We saw their depressive symptoms remit, but the antidepressant did not actually have an impact on those feelings of yearning and wishing that the person was back, that sort of that type of emotional pain was not actually helped by the antidepressant. And that was very helpful, again, in helping us distinguish between these difficult experiences. Do you suspect, though, that when someone is grieving and it's quite obvious how much they're

suffering, that somebody, a psychiatrist or their physician may prescribe, I have an antidepressant just to give them something when they don't actually need it. This is a bit of a challenge. I think, you know, there hasn't been a lot of education in medical schools, frankly, in psychology training either, about grief. It really is in its infancy. And so often because just as you say, doctors are empathic, they see this person, they want to give them something. Sometimes they'll prescribe an antidepressant, even sometimes when the patient says, I don't really feel depressed.

But the other problem is that a lot of people who are grieving have difficulty sleeping. And so a doctor will often prescribe a sleep medication. What we know about that is the difficulty sleeping that comes with bereavement is a temporary situation. It is incredibly difficult, but it is also temporary. And those sleep medications tend not to work well in the long run, and yet people tend to stay on them, sometimes because coming off of them is difficult. So it's more important to think about, for example, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, what we call CBTI, which is a way of thinking about supporting the natural sleep cycle through behavioral means and enabling that person to get back into a rhythm naturally. so that in the long term, they don't have these sleep difficulties. Now, your book was written pre-COVID, but it's very timely for right now, I would imagine.

So how much grief is happening in the world because of this virus? I mean, has this pandemic changed how you look at grief in some ways? It has in some ways. I think there's been a lot of discussion about grief, but what we know from evidence in the United States, some modeling done by some sociologists demonstrated that for every person who has died, there are about nine loved ones who remain, who are survivors. So if you think about we're getting close to, you know, a million people who have died of COVID. That's nine million people who are acutely grieving. And that's just in our country. And that's just in our country. So one of the difficulties is just understanding what it means to have such a large number of people, but also who are all going through it at the same time. Usually when we're losing a loved one, we have people around us who aren't going through that experience that we can kind of lean on. And now we have a pretty unusual situation where, I mean, let's face it, we're dealing with a lot of types of grief. But even if we focused only on bereavement, we're dealing with a lot of deaths. And for me, it isn't just what does that grief feel like or how many people have it.

But as a grief researcher, my interest is partly in why might the pandemic circumstances be harder for people who are grieving? And that thing I said before about the brain relies on this stream of information where we've maybe seen the person decline. We may have been there at the bedside when they passed away. We went to a funeral or a memorial service. Many of those circumstances have really changed because of social distancing. And so as I'm doing research right now, I'm talking with people who, you know, the 70-year-old woman who, dropped off her fairly healthy husband who had a cough at the ER and was having some trouble breathing. And then because we're not allowed to be in the hospital with them, the next thing she

knew, she was being told that he had died. And that's a very unusual circumstance for us not to be present. People who have loved ones in long-term care experience this as well. And I think the problem is that it doesn't give our brain a chance to understand what's happening as we're going through the experience. Yes, that I'm sure has happened many times, unfortunately. And as you say, we're experiencing what feels like a group grief event with COVID. Do you think this might change us as a species? It's an interesting question. Certainly, in the sense of a species,

Grief is such a universal experience. And even pandemics, right? Mass casualties. We certainly, as a species, have faced difficult situations before. And we can look to some of those for important ways that people have coped. I think it's unusual in a cultural way. Part of what we sometimes forget is that bereavement is a health disparity, right? So, 65% of all the children experiencing COVID-associated, you know, loss of a caregiver are of a racial or ethnic minority. And this has always actually been true. Black Americans become widowed at much younger ages. Work by Deborah Umbersome done at UT Austin showed that by the age, between the ages of 65 and 74, 25% of black Americans are widowed compared with only 15% of white Americans. Right. And so

bereavement isn't affecting everyone equally. If we're thinking at a kind of public health level, we have to really make sure that the response is targeted in the way that it will do the most help. If there are people who are listening and who are grieving, what do you recommend they do to listen to pain or help them move on or find help? This is a very challenging time for people. I think it's confusing. The grief experience is not often what people are expecting. There's a lot of anger often or just the intrusive thoughts. You can't sort of stop thinking about it. Much of that is actually pretty normal. And, you know, people often have the desire to talk about their experience to try to put into words what it means to know that you're not going to retire with this person. that you would plan to do that forever. So I actually recommend reaching out and talking with the people around you, especially people who may have had their own grief experience.

Often there's a level of empathy there that it can be more difficult for people who don't have the same lived experience. So reaching out and talking with people. And also, if people are experiencing things like feeling life isn't, worth living or feeling they can't get through the day without drinking a large amount of alcohol. These are really signs that it is important to reach out for professional help as well, because this is a temporary situation. And although it doesn't feel like it in the moment, it will change over time. And we want to support a person who's in that immediate part of grieving

in order to help them get onto that sort of healing, grieving trajectory. You know, the news is filled almost every day with someone else suffering a violent death, whether it's from gunshots, whether it's from murders, whatever. Is there a special kind of grief that these people, the relatives and the loved ones of these people go through that needs a special kind of treatment or counseling? We sometimes refer to this as traumatic grief, meaning that the situation itself that led to the death was a traumatic situation.

And we know that violent deaths and unexpected deaths can be more problematic as people are trying to understand what has happened and what it means for their life. Often people who've experienced a traumatic death experience more grief symptoms. But often also it comes with other things as well. Sometimes there is what we might call survivors guilt. So depending on what the situation was, the sort of question to oneself of why did I live when this other person did not?

And that can be complicating as you're trying to come to terms with what has happened and then learn how to sort of restore a meaningful life. What research would you like to see on grief and grieving in the future? And if I gave you, I'm going to give you the sci-fri blank check question. Maybe you've heard it before. If I had a blank check, which I don't have it, to give you for spending on buying anything you'd like on the kind of research you'd like to see done that hasn't been done, how would you spend it? You know, I think there are even some really basic questions that we don't know.

One is that we have a number of studies now on grief, that single snapshot in time across a number of people. What we don't have a lot of research on is actually grieving. So looking at the same person, putting the same person in the MRI scanner numerous times across that changing experience and seeing what does it look at? like in the brain when people are coming to terms with what has happened, restoring a meaningful life. And the second question I would want to know at the same time, we don't actually know if people who are psychologically having a lot of difficulty adjusting are the same people who are having a lot of difficulty medically adjusting. So we don't actually know yet because these tend to be different groups of people studying them, we don't actually know if the changes physiologically

are related to the changes in the brain and in the mind. And so I'd love to see more integrated work over time with people. When you say medically adjusting, what do you mean by that? Well, this gets a little bit back to what I was saying about the broken heart phenomenon earlier. What we know is that acutely, and this is true even in animal pair bonds, some work by Oliver Bosch at University of Regensburg in Germany, has shown that when a bond is formed, it's almost like cocking a gun so that as soon as there is separation, cortisol goes up, or the animal version of cortisol, cortisol goes up in humans upon separation and remains high. So think about that moment when you lose your kid in the mall and you can't find them, that utter panic, right? Or think about when, you know, a husband even goes on a trip out of town and you feel awful, right? As soon as that separation happens, we know there are these physiological changes and we're still really trying to understand in human beings for whom do those changes happen most. is that related to how they feel emotionally?

And then are there things that we can do to help sort of support the body as it deals with this stress hormone imbalance in order to improve their experience and even improve their medical situation in that initial period of grief? Talking with Mary Frances O'Connor, PhD author of The Grieving Brain on Science Friday from WNYC Studios. You told me earlier that you've been studying grief for over 20 years. Does it get to you studying grief?

This is a really common question for me. You know, I teach an undergraduate psychology of death and loss course, so 150 undergrads, you know, who say the word death probably more in that 14 weeks than they ever have in their life. And they often say to me, you know, I feel like you're too happy to be teaching this class. And I tell them, you know, the thing for me is the reason I'm happy is because I really understand the suffering. And so I have found a way in my own life from the death of my mother when I was in my mid-20s and then the death of my father not so many years ago. I know what that suffering is like. And for me, it has helped me to find a lot of meaning in life to know that working with that one student to help them understand.

something is really rewarding because this is all the time we got. So I think, you know, the surprising thing is for people who have found, meaning it can be very powerful. And that is sort of an unexpected side to grieving. Well, that's about all the time we've got, Mary Francis. Thank you for taking time to be with us and for this terrific book that you've written. Thank you so much, Ira, for bringing this conversation to the radio. Mary Frances O'Connor, author of The Grieving Brain, she's based in Tucson. And if you're interested in learning more about this topic, you can read an excerpt from the book on our website, ScienceFriday.com slash grieving brain.

We have to take a break, and when we come back, we'll talk about how experimental gene therapy has rid two patients of cancer for 10 years. But is it a cure? Plus the latest in Olympic Tech hot pants. Well-heated shorts, to be precise, we'll be talking about how the U.S. Alpine ski team stays warm on the slopes. The legs are what's most important to our performance, and it's the hardest to get warm once they get cold.

The duo of grad students from the University of Oregon came up with this innovative design. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Two cancer patients treated with gene therapy a decade ago are still in remission. Thousands of patients have undergone this type of immunotherapy called CAR-T cell therapy, but these are the first patients that doctors say have been cured by the treatment.

The findings were recently published in the journal Nature. Joining me now was Dr. Carl June, co-author of the study, and director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies at the University of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Dr. June, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. Thank you very much for having me. Nice to have you. Now, you've said that two patients in the study were cured of their leukemia, and I know most doctors are wary of using the word cure in the same sentence as cancer. What makes you so confident about this? First of all, we were very reticent to use that word and have not in previous reports of our therapies, but these were the first two,

treated, you know, a decade ago now, and they both had, you know, sustained remission with no further treatments. So we know from the natural history of leukemia, you know, when patients are cured with other therapies, if it doesn't recur within a few years, the patient usual never have that tumor come back. This doesn't give people immortality, but what it means is that they have aged now for 10 years with no further leukemia. That's amazing. I know these patients underwent something called CAR-T cell therapy, and this involves taking cells from the patients and do what with them? Yeah, so as you mentioned at the top of the show, it's a form of gene therapy and more precisely cell and gene therapy. So the patients actually

are involved in manufacturing the CAR-T cells, so they donate blood cells, you know, the T-lymphocytes from a blood donation. And then in our laboratory at the University of the University of Pennsylvania, they were grown for about 10 days and genetically modified so that they became killer cells for leukemia called CAR-T cells. And then after the manufacturing process, the cells were infused into the patient, just like a blood transfusion, and then that's it. It's a one-time therapy. And what do the cells do once they get into the patient? Well, unlike other drugs, which, you know, like if you take aspirin or whatever, they get metabolize. and you take them recursively over and over again.

These cells actually begin to divide in the patient, so we're able to measure them in the patient, and they expanded exponentially in the patients so that one car T cell became 1,000 in the patient. And inversely, at the same time, their tumors, which were in these two patients, between 3 and 7 pounds of tumor at the time we treated them, the tumor became undetectable as the car T cells divided

and killed the tumor cells. And so the patients still have their car T cells 10 years later? Yeah, that was a major surprise. You're exactly right. Both patients continue to have carty cells on patrol. We could remove them. You know, the patients kindly donated more blood samples, and we could find the carty cells in their blood,

and then in the laboratory exposed those car T cells to leukemia again, and the car T cells promptly killed the leukemia. cells. So they stay on patrol in a form of immune surveillance. You used the word amazing. Are you still amazed by this? Well, yes. So, you know, first of all, I've never said the word cure before because we didn't have that data. And now, at least in these first two patients, we have very mature follow-up data. So, and then, you know, secondly, we were in the actual trial, you know, we infused these cells and the informed consent document, we thought, based on our mouse studies, that the cells would only persist a few weeks in the patient and that they would go away.

And so it was a major surprise that these cells can literally take foothold and survive for a decade in the patients. Do you know why that happens? Well, we have some really good hints. And it was a major surprise because the body wasn't able to reject these gene-modified cells that had, for instance, now some mouse proteins in them. You know, the antibody that's in these T cells, which is where the word chimeric comes from, the Greek fusion of two different species of animals.

In this case, the CART cells are a fusion between a B cell and a T cell in our immune system. And because part of that came from a mouse, we thought the human immune system would, you know, within a few weeks, reject those cells and they would disappear. But we found out that there's a process called immune tolerance and that the body was educated and was unable to reject these cells that now are chimeric and have a mouse protein in them. Now, why do so many other patients not have such success that you've had with these two patients? Well, so these were the first two patients. And what we found, and now there's hundreds of groups doing this back in 2010, it was only a handful of academic centers. But now with

thousands of patients treated, we know that with these kinds of carty cells, the response rate depends on the cancer. So if it's acute leukemia, 80 or 90% of the patients go into long-term remissions. And the patients that we just described, they had chronic leukemia, and they're the success rate is about 30%. And it just so happened by, you know, the first two patients we treated are long-term, of these long-term responders. Is there any way to 12? week what you're doing and maybe get more of the chronic cases. Well, that's the $64,000 question. We have data now and there's several centers that if we combine this therapy with a small molecule compound called ibupinib, we can now get in chronic leukemia like this an 80 or 90 percent remission rate. So that's on

the horizon, which is like all kind of most cancer therapy. It's combinations of different therapies are required to get long-term cures. So we think that's going to be the pathway for that form of chronic leukemia. Now, what about solid cancers which make up, like, the vast majority of cancer cases? Do you think that there's some hope for this kind of technology? Yeah, well, that's clearly the major issue. 90% of all cancer in the U.S. and across the world really is solid cancer, you know, about 600,000 patients a year, I mean, in the U.S. die alone. And, you know, we have this conundrum where there's very promising data in a lot of mouse experiments in solid tumors with various cell and gene therapies.

But it's been disappointing so far on clinical trials, and this is where we need, you know, more research. So I'm hopeful that we're going to solve that problem over the next decade to feel well. There's now so much research in progress that hopefully will build on these initial steps in blood cancer. You know, when people hear this, people who are suffering from leukemia hear this, they're going to want to say, hey, how do I get in on that? Well, fortunately, you know, this therapy is now FDA approved.

That happened in August of 2017, initially for pediatric and young adult leukemia. There's many different trials now open across the world, but particularly here in the U.S., for all kinds of of blood cancer. And in some cases, they're FDA approved and others, they're, you know, still research trials. Like all early technologies, it takes some time to, you know, go into community hospital centers. So mostly the, you know, the initial research is at major cancer centers. And this is active all across the country now. Now, I know you've been developing cancer immunotherapy, what, for 25 years? How much of a milestone do you think these recent findings are? Well, I think it's great news for the field because it says that these cells can be

safe and do what we wanted them to be, you know, serial killer cells in the patient to kill cancer. So that's now proven in these initial patients. Whenever you have and talk about things like gene therapy, the big worry always is, is it going to turn a cell into some kind of Frankenstein like cell, you know, that would be uncontrolled and so on? And what what these two patients teaches is the cells behave exactly as we had hoped. They stay as leukemia, killer cells, not caused any side effects in these patients term. Well, we wish you good luck to you and your patients. It's wonderful that we have some really good news to talk about sometimes. Yeah, so much. And I want to really thank our initial patients who volunteered, you know, for this

and for the large team of scientists and clinicians at the University of Pennsylvania, you know, that made this possible. Dr. Carl June, co-author of the the study and director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. To fight the extreme cold at the Olympics, Team USA's Alpine Ski Team is wearing custom designed, heated shorts to stay warm as they warm up in Beijing. But these aren't your average shorts. They use a lithium ion battery, and the thread they're sewn with, it's the heating element. And if that's not, Wow Enough. It's a group of graduate students who came up with the cutting edge design. Joining me

now to talk more about this new high-tech garment are Josh Daniel and Lawrence Samuel's graduate students at the University of Oregon's Sports Product Management Program based in Portland. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. Nice to have you. Josh, give me an idea of how this technology works. Is it merely the thread that acts as a heating element as it's sewn through? through the garment. As far as the technology goes, it's just going to be a wire that is going to be embroidered down to a fabric, and then we incorporate that into the actual production of the shorts. That's going to hook up to a battery and actually has a little remote that the skiers can use to adjust the temperature on it. And is this used anywhere else in sports, this kind of concept?

Yeah. We actually got in contact with our buddy Colby Taylor down at Innovative Sports Technology and Eugene, and he's been working with some MLB teams as far as like pitching sleeves to heat up. I know that amateur skiers out there might be familiar with heated pants that you can buy in the store to keep your legs snugly warm. How is this technology different than those ski pants? Yeah, it's just a little bit more fine-tuned. In general, when you just go to the store to buy like a heated jacket or heated pants that are already out there, it's not going to be a single heating unit. it's actually going to be, you know, a bunch of smaller units that are then bound together with traditional wiring. It's going to be a little bit harder to control, a little bit less

consistent, and just overall, like, doesn't heat up as well or as efficient as the technology we're using. I understand that one of your instructors is approached by the U.S. Alpine ski team to help come up with a new product to help keep the athletes warm. And you were on the U.S. ski team a few years ago. You have some firsthand knowledge there. Tell me how you landed on making shorts, Lauren. Yeah, so the U.S. ski team came to us with an idea for a vest or a jacket for the upper body. And with my ski racing experience, I thought about it for a little bit and wondered what the current athletes were thinking. Because for my experience, the legs are what's most important to our performance.

And it's the hardest to get warm once they get cold. So we interviewed an athlete, current athlete on the U.S. ski team and talked with him through his daily routines for races and training and when it's really cold. And he told us that the most important part of his body was his legs. And he needed to keep those warm in order to stay focused and perform at its best. So we pivoted and went towards shorts. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Tell me how these shorts then solve a common issue. that happens when you're warming up ahead of an event?

So these shorts you can wear, you know, you could wear them until 30 seconds before you race if you wanted to. You can warm up and stay warm versus before you may have warmed up too soon and then you cool down and now your body was sweaty and now that sweats cold. So this kind of makes it more consistent. Why not just keep them on going down the hill? Is there something, any reason why you can't do that? Well, In our sport, hundies matter. We like to use that term, but hundreds of a second really can make or break your day. So every little bit counts and having an additional layer,

even if it's only a couple millimeters thick on your body, is not worth it for these athletes. And Josh, you designed these so that they can be quickly taken off right before you go down the hill. Yeah, the plan was to just make sure that they're going to be easy. to take off right before. Most of the design work that I did on it was going to be based on the heating element itself and how to navigate that wire through the butt and the leg to make sure that it isn't going to be unruly for the skiers to actually wear. So you can actually take these off without taking off your skis?

Yeah, yeah, that's the kind of the goal leading up to the race. It was kind of a key time where skiers were losing a lot of heat. and rather than having them continuously doing jumping jacks or trying to like run in place to or do other exercises to stay warm, we knew that if we could create this product that would, you know, step in and regulate that body temperature leading up to that final second, we feel like there could be performance benefit. Now, I know this whole project came together pretty quickly. The two of you came up with the concept and you manufactured the shorts in just

four months, Josh. How do you do that? Tell me. It was definitely a fun project. I think the fact that I had such a great team. We worked really hard to try to get all the idea together. Originally, we were going to just from scratch, fully manufacture all of these garments ourselves, and it ended up being kind of a time crunch. So we were able to incorporate some of the gear that was already being used by the ski team and custom fit the elements into what they're already wearing. And I think that benefited the product as a whole because it kept us from having to introduce the athletes to an entirely new product. The technology is wildly different, but they were already wearing these shorts. So they were a little bit more prone to accept this new technology that normally

they've had trouble getting adoption from. In fact, you were on such a time crunch that you ended up hand delivering them, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. I spent a couple hours in the lab just getting all the manufacturing done and realized that I had kind of passed the time limit for the overnight delivery that we needed to do. Hit up the team and was just like, all right, well, how are we going to do this? Kind of thought about it. And it's like, well, it's actually a little bit cheaper to just pack it up and hop on a plane and go down there. So it ended up being great. It worked out. Lauren actually just moved down to Salt Lake City. So she grabbed me from the airport, went up to the training facility and got to look around and see what's going on there.

So it was a good experience. That's pretty cool. Now, Lauren, I know you talked to the ski team in Beijing. How are they liking the shorts so far? Yeah, I talked to one athlete, and she said they're great. They were using it in the training days in the week leading up to the races. And Paula, Paula's from Minnesota, and she was like, you have no idea how cold it is here. It's colder than Minnesota.

and these shorts are incredible. It's game-changing for us to be able to train and stay warm. Saying it's colder than Minnesota is saying a mouthful, isn't it? Yeah. Well, I want to thank you both for taking time to be with us today, and good luck to you. I'm sure we're going to be seeing these in the sports shop someday, right? We'll see.

Josh Daniel and Lauren Samuel's graduate students at the University of Oregon, sports product management program. And that's about it for this week. If you missed any part of this program or you would like to hear it again, sure, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. You can also say hi to us on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or email us. SciFri at ScienceFri.com. Send feedback. Tell us what you'd like us to cover. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.