Science Friday - Jane Goodall, Coronavirus Update, Science Diction. March 20, 2020, Part 1

Episode Date: March 21, 2020

60 years ago this year, a young Jane Goodall entered the Gombe in Tanzania to begin observations of the chimpanzees living there. During her time there, Goodall observed wild chimpanzees in the Gombe making and using tools—a finding that changed our thinking about chimps, primates, and even humans. Now, Goodall travels the world as a conservationist, advocate for animals, and United Nations Messenger of Peace.  She joins guest host John Dankosky to reflect on her years of experience in the field, the scientific efforts she is involved with today, and the need for hope and cooperation in an increasingly connected but chaotic world.  Science has given us more than data. It’s also brought us words for everyday things or ideas—meme, cobalt, dinosaur. And there’s often a good story about how those words got into our common use. Take the word “vaccine,” the distant, but hoped-for solution to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. It turns out the word originates from vaccinae, relating to cows, because the smallpox vaccine was derived from cowpox, a related virus.  Science Friday word nerd Johanna Mayer joins John Dankosky to talk about the origins of the word “vaccine,” and how she sleuths the fascinating histories that she tells in her new podcast Science Diction. The first season of Science Diction is now available! Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts!   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 John Dankoski, sitting in for Ira Flato, and I just want to start by telling you, Ira is fine. He's just spending a week at home instead of his planned a trip to watch baseball spring training. Don't worry, he will be back next week, and hopefully, hopefully baseball will be back soon, too. Later this hour, we'll be talking with Jane Goodall. This year marks the 60th anniversary of Chimp Research in the Gombe. But first, Americans are being told that we're living in a new normal, social distancing, vigilant hygiene, restrictions placed on schools and businesses that will be part of our lives for quite a while. We're also hearing that the world will be different after coronavirus, that the fabric of our society will forever be changed. And we may be starting to see some of those changes play out right now. Here to bring us some of the stories of this new reality is Sophie Bushwick. She's tech editor for Scientific American. Sophie, welcome back to the show. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you. First of all, let's address the news coming out this week that people with mild or asymptomatic cases of this novel coronavirus. are doing more to spread the disease than scientists' first thought. So explain this to us. So as early as earlier this month, the health officials were saying that they thought the majority of the spread of coronavirus was coming from people who were already showing visible symptoms. They were maybe coughing and the spraying spit that had viruses in it on their surroundings and other issues like that.

But more and more studies have been coming out that suggests actually people with no symptoms at all could be spreading the virus. In fact, some people who were infected with the virus and not yet showing symptoms had what's called a higher viral load. That means there's more, they produce, so for example, if someone were to cough and to have a droplet of saliva go, the droplet of saliva from somebody who's not showing symptoms would have more viruses in it than a droplet of saliva from someone who is showing symptoms. So this is pretty scary.

Do these people go on to have more serious symptoms later on, though? Some of them do. Some of them don't. Some of them, so for what we do know is that a lot of people who get infected when they're first can be tested for the virus, they might not necessarily be showing any symptoms of it. Some of them later go on to develop mild or severe symptoms. And in other cases, somebody might not realize that they could have a case so mild, they wouldn't even realize that they had been infected. But they do know that there's at least one outbreak that they trace to people who were infected but didn't have a case so mild. have any visible symptoms. So this is a lot more evidence, it seems, for social distancing, even if you're not sick and you don't know if someone is sick when you're near them, you know, this is really something that we have to take seriously, even more so than we thought before. Absolutely. I think that somebody, one thing that officials have said is the way to think about social distancing is not that you're trying to avoid getting sick yourself, but assume that you have it and then you're trying to keep other people safe.

Oh, okay, so there's one scary story. I promise, Sophie, we're going to get to at least one story that's not incredibly frightening today. Good. But let's go to another scary news story here. Hospital respirators are in short supply in Italy. We know about that. But we may soon be seeing the same problem here in the U.S. Tell me more. Right. So hospitals in the United States have a limited number of intensive care unit beds, ICU beds, that are used to treat severely sick patients, and they have a limited number of ventilators. So one thing that can happen in severe cases of COVID-19 and pneumonia is that the people who are sick need to be put on a ventilator that will breathe for them because their own lungs can't do the job. The problem is New York and other states across the country have a limited number of ventilators currently being used. And the worry is that we're going to have more patients than ventilators soon, which is going to make force health care workers to make these awful life. death decisions about who gets life-saving technology. And, of course, those are decisions nobody wants to have to make, but the numbers here are

really staggering. 18,000 ventilators could be needed in a place like New York City, and how many are available now? Well, there are fewer than 10,000 currently in New York, and the problem is many of them are actually in use. So they're not necessarily, even though that count is, you know, there's thousands of them, many of them are actually being used right now. And so you can't just take a patient off of one of those ventilators to give it to a COVID-19 patient.

They think they could be short by 16,000 ventilators, which is very scary. So whenever we're talking about flattening the curve, right, this is how we keep a shortage like this from happening. Exactly. This is exactly what people are talking about with flattening the curve. The idea is you want to have fewer people at any given time needing these machines, needing a bed in an ICU, and needing professional care from doctors and nurses and other workers who are relying on personal protective equipment like masks and gowns that may soon be in short supply. Okay, so there's also news this week that the government is in talks to use anonymous cell phone

location data to help better understand how coronavirus is spreading. Tell us more about what they're trying to do here. So what they're talking about is so there's two different kinds of things people think about when they're talking about tracking the location of your smartphone. So this is a case where they would use the location data from people's smartphones to just build up a picture of how people move around certain areas of a city or even of the country. So this isn't the case of Big Brother following you individually around to see who you've interacted with. Instead, when researchers are building models of how viruses spread and trying to figure out

how quickly they spread. It helps to know, you know, what the foot traffic might be like in Times Square on a given day. So they could say, well, let's assume that people follow these walking patterns. What would happen if one of the people walking through here was carrying what was infected with coronavirus and potentially spreading it? How would that simulation look? How would that same simulation look if you assume you've got 10 people or 100 people on a given day? So this is just helping researchers better track how quickly cases are going to increase and how quickly this virus is going to spread. That's the specific application they're looking at. Now, on the other hand, other countries are using more individual data. And what they're trying to do is, for example, some companies

even here have talked about potentially developing an app that could tell you, hey, you were in proximity to someone who is known to be infected with coronavirus on X day. Here's what you should do about it. Maybe they should tell the person that they need to quarry to. themselves or that they need to warn their own contacts to get tested. So this is something that China is trying right now. I've been reading that Israel is doing something like this. I assume that privacy experts are pretty scared about this idea, though. Correct. So the idea of using anonymized data, privacy experts are more on board for that because you're not tracking any individual person. The idea of this other app, it really opens up

some scary implications because what if the government decided to prosecute you for walking, for going on a walk if you were infected. It just opens up the door to even more privacy invasions, and it also opens up the door to an application that maybe people could keep using after the coronavirus crisis passes. Okay, one more scary story here. Reports of a lot of bad actors out there using the fear of coronavirus now to spread malware and perform fishing attacks on people, like spreading another type of virus. What's happening? Right. So in this case, it's a digital virus that you want to avoid being infected with. So the idea, there's a couple different things going on.

One is some bad actors are sending out emails that claim to be maybe with health alerts. They might include a link that looks like it goes to the CDC website, but in fact redirects you to a website that's going to try to steal your information or download software. Other cases are phishing attacks where it might direct you to a website where it says, here's some important health information, sign in using certain credentials, using maybe your email password. You want to avoid those websites as well. And then another thing that's going on is John Hopkins has developed a map that maps the spread

of coronavirus in real time. This is really helpful tool. However, what hackers have done is they've taken that map and they're using it to lure people to other websites. So they might say, here's a link to the map and you click the link. And then that website might tell you, before you view the map, you need to download this software. and then that software would infect your computer.

So if you're looking for a map, please only go to the one on the John Hopkins website. That one is safe. And in general, just be cautious about downloading software from unknown websites and about entering your credentials in unknown websites. Be careful about clicking links in your emails, even if those emails claim to be about health information. Okay, so something else we're hearing a lot about is deep cleaning. Plains are getting deep cleaned.

Cruise ships are being deep cleaned. Even offices are right now. I don't know, Sophie, what does deep cleaning really mean right now? Okay, so deep cleaning is one of those terms that can mean different things depending on who's saying it. When people say they're, or when organizations say they're doing deep cleaning, they mean they're doing very thorough cleaning, but there's not a specific formula that that refers to. So some of the things that they're doing are pretty cool. For example, some airplanes have started using misting cabins or certain specific high traffic areas,

with this vapor of disinfectant to try to cover as many surfaces as they can. In other cases, deep cleaning means, so for things like cloth and carpets and soft surfaces, you can't clean that with disinfectant the way you can wipe off a harder surface. So in some cases, what that means is washing, clothing, and bedding in hotter water than would normally be used in an attempt to kill pathogens. I mean, we've all had the experience that planes are pretty gross places to be, why exactly weren't they doing this in the first place? Right.

I mean, if you ride a plane, whether now or later, if you're on a plane trip, I highly recommend that you bring disinfecting wipes and wipe down the area around you and anything you might touch because, yes, those things on a tip typically do not get cleaned as often simply because there's just not time. So a lot of times a plane lands at an airport, the passengers disembark, and they need to load the plane right back up. So they've got a limited amount of time, and they're going to focus their cleaning efforts on high traffic areas. They're going to try cleaning the restrooms. They're going to try cleaning

things that get touched a lot, like handles and knobs. And they're not necessarily going to have time to clean the tray on your seat back. I would guess not. Hey, Sophie, before I let you go, we have a little bit less than a minute left. People are trying to escape from this terrible thing that we're all stuck in right now, and they're escaping by actually watching movies and playing games about pandemics. What's going on? Right. So there's been a surge in popularity for things. like the movie Contagion, which is about a fictional pandemic, and for games in which you're trying to, you play a member of a public health team fighting against a pandemic. One game called Plague Inc. People actually crashed the website trying to download it. And so what could be going on here

is psychologically, it feels good to think that you are taking action and doing something instead of being helpless. And these games and media help people do that. Sophie Bushwick is tech editor for Scientific American. Sophie, thanks so much for the update and Stay safe out there if you would, please. I will. You too. When we come back, Jane Goodall joins us to talk about her work with the chimps and her work today encouraging hope and conservation around the world. Stay with us.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. 60 years ago this year, researchers began a project observing the behavior of wild chimpanzees in the Gombie. One of these researchers was a young Jane Goodall, who would go on to document tool use among the kids. with chimps and change our perceptions of the animal world. 60 years on now, Dr. Jane Goodall is a global conservationist.

She's founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and UN Messenger of Peace. Dr. Jane Goodall, thanks so much for joining us, and it's good to speak with you once again. Welcome to Science Friday. Well, good to speak with you too. But by the way, when I went out to Gombe, it wasn't a group of research. It was me alone. Well, yeah, I guess that's right. So a group of researchers versus you alone,

Tell us about that. Take us back to that time, if you would. Well, yeah, it's actually, you know, it's very easy for me to remember going along the lake shore and looking up at the hills. It's very steep. It's a series of valleys running down into Lake Tanganyika and looking there and thinking, how am I ever going to find the chimpanzees? But then having dreamed about being in the wild with animals since I was 10, Once we got the tent up, I climbed up a little way, I was getting towards evening, and I sat there, and there were baboons barking and a bird singing and looking out of the lake,

and it was just like, you know, my dream has actually come true. That must be an amazing feeling when your dream as a young girl comes true. What do you remember about that time when you actually realized, my goodness, I'm going to have chimpanzees surrounding me? It wasn't like that at first. they would take one look and run away. It took, I would say, six months before I could sit calmly with chimps around me. But luckily, after four months, one of them, David Greybeard, I named him.

He was the one who began to lose his fear. And he was the one who showed me chimps using and making tools, something that then it was thought that only humans did. That initial observation of tool use, is that still the most important thing that you think we learned from your research? research? No, I don't actually. I think the most important thing is, you know, when I went to Cambridge after two years, I hadn't been, I'd been with the chimps two years, told me that I shouldn't have named the chimpanzees, they should have had numbers. I couldn't talk about

personality, mind, or emotion because those were unique to us. But I had this wonderful teacher as a child who taught me that wasn't true, and that was my dog. Because chimpanzees are so biologically like us, and because by this time my to-be husband had been taking photographs and filming, science had to change this reductionist way of thinking and realize we're part of and not separated from the rest of the animal kingdom. What do you think researchers have learned from watching these chim families in all these lineages, in all these years after you first spent time there? Yeah, we're just into the fourth generation. And, you know, through DNA analysis, we now know who the fathers are. So one of the things that fascinates me to mothers, just as, and I was lucky in having a good supportive mother, she supported this crazy dream when everybody else laughed at me.

Looking back over 60 years, typically supportive mothers do better. The males reach a higher position in the hierarchy, probably some or infants, and the females are better mothers. What's a good chimp a mother like? I mean, what's the behavior that characterizes a good mother from a bad mother in that world? Well, I think we can all assume what we know a bit about humans, but tell us about the chimp world. It's exactly the same as in the human world, you see. And that is the good mother will be playful to always run to support her child. Even if that child has got in a squabble, a female, and the mother knows that she's going to get beaten up, she will still, you know, I've learned from the chimps that what is really important for us,

surrounded by up to three adults who are consistently there for the child and make the child feel secure. And even if it's not the biol, as long as there is that small group, and the child that gives them a really good student. We're talking with Dr. Jane Goodall, and you can tweet at, at Cy Frye, if you have some thoughts or ideas for her. Do you ever think about the fact that someone else may have done this? If you hadn't have gone out to the Gombe 60 years ago, that someone else may have seen this behavior,

do you think that they would have had the same experiences, learned the same things? If they've gone to Gombe, but we know now that chimpanzees in different parts of Africa behave in different ways. They actually have cultures, which the young ones learn by observing the adults. Chimps like us have a long childhood, and I think that's important because they have an awful lot to learn.

Do you ever think the world would have been different, or the world of this research would have been different, if you would have looked at some other form of African wildlife, you know, giraffes, for instance? I mean, is there something very specific that we learned because we studied chimpanzees because they're so close to us? Or do you ever think about the idea that you could have gone off on another quest to, I don't know, search for elephants? Yeah, well, I would have. I mean, I would have studied any animals in Africa with Lewis Leakey who wanted me to study the chimpanzees. And I think the importance of that was that I had not been to university. I hadn't been taught, you know, there was a difference in kind between us and other animals. If I had been to university and the scientists had tried to indoctrinate me in that way, I don't know if I would have been the same or different. Lewis Leakey pounced on this mind, as he called it,

uncuttered with reductionist scientific thinking. So, you know, I went and watched the chimpanzees. I came to recognize them. My qualities. You can see their emotions of happiness, sadness, fear, despair. You know, it's more or less the same as us. And because of that, because science began to change, it had to, then our relationship with the rest of the animal world has changed.

And we now can study emotion and intelligence in creatures. So much of your work now is about conservation. I guess I'll first ask, what do you think the world has learned about conservation from some of your African research? Well, what I learned is that when I'd been in the field for about, up until from 60 to 86. You know, at a conference where different people by then were studying gyms, gym numbers were decreasing, forests were disappearing.

At Gombe, it's a very tiny national park. It was surrounded by 12 villages, and they were literally struggling to survive, extreme poverty, overused, saw trees on the steep slopes, to try and survive. And so that's when it hit me. If we don't do something to find ways of, living with the chimps to conserve the chimps or go on studying the chimps.

So the Jane Goodall Institute began our program, Dakari, Take Care. It's now in 104 villages throughout the whole chimp range in Tanzania, can countries. You know, the villages have now become our partners in conservation. How much do you think the world, though, by and large, has changed in their views of conservation, over all this time. It feels sometimes as though we take a step forward and then a big step back. What are your thoughts about 60 years of conservation in the world? Well, it's not really 60 years because when I began, there wasn't really this need for conservation. It was an equatorial forest belt. The Amazon was still wild and unknown.

It's suddenly, the sudden realization that habitats were being destroyed as the Western world got more greedy and wanted more enemy works. on people go on buying and buying. You know, it's a vicious circle. And you can't, it's absurd to think you can have unlimited economic development. And a planet with finite natural resources can serve the environment. It's huge because we're up against the big companies, corrupt governments, corrupt business. You know, sometimes you think, well, how on earth we ever going to make change,

the change we must make, because we are part of the national. environment. We're not separated from it. We depend on forests for clean air and clean water and absorbing carbon dioxide, for example. But my biggest hope lies in the fact that we, in 1991, started our Roots and Shoots program. 12 high school students in Tanzania who are concerned about different things. It's now in 65 countries, hundreds and thousands of young people from kindergarten to university. And they all choose, between them, three projects. They choose one to help people, one to help animals, one to help the environment.

Depending on their age, a kind of environment they're in. Everywhere I go, there are young people wanting to tell Dr. Jane what they're termination. I love that idea, though, of doing something for the animals, doing something for people, and doing something for the environment. So many activists, it seems, pick one of those three and focus all their efforts there as opposed to saying we need to take care of all three of these things. You see, I learned about the interconnectedness of everything out in the rainforest. Where you learn that every species, no matter how small, has a role to play.

And all of it is important if you want to maintain the biodiversity, the habitat healthy. We're talking with Dr. Jane Goodall, a global global. conservationist, of course. She's the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, and we're taking some of your tweets at SciFri. I'm John Dankoski, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. At the Davos Forum on climate change this year, you threw your support behind an effort called One Trillion Trees. It's aimed at widespread nature restoration. Can you tell us more about that and why you think it's so important? Yes, well, that's many off of Salesforce that got behind that and made it prominent. The thing is that It's about one trillion.

The planting trees is important. Protecting the existing forest is even more important. In trees, land, planting trees in urban areas and provide shade. And of all, it raises the surrounding them. There were a few of your comments at Davos that were a bit controversial. You said that the environmental problems we're dealing with wouldn't really be a problem if we had the global population we did 500 years ago. What did you mean by that?

statement? Well, what I mean is that today on the planet, it's as faster than nature can we, and you have extreme, but then be 9.7, all wanting better lifestyle. How can the planet cope? So what I mean by it is, you know, as our numbers grow and as we make a real change of mind attitude and learn to live with after the environment. And one comment that I heard, we have many children. one child from a wealthy, I don't know, 10 times more, maybe slightly more natural resources than immunity in Africa. So as you said before, it's about that imbalance that the world of big businesses and corporations and the wealthiest use so many more resources than the poorest people in the southern part of the globe. Yes, absolutely. And so it's really awful all this climate change.

and yet the people who suffer are the people who really haven't contributed to it at all. It's extremely unfair. We've all got the same attitude, palm oil plantations, and planting trees, five million trees this year. And that's a pretty enormous number. We actually have some tweets coming in from some young people, and we'll get to some of those in just a moment. You can join our conversation at SciFri with Jane Goodall in just a moment. Please stay with us.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. We're talking this hour about global connectedness, conservation, and hope. My guest is Dr. Jane Goodall, founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and UN Messenger of Peace. We have some tweets coming in. John says, thanks to Dr. Goodall for all her conservation work. I use her advocacy for planting trees along farms adjacent to Gombe to help explain

landscape corridors and conservation when teaching ecology principles. And James has a tweet, says, our nine-year-old has been so inspired by your work. His dream is to work with and save orangutans. So what advice Jane Goodall do you have for him and his hopes? Well, first, I'm involved because then he's with others who want to learn about them. Jane Goodall, you've lived through a lot of eras in the world in which things have been scary and times have changed. It seems very scary right now. I'm wondering if you can talk about how you're.

feel about this particular moment in history as we're all huddled in our homes and unable to go outside and socialize? Well, I'm not in a position to not socialize because it's quite a large family of us in this house. I'm in the house where I grew up. It's a family home. I think, you know, the, if you always look for some kind of silver lining. It was with 9-11 when I was in New York and the world. Little silver lining. is that it's reopened our interaction with wild animals, the trafficking of them. People are blaming China for this in SARS. It was another wet market in China. But HIV virus are eating chimpanzees and monkeys, pandemics in the United States.

As we get closer and closer, particularly to wild animals, the viruses in them can the species bury and jump into us from handling them from the blood, eating slightly uncooked meat, and that sort of thing. There was another pandemic from came from camels in them, really making us rethink the animals. It is, but even with these signals, do you have hope that we get the message this time around? Well, China immediately banned all wild animals in China and closed down all the meat markets.

this pandemic seems to be worse than the others, having more effect economically, then we come to Africa. Well, until we eradicate, it's going to be very hard to stop people handling wild animals in Africa, because a lot of them depend on, you know, these are, this is how all this interconnectedness sometimes very, very challenging. And clearly, I don't have the answers. I know what we should know how to get there. You've spent so much time studying the behavior of chimpanzees. I'm wondering, as we consider just the boundaries of society, what it means to be a society when we can't interact in the way we once have, do you think that there's any wisdom that we can draw from the chimps and the societies that they have?

Well, they're so like ours that they're to understand our grief. They definitely grieve. to find out there's a common ancestor, ape-like, human-like years ago. So he thought in humans today, and he was fascinated in that because he was a palian for the remains of to imagine how these people living so long ago might have behaved. I want to read one more tweet, and this comes from Brooke, and it goes back to the beginning of our conversation. We were talking about how you know a good chimp mother from a poor chimp mother.

and she wants to know, do chimp mothers discipline their young? Oh, yes, they do. When they're very young, just with my own child, and I've seen human mothers, Bill's Milcom, the child is exploring, it's how they learn, and the mother will slap it. Well, it's okay to slap a child of one and a half, so chimp mothers are really good at,

you see a mother, Jim, and she's fishing for termites with one hand and tickling her infant with the other. And so, but if the infant goes and pushes her beyond her patience, they punish with a little bite on the hand. I'm thinking that story might resonate with a lot of parents, men and women who are stuck working at home with children running around the house these days. Yes. We're trying to think of lots of, lots of new things to do for children we're going to put out. Well, actually, if somebody else tweets, Amanda tweets, have you ever considered doing fireside chats on a podcast?

during this... Yeah? Talking about it today. Oh, really? Tell us more. What are you going to do? Well, I know we're making a list of people who might agree to do it. What would that sound like?

I mean, if you had a regular podcast or a regular message to get out to people, what would you want to communicate to people who would seek out your podcast? Well, I think, you know, I was thinking of the file side chats. It would be me and one other person. And, you know, whether it's what we do about the... wild animal trafficking people, the conversation would be interesting. Point us, if you would, quickly to another environmental or conservation leader, somebody who you might sit down for one of those chats, who we should know about.

Try and sit back Leonardo DiCaprio because he really cares passionately about the environment. And I know him quite agree, but, you know, he might agree. Other people, we haven't made the list yet. Well, I'm hoping that some of them are listening right now, and maybe Leo will call you right after this, because I think that I can imagine that millions of people would download that podcast, Jane Goodall. Thank you so much once again for spending time with this. I really do appreciate it. And please stay safe, all right? Oh, yes, I'll stay as safe as I possibly can. Wash my hands a lot, keep my distance. Okay, we'll elbow bump when we see you next time. Thanks again.

We will indeed. Jane Goodall. Goodall. She's a global conservationist, founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and UN Messenger of Peace. Okay, think of the word cobalt. It's a striking shade of blue, an element on the periodic table, and at one point, a tricky goblin from German folklore. Over the century, science has given birth to words that are now part of our everyday life. Dinosaur, meme, vaccine. Yeah, we'll say more about vaccine in just a minute. I know that's on your mind. And when it comes to tracing back the story of where those words come from, who better than cyphry's

resident word during Johanna Mayer. She's host of the new science diction podcast. She's here to tell us the sort of tales of words like Cobalt. Welcome back, Johan. Hey, John. How are you? I'm doing quite well. So Cobalt, there's a good story behind this word? There is. And it starts in the 1500s with a bunch of miners in Germany and this one particularly pesky ore that was giving them a ton of trouble. Okay. So the thing that was going on is that, first of all, this ore, when, they dug it up, it looked kind of like silver. It had this sort of metallic sheen on it. So they thought that they had great luck there. But when they melted it down, it was not silver at all. It turned out to be just a lumpy rock of whatever. So the second thing that was happening was that something in the

ore was making these miners sick. And they just could not figure out what was going on. So the miners came up with their own explanation, which was as good as any other, which was it had to be a gobliners. Of course. That was making them sick. Naturally, of course. But the thing was, it wasn't just any goblin. The miners said that it was a particular kind of goblin from German folklore. And this goblin was called a Cobalt that's with a K and with a D.

And the cobald goblin had a reputation for being particularly troublesome and mischievous. So they were saying that it was this cobald goblin that was like stealing the silver out of the oar and making them sick. And it wasn't until 200 years later when a chemist came along and had a hunch that locked inside this pesky ore, there could be a valuable element isolated in it. So when he finally succeeded in isolating the element, he stuck with the miner's name and he called this new element cobalt with the sea and a T. Uh-huh. So I just have to ask that what was actually making them sick if it wasn't a goblin?

So it turns out that when cobalt is found in nature, it's combined with arsenic. often. So that'll do it. Oh, so that will do it. I'm John Dankowski. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. All right. So tell us, Johan, about this new podcast, Science Diction. Very exciting. Yeah. Science Diction is a very nerdy, new show, all about words and science history. Yeah. So each episode looks at one particular word or phrase like Cobalt and kind of digs into the science story behind it. Excellent. So what are some of these other words that you're looking at? So on the docket for the first season, we've got cobalt, meme, dinosaur, and like you mentioned earlier, vaccine. Ah, very timely. Okay, so we've been hearing a lot about vaccines. Tell us the story of this word.

So for that one, you have to look back to the time of smallpox, which actually is a really ancient disease. I didn't know this before I started researching it, but there's evidence that Pharaoh's got it. And it was a totally devastating disease that people just couldn't figure out how to get rid of it. it. They tried everything from like herbal remedies to there's one record of a 17th century doctor prescribing 12 small bottles of beer in a day to try to get rid of small box. Hold it. That actually sounds like an okay treatment. I know. Maybe we should all try it. Right. Well, we'll try it. What the heck? I'll get back to you. Anyway. Yeah. So they couldn't figure out what was going on until in the 18th century, this doctor named Edward Jenner came along. And Edward Jenner formally

tested and documented this sort of hypothesis that had been floating around. And so the deal was there's this kind of apocryphal story that Edward Jenner overheard a milkmaid bragging about how she would never get a pockmarked face from smallpox because she had had this other disease called cowpox. So yeah, here we go talking about another animal-born disease. But cowpox and smallpox are both part of the same viral family. They just manifest differently. So smallpox, obviously super serious, but cowpox, when it manifests in humans, not so bad. You just got some kind of like mild but kind of nasty soars. And so for a quick biology recap, the idea was that cowpox and smallpox were from the same family. So once you get infected with the relatively mild cowpox, your body

develops the defenses to kick it. And then once smallpox shows up, those same defenses are able to kick in and say, oh, yeah, we recognize this and nip it in the bud. So Edward Jenner finally tested out this theory, and he published his findings in a report called an inquiry into the causes and effects of variola vaccini. And so here's the very nerdy etymology part of this story. In Latin, variola means postules, and vaccini means essentially something that comes from. a cow. So varriola vaccinee basically means cow postules or cowpox. And that's the basis of the word vaccine. Yes, super fun. Lovely. So hold it, but how did we start to use it more broadly than just

about cowpox? Right. So Louis Pasteur actually can take credit for that. He was the one who stretched the meaning beyond using cowpox to inoculate against smallpox. Ah ha. So once again, thanks to Louis Pasteur. This is going to be a fascinating podcast. Where can people find out more information, Johanna. You can subscribe to Science Diction wherever you get your podcasts, and we also want you to take a survey if you can at Science Friday.com slash Diction Survey. Tell us if you like the show. Excellent. Johanna Mayor is host of Science Diction. Subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Thanks so much, Johanna. Thanks, John. Charles Bergquist is our director and our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, and Kathleen Davis. We had technical and engineering help

today from Paul Ruest. B.J. Leederman composed our theme music. If you missed any part of this program or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcast or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. We want to assure listeners that we hear your concerns about coronavirus. We've put together a handy page on our website. You can find it at sciencefriiday.com slash coronavirus facts. And on the Science Friday Voxpop app, there's a lot more about coronavirus as well. I'm John Dankoski in New York.