Science Friday - Icefish, Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster, Wireless Baby Monitoring. March 1, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: March 1, 2019

During an electrical system test early in in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded. The disaster at the plant was not caused solely by the test, however—a perfect storm of engineering and design missteps, operational errors, and cultural problems all aligned to bring about the catastrophe. In his new book, Midnight In Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster, journalist Adam Higginbotham describes the events that led up to the meltdown, the dramatic, heroic, and perhaps futile attempts to lessen the extent of the accident, and the attempts by Soviet officials to contain the political ramifications of the explosion. He joins Ira to tell us more. Plus: Every vertebrate has red blood cells—that is, except for a small family of fish from the notothenoid family known collectively as “icefish.” These Antarctic-dwelling fish have translucent blood, white hearts, and have somehow adapted to live without red blood cells or hemoglobin. H. William Detrich, a professor of marine and environmental sciences at Northeastern University, explains how scientists are trying to decipher the secrets of the mysterious icefish. What’s more terrifying than becoming a new parent? Starting out as new parents in the Newborn Intensive Care Unit, where babies spend their first days entangled in wires attached to sensors that monitor their vital signs. But in the digital age, why must wires and sensors take up so much real estate on a tiny baby? That’s the question driving the development of a new monitoring device—a small wireless sensor that takes the scary “science experiment” effect out of the NICU, and gives parents more time to cuddle with their newborn. John Rogers, professor of material science and engineering and director of the Center for Biointegrated Electronics at Northwestern University, joins Ira to discuss how the new device could transform neonatal care in the U.S. and in developing nations around the world.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, we'll be talking about the mind-boggling details of the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. But first, let's talk about blood. In nearly every vertebrate on Earth, parakeets, dogs, lions, sharks, us, blood is red, distinctively so. You all know that. And there's a reason for this. The hemoglobin in red blood cells binds oxygen molecules and helps them get to our cells. Without those red blood cells, we be anemic, have far lower capacity to use the oxygen

we breathe. But venture to Antarctica, and you will find a biological marvel. The world's only white-blooded fish, the ice fishes. They've evolved translucent blood free of red blood cells and iboglobin and are somehow doing just fine in the cold waters of the southern ocean. How do they do it? Researchers writing in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution this week have clues from the ice fish genome. Here to tell us more is Dr. Bill Dietrich, Professor of Biochemistry and Marine Biology at Northeastern University's Marine Science Center in Boston. Welcome, Dr. Dietrich. Well, thank you very much.

It's a pleasure to be on your show. It's a pleasure to have you. Thank you. Paint this a picture of the ice fish forest. So, you know, we're on the radio. What does it look like? Okay. Well, imagine a fairly large fish, about half a meter in length, weighing them one to two kilograms, has very large crocodile-like head and a rather small body.

Its skin is scaleless and very ghostly pale. And although you can't see this, it has anaphy, running through its white blood. And so more than just one fish, it's actually a group of species, correct? Correct. It's a group of 16 species, none of which produce red blood cells. They're all profoundly anemic. Who first discovered this?

Well, this was first recognized by whalers around the turn of the 1900s when they were in the Southern Ocean, and they would catch fish. you know, open them up and even eat them, but the fish they noticed didn't have red blood. In 1929, Norwegian zoologist named Ditloferustad actually was able to capture one of these fishes, and he communicated this finding to some of his colleagues who later followed up on it. So, okay, what is the magic the fish does that we can't do? How does it survive without red blood cells? Well, that's very interesting question, of course.

Something that's been something I've been looking into quite a bit. So what do they do? They've given up on red blood cells, but it was not a lethal condition for them. On the other hand, it wasn't absolutely positive because we've seen that they've evolved very large vascular in a much expanded heart. They don't have scales on their skin so they can breathe through their skin. There are a number of compensations that allow them to do very well in this cold, oxygen-rich ocean that they live in. And your team sequenced the genome of one species of these ice fish.

Any clues to how it got this white blood? Because I've watched videos of this, it's just like a little serum, right? That's right. We have been able to establish that virtually all of the hemoglobin genes are absent in this genome. We are also following up to try to find out the chicken or versus the egg question. Did these fish lose their red blood cells first and therefore didn't have a cell to express hemoglobin in? Or alternatively, did they lose their hemoglobin genes and then the red cells, withered. So that's a question that we have to follow up on. So you say that there is enough oxygen

circulating in this serum that is instead of the red blood cells. Is that because they live in such cold water in Antarctica that there's plenty of oxygen in the water that can suffuse also through their skin and keep them going? Yes. The Southern Ocean is essentially saturated in oxygen, among other reasons, because it's very stormy there, and that mixes the water column. And so I guess, in the long-term global warming would be a threat to these fish? These fish, in fact, compared to their red-blooded relatives, are much more sensitive temperature, and they, in fact, are likely to be canaries in the coal mine if we see fish beginning to drop out as the Southern Ocean warms.

So these fish basically have had to find a way to adapt to not having the red blood cells. That's right. And I think the key clue to that is that you can take one of the red-blooded fishes that are very closely related. And you can expose that fish to carbon monoxide so that all of the hemoglobin is poisoned, no longer able to carry oxygen. And yet this red-blooded species doesn't die either. So what that's telling us is that even the red-blooded fishes in the Southern Ocean are relying on their red cells more as a reserve capacity for oxygen. And the red-blooded fishes are also living on dissolved oxygen like the ice fishes are.

We've talked about how cold adaptation in animals might help us with biomedical research, like freezing organs for transplant, for example. Is there anything the ice fish and its blood could teach us about ourselves and help us? Yes. Well, I think that the answer there is that we still don't know all of the genes that are involved in making red blood cells. And these fish that have lost the capacity to do so, that's going to leave a genomic signature behind. And that genomic signature is likely to reveal new genes for us to investigate, and potential new targets for therapy for anemia.

Have you caught one of these fish yourself? Yes, I have, yes, quite often, yeah. In a net with a hook, how easy are they to catch? We typically use a small scientific net that we trawl behind the Lawrence M. Gould, our research icebreaker in the Antarctic Peninsula. Years ago, when I was in Antarctica, I was watching scientists, catch what they call the Antarctic cod fish at those times.

They were living like at the bottom of the continental shelf a thousand feet down. They'd bring them up. They'd drain the blood because they were looking at the antifreeze. They were studying the antifreeze in the blood. And then they would smoke the fish and it was so delicious,

I remember, because they didn't need the fish. They just needed the blood. Have you tasted this fish at all? It's good? Yes. And in fact, the ice fish that the genomes, sequenced, that species is very, very good. And these fish have the same kind of antifreeze that other fish have in their regular blood system so that they don't freeze?

Right. They have the same antifreeze, in fact, as the codfish that you experienced. So what do you want to know now? What's your next step in this research? Well, the next step in the research is to try to figure. figure out the chicken and egg question, whether red blood cells were lost first or whether hemoglobin was lost first, and subsequently the red cell disappeared from the blood profile. And how do you do that?

Well, we're going to need to sequence other genomes, other ice fish genomes and genomes of the red-blooded relatives. And by applying phylogeny, we should be. able to tease out which of the events occurred first. This is a long-term goal, but I think it's doable. What's your suspicion if you were, you know, if I was a betting man? If you were a betting man, yeah. If I was a betting man, I think that the hemoglobin genes went first. That does make sense, doesn't it? It does make sense. And partly I base that on prior research that we've done across the 16 species, where we see that there are just a couple of different

gene variants in terms of the globin genes that have been lost. So I guess based on that, I would be willing to bet that the hemoglobin genes went first. And why would that be an advantage to them to survive? Well, not so much loss of hemoglobin, but the loss of the red cell. Imagine if we take a unit of human blood and cool it down to refrigerator temperatures, it becomes rather viscous. And viscous fluid is harder to pump through circulation than one that isn't. So potentially the ice fishes, by giving up their red blood cells, have, reduce the energy that they need to pump their blood fluid, if you will.

That's so it's easier for them that way. Now, the ice fish seem to be the only vertebrates with no red blood cells whatsoever. To me, that's kind of unheard of, an exception like that in biology to lose something that's so conserved in a whole group of organisms. Yes, and it's quite remarkable. Well, Darwin actually had a term for creatures such as the ice race. He called them wrecks of ancient life because they'd lost important traits that were present in their ancestors. And in the case of the ice fish we're talking about, it's the loss of red blood cells and also the loss of dense bones.

Oh, so it's, are they more cartiliginous? Yeah, they have more cartilaginous. They're actually rather floppy animals because they don't have, their bones are not firm, you know. So I guess the term ice fish would be because they live among where the ice is, but not that they're frozen. You know, this reminds me of cavefish losing their eyes and not needing them because they don't need them. They don't need them. They get along fine without them. That's right. They don't see any photons of light.

They don't. They actually Capefish start out making an eye as they're developing, and then that primitive eye regresses, and they're blind. Fascinating. Thank you, Dr. Dietrich. Thank you. We're much more informed now, and thank you for taking time to be with us today. Well, thank you very much for having me,

and I hope I've stimulated some interest in these really unusual creatures. You certainly have, Dr. Bill Dietrich, Professor of Biochemistry and Marine Biology at Northeastern University in Boston. We're going to take a break and come and talk about the nuclear reactor explosion in Chernobyl with an author who has written the book, Midnight in Chernobyl. This, believe it or not, it's a page turner. Yeah, stay with us. We'll be right back after this break.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, during an electrical system test, reactor 4, of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. A helicopter flying through a toxicly radioactive plume had its radiation meter register radioactivity higher than anything expected even during a nuclear war, prompting one officer on board to yell at the pilot,

you've killed us all. Yet the effects of that explosion and the contamination its spread were felt far outside the Soviet Union, the worst nuclear disaster in history. And the explosion at that plant was not caused just by the test. A perfect storm of engineering and design missteps, operational errors, and cultural problems all aligned to bring about disaster. I know all about this because I just read a great new book by Adam Higginbotham called Middite in Chernobyl, the untold story of the world's greatest nuclear disaster.

Just out from Simon & Schuster. Welcome to Science Friday. having me. We have a little excerpt at our website at ScienceFriday.com slash midnight. I think of all the things in the book that I read, when he yelled at, that was the most dramatic thing I had, you know, scary. Yeah, I mean, there's a few moments in the book

where people told me things like that. And in the interviews I did to get that material, I would think, oh, okay, I'll put that in. Before we get into what happened, I want to talk about how you got the information, the great, detail that's in this book. How were you able to find it? Well, I think, well, there are a few different avenues of doing it, but primarily what I was interested in when I began reporting on it, which was back in 2006, was in meeting eyewitnesses to find out exactly those kind of telling

details that you can only get by talking to people. So, you know, I would interview them and ask them how they felt at particular moments and what they could see. But another really a really important part of the reporting on the book was being able to go back to the places where all of this stuff had happened because obviously, you know, the plant and the town that was built to accommodate the staff of the plant was all evacuated in the immediate aftermath of the accident. So that meant that when I was reconstructing

what people were doing the day before or what they were doing during the evacuation, it meant that I could go back to the town or I could walk the streets and take the paths that they did and go to their apartments and see what the view was. So that was a really important way of getting those kinds of details in the book. And you had no fear about leftover radiation or anything that you were going to. I have plenty of fear, of course I do.

I'm not crazy to you. But to be honest, it's not that dangerous. I mean, Pripy at the town that accommodated the workers is now a major tourist attraction. I think 60,000 people went there last year. 844724-8255 is our number. Okay, let's talk about the accident itself. You go through it in graphic detail, minute by minute. So much is going on.

I'm not going to ask you to do that because it would be very difficult to keep track. But basically, what's the simple answer to what went wrong in Chernobyl? The simple answer is that the reactor was badly designed, and the people that had designed the reactor knew 10 years before of many of these defects in the reactor. but they did not do anything to fix them and they did not keep the staff that were operating a reactor fully informed of those faults or of their significance. And as a result of that, on the night of the accident,

all of these different faults fell into a kind of deadly alignment. And there reached a point where the staff of the plant had inadvertently put the reactor into a state of colossal instability. And all that was required at that point was to take a further action, which would unfortunately bring into effect one of the most serious faults, designed faults of the reactor, which was in the control rods, which could be used to bring about an emergency shutdown of the reactor, in which you want to reduce reactivity to zero so that the reactor is turned off. But there was a fault in the rods that meant that for a split second under certain circumstances,

instead of decreasing reactivity within the reactor core, they would increase it. And that was the precipitating action that caused the explosion. And nuclear reactions happened so quickly that even that fraction of a second was critical. Exactly. So I think looking at the records that we now have of what happened, you know, the final effects within the reactor took place. so quickly that the instruments that were supposed to be recording what was going on inside the reactor couldn't record what happened. It happened so swiftly.

And the culture was also part of the problem. You had officials, as you say, who might not know the actual workings of the reactor with the final say in how to operate it. And there were people, as you say, who knew there were problems, were not listened to. Yeah. Right? I mean, they were colossally overconfident because they had been assured that such an action. accident in which a reactor could explode. This reactor in particular could explode. It was impossible. It would never happen. It was much like the Titanic, you know, which was unsinkable. This was

a reactor that could never explode. But you also have the Communist Party in charge having to put the front up of saying, you know, this can't happen to us, right? This is the Soviet system, and we're better than Three Mile Island. That might have happened earlier. So the official explanation within the nuclear industry was that, you know, three mile Island had happened because American nuclear technicians of the plant were so poorly trained. You know, there were ex-Navy people, and they just didn't really know what they were doing. And that kind of accident could never happen in the Soviet Union because Soviet nuclear engineers were far better trained. So in the moments leading up to the accident, you had people who didn't entirely understand the massive work of

engineering, guiding delicate procedures and reacting in the wrong way. once things started to go wrong. Well, it wasn't so much that they didn't understand nuclear engineering. It was just that they had been led to believe that the device that they were using was far more, was far less sensitive than it actually turned out to be. They thought that, you know, their experience had taught them that sort of bending the rules and pushing the reactor around, you know, it was kind of like a Labrador that you could just, you know, poke and do anything he wanted with.

You know, they knew nuclear technology was dangerous, but they become accustomed to the idea that this reactor was just something that was, you know, endlessly flexible. And they were very, they took their time about alerting the people who lived around the neighborhood that there was something really going wrong here. They did. They waited. The officials who came down from Moscow who were put in charge of trying to contain what had happened, waited almost 36 hours before evacuating the local population. from the town. And by the time they left, that was at least 27.5,000 people who'd been exposed to fallout coming out of the reactor for that time. To give our listeners a flavor of the book, I'm going to ask you to read a big from page 94

of the book for us. Sure. It's a picture of the chaos right after the explosion. The two men turned into the corridor and reeled outside into the night. standing no more than 50 metres away from the reactor, Yuri Tregub and Alexander Yovchenko were among the first to comprehend what had happened to Unit 4. It was a terrifying apocalyptic site. The roof of the reactor hall was gone,

and the right-hand wall had been almost completely demolished by the force of the explosion. Half of the cooling circuit had simply disappeared. On the left, the water tanks that had once fed the main circulation pumps dangled in mid-air. Yvchenko knew at that moment that his friend Valeri Kodemchuk was certainly dead. The spot where he'd been standing lay beneath a steaming pile of rubble, lit by flashes from the severed ends of 6,000-volt cables as thick as a man's arm, swaying and shorting on everything they touched, showering the wreckage with sparks.

Wow. Wow. I mean, the picture of what that site must have been like right there in that early morning. is unimaginable. Can you compare it to anything else? It was like a war scene, a bombing? I mean, I find it even having spoken to the people that saw it, I find it unimaginable. And when, you know, because Alexander Eichenko,

who I mentioned in this passage, described this scene to me. And I found it kind of unbelievable that I was sitting opposite him after he had witnessed this. describing it to me. So, no, I mean, you know, a lot of these scenes are described in detail

in the book, but I, like you, find it hard to imagine what it was like to witness it. And the plant operators really did not know immediately after the initial explosion. How bad it was? There was a lot of disbelief. I mean, Victor Burhanov, the plant director,

is, you know, still held responsible for not adequately warning people, warning the plant staff as well as the population of the city of what had happened. But I really think, having spoken to him and spoken to the people who were around him at the time, that his mind simply couldn't comprehend what he was looking at.

And that's the case with several people who were there at the time, nuclear experts who were looking down from helicopters onto the open face of the reactor, thinking to themselves, well, this just can't be. Right, right. And so there was really no atomic bomb explosion. There was not a lot. But would you describe it more like a dirty bomb happened?

It was much more like a dirty bomb because what happened was, we think, because nobody knows exactly what happened. To this day? No. But the most realistic and accurate reconstructions that we know of suggest that it was a massive steam explosion within the reactor, followed by a hydrogen gas explosion. And it was those two explosions that tore the reactor and then the entire building apart.

You tell some amazing and horrible stories about the workers being ordered to go up onto the lid of the reactor to try to hammer in some stuck control rods. Three guys were sent from the control room to try and force the control rods back into the reactor to try and stop the chain reaction. But of course, by this time the reactor no longer existed. They found that when they got there, there was no roof on the reactor on the core. The core was totally exposed, right? Exactly. And they would look down and see a glowing blob at the bottom. I mean, I find it impossible to imagine what they saw.

And, you know, those three men, without wishing to introduce any spoilers into the conversation, those three men did not survive long afterwards. Let's go to the phone and see if we can get some reactions from our listeners. Let's go to Gary in Sacramento. Hi, Gary. Hi, good morning. I'm getting goosebumps from recollect. Well, Gary, you're there?

You hear me. Yes, go ahead. Can you hear me? You dropped out for a second. Okay. Back then, I was a tech sergeant in an Air Force laboratory that was responsible for analyzing airborne or microscopic airborne particulate, and we got real busy during the month of Chernobyl. Where was that? We were.

I'm sorry? Where were you stationed? Well, your screener asked me if I was in the Russian. I said, no, it was pretty close. I was in Sacramento, California. The first of the lab is. and it's part of the Air Force technical application center. Anybody wants to verify who is doing what,

but we were supposed to get the particulate out of the airborne samples and get it analyzed and figure out how much of what was going where. And like I said, it got real busy that month. I'll bet it did. Thank you for taking time to talk with us. Thanks for that call. Our number 844-724-825. We're talking with Adam Higginbotham, author of the book, Midnight in Chernobyl,

the untold story of the world's greatest nuclear disaster. I reflator, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. You know, the book is so richly full of details and sequence. It is like you've put a page Turner together. How difficult was that to be able to reconstruct the story of everything that happened in sequence? That's a very good question. It was pretty tricky because there were quite a few. When I started reporting on it, more than 12 years ago,

there were a few English language accounts of what had happened, but they were either largely technical or there were big holes in the story. And as I began talking to people, I discovered that there were a lot of things that were wrong in those accounts. So really what it was was a matter of finding both individuals who could tell me what really happened at specific instances in the story, and in finding documentation that could help either back that up or fill other holes in the story. Were people in Russia helpful? Did they put any roadblocks up for you?

No, I mean. Did somebody say, hey, let me open up this little drawer. I've got some files you might be interested in. Well, I did. I mean, I had a lot of help from people in Ukraine, and specifically, I had a lot of help from the Chernobyl Museum in Kiev. And the deputy director for science of the museum provided me with a huge amount of not only documents, but also handwritten memoirs, photographs, pieces of documentation like telegrams and stuff like that. And at one point she did say to me, after I'd spent several weeks basically convincing her that what I want to do. wanted to do was possible because initially when she told when I told her about it she just said well nobody could do this is simply impossible to tell an objective and complete account of everything

that happened and then at the end of one meeting she said she'd apparently come round to this idea and she did and she said she literally reached into a drawer and she said well if you're serious about this before you leave I've got something here that you might might think is useful and it was like a three-inch Manila binder, which was the original interior ministry working record of the accident from the police station in Pripyat that they'd kept from the morning of April of 26th to May the 6th. And it was all handwritten notes and type reports and, you know, footnotes written by KGB offices. And it, like a lot of the other documents that had been kept at the time, had been intended to be destroyed,

both to limit the spread of contamination and, I think, the spread of information about what had happened. But the officer who was charged with disposing of it thought to himself, well, this actually might be of historical importance. So I'm just going to take it home and hang on to it and see why. And he kept it in his garage for several years. And then after the fall of the Soviet Union

and the revolutions in Ukraine brought it to the museum and gave it to Anna at the museum and said, this might be important. So you were probably the first one to see it following. Well, certainly one of the first people is because she kept it in her desk drawer. So she understood how important that was. In her desk drawer, not somewhere down the hall. No.

This is stuff you have to protect. I was only allowed to photograph it in her office. It never left the room. Does anybody else know until now that she handed this over to you? That I don't know. All right, we're going to take a quick break and talk lots more about the book. It's a great book. It's called Midnight in Chernobyl, the untold story of the world's greatest nuclear disaster.

Adam Higginbotham. Is it Higombottom or Higginbotham? Higginbotham. That's what I thought. He's here with me. Our number 844-724-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFire. Lots of tweets coming in.

We'll go to the phones when we get back after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking with journalist Adam Higginbotham about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. He is author of Midnight in Chernobyl, the untold story of the world's greatest nuclear disaster, just out from Simon & Schuster,

and you can read an excerpt from the book on our website at sciencefriady.com slash midnight. Having, in my career, covered Three Mile Island, I was very interested in, I spent two weeks in Middletown there, and one word that kept popping up all the time was the China Syndrome. Because the movie had just come out, Jane Fonda, you know, very much like... It's a good movie.

Life imitating art, you know. You talk about in the book. Was there fear that this thing, the core would just melt down and go right through to the groundwater like they were afraid of it through Mount Island? They were absolutely terrified that that was going to happen. How close did he get to that? Well, the part of the problem was that although it would be reassuring to imagine from our standpoint now that, you know, this was something that could. only happen in the Soviet Union and that if such a thing had happened here, we would all have been very well prepared for it. The truth is that nobody on Earth had ever prepared to deal with a nuclear catastrophe on this scale.

And nobody knew what was going on. And nobody had any decent projections within the Soviet Union of what might be happening if this nuclear fuel started to melt down. And they had great suspicion that it was because they were taking air samples from which they could measure the isotopes that were being released from the... from the fire and the melting fuel. And yes, they were very concerned that this molten corium, as it came to be known subsequently, this mass of molten uranium fuel

and bits of the reactor itself and bits of concrete had got so hot that it would burn through the base of the reactor itself and then burn through all of the basement rooms directly below it and then enter the earth beneath and burn through into the water table. And the plant was built by the River Pripyat, which was a tributary of the NEPA, which led directly to the Black Sea. Wow.

And so they were concerned that this was, first of all, they were concerned that it was going to contaminate the water supply for two-thirds of Ukraine. But then also they were concerned that if it reached these water tanks, which were sealed water tanks in concrete boxes directly beneath the reactor, it could cause another huge steam explosion, which would release yet. more radio activity into the atmosphere. 844-724-8255. Let's go to Ryan in Pittsburgh. Hi, Ryan. Hi, how are you doing? Fine, go ahead. Hey, I just wanted to talk about the sarcophagus. I'm not sure how much you go into it in the book, Adam,

but just the scale of the engineering of the sarcophagus that is surrounding the reactor right now, It's the largest structure ever moved by man. It cost a billion and a half dollars, and it required a multinational effort and will last 100 years. In theory. But the documentary that I watched on the subject said there was a gentleman who kept driving home the point that we are going to have to contain this for longer than mankind has existed. Right. Yeah, the nut, you know, the deal that you make with nuclear energy,

because if something goes wrong, you have to live with it. Yeah, which is exactly what's happening with Three Mile Island. Yeah. Let's go to the phones to Mike in Pensacola, Florida. Hi, Mike. Hi, I have a great show. I just want to pass on to your listeners what it was like to be in Moscow at the time. I was in the embassy at the time,

and we received calls from the Western press about midday on Monday to 28. I understand that the Swedish ambassador was meeting with the Soviet foreign minister, Grimico, around 3 o'clock on Monday. And then it wasn't until 9 o'clock at night on the major news program, Bremia, that about the fifth story came on in announcement saying there was an accident in Chernobyl. There are victims, in the word in Russian, gherjerkry, not clear of deaths or injuries. And then the last statement was measures are being taken. and that was the end of the broadcast on that point, and then they moved on to some agricultural success. And then in the aftermath of that,

whenever we would try to engage the Soviet interlocutors, they would push back and not using the answer much, and then they'd say, but you had three-mile island. So that was the context for how it was broadcast to the Soviet people at the time, and the story did not appear on Tuesday to 29th in Provida either. So people, if you didn't see it at 9 o'clock, you were in the dark for the rest of the day. Lastly, I'll just mention that Gorbachev sent his wife, Riza, to Kiev in the days immediately afterwards,

he showed the flag a bit, and, of course, she had an early death in cancer. Who knows what caused it several years later. But anyway, great story. It was quite momentous. You were a diplomat. You're taking my call. You're a diplomat in Moscow. Yeah.

Okay. Thanks for it. He's taking notes for its follow. In fact, that's one part of the book is how people started detecting it in other countries. Right. Because the cloud started spreading. Yeah, because the Soviet Union had experienced numerous nuclear accidents before this, and they'd all been successfully covered up.

But what happened with this one is they tried to do the same thing, but the radiation that was released by the accident was of such a scale that it was detected at a nuclear power station in Sweden, more than 700 miles away on Monday morning. And that's how we in the West found out what had happened, not because the Soviets announced it. It's interesting to learn also that this design reactor is still operating, this kind of reactor. Still operating.

I think that with significant modifications, we should say. But I think there are still 11 operating in Russia now, yeah. And the official death toll from the accident is something like 30 people? They waffle on that a little bit? No, that remains the official death toll of the accident, 31 people, but they had died. They were the people who died of acute radiation syndrome and similar complaints within five months after the explosion. And really, you know, then a further few dozen people have subsequently been confirmed as dead as a result of what happened. But beyond that, you know, deaths of radiation exposure within the wider population,

five million people lived in the area that was worst affected by the fallout. You know, those figures are largely projections and estimates at this point. It's like the figures here in New York for the Twin Towers of 9-11. We have an official number, but we have all these first responders who keep dying from the effects of having been there. In a few minutes, I have left. What shocked you the most? What did you find the most interesting, surprising, you know, when you started doing your research? Or did people start coming to you and saying, hey, I've got a story.

to tell? I'll let you know. I think what I learned is you have to be careful of those people. Is that right? Because the people who say, I've got a story to tell are the people who've got some kind of often quite odd agenda. So there were a few of those. But I have to say that the most surprising thing was one of the first things I found out when I began reporting on the subject for the magazine story that I began work on in 2006. And was one of the initial points that made me think that I should write a book about it, which is where I was interviewing a physicist who'd been on the scene immediately after the explosion in Kiev. I interviewed him the same question I'd asked a lot of eyewitnesses during that reporting trip, which was,

what was for you the most frightening moment? And, you know, in most cases, I expected I knew the answer, which was, well, there was this tremendous explosion, the walls of the building shook. I thought the Americans had attacked us at last. You know, I thought the world was going to do that. But he didn't say that. He said, well, I think the most frightening moment for me was around May the 5th, when we really feared that there was going to be a second catastrophic explosion

so large that we were all going to die instantly. And at that point, you know, I'd never read about this in any English language sources. And I was talking to him through a translator, and I just had to say, I'm sorry, what did he say? What was that date? Adam, it's a great book. Thank you.

Great book. Adam Higginbotham, his new book, Midnight in Chernobyl, the untold story of the world's greatest nuclear disaster, and you can read an excerpt from the book on our website at ScienceFriday.com slash midnight. What's more terrifying than becoming a new parent? Well, finding your newborn in the neonatal ICU, all tangled in wires attached to sensors that might, monitor his or her vital signs. And most of the time, parents can only helplessly look into the crib, see what looks more like a science experiment, right, than a kid. But in this digital age,

why must wires and sensors take up so much real estate on a tiny baby? That's the question driving the development of a new monitoring device, a small wireless sensor that takes the scary science experiment effect out of the NICU and gives parents more. more time to cuddle with their newborn. Joining me to tell us more is John Rogers, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and Director of the Center for Biointegrated Electronics at Northwestern University.

Welcome to Science Friday. Yeah, hello. Hey, thanks for having me. That is a scary sight, is it not, when you see a newborn? Well, it's pretty daunting. I mean, I don't have any personal experience with that, but we work with parents of, you know, premature babies all the time,

and it's pretty easy to see. see, you know, the kind of experience that they're going through. And so our hope here is to, you know, through advances in engineering science, sort of change that situation and make it a little bit more humane for the babies, the parents, the nurses, the neonatologists, and, you know, allow things to be done in a different way. So you have a wireless sensor that is recording the heartbeat, the body temperature, the blood flow, transmitting it to where? It transmits it to an external data recording device, and so we can send it to a smartphone or a tablet or a laptop computer or a desktop system, anything that's equipped with Bluetooth wireless functionality.

And so then mom or dad or any of the doctors or nurses can come in and actually pick up and cuddle the baby because it has no wires attached to it? Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of several advantages of the technology relative to, you know, kind of the old way of doing things. The other is that the hardwired devices demand rather strong adhesive tapes to keep them in good contact with the skin of the baby. But the problem is these premature babies have very underdeveloped skin. It's very mechanically fragile. Those tapes have to be removed on a 24-hour cycle to clean and maintain the baby.

And that peel-back process oftentimes leads to skin injuries, peeling of the skin. And this is a fairly frequent occurrence. And so by eliminating those strong adhesive tapes in the wires, replacing that kind of approach with a soft skin-like, lightweight sensor that can just gently adhere to the surface of the skin. You really eliminate that risk. So there's a whole series of benefits of this technology over, you know, kind of the clinical standard that's out there today. This is Science Friday from WNIC Studios. I'm Ira Flato talking with John Rogers.

Okay, so what was the hardest thing to get right about these wireless sensors? Well, there's a lot of hard things, I guess. I mean, if you can think about these devices, you know, as a skin-like type of platforms, it's radically different than what you see in consumer gadgetry today. You know, so your smartphone is a great piece of technology, but it's rigid, it's inflexible, it's hard. It's, you know, totally incompatible with soft tissues of the human body, the skin being one example. So we really had to reformulate electronics into an entirely different form factor, one that adopts the thickness, the mechanical properties, the bending rigidity of the skin itself to allow this gentle, conformal interface to this very fragile surface so that that skin contact can be used as a window for measuring underlying body processes. So I think the form factor was a challenge.

The other thing that kind of flows from that is a device that's sort of paper thin and has this kind of. of mechanics can't be powered in the usual way. You can't kind of plug in a double A battery. I mean, it just completely destroys the mechanics. You have to think about ways to drive power efficiency of the computational resources that are available on these devices and the kind of radio frequency communication links that allow us to stream the data, do all that in a very power efficient way. And we are actually able to operate these devices battery-free. So we actually use a wireless power transfer scheme to deliver, you know, the operational power to the platforms, use that same link to pull data back out. So there were some

challenges in that sense as well. I would say the third is that it's not actually a single device. It's a pair of devices, one that goes on the chest, the other one goes on the foot, and they operate in a time-coordinated fashion to reproduce all of the clinical grade accuracy that's supported by these hardwired, taped-on sensors in this much less invasive kind of skin-like wireless platform. Is it possible now then for the baby took a home, still wirelessly wired? Well, we think so. You know, if you take a look at the parents, I mean, they're certainly nervous with their babies in this kind of science experiment, as you

described it with all the wires and so on. It turns out that they get even more nervous when they think about taking the baby home and removing it from all of that monitoring equipment. And I think these kinds of technologies would very naturally translate to the home setting so that the monitoring could continue, and the attending physicians, the nurses and neonatologists could have access to that data, thereby extending sort of the NICU level of monitoring into a home setting. And I think there will be a lot of value there.

Is it possible yet to do that? I mean, take it home and hook up to your home Wi-Fi? Well, yeah, we are able to do that now. And so, you know, this paper represents kind of the state-of-the-art for us about, you know, four to six months ago is just kind of the cadence of how scientific publication works. And so in the meantime, we've sort of adapted these platforms to align with manufacturing practice in sort of cutting-edge consumer electronics technology. And the goal there is to deploy these devices into the developing world, so almost like a

home setting, you know, certainly much different than the level four NICU that we're operating in at Lurie Children's Hospital downtown Chicago. So with partnerships and funding from the Gates Foundation and the Save the Children Foundation, we will be deploying tens of thousands of these units into the developing world, starting with Zambia in April, extending to India, Pakistan, and Kenya by the end of the year. So you'll have a sort of double duty for these, regular third world company, countries, and also right here? Well, we think so, you know, so we're looking to expand the deployment here,

domestically, but I think the developing world is a fruitful area as well, because there aren't monitoring technologies that need to be displaced. There's just nothing there right now, and so being able to deliver that information is going to be very powerful. If you look at the rates of mortality and the rates of premature births, their highest in the developing world. So I think there's a tremendous need and opportunity here that also is enabled by the relatively low cost structure associated with these platforms.

It's certainly compared to the high-end monitoring equipment that exists in hospitals here in the U.S. And so there are a lot of things that are driving it. Well, we wish you good luck, Professor, and thank you for taking time to be with us today. Yeah, thank you for having me. John Rogers, Professor of Material Science and Engineering at Northwestern University. BJ Leideman composed our theme music. If you missed any part of the program, like to hear it again, well, we've got our podcast, or have you a smart speaker. Just ask it to play Science Friday whenever you want to every day.

Now is Science Friday. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato in New York.