Science Friday - Insulin Price Plan, Monkeypox Facts, Milky Way Memoir. August 12, 2022, Part 1

Episode Date: August 12, 2022

A Plan to Cap Insulin Prices May Not Be Helpful 30 million people in the U.S. live with diabetes, and access to insulin can be expensive. More than 1 in 5 people with private insurance pay more than $35 a month for this necessary medication. The U.S. Senate has a plan to cap insulin prices for certain diabetics, but critics say this plan would not help make insulin affordable for a majority of people. Plus, many people have been following the discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, with baited breath. Astronomers may have found the youngest exoplanet we know of. And a deep space hoax of a chorizo slice fooled the astronomy community. Joining Ira to talk about these stories and other science news of the week is Katherine Wu, staff writer for The Atlantic based in New Haven, Connecticut.   What You Need To Know About Monkeypox Last week, the White House declared the monkeypox outbreak a public health emergency. Currently there are a little over 9,000 confirmed cases in the United States, and just under 30,000 worldwide. Since the end of May, monkeypox has been spreading in countries where it has not been previously reported. The virus is mainly spreading within gay and bisexual men and other men who have sex with men. And because of that there is stigma associated with the outbreak. Ira talks with Rachel Roper, virologist at the Brody Medical School at East Carolina University, and Perry Halkitis, dean of the Rutgers University School of Public Health, to explain the basics of transmission, answer listener questions, and debunk misinformation about the monkeypox outbreak.   Frenemies, Lovers, And The Fate Of The Cosmos: Our Galaxy Tells All Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is 13.6 billion years old, all-knowing, and a little sassy. It has a rich social life of friends, frenemies, and even love interests—all other galaxies in the local group, including the stunning Andromeda. And the Milky Way is a little disappointed that we’ve stopped telling as many stories about it. Or at least, that’s how folklorist and astronomer Dr. Moiya McTier imagines the galaxy’s personality when writing her new book, “The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy.” The book stretches from the beginning of the universe to the birth of our planet, and then on to the eventual theoretical end of the cosmos. Along the way, we learn both the science of how stars form and galaxies collide, and the many stories and myths humans have told about these bodies throughout our relatively brief lives. McTier joins Ira to tell all (on behalf of the Milky Way), and explain the importance of story in scientific knowledge and discovery. Read an excerpt of the book on sciencefriday.com.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, a master course on monkeypox, debunking some common misconceptions about the virus, and meet the all-knowing galaxy we live in the Milky Way in a sassy new tell-all. But first, 30 million people in the U.S. live with diabetes, and access to insulin can be very expensive. More than one in five people with private insurance pay more than $35 a month for this necessary medication. The U.S. Senate has a plan to cap insulin prices for some seniors, but critics say this plan would not help make insulin affordable for a majority of people. Joining me to talk about this and other science stories of the week is Catherine Wu, staff writer for The Atlantic based in New Haven, Connecticut. Welcome back to Science Friday, Katie. Hello, it's good to be here again. Nice to have you.

Okay, let's start with this insulin story. What's the current status of insulin? access for diabetics in the U.S.? Yeah, so insulin is very, very, very expensive, which is very unfortunate. As you've pointed out, this can be a life or death drug for some people, especially those with type 1 diabetes who can't make insulin on their own. And as you pointed out, there are some people paying way more than $35 a month for this medication. Some people are paying into the hundreds per month, which can be a huge portion of their

paycheck. that is massive. You know, that's on par with what they may be paying for food, even part of their housing. And this is much more than people elsewhere in the world pay. Absolutely. So there was a study, I believe it was last year by the Rand Corporation that found that, you know, average prices for a vial of insulin in the U.S. exceed prices in any other country and is about 10 times more than the global average, which is a huge gap. So the Senate plan for insulin access to doesn't quite solve this problem, does it? No. So, you know, obviously this bill is still kind of working its way through all of the legislative red tape, but it has cleared the Senate in kind of a

mixed bag form. So people with Medicare are slated to get a co-pay cap of $35 per month, but people with private insurance don't get that benefit. People who are uninsured and paying out of pocket aren't getting that benefit, and people on Medicaid are not getting that benefit, which is, as you pointed out, a lot of people. Is this just an instance of companies getting as much as they can? I certainly think that plays a role, though, you know, the companies that have sort of a monopoly on the insulin market have pushed back on that characterization. But the reality is, you know, insulin, it's not the most expensive drug in the world, but it's not necessarily cheap to make. We don't have a generic version available. And really three big, big, big,

companies dominate the market, and so they get to sort of put prices wherever they like. All right, let's move on to something that was a little surprising, I think, to most people about COVID-19, and that is the CDC releasing new guidance on COVID-19 protocols in schools just this week, right? What are the new guidelines? Yeah, so there are several things that are rolling out this week from the CDC. Basically, it is kind of a massive loosening of protocols. So there is going to be no more routine testing recommended in schools and workplaces. So this is very, very precisely timed. A lot of kids are about to go back to school, and that may be a huge change for them.

Before, there were a lot of places that had policies in place that, you know, if you are a kid and you are exposed to someone who has presumed COVID, has symptoms, has recently tested positive, you either have to quarantine or you have to take tests and make sure that you're testing negative to come back to school, a sort of test to stay policy. That is no longer being recommended. And more generally for everyone else, no one needs to quarantine anymore after they've been exposed to the virus, even if they're unvaccinated or not up to date on their vaccines. And there's no more recommendation of staying six feet away from each other. Is there a general feeling of why they're doing this? You know, it's a little complicated and I certainly can't

speak for the CDC, but the general sense seems to be the CDC has taken a look at the situation. You know, cases are quite high still in this country, but the proportion of cases that are proceeding to hospitalization or death has stayed thankfully very, very low. You know, on a press call yesterday, the CDC was saying a lot of people have some form of immunity, whether it's through vaccination or prior infection. The virus is just finding fewer ways to cause severe disease. And so the CDC is saying maybe it's time to loosen up a little bit, and this is kind of a way to, quote, unquote, live more sustainably with the virus. All right. Let's loosen up a bit ourselves for a moment and move to space for our next story. Many of us have been following the discoveries from the James

Webb Space Telescope, JWST, with a good form of shock and awe. And it seems astronomers may have found the youngest exoplanet we know of. Tell us about that. Yeah, so I do want to highlight that Rabin George Andrews had a great story on this in the New York Times. With this amazing new James Webb telescope, we are seeing our universe in unprecedented detail. And scientists have found evidence that there is an exoplanet orbiting a star about 395 light years away from us. And that star is just 1.5 million years old, which means that planet is probably about the same age. Now, you may be thinking 1.5 million years sounds like a really, really long time. That sounds kind of old. But, you know, for perspective here, Earth is 4.5 billion years old. So this is like a little BB exoplanet. Wow. So we might learn something about how planets form from watching this.

The way that I've been thinking about this is it's like we're getting baby pictures of this planet. And if we sort of keep at it with James Webb or other telescopes that, come out in the future, we could sort of watch this planet get older and older. You know, I certainly don't know if we'll be following it in this much detail four billion years from now, but at the very least, we can sort of look into our own past. If all planets form the same way, this could be the closest we come to watching, you know, our own plants early development. So we're not actually seeing a finished planet yet, right? It's sort of in stage of development. Right, right. So, you know, when planets are bored, it's less, you know, a fully formed tiny planet being birthed out of a bigger planet. It's not like an animal.

But basically, the idea here is we have this star and there's a lot of dust and gas orbiting around. And it looks like they are clumping together to form a planet. Imagine a ball of dough coming together. And that dough was going to get cooked from, you know, something raw and battery into a finished cake-like product. This planet is in the very early stages of that. Well, I'm glad you made this food analogy with a planet because it's a great segue into this other story. A bit of hubbub in the space community about an image that look beautiful, like a beautiful star deep in space. And it turns out that the photo is actually something much closer to home, a slice of chorizo.

Tell us about this. Yeah, this may be the biggest womp-womp story of the past week. But last week, a physicist posted this chorizo photo to Twitter, except he did not say it was a chorizo. He said it was a James Webb photo of this beautiful reddish star elsewhere in the universe. And a lot of people fell for it. The tweet totally went viral. And maybe it's not shocking that they did. You know, this was an established physicist.

He had a blue checkmark, tons of followers. But he later admitted, yeah, no, that is cured meat, not a star. And why were people so fooled? I mean, you know, well, maybe it's because we're so used to seeing some incredible pictures coming back from the JWST. We didn't question this thing. Yeah, I mean, there was probably little reason to question it. You know, all the photos we've been seeing so far have been beautiful in showing us as unprecedented detail. Why not something chorizo like? And as we were just kind of hinting at, a lot of things in space look delicious. My colleague Marina Coran at the Atlantic wrote a great piece, basically making that argument. You know, this is not going to be the only meat-like thing we see on space Twitter. And hopefully the next things we do see are going to be more legit. We're definitely already seeing things out there that look like tomatoes and meatballs,

delicious, savory red things that just also happen to be stars. I'm getting hungry. Let's move away from space. quickly. Let's go back to Earth to tackle a very serious medical story. We are no strangers to infectious diseases, of course, at this point. And in the New York City area, a few cases of polio have been detected. It turns out additional cases have been detected in wastewater. Tell us what's happening here. Yeah, so this has been an unfolding story for a few weeks now. And it starts a couple weeks ago when health authorities in Rockland County, New York,

that a man in his 20s had been paralyzed from a polio virus that had actually come from a type of vaccine that is not used in the U.S. but is used in other countries to vaccinate people against polio. So this is a weakened form of the virus. It can replicate in people and does not generally cause any form of disease. But if it spreads to a ton of unvaccinated people, it can mutate back into a form that can be pretty dangerous and can in rare cases cause paralysis. So I will point out here that the man who got paralyzed was unvaccinated. And so this is not going to be a massive threat to people who do have the polio vaccine. But this is worrisome. The fact that this paralysis occurred means that there probably is transmission of the community and the wastewater detection means that it's probably

ongoing. All right. We're going to keep our eye on that one. Let's talk about our last story. Another infectious disease on many people's minds, monkeypox. You wrote a story about vaccine vaccine splitting. Tell us what that is. Right. So it's quite clear that at this point, we do not have enough of the monkeypox vaccine here in the U.S. We've been using a brand called Genios. And there are more than a million people at very high risk of monkeypox right now, most of the men who have sex with men, many of them who are living with HIV. And so to really stretch the resources we have, the government this week decided we're going to split the genios doses we have into five. and instead of injecting a full dose under the skin into the layer of fat that sits underneath,

we're going to use a fifth of a dose and use a special needle to inject it between the layers of skin. So it's a more shallow shot. It's more difficult to administer. But the hope is that this will stretch our supply. The tricky thing here is that procedure, making that switch from so-called subcutaneous dosing to intradermal dosing, is really just based on a single study that was done in 2015. in mostly young, healthy adults. We don't quite know exactly how it's going to perform

as it rolls out into the public in the context of this outbreak. So it's going to be like a little bit of an experiment to find out. Definitely, a real-world experiment. Yeah, well, we're going to be talking about monkeypox in our next segment. Everything you wanted to know about it with some experts, so we'll cover that also. I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today. Absolutely.

Thank you so much for having me. Catherine Rue, staff writer for the Atlantic based in New Haven, Connecticut. We have to take a break, and when we come back, as I say, it's going to be our latest installment of fact-check-my-feed, talking everything you wanted to know about monkeypox. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm I Refledo. You've probably heard the headlines about monkeypox. As of last week, the White House declares the outbreak a public health emergency. Currently, there are a little over 9,000 confirmed cases in the U.S. and just under 30,000 worldwide, spreading in countries where we've never seen it before, all since the end of May. The virus is mainly spreading within gay and bisexual men and other men who have sex with men, and because of that, there's a stigma associated with the outbreak. A lot of you have written in with your questions about monkeypox, and joining me now to answer those questions. are my guests. Rachel Roper, PhD,

virologist and professor of microbiology and immunology at the Brody Medical School at East Carolina University based in Greenville, North Carolina, and Perry Halquitos, PhD, dean of the Rutgers University School of Public Health based in Piscataway, New Jersey. Welcome both of you to Science Friday. Thank you, Ira.

Hi, Ira. Nice to have you. Dr. Roper, let me begin with you. Let's start with the basic, questions here. We've gotten so many questions from our listeners to clarify stuff they're seeing, misinformation circulating. How does monkeypox spread? So monkeypox can spread through the respiratory route if you're very close to someone, but the way that this variant is spreading is through close personal contact, skin-to-skin contact. And like you said, mostly it's spreading now with

sexual contact between men who have sex with men. So it's much less contagious. than COVID. You're not going to catch it through the air like you would catch COVID. So you're not going to catch it from touching a surface or clothing that someone else has touched? That's a place where monkey pox is actually more of a problem than COVID would be. Monkey pox, the pox viruses have very stable virus particles. So it can spread more easily on surfaces just because it's more stable. So if you go to the CDC website, you can look for how to disinfect clothing and surfaces. it could potentially spread that way.

It's not likely. It's much less contagious than COVID. But if you're out somewhere and you touch a doorknob that someone just touched and they've got monkey pox, you could get it on your hand. And then if you touched your eyes or your face, it could get into your body. You know, it's a good idea always.

If you've been out in the public somewhere, you know, like don't touch your face while you're out in the public, especially if you're touching things. And then when you get home, wash your hands with soap and water. It's just always a good idea to do that. Dr. Halcady says Dr. Roper mentioned monkeypox can spread during sex, but it's not a sexually transmitted infection, is it? How has this framing of monkeypox as an STI impacted the public's understanding of the virus and how policymakers dole out resources needed to contain the outbreak? Yeah, that's a really terrific question.

Just to clarify that when we say sex, right, we don't necessarily mean intercourse. People can be engaged in intimate relations with each other. They can be rolling around with each other. There doesn't have to be an active intercourse for monkeypox to spread. And so it is not an STI per se, as we might think of syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia. You know, you can be in bed with an individual, you can be kissing that individual, you can be hugging that individual. If that person has an infection, you may become infected.

Now, what's really interesting here is I think so much of our response over the course of the last few months, I think is in some ways been shaped by people's concerns about how we dealt with HIV in the 1980s and the messaging there, where this disease was attributed to gay men, where gay men were stigmatized. So I think the CDC and other federal officials and certainly local health departments are walking a very fine line here. The bottom line here is we've said this from the beginning of monkeypox, anybody can get it. You know, as my colleague just said, however, it is primarily in game by sexual men right now who have intimate relations with each other. So our policies in some ways have been shaped by the past and fear of making a mistake

right now in the present. I will say one more thing, Ira. I think our uptake and our response has been a little slow, and one can't help but think that the response may have been somewhat what more quick had a different segment of the population been infected. That's just the hypothesis. That's just the conjecture. Let's also, as we think about this disease and we think about policy, not ignore the fact that gay and bisexual men are being infected. I think we have to acknowledge that fact.

And I think as a population, we have an obligation to say, let's protect our gay and bisexual brothers. Let's control the virus. And that's segment of the population. And then hopefully all of us as a community will benefit. You know, this sounds so much like the messaging from the 1980s, as I recall, when AIDS was spreading wildly. It is, Ira, very similar. We're 41 years into the AIDS epidemic, so let's just all remind ourselves, we still have COVID, we still have HIV, right? We still have like 40,000 new infections of HIV each year in this country, and now we have monkeypox.

When you make a disease, and you call it an STI, when you over-emphasize sex, and you make it about, gay sex, right, which is, you know, sex is stigmatized to begin with. Day sex is even more stigmatized. Then it becomes in the hands of wrong people, like politicians, who are seeking to do harm, potentially a very lethal weapon that will stigmatize and sort of diminish the well-being of the population affected and ultimately deny, in this case, gay and bisexual men, the resources that they need in order to combat this virus. You know, one other question we get is, should we be concerned about monkey pox mutating and adapting like COVID-19 has Dr. Roper?

Yes, so a good thing, pox viruses are large, double-stranded DNA genomes. So those mutate much more slowly than an RNA virus like COVID-Sars-CoV-2. So the mutation rate should be much lower. But a paper did come out recently showing there were 50 single mutation. that have occurred already in the last few years. And that's probably as monkeypox is adapting more to spread human to human. So it can mutate. It almost certainly will mutate.

But it should have a mutation rate much slower than COVID-19. Is there a simple test for monkeypox like we have for COVID? Should we be testing more than we are now? My lab can easily test for the monkeypox virus genome or for the protein. it's really easy to do. The thing that makes it more difficult is that diagnostic labs have to be certified as properly testing, right? So they have to test that they get a certain, you know, very low number of false positives and a very low number of false negatives with a large sample of human population. So that's a much higher standard than just being able to detect it in a research

laboratory. So that's why it's different. But the CDC has been working with these Clea certified labs to get them up and running and testing so that we can test more samples at a higher rate. And I think that is important because, you know, you can't find something if you're not watching for it. And there could be rashes, you know, showing up in dermatologists' offices or in gynecologists or general health practitioners offices that we really probably should test. Can I ask Dr. Roper a question? Dr. Roper, I'm curious because, you know, I've been grappling with this issue, too, is, you know, obviously, the lesions kind of curl over the body.

It seems like in this particular outbreak we're experiencing right now in the gay and bisexual male population, there seems to be lesions that are manifesting primarily in the genital area. Is that different than the way we've seen it in outbreaks in the past? And could that be an evidence

of changes in the virus and the way it's transmitted? So I'm not sure if the location of the lesions relates to the mutating in humans. You do more frequent. get lesions on the skin of the face and the genitals just because it's more thin skin and it's easier to create lesions there. But certainly the sexual contact, you know, that's probably some localized lesion to lesion spread. But then people are getting, you can get it on your hands, your feet. And,

you know, the hands are especially a problem because people walk around touching things with their hands and they could be leaving virus on surfaces. And they get lesions in the mouth too. Yeah, walk us through then. What they typically. person should be looking for in their own body. So the thing that I worry about is that the first symptoms can be just like many illnesses. You can get fever, chills, be tired, you know, have muscle aches, backache, respiratory symptoms. So sore throat and nasal congestion, those can be the first symptoms. And the person might not get a rash until four days later. So they might have monkeypox for four days and not know it. So people could get it and end up transmitting it before they

they realize that they have it. That's interesting. The FDA announced this week that they will be splitting single doses of the vaccine, the most widely used monkeypox vaccine, into five smaller doses to stretch the supply. Dr. Roper, is that a good approach to get more people vaccinated? And they're changing the way the vaccine is injected, too, right? Yes. I think that's a reasonable approach. You know, if you want to stimulate a good immune response, you usually want to use a lot,

of antigen, a lot of the vaccine, but you can get a reasonable response with a smaller amount of the antigen that's in the vaccine. So, you know, given our limited supply right now, I think it's probably a good idea to go ahead and reduce the dose like they are planning to do. And that's the Ginios vaccine. The other vaccine we have is called ACAM 2000, and it's very strong and very effective, but it has some safety concerns. And so that's why they're recommending using the Ginios vaccine. vaccine now for monkey pox. And the vaccine now is talking about being injected just underneath your skin. Yes, yeah, the subcutaneous. The ACAM 2000 and the original, the old vaccine, they put a drop of virus on your skin and then puncture 15 holes in your arm. I remember that. Well, I was a little baby.

I don't remember. Yeah. But I remember seeing, seeing doctors do that. Yeah. And then you would get a lesion, a blister, and eventually it was scab over. And most of us who have had this vaccine have a scar in our upper arm. It's the round dime-sized scar on the upper arm of people that are, you know, 50 years or older generally. And so now with the genios vaccine, they don't do that multiple hole poking mechanism they used to do, but they're injecting subcutaneously. We got a question from listener Rachel who wants to know if you think the smallpox vaccine should be made available to healthy adults as we ramp up production of the monkeypox vaccine. So the smallpox vaccine is the monkeypox vaccine. Smallpox, monkeypox, and vaccinia virus, which is what the vaccine strain is, are all in the same genus. They're closely related viruses. So the government and the scientific community has focused on smallpox for the last 30 years because that's really what we've been concerned about. So all of these vaccines and drugs were designed for smallpox, but they also work for monkeypox. And that's our current problem. So that's why those vaccines.

vaccines and drugs are being used for monkeypox now. So if I got those scratches when I was a kid, are they still good? Is that, do I still have immunity? Yes, you probably do have some residual immunity, but immunity does wane over time. So the older you get, the less strong your immune response is, and also the longer ago that you had the vaccine, the less likely you are to have strong protection from it. But this monkeypox that's circulating right now is a less virulent strain. it's the West African strain. So that's really good news. It only has a fatality rate untreated around

1%. And in the U.S., we have drugs for it. We have good medical treatment. So it's unlikely to kill people in the U.S. It's going to be much more of a problem for someone who's immunocompromised or also potentially people that have eczema or other skin inflammatory conditions. It would be more dangerous for them. And for pregnant women, it can cross the placenta. So it is dangerous. dangerous for certain subgroups of people. I think your line of questioning raises some interesting ideas, which is, you know, there are people like myself who is 59 years old, right, who clearly had a smallpox vaccine, you know, and in an era, you know, and I'm a gay man, right, but I'm not a gay man who's 25 years old

and socializing at clubs every single night of my life. Thank God. And I, you know, it makes me wonder, as we're thinking through the vaccination strategy, and I appreciate, you know, my colleagues comments that, you know, we want to get as much vaccine in people's arms as possible. I don't love that it's being used in a way that wasn't really tested for, but I can live with it. But I wonder if there should be some more nuanced thinking about, you know, which members of the game by sexual population might be most, you know, in need of the vaccine? Should we start with the 20 and 30 something and the HIV positive population? I think I'm not saying that I have the answers to these things, but I think there's a more complex thinking that should go on. that might benefit the whole population generally in a more effective way.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I remember Larry Kramer saying in the 1980s that gay people were getting infected because they were having too much promiscuous sex. Is that the kind of complexity you're talking about? Actually, Larry, who was a dear friend, actually said we should stop having so much rampant anonymous sexual partnering. And the fact of the matter is it only takes one person to infect you with HIV. So, you know, the choice of a wrong partner who you're monogamous with could still infect you with HIV. No, I think in this particular situation, again, I'm walking a fine line here.

It is probably not a bad idea for individuals who are not yet vaccinated to consider their behaviors and to use harm reduction strategies, you know, to engage in sex, perhaps not close into mid-contact, perhaps, you know, postponing until somebody is vaccinated. There are things you can do to protect yourself. We're not saying that you should completely stop having sex, but perhaps having sex that might not put you at risk in the absence of a vaccination. Yeah, yeah. I also want to bring up the disparities in who even has access to this limited supply of vaccine.

Poor and black men have lower vaccination rates, right? I remember at the beginning of COVID doing a set of interviews about, you know, the disease and how it was spreading and, you know, reporters were asking me, why is it black, the black population and the Latin population? I'm like, why are we surprised at this? When we look at health disparities in our country, they tend to manifest in those populations that have less access that are more marginalized. And you think about the black community, black population as compared to the white population,

you know, certainly more levels of discrimination, you know, less economic well-being. And as a result, increased health disparities. So it's, of course, manifesting the same way in the game, bisexual, population. The LGBT population is not monolithic. And the latest data show that, you know, black men are more likely to not be vaccinated and more likely to be infected with monkeypox in a very similar way that in the United States, the majority of infections that we're seeing for HIV at the present time is young black gay men. And so it's like history repeating itself here. And I think what this speaks to is making sure that we provide access to the vaccines in a way that's easy,

for people who might not have the means to, like, you know, take off their work or travel long distances, you know, to bring it to neighborhoods that primarily serve racial and ethnic minority populations and, you know, being really strategic in getting the vaccines in those arms of those folks who might not normally have access. This is a virus that we know and that's been around and has been infecting humans since 1970. So we're way ahead of the game. I wish our response had been better given that the fact that we're. that we've known about this virus for such a long time. Good place to end.

Great discussion. Thank you both for illuminating and taking time to talk with us today. Thank you. What a pleasure. Thank you, Ira. Dr. Rachel Roper, virologist and professor of microbiology and immunology, Brody Medical School at East Carolina University, that's in Greenville, North Carolina, and Dr. Perry Halquitos, Ph.D. Dean of the Rutgers University School of Public Health.

We're going to take a break and when we come back, what if the galaxy we live in could talk or even write a sassy telomemoir? Well, I have news for you. Stay tuned. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Picture this. You are a galaxy, a vast collection of stars, planets, dust, and hot gas. You're 13.6 billion years old. You know pretty much everything. And you've decided to tell all. That's the premise of astronomer and folklorist Moia McTeer's new book, The Milky Way, an autobiography of our galaxy. She tells the story of our galaxy and the universe from the voice of a sassy, sometimes depressed Milky Way. And along the way, we meet our galaxy's love interest and frenemies. We spend time with the bullying black hole at its

center, and we meditate on the eventual death of stars. Yes, even our star. But why does our galaxy need to tell us all of this? And what can we earthlings take away for our more mundane planetary life? Dr. McTeer joins me now to explain. Welcome back to the show. Thanks so much, Iretz. Really good to be here.

Oh, you're welcome. You've written this book as if our galaxy were, well, shall I say, a celebrity, right? A character in a tabloid gossip. Your galaxy has a real attitude. Sure does. So if this is a person, right? If it's a person, who is the Milky Way?

Ooh, I think that the Milky Way is your sassiest friend who might be a little reluctant to join all of the friend group activities. Not a Beyonce, not a Lady Gaga, but someone with that definite queen energy. Oh, I like that. I like that. And you use this personality as a way to tell the story of the universe from the beginning to the end, really, telling it really, really well. Thank you. Tell me, after all these people, all these other. people have told stories about the universe and have written about them, why does your story still need telling? It's not my story. I read the Milky Ways. When I was proposing this book and trying to

figure out how I wanted to write a book about the Milky Way, I was thinking about this very question. Who am I, Moia McTeer, to add my voice to people like Brian Keating or Michi Okaku, these people who have been talking about the universe already. And I realized, I don't have that much. to add, but the Milky Way sure does. So I wanted to use the science to craft a voice and personality for the galaxy. You go through the different names that the Milky Way had over the eons. How did it stick the word Milky Way? How did that get to be its name? According to the International Astronomical Union, which is in charge of official names for all astronomy objects, the Milky Way doesn't have an official name. It's just called the galaxy. But in the West, we

tend to draw a lot of our astronomy names from classic mythology, Greek and Roman mythology, which themselves are inspired a lot by Egyptian and Babylonian myths. So the name Milky Way probably comes to us from Greek mythology, and it has to do with this story where Hera, the goddess of marriage and the hearth, she was, unbeknownst to her, forced to nurse baby Hercules. And when she looked down and realized that this was not her baby that she was breastfeeding, she pushed Hercules away, and that spurt of breast milk that came out of Hercules mouth was the Milky Way. And that's where we get the word Milky Way from, and even the word galaxy comes from old Greek for milk, Galaxios. Wow, that is a great story. What were some of the other names that had from other cultures?

There are so many. I think in the book I talk about an old Finnish myth. where the Milky Way is called the Straw Thiefs Way. There are people who called the Milky Way the Way of the Birds because it looked like birds were following the path of the Milky Way as they made their annual migrations. I think that if you look at myths about the Milky Way from around the world, you can see that people had very similar thoughts on it. A lot of it was this drawn-out path,

this diffuse, milky-looking path. But there are also fun differences that different cultures put in their myths. And you should know because you're the only person who ever graduated from Harvard majoring in both folklore and astrophysics. A little opposite ends of the spectrum. Just a bit.

At least that's what most people think when they hear it. But the more you start thinking about that connection, the more overlap you see between them. Initially, it's, oh, you're going to talk about constellations or astrology, but then when you think about it more, it's, well, maybe you can start comparing creation myths from different cultures around the world and see how they compared to our Big Bang, like scientific understanding of cosmology. And then the direction I took it was just fictional world building and seeing how space has influenced our culture and our folklore here on Earth, because it really has. There's a lot of influence there. For example, give me one of the greatest influences.

Mm, I mean, we have used the Milky Way to. to navigate to keep time. So there are a lot of practical influences. But even today, with modern astrology, which has roots in very practical, useful things, I think it's something like 70 million Americans read their horoscopes every day. So that is absolutely a connection we have. And yeah, we still name satellites and space missions and all kinds of objects we send into space after folklore. We sure do. Yeah, usually there are like competitions. The IAU will often, or NASA will often ask the public what they think something should be named

with a few options. And often those options are based on mythology, because now there's kind of a naming trend in place where we want to keep with that same pattern of having constellations and comets and moons that we find in the solar system named after creatures and figures from folklore. Right. Let's talk about the Milky Way social life. The Milky Way has friends and, yes, romantic relationships with other galaxies in its neighborhood that we call the local group, which is kind of true in real life. What's going on there?

The Milky Way is just one of about 50 or so galaxies in this little neighborhood that you're right, we call the local group. And most of those are tiny dwarf satellite galaxy. that orbit around the Milky Way or Andromeda, which is the other really big galaxy in our neighborhood. When I was trying to think of the Milky Way as a person, it made sense that some of its neighboring galaxies would be really annoying to the Milky Way and some of them would be more endearing. And so the large and small Magellanic clouds or Larry and Sammy, as they're called in the books, they make a lot of appearances. Larry is boring and gets on the Milky Way's nerves, but Sammy, the small Magellanic Cloud, is more of what the galaxy would consider a friend.

And then Andromeda is this long-term, epic, long-distance romantic partner that the Milky Way has been courting for billions of years. You call it an absolute smoke show, I believe it says at one point. Right? Yeah, Andromeda's hot. And the language you use, news. You said it was sassy. It certainly is. Do you, as a communicator, find that that language is appealing to a certain demographic you want to reach? I'm thinking about, like, younger people than normal astronomy or

astrophysics books? No, not really. I don't think that there was much strategy in coming up with the voice of the Milky Way because I have received some feedback that it's a little too sassy for some people. But that's just what made sense for me at the time. If you have this being that has been alone for billions of years and much of its time is spent creating stars that it knows are going to die eventually, that it would be sassy and it would have kind of a chip on its shoulder. So I wanted to stay true to the science in that way. And the Milky Way is a three-dimensional galaxy. emotionally, I mean, it's depressed, right, as it reveals. Yes.

When discussing the emotional turmoil that its famous Black Hole, Sajai Star creates for it, right? What do you have against black holes? I was worried I would get this question. I, Wemiteer, have nothing against black holes. But I was writing this book during the pandemic. I got the deal to write it just a week before lockdown happened. New York. And I, myself, was going through a lot of mental health struggles over the past two years. So, of course, that was reflected in the book that I wrote. And I thought that maybe it could help other people. Throughout the book, the Milky Way learns to give its inner turmoil a name. It calls the black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sarge. And once it gives it a name, the Milky Way can control more of what it does around the black hole. So it learns how to not let all of this anxiety and depression get to it in a way that I have had to learn how to do that over the last couple of years.

Interesting. That's really interesting. And you do describe the physics of a black hole in terms that general folks like me can understand. And you do it very well. And I thank you for that. Thank you. The Milky Way also thinks that it is the be-all of all galaxies. You know, is there really such a special galaxy in the context of all the gazillions of them in our universe? No, not really. But have you ever been a big fish in a small pond? It's really easy to feel like you are the biggest, baddest thing out there.

And in terms of the local group in this neighborhood that the Milky Way spends all of its time interacting with, yeah, it is the biggest and baddest. So that's what informs its personality. But if it went to a nearby galaxy cluster, like the Virgo cluster, for example, it would not be that big of a deal. Right, right. And the Milky Way takes credit for making scientists, I mean, astronomers better at what they do by developing new tools and techniques to study it. Of course. We wouldn't have this technology if the Milky Way weren't so interesting that we had to study it. Some people call astronomy the oldest science, and the Milky Way is very proud that it. was able to inspire that type of creativity and curiosity in humankind. And in that science, I find that you make a really interesting observation about how science by definition is usually conducted by

experimentation, but not astronomy. As you say, quote, some science is observational in nature, but not experimental, right? Absolutely. I have never touched a star. I have never touched a planet that wasn't Earth, and yet I got my PhD studying stars and planets and how they move around the galaxy. So it really is observational. We can't create control groups out of stuff that we make. Instead, we have to look out at all of the examples the universe has given us. Say we're studying stellar evolution, how stars change over time. We have to find stars at different stages of their evolution to study. We can't just look at one star and trace it over its entire life because they live a lot, longer than humans do. And it's pretty hard to make one in our laboratory. Yeah, exactly,

hard and like might be pretty dangerous. And also the Milky Way wants to tell us about the end. I mean, the end of the universe, the death of stars, the death of everything, and from our own myths about the end of the world, we have all different kinds of myths about the apocalypse, right? How does the science of cosmological collapse relate to our own stories of creation and destruction? and all these myths. Oh, I love that question. I think it's really interesting that we only kind of recently, in this grand scale of humanity, started thinking about the ultimate end of the universe, because we only recently had the technology to know what the universe was and how it could end. But even though that's a recent thing, humankind has thought about the end of the world for as long as we

have thought about the beginning of the world. I love that we assumed that things would end, because that kind of makes the time we have precious. I love the way that you can project our human lifespan and the fact that we will die onto the biggest things that we could possibly comprehend, like the universe, which will also die. So in a way that makes it just like us, but a lot bigger. Yeah, it gives us a sense of our own mortality. Yeah, and that's really important for us to have. Yeah, yeah. And the Milky Way is also sad about us because we're not telling stories about it like we used to. And you leave us with the directive to start telling new stories. Yeah. Where exactly will these new myths come from? We are creating new myths all the time. There's

a chapter in the book called Modern Myths, and I poke a lot of fun at science fiction, especially Star Trek. in an earlier version of the book, there were a lot more digs at Star Trek than you see in this final copy. And well, I'm glad you brought that up because one of the digs about Star Trek and other creatures that we make up is a worry that humanoid-looking aliens on rocky planets with breathable atmospheres are going to give us the wrong idea about what lies outside of our own solar system. Yeah. And what to look for. Absolutely.

why should anything else in the universe look like us when there is an amazing diversity of planets out there that vary in size, the type of star they orbit? I think it's a lot more interesting to think about aliens that would evolve and adapt to the environments that they're in. And there are just so many fun environments out there. Like, why limit our imagination to stuff that looks like us? Finally, I want one last question about the Web Telescope. I'm sure you've seen these wonderful images. What do you think was so special about the JWST images that you saw? I was blown away by how far we could see with JWST for the first time.

We were looking at galaxies, some of the first galaxies to ever form in the universe, and that gives us a better understanding of where we came from and where we might go eventually. But I think it also gives us a better sense of this. scale of time in our universe. One thing that I really wanted to do in this book was get people to shift their perspectives and zoom out from their tiny scale, both in time and space. And the more we can learn about the vast expanse of the universe, the easier that will be for us. And as an aside, the Milky Way says that we need to rename the telescope. And who are we to argue with our own galaxy, right? Yes. There has absolutely been a push in the astronomy community to rename

JWST. The Milky Way is all for that because even though it's this big thing that doesn't really care about us, it also thinks we're pretty silly for judging people based on who they love or what they look like. So the Milky Way is all for changing the name of JWSD. Well, that's a good place to stop. I want to thank you for this book. It's a great book. Thank you very much for writing the book and for taking time to be with us today. Oh, thank you so much. I'm really glad you enjoyed it. And it has been a blast talking to you about it. Dr. Moia McTeer, astronomer, folklorist, and author of the book, The Milky Way, an autobiography of our galaxy. That's coming out next week. But you can get a sneak peek on our website. Read all about it at ScienceFriday.com slash Milky Way.

Speaking of great storytellers, ever wonder how authors make realistic and alarming science fiction? Well, you can meet the team behind one genetic engineering thriller and this month, Cy Fry Book Club pick. On Tuesday, July 16th at 7 p.m., we'll live stream with author Blake Crouch and geneticist Michael Wiles, who helped make the science in Blake's book upgrade feel closer to life. Go to sciencefriady.com slash live stream for details. That's science friday.com slash live stream. And that's about it for this hour. Here's Valissa Mayers with some of the folks who helped make this show happen. Thanks, Sarah. John Donkoski is our director of news and audio.

Diana Montano is our experiences manager. Beth Rami is our controller. And I'm office manager, Valissa Mayers. Thanks for listening. Thank you, Valissa. BJ Leatherman composed our theme music. And a quick reminder, it's a big weekend for the Perseid Media Shower. A full moon is going to make it tough, but here's wishing you some good viewing weather.

Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato.