Science Friday - How important ideas get reawakened, with David Byrne

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

On Science Friday, we love to talk about ideas, especially ideas that have the power to shape the future. But there are plenty of groundbreaking ideas that almost don’t make it out of the lab or the art studio: ideas that are birthed but then fall into a deep slumber until, years later, they’re reawakened.Why this happens is the subject of the new book, “Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up,” by David Bryne, artist, musician, and lead singer for Talking Heads. He joins Flora to explain.Read an excerpt from “Sleeping Beauties.”Guest:David Byrne is an artist, musician, and the lead singer for Talking Heads.Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey, it's Flora and you're listening to Science Friday. On this show, as you know, we love to talk about ideas, especially ideas that have the power to shape the future. But there are plenty of groundbreaking ideas that almost don't make it out of the lab or the art studio, ideas that are birthed but then fall into a deep slumber until years later they're resurrected. Why and how ideas go dormant and then wake up. up is the subject of a new book. Sleeping beauties, why good ideas go dormant and how they wake up, written by David Byrne, artist, musician, and lead singer, of course, for the talking heads. David, welcome to Science Friday, and thank you so much for coming into studio.

Thank you. Good to be here. You seem blessed with the freedom to do almost any creative project you want these days, although maybe that's not true. You can correct me. But I'm curious why you wanted to take this on now, and in this format. It's true. I'm very lucky that I could do a book like this, which is,

for the most part, out of the, outside of the kind of boundaries of what people might expect me to be doing. And the publisher said, okay, okay. So I'm lucky that way.

What was the second part of the question? Why this? Why did you want to do that? Oh, why this? Why this? I read the terms, sleeping beauties in a science paper that was about the phenomena of sleeping beauties in science. It was about papers that get a little bit of attention when they come out.

And then the citations and references kind of drop off sometimes to almost nothing. And that can go for some years. It can go for decades. And then somebody stumbles on the paper again. And it's revived and resurrected. And people go, this is exactly what we're trying to do. with now and this person kind of figured it out maybe. So I thought, I know this phenomena.

I know it from music and art, literature. It happens in everything. Why restricted justice science papers? So I started, I thought, this is such an intriguing idea. But wait, why does it intrigue you? Everybody loves a story. of a resurrection, a return. It is age-old.

Yeah, something that's saved. Everybody, somebody who comes back from the dead, somebody who's forgotten, and then suddenly we realized, no, this person was a great artist. We love those kind of stories, and I'm no different. So every time I'd be reading an article

about some artist or radio review of something about Herman Melville, and it would say, Melville, Melville was incredibly successful, the most successful author in the United States or in North America. And then Moby Dick, and that was a failure. And he was so forgotten that at one point somebody wanted to write something, and they said, isn't he dead now?

No, he wasn't dead. And that's how far he fell. That's how far he fell. Yeah. And then, yeah, it was quite a while later, 50 years, 60 years later, more contemporary writers started checking out this book that he'd written and realized, particularly after War, War I, when people started to question, what are we? who are we that we could do something like this? Yeah. What's our psychological makeup?

What's our national makeup? What's all those kinds of questions? And that book deals with a lot of those kind of questions. It deals with that kind of psychology. It deals with racism. It deals with cultural imperialism. It deals with all colonialism, all sorts of stuff that was on people's minds at that point. and there weren't very many other books that touched on those subjects.

So bingo, he's back. It was ahead of its time. In some ways, yes. You know, you write a lot about science in the book, and there's this story about Vera Rubin, who on this show is like a household name. She's an astronomer. She pioneers Dark Matter. And she has this moment where she kind of puts together her ideas.

They crystallize after she takes out a sketchpad. What did you love about this story? Why did you want to include it? Well, just the science is interesting, how she realized that there must be forces out there in the universe that are causing the rotation of galaxies and all this to behave in a certain way. That it was a force or something was out there that we didn't know what it was. was. That takes a lot of imagination from the jump. Yes, from the jump to make that leap. And she says that too. She says, I had to make the leap to say, what if it's something we can't see? What if not everything emits photons, emits light? Which is hard for scientists, right?

Hard for scientists, because everything we know, everything we see emits photons or reflects photons or whatever. And so to say, what if there's something that doesn't? It's just like, yeah, what if the Earth is square? Yes, it seemed like a ridiculous idea. Yeah. But her dream is to work, I think, was Mount Polymar, the newest, biggest telescope maybe in the world at that point.

And so she, you know, had an appointment to go and do some of her research there because she needed to actually observe the behavior of these galaxies in order to see if any of her ideas were correct. And they said, of course, everyone in the observatory was all men. And they said, we work at night, and we have no facilities for women. So she took a piece of paper and some scissors and cut out a little figure of all. a woman has stuck it on a, on a restroom door and said, now you do.

I wonder to, I mean, you talk about this a little bit. I know you work across many mediums. Like, do you think that, you know, so in this story, she writes on a sketchpad and then sort of put something together that she wasn't able to before? Do you feel like you're able to understand things differently when you cross mediums in your work? Oh, absolutely. Yes. I didn't get to that part, that she's got all this data.

And she starts plotting it out as drawings. And then suddenly it becomes more apparent to her. This is what's happening. And I thought, yeah, I know that feeling of when you take a thing and move it into another medium, a astronomical idea, expressing it as a drawing, you suddenly can see, oh, now I see why that happens. We have to take a break, but when we come back, I want to ask you about how you know when not to give up on an idea.

So I've reported a lot on scientists who are out on a limb with their ideas. I find this to be a very interesting theme. And do you happen to know the story of Catalan Carrico? No, I don't. Can I tell it to you? Sure, sure. Okay, so she's a, she's a biochemist, and she worked for decades, basically, like, in obscurity. She was, she never got a professor position.

She was demoted, fired from her job, and then she won the Nobel Prize for the basic science that led to the COVID vaccine. And it's really a remarkable story. Is this like the MRI? Yes. Things, yes, and now there's going to be more of them. Yes. And one of the things that fascinated me so much about it is that for all those years, when people were saying, this is a fool's errand, this is a dead end, why are you doing this? You know, we're literally laughing at her by her description.

She was very confident she was right. And I want to just play you this tape because I think it's so amazing. This is from an interview I did with her. So she's getting fired, and this is what her boss is finding. her and this is what she says. I literally told the chairman, this place will be a museum. You told them it'd be a museum.

That's an amazing thing to say when you're being basically kicked out of your job. Yes, because I believe so much that one day, you know, it will be important. What does that make you think? Thank God she was

tenacious and held on to her beliefs. There was another son. scientists in this book, Lynn Margulis, who was also very tenacious. She kind of educated herself in a wide variety of areas, genetics and mathematics and different things, which helped her imagine how things could work in a way that other people could not. She had lots of theories and ideas why her ideas weren't being accepted. And not just her, but other ideas. She said that the specialization that happens in science is sometimes detrimental. She also talked a lot about the hierarchies and the descriptions and the taxonomies

that separate things into different things when there actually, there are connections. But when you put them in these different boxes, those connections are conceptually. severed. And she said it makes it hard to think about relations. She said, everything is about relations, not about isolated things. Do you feel like you're tenacious in the way that Lynn Margulis or Katzlan Kariko is tenacious? I've been told that I'm stubborn sometimes, yeah. If that's, yeah, if that's tenacious. I think it's probably required. To some extent, yeah. I mean, but it's also, you also have to know when you're wrong. Or when, yeah, it's not the right time to push an idea.

Yes, I think that can be hard to know. Do you have an idea or a project that you're trying to wake up right now that's been slumbering? Yeah, but I don't want to talk about it. I'm sorry. This is a cliffhanger. I know, but it's, yeah, it's a curse, too. I understand. Is there something that has woken up recently that you feel excited about? Oh, my God.

That is very recent. The discovery of how Roman concrete worked. Our favorite topic on Science Friday. A lost recipe. A lost recipe. 2023. That's when it was... Amazing.

Announced. Oh, now we see it. how it works. We covered it, of course. What if I have an idea that I think should be woken up? How do you do that? Do you have any advice? Is there anyone else who might be a champion or a supporter that would have the ear

of whatever, the public or whatever? I think that's important. We'll talk offline, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You're that person for me. I think, as we mentioned, you have to see if the culture is ready for the idea. And if it's not totally ready, is there an angle where you can kind of wedge part of the idea in? Oh, I like that.

Do you know what I mean? Yes. Maybe the whole thing is too big of a bite. Yeah. But there's some little piece that could fit. Yeah, get a foot in the doorway there. Before we let you go, we're recording right now on Barrack Street in WNYC's studios. I know this is a neighborhood.

I think that you spent a lot of time in in Soho. Oh, yeah, yeah. I lived in Soho for a while. I haven't been in a while, but I used to go to a club called S-O-Bs, which is about a block north of here. Yeah. And I wondered if you look back, on that time.

You know, one of the things that seemed true reading through your book is that some of these ideas, like there was a turning point where they could have gone either way. Like they could have continued to slumber or they could have woken up or maybe they never would have gone to sleep if something was different.

Do you feel like that's true for your own career? Like, are there moments like that where if something had gone different? Absolutely. You would be in a different place. Absolutely. I have, said to people many times, I said, we were in the right place at the right time to get noticed.

And we were very lucky. I mean, we can take credit and say, well, what we were doing was really innovative and interesting. That might be the case, but that doesn't mean that anybody's going to hear it. We happened to be here when other people were doing things, too. And so there was kind of an attention going towards a little handful of musicians and artists and different people who were doing things at that moment, and we happened to be there. So I think, yeah, there's a lot of luck involved. So true of most of life. David, thank you so much for talking to me today.

Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. That was fun. It was really a pleasure. David Byrne, member of Talking Heads and author of the new book, Sleeping Beauties. If you want to see this interview, you can watch it on our YouTube channel. And if you want to check out an excerpt from the book, head to our website, ScienceFriday.com slash Sleeping Beauties.

This episode was produced by D. Peter Schmidt. Thank you to Wayne Schollmeister, Valentina Powers, and the team at WNYC for their help. I'm Flora Lixman. Thank you for listening.