Science Friday - How Viruses Shaped Our World, A Seagrass Oasis For Manatees. Aug 19, 2022, Part 1

Episode Date: August 19, 2022

Will A Colorado River Drought Dry Up Energy Supplies? This week, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, a federal agency that manages water in the Western U.S., started the process of cutting water use allotments along the Colorado River after seven states missed a deadline for coming up with their own reduction plan. The area has been under a long-running drought—and with water in demand for everything from drinking to agriculture to industry, and with the population of the area on the rise, agreements over water use are difficult to come by. The drought has another less obvious effect on the area as well—drops in water allocation could lead to declines in power production in a region that relies on several major hydroelectric facilities. Umair Irfan, staff writer at Vox, joins Ira to talk about the plan for distributing western water and other stories from the week in science—including a possible reprieve for nuclear power plants in Germany and California, a geomagnetic storm sparking an astronomical light show, orders for future supersonic aircraft, and investigations into why thinking hard makes you physically tired.   How Viruses Have Shaped Our World SARS-CoV2. HIV. CMV. HSV-1 and HSV-2. MPX. EBV. HPV. WPV. WNV. The alphabet soup of viruses that infect us may seem long and daunting. But as scientist and author Joseph Osmundson writes in Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things In Between, these viruses are vastly dwarfed by the total number of harmless or even beneficial viruses on our planet. “It’s a rounding error larger than zero,” he writes. A single ounce of seawater will contain more than seven billion individual viruses incapable of doing us harm. Osmundson’s book is both COVID-19 quarantine memoir, and reflections of a self-described queer man coming of age after the identification of the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS. In it, he questions the war-like language we ascribe to “fighting” pathogens, explores the non-binary nature of health and illness, and advocates for a world where we are more ready to care for each other. “The problem wasn’t illness,” he writes of HIV’s death toll before the development of effective treatments. “The problem never is. Illness is a fact of life. The problem is our inability to provide care to all.” Osmundson talks to producer Christie Taylor about making new meanings for viruses through biomedicine and public health interventions. Plus, lessons for the monkeypox global public health emergency, and all the viruses to come. Seagrass Oasis In Gulf Of Mexico Signals Good News For Manatees Florida’s offshore marine habitat is in peril. Populations of fish are dwindling in many places, and manatees have been dying in record numbers. The basis for much of this life lies in seagrass just under our boats. We join scientist on a trip into one of the healthiest seagrass meadows in the Gulf of Mexico. Read the rest at sciencefriday.com. 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. This week, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. That's a federal agency that manages water in the western U.S. Started the process of cutting the amount of water allotted to users along the Colorado River after seven states missed the deadline for coming up with their own reduction plan. The area has been under a long-running drought and with water in demand for everything from drinking to agriculture to electric power and with the population. of the area on the rise, states just can't seem to be able to hash out an agreement themselves. Joining me now to talk about the plan for distributing Western water and other stories from the week in science is Amerifan. Staff writer Ed Vox. Welcome back. Hi, Ira. Thanks for having me back. Okay, these water cuts. This is serious stuff, isn't it, with a strangling drought in the West. Who gets the water? How much? Yeah, that's right. You know, there are seven states that are part of this

Colorado River Compact. And initially they were supposed to come up with a plan by this week to cut two million to four million acre feet of water. One acre foot of water is basically how much water it takes to flood one acre of land one foot deep. And they just did not do that. And so the federal government said, well, one, you still have to come up with that plan. And two, they started imposing their own set of cuts on top of that. And so the new set of cuts will affect Arizona, Nevada, and parts of Mexico, and they'll have to reduce their consumption by about 720,000 acre feet. You know, that's not anywhere close to the millions that are needed, but these are the cuts that are going to be imposed by the federal government. And that's because, you know, as you noted, there is a long-running drought.

There is first this 20-year-long drying period that we are in in the West, and also we're in a drought period from the last two years. And so sort of a drought within a drought is happening right now, which is pushing all these water resources to the brink. So how do they decide how much different users get allocated? Well, it goes back to history, and there's some strange rules with how the Colorado River's water is divided. You know, initially this has to do with seniority. Basically, the people who are there first have the longest standing and the first claims to it. But the water that's being allocated, there's more water being allocated than there actually is. And so this over-allocation problem is part of why there's been such a rapid drawdown. And so

states and water users in the region have to basically go back to their baseline and how to use what the actual water is there. They have to actually deal with what's physically there rather than what they're actually imagining would be there. And that's going to be a big political challenge. You know, there's a lot of very powerful interest here that don't want the status quota change.

While there are others that, you know, that are very drastically suffering, you know, people in Arizona and people in Mexico are getting just a trickle of the water from the Colorado River. And they desperately need that just to, you know, stay hydrated and to keep their farms and other kinds of livelihoods running.

And so there's a big tension here that really needs to be resolved. And it's also the problem of making electric power because the water level in Lake Mead that drives the power generators and the Hoover Dam are at record lows along with levels in Lake Powell. So there's an energy crisis looming. Right. And it's not just the hydroelectric plants.

You know, water is essential for making all kinds of energy products. You know, hydraulic fracturing to make oil and gas. It takes about one and a half barrels of water to make every refined gallon of gasoline or refined fuel. So it's also, really important for cooling power plants. And we're seeing stresses on all of these things right now. When water temperatures get too high, power plants function less efficiently and they produce less electricity. And, you know, there's also limitations on how hot of water that they can discharge

back into nature. And so in this period, we've seen this summer with extreme heat and extreme dryness, a lot of power resources have been stressed. Now, the West so far hasn't seen any major blackouts. And that's because in the Pacific Northwest, they've actually had a fair amount of rainfall this past winter and they're generating a lot more electricity to compensate for it. But, you know, water managers and resource managers in the West are concerned that, you know, in the next few years, if this drought persists, we could see a point where the major generators, like you noted, on the Hoover Dam and on Lake Powell with the Glen Canyon Dam, they could reach a point where they're no longer able to generate electricity. And so some of them are turning to nuclear power, right?

Right. You know, we've seen a step in of all sorts of different kinds of energy resources. We've We've seen fossil fuel plants step in to compensate for some of the downfall of hydroelectric power. We've seen a big cutoff in that. But recently, just this week, we saw an announcement from California that they want to bail out their last remaining nuclear power plant. The Diablo Canyon plant, this plant provides about 9.3% of the state's electricity, and now there's a proposal to keep it running from its initial shutdown date of 2025 all the way out to potentially up to 2035. And this is not just here in the states there. over in Europe, they're thinking of extending the lives of their nuclear power plants. Right. Europe is also facing a major energy crisis. Like similarly for many of the heat and drought

reasons we've seen here in the United States, you know, water levels on the Rhine are really low, so Germany is having trouble getting its fuel shipments, its coal and gas in. And in France, nuclear power plants have had to actually shut down because water temperatures have gotten too hot for them to cool off. But Germany was initially planning to shut down all of its nuclear power plants by the end of this year. But after Russia's invasion, of Ukraine, they saw a big drop-off in their natural gas resources. Germany is the largest purchaser of natural gas, and they're now concerned that they won't be able to meet their domestic energy demand. And so the government is now proposing, rather than shutting down their nuclear plants,

keeping them running. So about 13 percent of Germany's electricity used to come from nuclear. It's now down to 6 percent. But the government now says that it's really vital to keep that resource running. Was the California plant not economically feasible to keep running? Yeah, there were a number of factors. Nuclear is fairly expensive to keep running. And in California, you know, they have plenty of solar and wind, which can come on the grid very cheap and then also a lot of natural gas, which is also very cheap. And this plant was also fairly old and it needed a number of upgrades in order to meet current regulatory and safety standards that were fairly expensive. But the state says that, you know, now that the upsides of keeping nuclear running outweigh the downsides and the cost of this, there was a study that came out just a couple of

years ago that said that California could reduce its power sector emissions by about 10 percent and save about $2.6 billion by keeping the plant running through 2035. So there is sort of a financial case over the long term for keeping this plant running. Yeah, but there's also the political case here. California is not known for being pro-nuclear. Right. You know, there's been a major environmental movement there, and a lot of anti-nuclear campaigners have been very successful in shutting down the state's other nuclear power plants. And so there is some of political tension, you know, particularly since, you know, California is governed by a democratic coalition, and, you know, environmentalists and some anti-nuclear environmentalists are part of that. And so

resolving that and making the case to them is going to be part of the challenge from keeping nuclear running. Okay. Let's move on to a different kind of energy. a cosmic light show that's unusual. Tell us about that. Right. So a few days ago, scientists detected these eruptions on the sun called coronal mass ejections, and they send these waves of energized particles away from the sun and toward Earth. And when these particles hit the Earth, they can actually excite the gases in our atmosphere and cause them to light up, similar to how, you know, electricity excites neon gas and makes that light up. And this is the phenomenon that's behind the northern lights, you know, Aurora Borealis and also the southern lights near the South Pole.

Typically, they stay near the poles, but because we saw such an intense wave of these energized particles hitting the Earth this week, starting on Wednesday, they are now can be visible much further south in parts of even the northern continental United States in states like New York and in Oregon and in Iowa. And a storm is expected to continue tonight as well. And so this is sort of a very unusual event to see these lights from this far south. It's one of the few ways that we can perceive space weather from the ground. I'm always just a little too far south to see these.

Are they predictable at all? Yeah, actually, NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, they have a space weather prediction center where they monitor these kinds of things and they can actually put out models to see where they expect auroras to form. Now, you know, these magnetized particles, in addition to making auroras, if they get severe enough, they can damage electronics, communications, and satellites. And that is the main reason that they're monitoring it because they want to be able to anticipate these kinds of problems. But the strength of the recent storm is not expected to reach those levels.

And so we'll hopefully just get a nice light show out of it rather than any kind of disruptions. Yeah. Hopefully. Let's turn to something else in the skies. And this is the possibility of resurrecting supersonic air travel. I remember those SSTs. Yeah. This week, American Airlines said that they're going to be buying 20 supersonic aircraft from this company,

called Boom Supersonic. Supersonic aircraft are planes that travel faster than the speed of sound, about 768 miles per hour. And this follows an announcement from United Airlines while back that said that they would buy 15 airplanes from this company. So this seems to be a fairly large purchase order from airlines from this company that really hasn't built any planes yet, but they expect to begin test flights in 2026 and start carrying passengers in 2029.

Aside from trying to fly in a jet called boom. I don't know who came up with that name. I mean, the Concord, as I say, used to be in service and it was taken out of service. What makes this time different? What has changed? That's a great question. You know, the Concord, when it first came out, was, you know, hailed as the future of aviation, but it was quickly hit by an energy crisis.

You know, there was a big spike in fuel prices around the world. People started being concerned about the environmental impacts. You know, in order to go faster, you need to burn more fuel. And it wasn't very big inside. so it wasn't a very large and comfortable aircraft. It was a fairly small and cramped way to get around. And so the cost got too high. The environmental benefits were very low.

And so that's part of why the Concord was phased out. And many of those same concerns are still present now. You know, we're still facing a fuel crunch. We're still more concerned about things like climate change. And, you know, aviation is a major contributor. About 5% of warming can be attributed to the aviation sector in any given year. And so decarbonizing aircraft is going to be a big challenge. Now, this company, Boom Supersonics, says that they want to be net zero carbon from day one.

They have a suite of different tactics they want to use to do that, basically using renewable fuels and also perhaps a combination of offsets and other mechanisms. But this is really sort of an untested strategy and it would be really interesting if they can actually pull off the environmental component as well as they pull off the flying very fast component. Finally, heading into the weekend, we all know that thinking hard can leave you exhausted, but there's new research into why, right? Yeah, I read this piece by Claire Wilson and new scientists that looks at this recent study about why people feel tired after doing difficult mental tasks. Now, the conventional wisdom was that your brain doesn't actually use that much more energy when it's thinking hard versus when it's slacking off. But they found that there might be an actual mechanism that explains this kind of fatigue. So researchers at the Paris Brain Institute in France, they use this technique called magnetic resonance spectroscopy, which can track chemicals inside living tissue. and they asked 40 people to do these memory tasks inside a scanner where they had to look at letters and numbers and colors and try to remember different aspects about them.

And after six hours of these tests, they found that the people who did the harder task had elevated levels of this chemical called glutamate. Glutamate is an amino acid, but it also functions as a neurotransmitter. And the people who did the harder task had more of this glutamate and they reported being more tired. So this could potentially be a way to signal mental fatigue and a way that you can actually track this in people. Wow, very interesting. Always interesting stuff, Umer. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. My pleasure. Have a good weekend. Thank you. Have a good weekend, too. Omeri Fon, staff writer at Vox. We have to take a break, and when we come back, we'll talk about the big and small ways viruses have shaped our lives. This is Science Friday. I'm I'm Iroflato. From HIV to COVID to monkeypox, viruses have been on our minds lately.

Of course, viruses are no strangers. From the common cold. to cold sores to shingles, we've always had to deal with them. Sci-fi producer Christy Taylor is here with reflections from one microbiologist about living through multiple viral crises. Hey, Christy. Hey there, Ira. Why do I get the impression we are about to get philosophical today? Well, as you know, Ira, we live on a planet of viruses.

There are more individual viruses on Earth than there are stars in the universe. An ounce of ocean water contains more than 7 billion viruses. And almost all of them are harmless to us. You know when I think about it? Yeah, some are even helpful, like phages, which can kill harmful bacteria. Right, exactly. But as you mentioned, a few touch our lives in really major ways. We've been covering the anxiety and uncertainty around monkeypox, for example, and there's the virus that causes COVID.

But there's also the trauma of HIV and the AIDS crisis, which has. has shaped many, many lives, even since the advent of effective treatments. I talked to Dr. Joseph Osmondson. He's a self-described queer scientist who teaches microbiology at New York University. And he has a new book out called Virology, essays for the living, the dead, and the small things in between. It's part COVID quarantine diary, part meditation on his experience as a queer man growing up in a world where HIV has always existed. And he's got a little bit of praise also for the sheer beauty. of viruses as well. Beauty? I guess in the same way, a cruise missile is a thing of beauty. And so I'm

not quite sure I can agree here. I know, I know. I see where you're coming from Ira. But by the end of his book, I too was a convert. However, we did just start by talking about the basics, what a virus is and how it does so much for something so small. In general, we think about life conforming to what biologists call a central dogma. And the main component of the central dogma is that genes, genetic information is always, always, always, always, capital A encoded in DNA. And there are particular mechanisms through which genes get activated and turn into their protein products. Viruses don't even follow that basic tenant of life. So there are RNA viruses that encode their genome, their genetic material in RNA. There are single-stranded RNA viruses, double-stranded RNA viruses,

Stranded RNA viruses, single stranded DNA viruses, double stranded DNA viruses. And each virus is just trying to copy itself. So it will do whatever evolution has taught it to do to make more copies of itself. So the virus is going to use itself plus you, so itself plus your cell, uh, to copy itself. And we kind of classify viruses in different ways. One is by the genetic material it has RNA versus DNA. Another is whether the viral infection, is acute or persistent. Some viruses like HIV, like herpes virus. Once you get infected with it, that virus will live in your cells for the rest of your life.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, right, is an acute virus. The virus comes in, copies itself a bunch, and when your immune stem clears it, the virus has left your body. Viruses are curious, magical, wonderful, horrifying little thing. and each virus solves the problem of replication of copying itself in its own unique way. You know, the images that we see of viruses like that famous kind of gray ball for SARS-CoV-2, that is actually what that virus looks like under an electron microscope, plus some additional structural data from higher resolution methods. So when you look at those graphics, that actually is,

if you had an eye small enough to see, that really is what a virus looks like. The scale bar that you need is the cell that it would infect, and the cell is, you know, a thousandfold or more larger than that. So it's the virus would be just a tiny dot compared to the size of your cell. And you alluded to this a moment ago when talking about HIV. I think another famous example is, you know, herpes, people who get cold sores have herpes forever. Why am I not just me, but me plus herpes? Yeah. And there are two really interesting examples because HIV is with you in your T cells because

when it infects your cell as part of its life cycle, it literally cuts itself into your DNA. So your DNA, your molecule of heredity in those cells that will be passed on to the offspring of all of those cells become a virus human hybrid. And so that means that, you know, the virus obviously can pass from your. you to another person, but it will also pass from your cells, your T cells to all of your future T cells. Herpes is a little bit of a different example because it actually doesn't integrate into your DNA. Its DNA makes what's called an epizome, but that stays, that epizome knows how to copy itself

and stay with you. So the way I think about herpes infection is your DNA doesn't become a human herpes hybrid, but herpes is always in your cell, and it is always probably replicated. at some low level. And your immune system is kind of talking to that replication and kind of your immune system is turning it down. And, you know, the herpes is kind of rolling along. And so it's, you know, mostly from a lot of folks, if you're stressed or you have a dip in immunity, then the virus talks a little louder. And on top of being stressed, you have a cold sore. And then you're stressed about that. And then you're stressed about that. And, you know,

onward we go. You know, I think herpes really reframes for me, you know, and other very common viruses like Epstein-Barr virus, what it means to be a person, because most people have herpes. You know, we have to acknowledge that a small number of people who have herpes is sort of a debilitating illness. They have outbreaks all the time, and those people deserve better biomedicine and better care. And at the same time, having herpes is totally normal.

Most people do. And for most people, it's very manageable. And there's even some research that I talk about in my book that hurt. that herpes actually is activating the immune system to fight particular bacterial or parasitic infection. So in that way, you can almost think about a herpes infection as a component of your own immunity. Wow, that's really cool. I feel like I should be saying thanks, herpes. It's like, go herpes in this context. And some viruses kill bacteria for us. Oh, so that's what I did my PhD on, right? I was studying a bacteriophage. So these are viruses that only infect

bacteria and the virus I was studying infected staff bacteria. So these are actually viruses that have been used in humans. The virus that I studied came from biomedical research in Georgia, the country Georgia, where it was actually used as a therapeutic for people who had staff infections. So, you know, sort of the enemy of your enemy is your friend type of a situation. I feel like there's a handshake meme in there. I like the Spider-Man one. The Spider-Man, the two Spider-Men's pointing at one another. And, you know, the other fun thing about the virus that I studied in my PhD is just how, you know, really digging, I read, I looked at every single, you know, maybe 200 genes in that sucker. I looked at every single one of them. And like 80% of them were not related to any

other known protein, which doesn't happen in living things, right? Living things are related to other living things, whereas viruses evolve in these spaces and these ways that they can be super special little snowflakes. Well, and you have used some pretty admiring sounding language already in this conversation. I think you said wondrous at one point about viruses. What's your emotional relationship with these? I don't even know organism or life form is even the right word. But tell us about your feelings, Joe.

They're definitely not a science question about my feelings. This is deeply my brand. They're definitely not an organism. I call them a life form because they cannot replicate themselves so they're not too biologists living. I use the word awesome to talk about viruses in the sort of original sense of that word. As a queer person who was born in 1983, you know, around the six months where HIV was shown to cause what was then called grid and is now called HIV-AIDS, I've never not understood the deadly impact of a virus and the emotional weight of queer bodies being

put in black plastic garbage bags and left on the street because hospitals didn't want to deal with them, people being rejected by their families. I cannot take my lived experience away from the horror, the true horror, the horror of HIV, AIDS, both in the 80s, 90s and still now, because people are still getting HIV and people are still dying of AIDS and in this country. The horror that was 2020, the absolute abject horrific experience that has been watching, you know, people including two of my very dearest friends get monkeypox and have to isolate for weeks on end. It is remarkable how profound viruses, profoundly viruses have impacted every aspect of our lives at this point. And yet, the vast majority of the vast majority of the virus. there are more viruses on earth than there are stars in the sky.

The vast majority of viruses are phage that infect only bacteria. I had to undo a lot of my thinking about viruses that focused only on HIV AIDS as a viral model. And part of that was undoing shame and stigma that I had put on myself that said if I ever became HIV positive, I would be less desirable. I would love myself less. I would have less sex. And that was shame and stigma I had to undo in myself even. You know, HIV is a horror. It is a particle with nine genes made out of RNA.

And we have 40 trillion cells and 22,000 genes and 3.2 billion unique letters of genetic information. And RNA has figured out how to get into our cells, replicate in them, and even kill us. if we don't have biomedicine. And so there is something awesome in that power that it has and essential to understand how that works, because through understanding that awesome power, we can actually invent interventions, and we have. You're writing here, too, about the meaning of viruses and how that meaning changes. And, you know, the invention of the biomedicine, you know, Truvada, which is, you know, pre-exposure, prophylaxis, has changed the meaning.

of HIV also, and I should also acknowledge the anti-retroviral therapy as well for people living with HIV. How has the meaning of HIV changed both personally and socially in the decades since it first emerged? This is like one of the biggest thrusts of my book. It's not to feel nihilistic and helpless in the face of plague or a virus, is to understand that the virus, our body, and biomedicine make meaning together. And each one, one of those three things is able to shift meaning. You know, I think it's as essentially U equals you, which you mentioned, that someone who is HIV positive and undetectable because they're controlling HIV's replication

with antiretrovirals, it is impossible for that person to transmit HIV. It does not and cannot happen, which means actually that someone who's HIV positive is the safest sex partner you can have for HIV transmission. And that broke my brain open in the best way. That biomedical intervention, that really incredible science that took many years to show that, incontrovertibly, made me love myself differently because I could love myself as someone who is HIV negative and HIV positive. And it made me think about sex with people with HIV in a completely different way. So in 2012, before we had a pill to prevent HIV, whether or not a condom broke or you wanted to use one to, you know, 22, 10 years when you have the knowledge that HIV positive people are your safest sex partners in terms of HIV transmission and I can take a pill to make my risk so close to zero itself. You know, HIV's meaning just, it just shifts in profound ways that for me at least have undone,

some of the trauma of having grown up in the shadow of HIV. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. If you're just joining us, I'm Christy Taylor, and I am talking to microbiologist and author Joseph Oswinson. He's the author of the book Virology, essays for the living, the dead, and the small things in between. Do you think that, you know, that shadow and the trauma from those plague years when HIV was not survivable,

Do you think that's giving gay men and other LGBTQ people a different relationship with infectious disease? It certainly has given us the lived experience of doing harm reduction around infectious disease and a viral infection. Because for many years and still today, when you have sex, you are making a large number of complex decisions around risk for HIV and other infectious diseases that are generally front of mind for us. us. And so, you know, when you talk about COVID risk reduction or biomedical acceptance, right, am I going to get the vaccine for SARS-CoV-2? Well, gay people got that vaccine at higher rates than almost any other group because we're like, I would quite like to go back to being social without as much worry about getting an infection that could kill me. And oh, hey, there's a biomedical intervention. That's great. And, you know, I think the focus really needs to be on equity and how we

imagine the gay community as one thing and how the gay community in actuality or the queer community or our sexual network is an entirely other thing and that people in rural areas, people of color, black and brown people and indigenous people in particular are often left out of our imagination and that also leaves them outside of access to care that has become routine for many upper middle class gay men in New York City. And you're talking about the expense of these drugs. You know, it's not just the expense because there are interventions to make PrEP affordable for most people. It's also, if you talk about the rural South homophobia of health care

providers, some people literally live 60 plus miles from their nearest clinic. Do they have health insurance? Has information about PrEP even gotten out to them? You know, I have a gay doctor in Chelsea. And so he's just like, what's your prep deal? And I'm like, this is my prep deal. And then we sort it out. It's very easy. That is not the case for everybody, right? So it's, it is the cost, yes, but it is a million things besides, in addition to the cost, that have direct and dramatic impact on accessibility. You know, all of these lessons of HIV about, you know, who is still zero converting, who's still getting HIV today, and it's largely black and brown people, a lot of folks in the rural South, people outside of our imagination of gay sexual networks,

and people outside of our imagination of the queer community. Biomedicine is never enough. Biomedicine is magical. HIV meds save lives. They pulled people back from the brink of death in 1996. And yet, you know, I have a friend who I know, who's parents. died of HIV both, including one in and around 1996 because they weren't able to access those pills soon enough, right? There are people even now who get their HIV positive diagnosis when they are presenting with AIDS because they've been living with HIV without knowing it for years. So biomedicine is magical, but biomedicine without access, global access, is never, ever enough. Chris, we need to take a quick break, but what?

When we come back more from your conversation with NYU microbiologist Joseph Osmenson about how viruses are shaping our lives. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We've been listening to producer Christy Taylor's interview with microbiologist Joe Osmondson about growing up in the post-HIV world, how COVID-19 changed us, and how viruses may shape our lives in the future. His new book is Verology, Essays for the Living, the Dead.

and the small things in between. Here's more from that conversation. I want to go back to your book for a moment to the COVID-19 pandemic, where you write about the initial months of quarantine in 2020. You created a pod so you could see a couple of friends safely still. What felt important about sharing this experience

in a book-length meditation on viruses? You know, what I learned from reading folks who had written about the experience of HIV in the 80s and 90, it can be very dangerous to live through a trauma and not look at it closely. I lived in New York, which was profoundly impacted by fatalities. I mean, 24 hours a day, you could hear sirens in the distance carrying the sickest New Yorkers to the hospital where they may or may not get the care that they need. That lived experience of how we tried to care for one another in the face of that and how

horrible it was and how magic other people were, was essential to like really, really sit with profoundly to say, this is something that we need to emotionally process. Now, do I love looking back on that, given that COVID is still killing people and now monkeypox is here? It's an ongoing profound emotional experience, but I do think it's helpful to allow ourselves to feel even as we're still in it and allow ourselves to remember that profound experience. And, learn from it. Try to take how we cared for each other in spring and summer of 2020 to continue that, to do that hard work of putting care, community, and harm reduction at the forefront of our thoughts and minds, even years later. Yeah, and you write about, you know, you write about this

vision of care. You also write about some of the activism you were involved in with COVID in trying to get New York City to shut down earlier than it did. And there were so many different kinds of of response, even across the country, around the world, even within New York City. But why did people behave in different ways in response to this very sudden, terrifying time? Yeah, I mean, people deal with trauma differently. And there were systemic and governmental failures in messaging and providing people the tools that they needed to isolate, make sure that people had money in their pocket to pay their rents if their work was interrupted. I mean, the essay about my pod and the essay about activism, I view both the community care and the activism we were doing as a way to love, because one is in a personal care, and then activism at its best is care extended into politics.

And, you know, the RNA sequencing we tried to do like Seattle did that actually successfully got Seattle shut down very early in March. We failed. We didn't get the samples we needed to get the information. to force politicians to do the right thing based on science. And tens of thousands of people died who didn't need to die. As of last week, the CDC has relaxed the guidelines requiring quarantine after exposure to COVID-19. How does this relate to the vision of care that you tried to express in virology? Girl, girl, girl, girl. Oh, Lord.

I mean, it's so funny because the CDC is arguing that this is, quote, unquote, meeting people where they're at, which is an important notion in public health. You don't show up at someone's home and yell at them. You provide lots of options to mitigate risk that accepts that not everyone is able to do the very best perfect thing. We've been having this fight with monkeypox as well. Isolation for monkeypox is four to five weeks. And the guidance is to isolate.

But we also acknowledge that not everyone cannot go grocery shopping for four or five weeks, right? What are people going to do? And so, you know, we provide guidance that if you do have to leave the home, wear a mask, cover all your lesions. Meeting people where they're at is not get on an airplane, don't wear a mask. You know, we don't have any guidance that says to isolate after you test positive. That's not care. And this is so deeply tied to capitalism to the fact that the government views itself as getting out of the way of people making people work when they're sick like they used to before COVID. policies like universal health care and universal sick leave are the solutions to this problem.

You know, if you look at the UK's monkeypox data, they have way fewer cases per capita than the U.S., and the cases are now falling. They actually had fewer vaccines per capita, but had enough of a public health infrastructure that they could test and trans all the cases and keep the number down with non-pharmaceutical interventions largely. That's so frustrating. It's not rocket science, people, you know, but the notion of like ripping off the band-aid and saying, go do whatever you want is just really insulting to all of us who have been trying to both lead with care in our individual lives and then also advocate for care being center of public policy. Let's talk about monkeypox. Even as public health experts are stressing that the virus is not solely a sexually transmitted infection. And even as people are being very wary and careful about stigma against LGBTQ people who are the majority of the patients so far, even so we're seeing high profile newspaper and magazine editorials urging queer men and others in their sexual networks to have less sex. As someone talking about harm reduction this whole, this whole interview, what is your reaction? Man, the problem is not communicating to people that we need to for a time probably change our society. sexual behaviors. The thing is, this came from the community of people who have the most sex.

Everyone knew everyone who was sick. Everyone had a friend who was ill and saw how horrible it was and didn't want to get sick. This community, the very community of people that I'm in, has been making guidance that includes telling people that altering their sexual behaviors will lower their risk for infection, but also does not stigmatize group sex or going to Asana or bathhouse or having multiple partners on Grindr and says, you know, we need to wait until we get the biomedicine to protect us and then we need to study how well that biomedicine protects us largely vaccine. It is infuriating that the vaccine situation has been so horrific. So many people I know wanted to get vaccines, couldn't get vaccines, and then got sick. And that is a crime. So, you know,

it's coming from this, this fine line, this threaded needle, this knife blade edge, right, says community should be leading. We need to give people information, but we also need to not stigmatize this type of sex. And when a piece gets published in the Atlantic that opens with a 1927 bathhouse scene talking about the men being ghosts and not being able to look at each other and cites Larry Kramer and everyone else who agreed that, you know, sort of promiscuous sex gets in the way of intimacy. It is just doing harm to the community that's already suffering. It is implying that people got sick out of a lack of self-control as opposed to out of a lack of tests, treatment, and vaccines. And the community is really insulted. It feels patronizing.

And people are angry. Sure. If viruses are inherent to the world we live in, as we sort of started out this conversation acknowledging, and we're going to remain in conversation with them for the entirety of our existence as a species. What is your vision for how we can do better to reduce the death and pain of that conversation in the future? Biomedicine is an incredible human invention and we need every nation, everyone on earth should have their people able to do research science on the priorities of the folks who live there. So it should not be the U.S. shipping our monkeypox technology to Nigeria, although that is an immediate goal. But, you know, why does Nigeria and why does the Congo not have the biomedical infrastructure

themselves? Well, it's because of colonial extraction of the wealths of those nations and neo-colonial interactions between their governments and ours continuing that wealth extraction. So, you know, I think viruses point us to the home. that we do to one another. And we will never eradicate the risk of a viral infection, a new viral infection and old viral infection. But if we lead with care and if we look to the places where viruses have shown us that we've done harm to one another and try to repair that harm through that act of reparation, we will be protecting ourselves and one another from all viral threats. Joe, thank you so much for the time today. Oh, this was

such a great conversation. Thank you so much for having me. Dr. Joseph Osmondson teaches microbiology at New York University in New York City. His book is Virology, essays for the living, the dead, and the small things in between. And we've got an excerpt if you want to take a look up on our website. That's at ScienceFriiday.com slash virology. That's sciencefriety.com slash virology. I'm Christy Taylor. Thank you, Christy.

Our coverage of monkeypox is continuing as this global health emergency unfolds. We have a Q&A from past experts up on our website for you right now. ScienceFriday.com slash monkeypox. Again, science friday.com slash monkey pox. This is Science Friday from WNIC Studios. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KER. For WWNO. St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. Florida is home to one of our favorite charismatic creatures, manatees. We've spoken in the past about how populations of these mammals have gone way down over the years, and a lot of that has to do with the health of Florida waterways. And now there's

finally some good news off the coast of Tampa. The water, it seems, is in great shape, and its plant life is flourishing. This could be a great sign for manatees. Jolene me now is a manatee. Jolie now is a who loves diving into a good story, Steve Newborn, reporter for WUSF in Tampa, Florida. Welcome to Science Friday. Great to be here, Ira. Great to have you. Okay, so tell me about this area that you went to for this story. Right, this is just off the coast of Tampa Bay to the north.

It's called the Nature Coast, which probably gives you an indication of why it's so healthy. It's the second largest seagrass beds in the Gulf of Mexico, just second to Florida Bay, which is at the tip of the Everglades in southern Florida. And the reason it's so healthy is because it's relatively undeveloped. It's called the Nature Coast for a reason. It has several aquatic preserves there. There's very little development along the water because it's very marshy, the famed beaches that we have in the Tampa Bay area to the south of here. So not a lot of people live on here. And it's home to a lot of rivers that are pretty pristine that flow into the Gulf.

They have names like the Chasawitska, the Wakasasa, and the Wikiwachi, which some of your listeners may have heard about the mermaids there. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's very clean, pristine. And state officials and federal officials are trying to keep it that way. And so that's why the seagrass is growing so well there. That's right. Yeah, it's the water's clean. The problem we've had in the Indian River Lagoon over on the Atlantic Coast is that it's basically a kind of a closed ecosystem.

It's a long lagoon that only has a few cuts through the barrier islands to let the Atlantic Ocean flush. And that's why there's been so many nutrients that have been collecting there. And basically fueling algae blooms that kill the seagrass that the manatees need to survive. Yeah. That's the key here, the connection between the seagrass and the manatees is that there's a lot of sea grass they love to eat. Right. This area has a lot of flushing in the Gulf. I went out with a water quality scientist with the Southwest Florida Water Management District by the name of Chris Anastasio. Here's what he had to say about this. If anyone's been to Crystal River, Kings Bay, you know in the wintertime, that's the place to go to see manatees. Those manatees feed on these grasses. So the health of these grasses ensure that those manatees have plenty of.

food to eat. What were you doing out on the boat there with him? They do a survey of the seagrasses every once in a while just to kind of check and see how they're doing. And the beauty of this was, we weren't really expecting it, but there's more seagrass now than there was a few years ago, which is quite surprising. It's not the way in much of Florida, you know, with all the septic tanks and, you know, the lawn fertilizers that people put in the lawn that kind of just fuel these, these algae blooms. Well, this area, I mean, 80% of the sandy bottom was covered with seagrass. I mean, he went down there where he was picking up drift algae and handing it to me

and let me have a little taste. It was quite delicious, actually. I never thought I could eat this stuff. But it was really clear water. So the seagrasses have plenty of sunlight. Manatea's love it. Chow down. Yeah, I guess the rest of Florida could take lessons from the nature coast to remedy their

sea grass problem. Well, it was only that easy. The problem is we have so many people moving into the state, you know, 800 to 1,000 people a day, according to some estimates. And all those people like to live in the coast. They like to have boats, which are another threat to manatees. And they like to do a lot of flushing, which goes into septic tanks, and all this development kind of fuels the amount of nutrients going in the water. So this is, it's nice to see that not happening in at least one part of Florida. Is there anything you can do to remedy this issue?

Well, the state is mandating that more places hook up to water treatment systems rather than into septic tanks. And the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently agreed to a settlement with several environmental groups to publish a proposed manate-critical habitat revision in their plans by September of 2024. This rule would bring enhanced federal scrutiny to projects that might affect the manatees. Also, the state of Florida has agreed to spend $8.5 million on a variety of projects such as planting new seagrass and improving water quality, which is basically helping to build more water treatment plants to get rid of some of the septic tanks. Well, that's great news, and it's great to see that you have found a great spot where the seagrass is growing and the manatees are flourishing. It's beautiful. It's a beautiful spot. If anybody wants to get out there, it's scalloping season just ended, but we do have a lot of sponge diving. You know, Tarpon Springs is the big sponge diving place just south of there and a lot of good recreational fishing in this area. It's quite beautiful.

Well, the Chamber of Commerce welcomes you, and thanks you, Steve. Steve Newborn, reporter for WUSF in Tampa. Thank you for coming on the show. My pleasure, Ira. One last thing before we go. If you're anything like me, you may have a soft spot for fish tanks. I mean home aquariums. Yeah, for a long time, I had a saltwater reef tank in my living room. It was home to a few clownfish and eminies and corals. And you know, there was something really therapeutic about building and caring for my little underwater community.

There's a word for the craft of putting together an underwater habitat. aquascaping. Aquascaping is the subject of our newest Science Friday video out now. For most people that have never seen an aquascape, when they first see one, they're kind of blown away. It's this exciting new world that they didn't know was possible. There's a lot of invisible science that's happening in what looks like clear water. You have to really understand how the plants work and how the plants grow, but aquascaping really is an art form. Take a look at the video on our website, science friday.com slash tank.

And since aquascaping is a hobby, we've got some great resources for how you can get into this. Again, that's science friday.com slash tank. And that's about it for this hour. Here's Kathleen Davis with some of the folks who helped make this show happen. Thanks, Ira.

Nehima Ahmed is our manager of impact strategy. Felissa Mayors is our office manager. Annie Niro is. is our individual giving manager. Charles Berkwist is our radio director. And I'm Kathleen Davis, radio producer. Thanks for listening. Thank you, Kathleen.

BJ Leidman and compose our theme music, if you missed any part of the program, or you would like to hear it again. Subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato.