Science Friday - Indigenous Fire Management, Oliver Sacks Film. September 25, 2020, Part 1

Episode Date: September 25, 2020

Down a long, single-lane road in the most northern part of California is Karuk territory—one of the largest Indigenous tribes in the state. It’s here that Bill Tripp’s great-grandmother, who was born in the 1800s, taught him starting as a 4-year-old how to burn land on purpose. “She took me outside—she was over 100 years old—and walked up the hill with her walker,” Tripp recalled, “and handed me a box of stick matches and told me to burn a line from this point to that point.” Those cultural burns—or prescribed burns, as they’re often called now by fire agencies—are a form of keeping wildfire in check, a practice the state and federal agencies do use, but experts say isn’t leaned on enough as a fire prevention tactic. Climate change is a driving factor of California wildfires, but so is a build-up of excess fuels. That’s often attributed to a century of fire suppression dating back to the era of the Great Fire of 1910. But what experts say is often missing from this conversation is the racist removal of Native American people from California. Along with their physical beings, the knowledge of taking care of the land was also removed resulting in overgrown forests, experts say. Read the rest of this story at ScienceFriday.com. Plus, the neurologist Oliver Sacks died just over five years ago after a sudden diagnosis of metastatic cancer. Over his long career, Sacks explored mysteries of both human mental abnormalities and the natural world. Endlessly empathetic and curious, Sacks shared his clinical observations through a series of books and articles, and appeared on Science Friday many times to discuss his work. A new film released this week describes Sacks’ life through his own words and reflections from those close to him—including the story behind the book ‘Awakenings,’ which later became a major motion picture and propelled Sacks into worldwide prominence. It also details his difficult childhood, his addiction to amphetamines in young adulthood, and his homosexuality, including three decades of celibacy before he found love in the last four years of his life. Ric Burns, director of the film Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, joins Ira to talk about the life and legacy of Oliver Sacks. The film premieres nationwide this week on the Kino Marquee and Film Forum virtual platforms.   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 Iroflato. A bit later in the hour, we'll talk about indigenous methods of wildfire management, and we'll talk with director Rick Burns about his new biography of Oliver Sacks. But first, the race for the COVID-19 vaccine is heating up. Just this week, Johnson and Johnson announced its vaccine is entering a final stage of clinical trials, making it the fourth U.S. company to do so. So what does this mean for when an actual vaccine makes it to a major muscle of mine? Here with me to talk about this. And other news from the week is Sarah Zang, staff writer at the Atlantic in Washington, D.C. Welcome back to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. Good to talk to you.

Nice to have you. Okay, let's start with what's going on with a COVID-19 vaccine. What does it mean that four vaccines are in phase three trials? Yeah, so phase through trials are the last step before final approval. And so these are really large trials that have tens of thousands of people. From the protocols that have been released, these trials will probably take a few months themselves. So it'll probably take a few more months before we really know any of these vaccines are effective and safe. But after that, state and local health departments are kind of preparing for what they've called the largest, most complex vaccination program they've ever had to do in their history.

And that has to do, one, with just the sheer scale of trying to vaccinate hundreds of millions of Americans. And second has to do with the kind of the particular characteristics of some of the leading vaccine candidates, especially the two that are furthest along in clinical trials. So they use a new technology that is just both new and also the vaccines themselves are extremely physically fragile, which means that they just have to be kept at really low freezer temperatures, as low as negative 94 degrees Fahrenheit. Isn't that going to be a problem if you have to keep a vacuum? vaccine at negative 94 Fahrenheit? How do you move it around? Yeah, exactly. This is what people are

trying to figure out right now. They're trying to draw out plans for this right now. So, you know, if you are a large hospital in the city, you probably have a deep freezer that can go down to negative 94 degrees Fahrenheit. So Pfizer, who makes a vaccine that needs to be kept as cold, they've actually been working on making these what they call thermos shippers, which are these kind of pizza box size boxes of vaccines that can ship them out and dry ice and hopefully keep them for you know, 10 days or so. One of the issues, and this is one of those things that is going to sound small until you really delve into details, is that these boxes hold at a minimum, minimum about a thousand doses of vaccine. And again, this is like fine if you're a large

hospital in a large city, but if you're trying to think about, you know, vacciting all of the doctors at rural clinics in a large state, now you're getting into, well, how do I distribute these really cold vaccines across a really large state, right? So in North Dakota, for example, The health department told me that they are literally thinking about buying a dry ice machine and then physically driving these vaccines around the state at first. Yeah, that's what my next question was you'd need a lot of dry ice if you think about it nationally. If you're going to distribute all of this, is there going to be a shortage of the dry ice? I had the exact same question.

So there is actually a current short of dry ice because dry ice is actually kind of a byproduct of ethanol production. So it's kind of made through the off gas when you make gasoline. So there hasn't been a lot of driving the past few months or it's been less driving the usual because of the lockdown. So there's been a little bit less dry ice than usual. The industry tells me that they think that they have capacity to ramp up production by the time the vaccine actually comes around. So hopefully that's the case. Hopefully. Okay, we'll keep watching that.

Let's move on to a COVID-19 adjacent story. And this is really interesting. A lockdown has actually changed the birds song for some birds in California. Yeah, exactly. So these are sparrows in and around San Francisco. So I think when we first started sheltering place, I remember people saying, hey, like, are you hearing more birds? Are the birds louder? So a bunch of signs in San Francisco actually went out and quantified this.

And they did find that their songs did change. They were actually quieter. And that's because there was less traffic around. And the other change it made is that, you know, traffic is kind of just like, you know, usually just like kind of low, rumbly sound, right? So without traffic, birds didn't have to try to sing higher, like higher pitch to kind of talk over the traffic the way you might try to talk really loudly at a party when there's a lot of background noise. So these birds were actually singing differently based on kind of old recordings they did. This was kind of how they sang back in the 1970s when the city was less loud. That's really cool. I wonder whether when COVID is over and traffic comes back, whether these bird songs are going to change their tune again.

Yeah, I hope that they're recording their songs right now. I think what we saw is that birds can change their songs fairly quickly in an adapter environment. And I have, you know, if I were to guess, I think they do that again once we start driving cars and going outside and, you know, construction backup. They seem very flexible. Let's stay in California for this. next story, but move to climate change related news. And that is about the state's governor, Gavin Newsom, signing an executive order that will ban the sale of gasoline-powered cars by 2035. That sounds like a pretty big deal. Yeah, it is a pretty big deal. California has kind of historically been a real leader in car emissions. In the past, for example, they've set car emission standards that have been stricter to the rest of the country. And what ends up happening is that if you're a

large rear car manufacturer, you don't want to make one car for California and one car for the rest of the country. So they end up following California's kind of stricter regulations. California is also the world's fifth largest economy. So whatever they do, it tends to have a lot of sway. And, you know, this is a kind of a big deal for California to jump out in front of this in the U.S. But if you look at the larger global context, several other countries in Europe, as well as China and India, have also set similar goals of phasing out, gasp out cars in the next decade of two. Now, does this seem like it's related at all to the terrible wildfires season that the state

has been going through this year? Yeah, it's a good question. So Governor Newsom, when he signed the executive order, did in fact mention the fact that, you know, wildfires have been all over California this year. And actually not, you know, these natural disasters is not just California, right? It's also the rest of the country. We are in a hurricane season where we've gone through an entire alphabet and are now. back to the Greek alphabet.

So I think all throughout the country, you're seeing these disasters that are being amplified by climate change. And obviously, car emissions is a big factor in, you know, carbon output. You know, we've already seen the Trump administration push back against California car regulations before. I'm imagining we might see this even in a larger scale, considering the size of the effort that Gavin Newsom is talking about. Yeah, exactly. I think we can expect that, too.

You know, the stricter car emissions I was talking on earlier from California, those are being challenged in court. So I think we can expect that this phase out of gas-powered cars is probably also going to be something that the courts will look at. All right. Let's move on to a story from the other side of the world, and that's about researchers in Iran found something interesting in the desert. What did they find? They found shrimp.

And you might be wondering, what are shrimp doing in the desert, Don't they need water? So this is a new species of fairy shrimp. And what happens is, you know, the desert, obviously there's usually no water. It's very dry. But when it rains, sometimes you get these large lakes of water that show up. And this is when these tiny dried eggs of this shrimp that may have been sitting there for maybe decades, this is when they hatch and they come out and they're the kind of small, feathery little crustaceans.

And they swim around and then they mate. and then they die, and their eggs will hopefully hatch again when it rains again. Can you eat them? I mean, are they harvesting them for food? I don't think they're, I don't know if they're that tasty. They're not, you know, we call them very shrimp, but they're actually not that closely related to the shrimp and like prawns that we buy, the grocery store and that we eat. But they are kind of a remarkable. They look almost little insect-like. Well, you know, if there can be so much life in the Great Salt Lake in Utah, I, I, I, shrimp growing there. I imagine

shrimp are pretty hardy and can find other places to grow in hostile climates. Yeah, well, they do have a very strange life cycle, right? They like live in, as you say, this desert in Iran, which is one of the hottest spots in the world that can get as as high as 160 degrees Fahrenheit. One of the scientists who

was, you know, interviewed about his discovery, he was just talking about how hard it was to work in this desert. And these shrimp survived there. And the reason they actually even discovered the is that it was just so high, and they found this body of water and started wading in, and that's when they noticed all these little white creatures around their legs. That is a hot, cool story.

Indeed. If I can phrase it that way. One last story, unfortunately, we're not getting the Tokyo Olympics this summer, but still a world record for diving has been smashed by a whale. Are we talking about a double somersault with a half twist on this here? We don't know, but I can tell you. tell you how long it was. So this is a beaked whale, which was recorded to have been underwater for three hours and

42 minutes, which is just remarkable, you know, because whales are also mammals. They also need oxygen, so they're somehow swimming underwater for almost four hours without needing to breathe. So this is a species called a beaked whale, which spends a lot of its time underwater. So they are kind of a mysterious and eczumatic creature. and this is one of the first times we've had a large-scale study of how often and how long these whales dive. And, you know, most of them are not spending almost four hours underwater. Most of the time it's only, oh, half an hour to two and a half hours.

But it seems to have gone on the slow as long as three hours and 42 minutes. You know, that's one of the great mysteries about mammals that live in the ocean and other animals like seals is how how they can hold their breath for so long and survive underwater for hours and what's going on inside their bodies that we can't do. Yeah, exactly. So there's some theories. When is that maybe these whales are able to shunt blood away from their guts and their organs to their brains and their muscles so that, you know, they're kind of not wasting oxygen and parts of their bodies are not using. Also, their muscles might be slightly different. They might be better at tolerating kind of the toxins that would normally build up if we weren't breathing for a while. But

You know, the real answer is we don't know. These whales, we don't see them very often. They don't come up to the surface very often. But they're somehow managing to survive. I'm not having to breathe for three hours and 42 minutes. I'd love to see. I'd love to see how they know how to do this. Thank you very much.

Yeah, great to be here. Good to talk to you. Great stuff, Sarah. Sarah Zang, staff writer at the Atlantic in Washington, D.C. We're going to take a break. And when we come back, why bringing back Native American land stewardship practices could offer relief from the rise of record wildfires in the West. Also, on the Science Friday Voxpop app, we want to hear from you listeners out on the West Coast.

Are there long-term health effects due to the wildfires that concern you? We want to hear from you. Are there long-term health effects due to the wildfires you're concerned about? Please tell us all about your concerns on the Science Friday Voxpop app. wherever you get your apps. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio. Iowa Public Radio News. Local stories of national significance. It's still wildfire season on the West Coast. And as crews

work hard to put out the flames, save lives and protect communities from damage, a conversation is raging about how it got so bad in the first place. First, there's climate change, right? That's a definite contributor, but there's also the role of forest management and whether it could have been done better. The original experts on this topic, the Native American tribes, who have occupied the West Coast for thousands of years while carefully managing the land to keep wildfire risk low. Reporter Ezra David Romero from Capitol Public Radio in Sacramento reported last week on how colonization, racism, and a fire suppression mentality all reduced the ability of the tribes to manage their ancestral lands and what could change? As a four-year-old Bill Tripp's great-grandmother taught him

how to burn land on purpose, those cultural burns are a way of keeping wildfire in check. Walked up the hill through Walker and handed me a box of stick matches and told me to burn a line from this point to that point. Now as deputy director of the Karak Tribes Natural Resources Department at the Northern Tripp of California, he's working to give indigenous people more power to practice cultural burns. Tripp is doing this work because Native American people were largely removed from the landscape in the mid-19th century. That altered California, said Charm Miller, an environmental analysis professor at Pomona College. Once the state of California enacted what we can call a genocidal attack upon Native peoples in the state.

What started to happen was that the lands that they had tended, managed, started to do what nature does, which is to grow. Miller says the systematic anti-Indigenous racism resulted in the exclusion of fire. Ron Good is a tribal chairman of the North Fork Mono. Well, removal of Native American from the land is a result of what we have today. Good says there's some hope. He's working with agencies in the central Sierra to increase cultural burns and to restore mountain meadows. But how scalable are indigenous practices?

Don Hankins, a plane's Miwok fire expert at Chico State, says vary. It's definitely scalable on the larger public lands that are out there. You know, I'll develop maps to think about how I would go about burning in those particular places. But Hankins admits for change to come, Californians need to adapt to the idea that fires aren't always bad. Ezra David Romero, Cap Radio News. Ezra David Romero joins us. Now, welcome back, Ezra. Thanks for having me.

How did this story come to your attention as a reporter? I'd been reporting on wildfire for about eight years, and I had reported some stories like this in the past, but then I was deep in a story about fire suppression, and I was on the phone with a friend, and he was like, you need to look at racism-fueling today's wildfires, and a little red light went off in my mind, and I was like, this is a huge story,

for me it crossed over when I was talking to some of the people here later, but there was these big fires in 1910. After that, the Forest Service and others decided that wildfire is not good on the landscape. But they alerted to me that before that 1910 time, Native American people were murdered and put into camps or, you know, put onto reservations and that their lives were taken off of the land that they've lived on for a, millennia, and then two, they have this knowledge about wildfire that was no longer there, and that was sort of deemed not good. And 100, 120 years later, the absence of that historic knowledge of wildfire on the land is gone. And they say that it's resulted in this fire suppression and the ability for fires to get so big, so fast. When we say fire suppression, we're just talking about putting fires out fast, and then seeing a lot of...

of brush, debris, and trees that would historically burn every nine or ten years not happening anymore. Let's talk about where this story about indigenous land stewardship falls in the conversation about this record 2020 wildfire season. Has the story gotten a lot of attention? Yeah, the story has gotten a lot of attention from outlets across the country to other people who study wildfire in California. I've seen a lot of stories in the past about return to Native American ways in the landscape and how that is the way, but I hadn't seen many stories that question if that's actually possible or not in our current landscape. I try to

capture that in this story about whether it's actually possible to go back to Native American ways. And the answer is yes in part as much as we can. And that's a good segue because that's what we're going to be talking about. I want to bring in two more guests. You heard them earlier in Ezra's story. Bill Tripp, Director of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy for the Karak Nation, Dr. Don Hankins, Professor of Geography and Planning at Cal State University, Chico. He's also a Plains-Mewok cultural practitioner. Bill, as we heard, you've been setting prescribed burns since what? You were four years old? Yeah, I mean, the fire I experienced at four years old was basically a teaching tool where I had on my belly and try to get the black oak leaves

to burn. And so I had to learn how to arrange the fuels in a way that they would burn and how I could use the fire to draw itself together to move around. And so I was able to learn how to understand what fire is and how it moves on the landscape at a very, very early age. What makes these burns good then for preventing worse fires? Well, you take a black oak stand, for example. You know, those leaves fall off every year. And so if you let them pile up, that's more fuel for the fire when the fire does come. So if you're able to get in there and say there's some hazel that our people need to weave baskets with,

you burn it on a regular interval. Not only do you get good, healthy, pliable hazel sticks for basket weaving, but you also reduce that fuel load. So if a wildfire does come through, it doesn't burn as hot or as fast. How does a cultural burn differ from what we might call controlled burns done by, let's say, wildlife agencies? Well, today, people go out there with fire engines and hand tools and cut handlines and false nags and do all these things before they do a prescribed fire. You know, they require you to have certain qualifications before you can do a prescribed fire. You know, they require you to have certain qualifications before you can do a prescribed fire.

You know, the cultural burning I do in a lot of cases doesn't even involve a handline. Sometimes it doesn't even involve having any water. It's just knowing that time of day to where a certain type of vegetation will burn, and it's going to go out when it hits that other kind of vegetation is right next to it. It just takes a basic understanding of your environment, and longer you can interact with the same environment, the greater your understanding can be. Even prescribed burns can have cultural objectives. You know, we can use the hand tools and the fire trucks and all of these fancy toys we have today to do prescribed burns with cultural objectives as well. So we can get to the point to where we have a

restored landscape to make it part of the culture once again. Don Hankins, as someone who is both a researcher and a cultural practitioner as well, how do you describe the value of these burns and how are they different? When I think about the situation of prescribed burning versus that cultural or traditional side of it, there's a lot of nuance that's there. As Bill alluded to, you have to have an understanding of the environment, the wind, the soil, you know, the different weather patterns that are coming in, houses are changing, what the fuel moisture conditions are in the vegetation communities you're working in. You don't have bare mineral soil being exposed by raking a line around it or anything. You know the system, you know where the fire is naturally going to go,

and you work within that landscape by reading those cues. So while a lot of prescribed burns might focus in on hazard fuel reduction and wildlife habitat improvement, the timing of when that's happening, the outcomes of those fires will be quite different than what we would necessarily see from traditional burning. I've done burns with agency folks who will set the time, go out, and burn, and based on cultural indicators, I know that it's not the right time. We're not in the right place for those things to take place. And I think about how that can have an adverse impact on biodiversity. So, you know, there's a lot of very specific objectives around why and when and how we're burning

across different ecosystems. And every ecosystem has its specific time for when it should burn or when it's appropriate to burn within that system that is set forth based on our knowledge. And that's been passed down generation after generation. Let me ask both of you, Don, Bill, is there a short explanation for what is a good place or when is a good time to do some of these burns? During the onset of the rainy season is really a go-to time for burning. And I can say from my experience in working in Northern Australia, the same pattern is there. You know, when the rains start to come in, people are starting to burn or they're doing it at the

the beginning of the dry season is happening. And then there's a time period when there's really not any fire activity happening, but maybe just a little bit here and there. Those are the safe times to burn. And if we know our systems, it's pretty easy to be able to put fire back on the ground in those different places. Bill, do you agree with that? Yeah, I mean, that's a very valid point. And there are other timeframes for other things, depending on why you're burning in that cultural context. And prime example that we're seeing right now, you know, with our tan oaks stands. Kuduk people burn in those tanok stands at a very specific time of year. And it's not so much because it's, you know, Tuesday, October 1st or something, but it's because the buggy acorns

have fallen with that first wind that came through or light rain. And then you get to a point to where some of the good, viable acorns without bugs are starting to fall. fall. And so there's a window of time between when that wind event happens and when those good acorns start to fall, where you typically have a range of conditions in between those weather systems that is conducive for good, safe burning. And so by watching for those cues, you're able to do that at the proper time and achieve your cultural objective to kill off the bugs before they get a chance to burrow into the ground. I'm Ira Plato, and this is Science Friday. In case you're just joining us. We're talking about the role Native Americans have had in wildfire prevention

with my guests, Ezra David Romero, Bill Tripp, and Don Hankins. Ezra was reporting on the role of racism in undermining indigenous land stewardship. Bill, Don, do you experience that? You know, I got thrown into the middle of the government-to-government consultation arena with the Forest Service when I was about 19 years old. And I'm a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, indigenous person. And so I was in meetings looking like an intern. I'm a white family. So yeah, I heard a lot of things that would really shock a person. But when I think of the racism involved, I think of the laws that were created that made this illegal to begin with. And some of those were framed specifically around separating indigenous peoples from their resource base. The very foundation

of the fire management system we have today are rooted in some of that racism. From my experiences, I mean, obviously from a policy level standpoint, thinking back to mission time period in the state, you know, obviously the policy is a big part of that, but people hear me talk about indigenous burning and, you know, I've even had people say, well, you just want to run around naked in the woods and set fire. And it's like, no, that's not what indigenous burning is about. You know, indigenous burning is about so many levels of different thing from the, the cultural, the ecological, the metaphysical, you know, spiritual relationships of just being able to burn

and be able to uphold that responsibility that was put to us by our ancestors. And, you know, hearing people make fun of it in that sense is hurtful. And I wish that people had a better understanding of what it is. And I know that in the past, when I have brought forward that idea of doing cultural burns and say, well, we can use it as a tool to protect, you know, the wildland urban interface and the people who live in those places. That's one of the reasons why we do these kind of burns. That's where people's attitudes about, well, you know, the landscape is changed and people are living these places and you can't practice the way that you used to practice.

But knowing that that is our knowledge and that is what has been effective for so many thousands of years, that to me is very, very dismissive. And I hear people from within the agency say, well, we'd like to work with tribes, but they have to learn our standards to be able to do burns. Really what I think the standard should be is the inverse of that, where if they don't have our knowledge of understanding, then they shouldn't be using fire. And when you have thousands of years of that knowledge, you don't see it in that light of fear. So those are some of the basic things that I see surfacing, as well as just the regulations around

and the policies of who can be the keeper of fire, who can actually use that tool. We have our own ways of training. We have our own ways of teaching people and experience and intergenerational learning is a big part of that. So how do you get kids out to learn from grandma and grandpa and everybody else in the family or in the community if you're not allowed to do that because they don't have a card or grandma and grandpa don't have a card or they didn't pass their pack test, you know? That's really interesting to hear that perspective. Ezra, where are you seeing meaningful pushes then toward incorporating indigenous knowledge of the land into how it's managed? Well, there's movement across California around prescribed burns and, cultural burns everywhere from Upper Bill is at. There's smaller agencies they're working on it.

There are other larger agencies that are doing prescribed burns, but they're not always doing it in this cultural fashion. What I learned most from reporting this story was that the decision for curbing prescribed burns or stopping them was this political decision. And so everyone I talked to said that there needs to be a new political decision, whether it's in the California legislature or in Congress, these people who represent the people of their land need to take. take this up again. And one way is this National Prescribed Fire Act of 2020, and that would establish around $300 million for both the Forest Service and the Department of Interior to plan and prepare, conduct, controlled burns on all these jurisdictions, whether it's federal,

state, or private land. And it also will establish this $10 million for this collaborative program to work across these barriers. It would establish somewhat of an incentive program will actually pay certain jurisdictions to do prescribed burns. And that's if it ever leaves the house in Congress. But there is some movement around all of this, but it is still very slow to be adopted like you hear from these two men. Bill, as someone working on behalf of one nation, and I'm talking about the Carrick, what resources or support would help you take care of the land better. You know, the recognition of us as a sovereign indigenous nation that still occupies and utilizes our territorial land base, I believe, is the key to even getting serious in the

conversation. I hear a lot of talk about, you know, giving billions of dollars to this agency. You're giving billions of dollars to that agency. And, you know, it's, yeah, we can get a grant but they're probably going to make us sign a paper wave in our sovereignty. And, you know, we really need to get to the point to where we can have the programs to do this in our places because this is who we are and this is what we've done for millennia. I want to thank all of you for taking time to be with us today. Ezra David Romero, reporter for Capitol Public Radio in Sacramento, Bill Tripp, Director of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy for the Karak Nation.

and Dr. Don Hankins, Professor of Geography and Planning, California State University, Chico, and a Plains-Mewock cultural practitioner as well. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. No problem. Thank you, Ira. You're welcome. We're going to take a break, and after the break, a new film looks at the life and legacy of the neurologist Oliver Sacks.

Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Just over five years ago, last month, neurologist Oliver Sacks passed away. He was a man curious about everything. And while his work focused on the inner world of the brain and its many fascinating variations and disorders, he also found inspiration and wonder in things from ferns to psycheds, cephalopods to minerals. And he shared that curiosity with the world through his many eloquent books.

He spoke with us on Science Friday many times, you may recall. Way back in 1995, he talked to a caller about the goals of his writing. I don't quite know what I want to achieve, although in the first place I want to redirect attention. I want to arouse excitement and curiosity and again make people feel, including some of my colleagues, that even on the back wards and in particular individuals, there is a huge amount to be learnt that one doesn't have to have vast series. I think that I want a direct attention again to what it means to be an individual responding in a particular way to a challenge.

Dr. Oliver Sacks talking about his work 25 years ago. And now there is a new documentary that looks at the life and legacy of Oliver Sacks, with his own words and comments from people who knew him best. Joining me now is director Rick Burns, his film Oliver Sacks, his own life, premiered nationwide this week on the virtual cinema platform, Kino Marquis and Film Forum, Virtual Cinema. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Ira. It's so great to be with you.

Nice to have you. You filmed this with his own participation. How did that happen? Give me the genesis of this film. For me, it was kind of mind-boggling. five and a half years ago in early January 2015, we got a call from Kate Edgar. Kate Edgar, you know, is Oliver's incredible editor, chief of staff. Somebody once said Kate is his everything.

And I didn't know Kate and I didn't know Oliver, except, of course, I knew his writing. And she called up through a friend of a friend and said, Oliver is going to die. Will you come in and start filming? And so we did without any sort of preparation or kind of fundraising. and it's important to remember that in, you know, in 2015,

what wasn't known about Oliver Sacks, who was so celebrated and so widely known, was that he was homosexual, that he was, had an extremely difficult, I would say, even tormented life. His childhood, which was blessed in many respects, was also extremely painful. And all of that, his sexuality, his difficulty with that,

his relationship to his family, particularly his mother and perhaps his older brother, Michael, who was one of four, who was psychotic, who was schizophrenic, his flight really to America when he was 30 to get away from all that. And of course, you can't really ever get away from all that. Went to San Francisco, kept working as a neurologist starting up there, got involved with amphetamines, was woefully addicted, and was really kind of had, you know, maybe you, you know, two if not more wheels off the ground for much of his early adult life, really unhappy, never really found his way with in a relationship. All of that was really below the surface of this vastly calmer, even soothing persona,

which came off the surface of his writing and which in some sense, the point of his writing was to allow him a place to be where he didn't have to contend with those things. And he certainly didn't want to interact with other people. on that basis. So, you know, we suddenly walked into that and were thrown into the deep end of Oliver Sacks at the very moment, 81 years old. He had written, but not yet published, this remarkably candid memoir talking about all those things, which he'd never really discussed before, outside a small circle of people, on the move. It hadn't been published yet. And then he got this mortal diagnosis of a metastasized cancer. So he was a man who wanted to sum up.

and he wanted to do so, as Kate pointed out, not only in words, but also on film. And you spoke with many, many people who were very close to Oliver Sacks, and they all offered sort of a vision of who they thought he was. Yeah, absolutely. It was interesting. You know, we spoke with Oliver for about 90 hours, you know, in February and April and June of 2015. Then he died on August 30th, 2015, and we spoke with 25 people who'd known him well from patients, like Shane Fistel and writers like Lawrence Weschler and, you know, Robert Krollwich, who had

gone up to try to find out who this guy was early on, as had Ren Weschler. Everybody had their own Oliver, but there's a remarkable consistency in their viewpoint. And the film is really, you know, in his own words and in the words of those 25 people who knew him best, including family members, Kate, the only person he ever had a really satisfying and deep, romantic and sexual relationship, a remarkable person, Bill Hayes, photographer and writer, who really kind of like, you know, in the December of Oliver's life, they met. And this, Oliver had been at that point celibate for 35 years. That was not something he was expecting. And so there's a kind of a narrative, of extraordinary narrative shape to his life that's very moving and that these, this amazing

assortment of neurologists and neuroscientists and patients and friends and partners spoke to, and which then by about 2016, we had to sit down and say, so what's this story all about? Yeah, you mentioned Robert Colich, who's an old longtime friend of mine also and the host of Radio Lab. and he really found a very fine way of summing up, finally finding the love of his life, and we have a clip from that in the film. And the last four years, I think, felt like an enormous sigh in so many directions to his friends, to his best friends,

to pretty much everybody. He'd found balance. He'd found balance. Well, it's really, really true, I think. I mean, I came to understand that that was true. Obviously, we knew him only in the way filmmakers would know someone briefly, intensely, and they're at the very end. And Robert Krollwick also said, I know you'll remember, Ira, this remarkable thing,

that it's patience for these people who are very, very in trouble. Lonely, as Robert put it, left out, often. seen as woefully other afflicted with some kind of neuro atypicality. And he storied them back into the world. And, you know, Ren Washler, who introduced Robert to Oliver, you know, said something very similar saying, you know, he used narrative as therapy. And that was really the kind of, you know, the genius of Oliver. And I think there was an aspect of genius in that.

that at a time when neuroscience and neurology was extremely quantitative and extremely based on objective criteria. Oliver was doing something, you mentioned it so powerfully and beautifully early, in the first clip from Oliver, he's interested in observing individuals and their experience. He's interested in their unique consciousness. And that subjectivity was his subject, partly because his own subjectivity was his subjectivity was His own self was very complicated and mysterious and troubling even to Oliver. That theme comes out throughout the film in how personal his medicine was,

I want to play a Science Friday clip we had from 2012 in which he talked about his style of medicine. A lot of medicine now consists of large statistical studies, and these may be extremely important, for example, one could never have shown that tobacco is related to bronchial cancer without a huge statistical study, but for myself, the individual person and their story is always central. And I care for them. And I don't think medicine or medical care is possible without a deep caring. You talk about this in the film.

I thought this was very, very interesting. He was criticized by other scientists for not having a theory about many. of the illnesses he observed and wrote about, and you show in the movie that he pushed back by saying, hey, look, I'm just an observer who gives you theorists something to think about. And you also back that up with something Temple Grandin describes him in the film. What Oliver did is sort of like the Hubble Space Telescope of Neurology. It's astronomy of the mind. What a great quote. What a great quote. I mean, and so true. I mean, this sense that, that the subjective inward experience,

which is obviously what we all have. It's the most familiar and the most mysterious part of all of our lives. But that is a material kind of data. And that he wanted to investigate that and not see it as something which is outside the purview of science. And that just because you couldn't measure it and indeed couldn't see it doesn't mean it wasn't there and didn't mean it was the whole reason

why we were doing any of this stuff. And so that, he made subjectivity available to scientific inquiry. And of course, it's not going to be mainly done through objective means of science. MRIs can see your brain, you know, sparking away and cat scans. But, you know, how does it feel, Ira, to be listening right now? How does it feel to be a Touretter or to wake up hung over in the morning or to whatever? That is the experience Oliver was trying to plumb in, which was really considered not unimportant by neurologists of Oliver's time in the 60s and 70s and 80s, but kind of unavailable to the instruments of science. And he said, well, what about empathy?

What about imagination? What about spending a long time with these people? What about constructing a story in tandem with them, which then becomes a token of exchange between them and you. And hence, as Robert Krollwich put it, allows you to help story them back into the world and give them a form of therapy. I attended a party for his last book on the move, his second autobiography. published a few months before his death and speaking with him, I found there really was no melancholy in him at the party. And I jokingly said to him, so what comes next? And he very seriously said, there will be another book after I'm gone. And you see that all the people that are in your room

have tears going on. And he's saying, I see you're all crying, but I'm not. It hasn't sunk in yet, perhaps. Right. And I think in a funny way, he, you know, the moment you're describing in the film, he had just finished reading the as yet unpublished op-ed piece that came out in the New York Times in February announcing his mortal illness. And when it's over, he looked up and there was all of us, you know, obviously old friends and Kate Edgar and his boyfriend, Billy Hayes, but, you know, Buddy Squire is our cinematographer and our sound person and me. and he says, you know, he looked at us kind of sheepishly, just sort of suddenly taking it in, and he said this amazing thing. He said, well, there it is, you know, which had huge kind of resonance at that moment, and then said, you know, I do see tears all around me, but I have yet to shed them myself.

And I think that he was committed, you know, he said he had anxiety, he had uncertainty, and, you know, there was sorrow at his impending demise. But I think that he so clearly knew, this is it. We all live 100% within the envelope of, you know, the material world that made it made us possible. And he wanted to explore that. And so the gift that he gave all of us, you know, I mean, as Ren Weschler put it,

he gave a master class in how to die, which sounds so gloomy. But Ira, you know, it turns out of us. out to be as moving and as inspiring as almost anything will ever have the good fortune of coming in possible. I'm Ira Flato and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. When I see a biography of a person released after their deaths like this wonderful film you made, it makes me sad sometimes because I wonder if that film had been done and released while they were still alive. I might have been able to enjoy that person a little bit more for their

accomplishments while they were alive? Do you ever feel that way and say, I wish I had been here a year ago or five years ago or 10 years ago and done this film? You know, with respect, 100% not. You know, we got, there we were, early January in the last year of six months of Oliver's life. The film is about his entire life, but about especially its relationship to those last six months. And that is the film. And we wouldn't even be there. if he hadn't got that mortal diagnosis and Cape Edgar call us up. And so the very point of departure,

the door we walked through was the door of Oliver Sacks who was going to die. And that conditioned every aspect of the film. And therefore, I don't regret that Oliver never saw it. I don't regret that it wasn't available for people to understand

who he was better while he was alive, but rather to hear this voice, You know, it's funny, he always sounded the same. You played clips from 95 and from 2012, and it could have been yesterday. And not just because of the quality of your incredible recording, but because Oliver was, as Roberto Coloso, his Italian editor, put it, he was the most childlike person from beginning to end. And so there was this remarkable throughline in Oliver,

which is a man-child, man, constantly looking around with a sense of wonder and curiosity and excitement, including finally wonder and curiosity about his own end and how would that transpire? And that is an aspect of courage and a model, which is huge for anybody, I think. Hard to believe it's been five years. Rick Burns, we've run out of time. I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you, Ira, for having me. It really, really means a lot to me.

Rick Burns, director of Oliver Sacks, his own life, a terrific, terrific film. It premiered nationwide this week on the virtual cinema platform, Hino Marquis and Film Forum, virtual cinema. Thanks for being with us today. If you'd like to see a video tour given by Oliver Sacks, a tour of his own office with all of those chotchkes and all of those elements, we have a... up on our website. It's part of our collections up there. You can go to our website, Science Friday.com slash Oliver Sacks, part of our desktop diary series. Charles Berkowitz is our

director. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, Kathleen Davis, B.J. Leatherman composed our theme music. If you missed any part of the program or you'd like to hear it again or tell other folks about it, especially about our Oliver Sack segment, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speakers to play Science Friday. And on our Science Friday Vox Pop app this week, we want to know what suspicious political claims you have heard relating to science and the environment this election year. We want to fact-check your feed coming up to the November elections. What suspicious political claims have you heard relating to science and the environment this election year?

On the Science Friday Voxpop app this week, wherever you get your apps. I'm Ira Flato. We'll see you next week.