Science Friday - JWST Images, Solar System Exploration, Monkeypox. July 15, 2022, Part 2

Episode Date: July 15, 2022

Stunning JWST Images Show New Details Of The Universe After many delays, a Christmas launch, and a months-long period of travel and testing, the first science images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) were unveiled this week. The JWST has a huge multi-segmented mirror that allows it to gather faint light—and it sees in the infrared, allowing it to see through dust and gas and reveal details about the universe that were previously unseeable. On Monday, a short ceremony at the White House unveiled the first image, a “deep field” image taken by staring for hours at a piece of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length. The image shows thousands of galaxies, including ones so distant that their images have been warped by the gravitational lensing effect of massive objects in between. On Tuesday, four more images were unveiled, including a spectrograph describing the atmosphere of a distant exoplanet, a cluster of galaxies known as Stephan’s Quintet, the dying stars of the Southern Ring Nebula, and the star formation region known as the Carina Nebula. Amber Straughn, an astrophysicist and deputy project scientist for James Webb Space Telescope Science Communications joins Ira to talk about the images, and what lies ahead now that the JWST has entered its operational phase. To compare the JWST images side-by-side with the Hubble images of the same subjects, visit www.sciencefriday.com.   A Busy Time For Space Launches While much of the astronomical world was gazing at the first science images from the James Webb Space Telescope, there’s been a lot of other space news to discuss—from launches and testing associated with the Artemis I mission to the moon to new data from the Martian rovers. There’s also big news with commercial space flights, and even plans from some commercial vendors to work on a replacement for the aging International Space Station. Ira talks with Brendan Byrne, space reporter from WMFE and host of podcast “Are We There Yet?”, along with planetary scientist Matthew Siegler, about recent solar system news, and space events to keep an eye on in the months ahead.   U.S. Attempts To Catch Up With Rising Monkeypox Cases The outbreak of the orthopox virus currently known as monkeypox continues to spread in hotspots around the United States, with symptoms ranging from fever to intensely painful, contagious lesions. From five cases in late May, the known number has grown to at least 1,053 as of Wednesday afternoon, with epicenters including New York City, the Bay Area, Chicago, Washington D.C., and other major cities. But the current numbers most certainly are an undercount, as people seeking diagnosis report difficulty accessing tests. Meanwhile, the rollout of the existing monkeypox vaccine, Jynneos, remains slow and inadequate for demand, with more than a million doses still stuck in a stockpile in Denmark. So far, the virus, which is known to spread through respiratory droplets and skin-to-skin contact, has been detected predominantly in men who have sex with men. New York public health researcher Keletso Makofane and San Francisco AIDS Foundation CEO Tyler TerMeer speak to the frustration of LGBTQ men and nonbinary people in the most at-risk networks, as resources and response lag. And Ira talks to UCLA monkeypox researcher Anne Rimoin, who twelve years ago published a warning that cases were rising in African countries as immunity to the related smallpox virus waned. He also speaks with Brown University epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo about the outlook for global and domestic containment, and the pressing need for more data.   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 am I Refledo. Later in the hour, what you need to know about monkey pox. But first, the must-see space story this week. I'm talking about the deep space images from the James Webb Space Telescope, J.WST. As I say this week, the first images from the telescope, sitting a million miles out in space, were unveiled and they were spectacular. Joining me now to review the slideshow is Amber Strong, astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight. Center in Greenbelt Beryl. She serves as the Deputy Project Scientist for James Webb Space Telescope Science Communications. Welcome back to Science Friday. Good to have you. Thank you. It's great to be here. What a week. I'll bet. Have you come down yet? Not really. I still feel like I'm floating on clouds a little bit or maybe on a nebula.

Well, let's float just a bit more. Would you do that for us? We're seeing planets of our solar system now coming out from NASA, what's so unique about them and why should we be interested in them? Right. Well, this sort of shows a really interesting thing about the telescope because Tuesday we got the first five images and here we are just a few days later and we can see there's already more new images out. And so some of these first views of Jupiter are just incredible. I actually saw these several weeks ago when they first got taken and I was I was floored. I mean, it just proves that we can do almost everything with this telescope in terms of distance. You know, we can see objects within our solar system all the way out to the most distant regions

of space. Let's talk about the first pictures we've all seen them by now. We have them up on our website at sciencefriiday.com slash JWST. I know you study how stars and black holes form in distant galaxies and how these processes change over time. So give me an idea of what the images you see from JWST can. tell you about the formation of the stars and black holes in the universe? Yeah, so this is just a first look, so I haven't had a chance to actually dig into the data yet, but you can see just by looking

at these images hints of what is going to come. For example, in the cluster image, the deep field, of course, everyone there is focusing on the little red dots scattered across that image, which are some of the very, very distant galaxies, which is one of the primary things JWST was designed to find. And this image proves we can do that. But what my eyes are immediately drawn to is all of the galaxies that we see that are not quite as far away, but that are, you know, these stunning details, these really interesting morphologies, the shapes of the galaxies. And what we see is that we're going to be able to study these types of galaxies at a further distance in ways that we haven't been able to before. This is going to help us piece together how,

galaxies change over time and ultimately how the universe sort of evolves over time. Go into that a bit more. Give me a scientist's eye view of exactly the kind of things you could learn and what you would be looking for. Sure. So part of what I study is I'm interested in galaxy mergers when galaxies collide and how that process of galaxy interaction sort of impacts the overall evolution of galaxies over time. If you think about how we've been able to do this with Hubble images, we've been able to look at morphologies of galaxies out to, not too far into the, into the past. And of course, with infrared light, same story as with the very distant galaxies. We're going to be able to do this at even earlier times in the universe. And so, for example,

what I would, I'm looking forward to doing with this data is going in and finding all of those weird-looking galaxies, you know, the ones that aren't the typical spirals or ellipticals, the ones that have strange shapes that show us that they're undergoing interactions, and to be able to study those in detail, to see how they're forming stars, to see which ones have signatures of black hole growth. So those are the types of things that I'm really interested in. It's interesting that you bring up the weird galaxies, because I'm looking at one of the images, the Stevens Quintet, the five galaxies that are arranged together. They look to be more like a family of jellyfish to me. Right. I've heard several people.

describe it as looking like jellyfish. Isn't that it? So what is different about those? They don't, like you say, they don't look like your normal central casting spiral galaxies. Right, right. That particular image, Stefan's Quintet, is a great example of a closer version of this activity of galaxies merging. So what we see here, the four galaxies on the right side of the image are the compact

group of galaxies that are undergoing interactions. The one of the left is a little bit in the fourth. foreground, but it's those four on the right that are actually actively engaged in a merger scenario. And you can see that, right? You can see the sort of wispy structures in between the two. So that's a great sort of closer example of the things I study in terms of what happens when galaxies merge. And you can see it. Like you could see what's happening here up close. It's really, really incredible. And why does looking in the infrared portion, which our eyes normally can't see, Why does that show you more than we would see, for example, with the Hubble?

So there's a few key things that infrared light gives us. The first, and what's really key to my area of research, is really just distance. So I'm interested in star formation, and we see that primarily in ultraviolet light and a little bit of optical light. And at high distances, that light is shifted into the infrared. And so it's sort of the same principle as why we need infrared light to see. see the very first galaxies that were born over 13.5 billion years ago is that the cosmic expansion of space has caused that light to be shifted, redshifted, all the way into the infrared part of the spectrum. Wow, I didn't realize that. So you're able to see further back in time. Well, we haven't

had time to really, really do detailed analysis on this deep-filled image yet. And so we don't know if we've sort of broken the cosmic distance record. But what we do know, And one of the things that really took my breath away when I first saw this data is we have a spectrum. We have a galactic fingerprint of a galaxy whose light has been traveling for 13.1 billion years. So we have this pristine, beautiful spectrum that tells us for the first time ever what chemicals are in these extremely distant galaxies. And I think that this is the type of thing, this is the type of science that is really going to revolutionize our understanding of how galaxies really got their start. That's really cool. All that star stuff that we've been talking about for decades.

I mentioned before that Stefan's Quintet is one of my favorites. We were talking about that. But I found myself in awe of the Karena Nebula, an image that was not unlike we've seen coming from Hubble. but I mean, an image that drove home the point once again just about how many stars and galaxy and dust and gas there is out there. I mean, in this image you're looking at something that looks, as the caption says, looks like the cliff of a mountain range. Weren't you the one at the newscomers who blurted out? We don't even know what's going on over in here. Yeah, that was me on the NASA broadcast.

Yeah, it's just this image is stunning. This is the one that made me cry when I first saw it. be honest. I mean, it's just, it's just so beautiful, like on a human level. But then, yeah, digging into the science to what's going on in this beautiful image. Yeah, there's just, there's so much. Describe what's going on there. What are we, what are we actually, what is that brown stuff there, that wall made out of? The orangey, brownish stuff that you see, that is gas and dust. And then up above the region of gas and dust, up above that ridge, are these gigantic hot young stars that have these massive stellar winds, radiation is coming off of these stars, and it's sort of pushing down in on this region of gas and dust. And you sort of get that sense, right? This image has so much texture and depth. And you can see almost how it's sort of pushing down. And of course, all that stuff, the gas and dust, that's the raw material for new stars and baby planets. And

that's exactly what's happening here is that we think that the radiation from those hot young stars up above the ridge is causing new stars to form in this region of gas and dust. And, you know, this gas and dust is the same kind of stuff that we know that our own solar system formed out of, that our earth ultimately formed out of, and of course us, you know, it goes back to the classic Carl Sagan concept that we really are made of the same stuff that makes up the stars. Yeah, so people wonder, where did all the stuff on Earth come from, and now we can see where it came from. We can see.

This is a beautiful, beautiful example of, you know, the stuff that we're made of, literally in our bones, yeah. You know, there were a bunch of pretty pictures we're looking at them, but there was one image that probably to the average person didn't look all that exciting, but was probably a very big deal to certain kinds of astronomers. And I'm talking about the image of a graph. Tell us about that one.

The spectrum, yes, this spectrum, this fingerprint from the atmosphere of an exoplanet. This is absolutely incredible. So, of course, what we're seeing in this graph is the light that's coming from the atmosphere of a planet that is orbiting another star. And so these exoplanets, we now know that they're everywhere. That's something we didn't know when I was a kid. We didn't even know there were exoplanets, but we now know that exoplanets are everywhere. And this telescope, I think, is poised to do some incredible groundbreaking science in exoplanes

because we have never seen spectra in these wavelengths before. So if you look at that particular spectrum that was released this week, we've been able to go out sort of about halfway in that spectrum with Hubble. to see a little bit of what's going on in these atmospheres, but this telescope is going to allow us to do it in brand new ways, at brand new wavelengths. And one of the key things we see in this spectrum is the signature of water vapor. And the details of the spectrum reveal new things about this particular planet.

And so it's just, you know, it's awesome. Yeah, spectra aren't as pretty as the images, but the interesting thing, and this is really key, is that in the first year of observations, about 70% of the time is dedicated to spectroscopy. Wow. And so it's just so important to, because this is where the physics is, this is where the astrophysics is. We get to learn what objects in the universe are made up.

Well, Dr. Strawn, I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today. I know you've had a very active week. We'll let you go decompress now. Thanks. This has been fun. What a week. Amber Strawn, Deputy Project Scientists for James Webb Space Telescope Science, communications and an astrophysicist at NASA's guttered spaceflight center in Greed Belt, Maryland.

Congratulations. We're looking forward to what you can find in the coming years. And once again, you can see the pictures we've been talking about at sciencefriiday.com slash JWST. We're going to take a break. And when we come back, JWST isn't the only thing in space. We'll talk about new missions to the moon, Mars, and beyond, and what planetary scientists are learning about our solar system. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Those deep space images were quite amazing, weren't they? But you know what? That's not all that's going on in space, because it's been a busy few weeks closer to home, closer to Earth, and there is more action on the horizon. Joining me now are Brendan Byrne, who reports on space for WMFE in Orlando, and host the Are We There Yet Space Program. And

Matt Siegler, Research Associate, Professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and Associate Research Scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, and his interests include the Moon, Mars, and Mercury. Welcome back to Science Friday, both of you. Thanks, Ira. Thank you. Nice to have you back. All right, Brendan, let's start with you.

A lot of the public's attention has been focused on that telescope, but there's been some progress to report with the Artemis mission, taking us back to the moon, correct? That's right. rocket that will be flying the Artemis 1 mission completed a very critical test before its launch sometime this year. The rocket that's going to take us back to the moon is this rocket called SLS. It's like this 300 foot tall rocket with this massive orange core and these two side boosters, and it's going to be boosting the Orion Space capsule. This will eventually take

humans back to the moon. So they stacked it all together in the massive vehicle assembly building here at the Kennedy Space Center. They rolled it out to the pad and they did a dress rehearsal. So they fueled it up and they practiced counting down the rocket. They did not launch it, which was a good thing because it wasn't ready just yet. And that went very well, according to NASA leaders. So what they ended up doing was bringing the rocket back into the vehicle assembly building to do some final preparations before bringing it back out to the pad for one final time before they launched this uncrewed mission around the moon. and back. We are months, if not weeks away from this actually leaving the planet.

That's cool. We will launch no rocket before its time. We briefly talked about the Capstone mission that would kind of scout out the orbit for the space station circling the moon that's associated with this mission. What are some of the other parts that need to go into it? Yeah, there's quite a bit of stuff that needs to get near the moon before we can send our astronauts there, right? So Artemis I is kind of this proving ground, right? It's following the footsteps of capstone in this, in this very intricate and novel orbit around the moon. But before we put humans on the surface, NASA wants to put a small space station around there. This is called Gateway. And so when astronauts leave Earth, they will meet up in the Orion spacecraft

with Gateway. They will dock there. And this is kind of like the mud room before, before you head out onto the lunar surface. And waiting for them there will be some sort of lunar lander. Right now, NASA has an agreement with SpaceX to use its starship as the lander for the first few missions. So the things that need to come into play is we've got to have a successful Artemis 1 mission, this first uncrewed mission. The following mission, Artemis 2, will have humans on board. And in parallel, while these are happening, the development of the gateway, this space station will go into this orbit around the moon, and then the development of SpaceX's Starship, this lander to go there. So a lot of these pieces still need to come around and come into play

and get off the planet and get into orbit around the moon for this to happen. But things are marching towards that goal. All right. We'll have to wait for it. And Matt Siegler, from a science angle, what do we still need to learn about the moon that we don't know already? And how does this all fit into that? Well, it's really exciting. I mean, this SLS launch is actually carrying a couple lunar satellites on it as well. These small cubesats are kind of the first stage. One of them is an exciting one called Luna HMap, which is going to map the water at the poles of the moon by looking at hydrogen. And a lot of the new exploration of the moon is motivated by the discovery probably about 20 years ago now of water at the poles of the moon. And so we're going to have.

of in the next few years, three landed missions, at least to the South Pole of the Moon, one of which is a very exciting rover called the Viper Rover. Then I'm part of the mission team on, and we're going to drive around, and we're going to drill down to about a meter underground and search for potential places where there might be ice near the surface. And then that's not going to land too far from where we might land astronauts before the end of the decade. Is that why it's so important to find water there at the South Pole?

because you're going to be landing astronauts near there? It's certainly important for, you know, so astronauts can drink martinis on the moon. But it's going to be an exciting discovery. Just figuring out how the water got there. It's a big question whether it is recent water delivered continuously, potentially from, you know, small micrometeorites continuously hitting the moon or the solar wind depositing hydrogen on the moon,

which links with the oxygen in the rocks that are already there. and from that you can make water in situ on the moon, or it may be that this is water that's three and a half billion years old, right? And it's basically giving us a preserve of the same water that we believe came to Earth. Cool, cool. Matt, most of this moonwork is in preparation for an eventual trip, right? Maybe to Mars. What's the latest Mars news? We can never get enough of that. Oh, sure. Mars is really fun.

I'm personally working on two Mars missions, the Mars 2020 rover, Perseverance, which is really exciting right now. It has finally reached the Delta. So if you know River Delta, you know, something like by New Orleans, right, the river dumps out, the material fans out as it dumps out the river. And this basically is showing us that this landing site where Perseverance is exploring used to be a big lake with a big river running into it. And all this material was deposited it out about 3.6 billion years ago probably. And we've just this last couple weeks taken the first samples from this delta. And we're putting them in little capsules. And later in the decade, there's a new mission that's going to go and land take these capsules back to Earth and we'll be

able to learn in detail about them. And one of the things that's excited about the Delta, you know, down by New Orleans, they also drove for oil and such. So these deltas are very good for preserving organic material. And so it may be that this is one of the best places to preserve ancient organic material on Mars. And we're getting samples that are going to come back to us. Well, I think if you're using the New Orleans and the Mississippi as a reference, you've got to name the Lander or the return mission, the Delta Queen or something like that. Brendan, you mentioned Starship earlier, right before the first web image was unveiled on Monday. there were some, let's say, unexpected activity at a SpaceX rocket test? Tell us about that.

That's right. Well, I mean, SpaceX likes to blow things up. So how unexpected was it? That's up for debate. But they like to push their hardware to the limit. And that's kind of how they've gotten as far along in development in such a short period of time. But what you were talking about, well, we were all kind of gazing at these James Webb Space Telescope images. SpaceX was conducting a test of its super heavy booster. Now, I mentioned earlier Starship. That is this kind of like, it almost looks like a steampunk 1950s cartoon spacecraft, right? It's this really sleek, stainless steel-looking thing. To get it off the planet, they need a big booster. So they're testing this thing called the super heavy booster, and it's got at least 30 engines on it. And during one of these tests, where they're testing out these new engines, there was this massive explosion. We don't really know too much about it. SpaceX's CEO, who is kind of their lead engineer, Elon Musk.

He said, yep, that wasn't supposed to happen. We're trying to figure out what it is. And it's going to be important for SpaceX to figure out what happened and how to fix this, because NASA is relying on this booster and the eventual starship that they're going to launch. We don't know if at all this will have an impact on landing people on the moon or getting that lander there. But it definitely looks like a setback. They're not the only commercial space operation, right? What else is going on there? There's so much happening in commercial space, Ira. I don't even know where to begin. I got some time. Go ahead. Well, SpaceX is definitely leading the charge, right? I mean, they're working with NASA to kind of get cargo to the International Space Station, get astronauts to the International Space Station. We also have Boeing is probably going to launch NASA astronauts on their spacecraft this year. there has been this kind of paradigm shift at NASA where NASA no longer owns the hardware that they're

sending to space. They're relying on these private companies. And it's been described to me as, you know, instead of you and I buying a car, Ira, we just call an Uber when we need to get somewhere. Well, that's what NASA is doing, right? And that's really been propelling a lot of commercial development when it comes to spaceflight. We know the International Space Station will be decommissioned by the end of this decade. It wasn't built to last longer than this, and NASA has told us 2030 will probably be the end of it. So there are commercial companies that are building private space stations and already starting to lay the groundwork in doing that, learning how to fly their own private astronauts, testing out some of these habitats that may become a space station

in the future. So when it comes to the kind of civilian side of space, there's a lot of commercial companies coming in to fill in the blanks. Also on the moon, the entire new wave of lunar landers that we're going to start landing about two commercial lunar landers a year. They're all private, small companies, astro-robotic is going to be the one that lands the viper rover for us. I mean, so it's really exciting that all of these new science without humans, instruments to the moon are also going on commercial spacecraft. And that capstone mission that we spoke briefly about earlier, Ira, that was launched by a commercial company Rocket Labs, a relatively new commercial company.

So you're seeing that they are kind of doing the heavy lifting for all this exploration. Now, Matt, I know one of the planets closest to your heart is Mercury. You were on the show about 10 years ago talking Mercury with us. What's the latest going on there? Oh, yeah. Mercury is going to get exciting again in a few years as the Beppe Colombo, the European Space Agency spacecraft gets in orbit there. It's a Jaxa European Space Agency combination.

It's done a couple flybys of Mercury, one of them fairly recently. what's new about it, especially from what we did 10 years ago on the Messenger mission, is it's going to be in an orbit that gets close to both the North and South Pole. So we got a lot of great data about the North Pole of Mercury, but Bebby Colombo is really going to fill in the South Pole, and it's got a lot of neat instruments to tell us more about Mercury. Why do we care about Mercury this hot rock sitting close to the sun? I mean, I guess to go back to what we had talked about before,

about the delivery of ice to the inner solar system in general, the polar regions of Mercury are especially interesting there, and that somehow you got ice delivered to this hottest body in the solar system. And it's because the poles have these craters that are colder than the surface of Pluto. And then Mercury itself, the formation and everything is very weird. It's basically a big, large core with a very thin mantle. That's one of the things we've discovered with the messenger mission. It's really weird. Planets shouldn't form that way. Did it lose its surface material because the early solar system was so hot and volatile? You know, what's going on there?

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you're just joining us, we're talking about space exploration with Brendan Byrne, who hosts the Are We There Yet Space Program, and Matt Siegler, research associate professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Let's expand our horizon to the whole solar system, Matt. And if you were picking a spot for the next planetary mission, where would you want to go? Well, I mean, I think the exciting thing that's already on the horizon is this Europa Klipper mission, which should launch before the end of the decade, probably scheduled for 2024.

That's going to be a very exciting mission in that it's going to a place where we think could have the conditions currently to harbor life. A moon of Jupiter, right? Yeah, Europa is a moon of Jupiter. It has an ice shell that is maybe a couple kilometers thick to as much as 10 to 15 kilometers thick. And Europa Clipper will actually carry a radar instrument that will measure that thickness very precisely. So that's pretty exciting. And then what I'm really excited about is I'm a part of the Juno mission, and we're going to fly by Europa in September. So that's going to be some neat new images and data from Europa coming up this fall.

And the attraction of Europa receiving all. this attention besides Arthur C. Clark talking about it so much is what? Europa, I think I'm trying to remember the volume. It's roughly five times as much water as all the water on the earth in liquid form underneath this ice cap. And then there may be volcanoes at the bottom of that. And a lot of theory now says that we think that the first forms of life formed in these hot sub-ocean volcanoes on Earth. So it could be that we have those conditions for life on Europa. And what we're trying to figure out with the Europa Clipper mission is how that material

doesn't get back up to the surface. Does material from the surface get down into that ocean? And could we detect it without having to drill through miles and miles of ice? Right. Brendan, it's obvious that the U.S. is not the only player in space. What's going on on the international launch scene? What's going on with vehicles on other planets? Anything we should be watching out for there?

For example, China has a lot of it. a moonlander, right? When you look international, I think China is definitely something that's extremely exciting, right? They've got a moonlander, they've got a space station in orbit, with three of their technotches just launched last month. They are on the station for an extended period of time, and they're kind of putting it together. So I think what's happening with the Chinese space agency is really interesting. I also think there's a little bit of politics at home playing into that, that, you know, seeing China as a bit of an adversary when it comes to exploration is helping us get some money here in the U.S. for U.S. exploration because we don't

want to be, you know, left in the dust by what they're doing. But also when we talk about what we're doing here at the U.S., a lot of the stuff that we've talked about in this segment, Ira, is because of international collaboration. Matt talked about those sample returns from Mars. That has to be done with international collaboration. One country can't do that alone. own, the Artemis missions, that gateway is international collaboration as well. So we're seeing all these kind of countries come together and really kind of explore our solar system like never before. It's a really exciting time to be following space. Right. Let me wrap up by asking each of you, what are you looking forward to? What's the biggest thing that excites you for the year ahead, Brendan?

What is it? Well, unlike Matt, I haven't had any of my work leave the planet. So I'm sure he's got far more exciting things to talk about. But I think watching Artemis 1 launch, that SLS rocket, for me to be able to see something like that that's right here in my backyard, is going to be absolutely incredible. And I'm counting down the days for that to happen. You'll feel it more than you see it. Oh, absolutely.

Correctly. And Matt, what about you? What's the most exciting thing for you next year? Oh, there's just so many exciting years. I mean, both the SLS and the SpaceX launches that are going to take place this year are really great. I'm sad to see the end of the Insight mission, but it was very excited to be on it. It probably will not last through this fall. And as I said before, the Juno mission flying right by Europa is going to be so exciting to see. And then Mars 2020,

driving up this Delta, hopefully this year we're going to drop off the first sample cache of material that would be brought back, but then we're going to keep collecting more samples over the next couple years. So there's a lot of really exciting things this fall. And Mercury. I'm Team Mercury. Okay, well, I'm writing that down right now

because we'll be back talking to both of you. How's that during the year and see how these things are going? Okay, thank you. I would love that, Ira. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Brendan Byrne, who reports on space for WMFE in Orlando and hosts the, are we there yet? space program. I love that name. And that's Siegler, Research Associate Associate

Associate Associate Professor at Southern Methodist University and Associate Research Scientists at the Planetary Science Institute. Thank you both for joining us today. When we come back, the White House and CDC announce action to tackle the monkeypox virus. But so far, the lack of action has the feeling of deja vu all over again. What both epidemiologists and gay men want you to know, stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm a the White House and the CDC today announced progress on increasing availability of tests, treatments, and vaccines for monkeypox. Monkeypox continues to spread in the U.S. The virus causes fever and painful, sometimes blistering rashes, and it seems to spread by both respiratory

and skin-to-skin contact. The number of confirmed U.S. cases keeps rising, with hotspots like New York City reporting a number of likely positives too. But reported numbers may be be still too low because people seeking tests have also reported delays, roadblocks, and trips to multiple providers just to get swabbed. Even the swabs get delayed to and from the lab. Vaccines are rolling out slowly. New York City's first batch of vaccine appointments was so popular that traffic crashed the website. The majority of cases so far are concentrated in the gay community of men who have sex with men, as well as people in the same sexual sexual. networks. We talked to Dr. Colizzo Makafani. He's a public health researcher based in New York City,

and he said he knew multiple people who had tried repeatedly and failed to get tested for the virus, including one friend who had to see four different doctors in the process. His doctor did a CT scan before swabbing him for Monkey Park. It's unbelievable that you would go to those lengths to avoid investigating this thing that is in the news and ran in front of your face and the person who's very knowledgeable about his body and about the science is pointing to true. And he says people are angry, too, to see an inefficient response unfolding even as people continue to find themselves exposed and symptomatic.

People are experiencing immense pain and people are hearing stories about their friends experiencing immense pain. They are angry. I think the anger is a response that makes sense. Dr. Makofane is also the principal investigator of a new community-driven monkey-pox research project called RespondM-I, which he said was necessary because of the frustrating slowness and lack of information in the local public health response. The information systems that people depend on to figure out what's happening in this outbreak

in the U.S. are very, very bad. The scale of testing was so low that we knew that those numbers can't help us to planner funds, we need to have information about the outbreak that doesn't depend on people engaging with the health system because we know that not everyone can engage with the health system. Dr. Tyler Tamir is the CEO of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. His clinic has set up a hotline specifically to field concerns about monkeypox. He says interest is so great that they're getting one to two calls per minute. Many folks who are calling into our hotline line are frightened. They've never heard of monkey pox before and they have just received an email

from an event producer saying they were exposed to monkey pox. Then their search begins for vaccine. They're waiting on long phone tree cues. They're standing in these long lines, uncertain if it will truly result in a vaccine at the end of the day. This is scary stuff. Regardless of whether it's fatal or not, things are scary when there are a lot of unknowns, when people don't. When people don't know what they're supposed to do. Dr. Tamir's clinic has received fewer than 300 doses of vaccine. We would need something like 6,000 doses to effectively respond to our patient load at Magnet. And while we know that there are about 500 additional doses coming our way by the end of this week, we currently have a waiting list of eligible patients of over 2,000.

500 individuals who want access to vaccine and are waiting frantically trying to find one in the city. Now I want to bring on one of the veteran researchers of the monkeypox virus, Dr. Anne Ramein, an epidemiologist at the School of Public Health, UCLA. She's been researching this virus for more than 20 years. Welcome back to the show, Anne. Thanks for having me. It's nice to be here. How would you characterize the seriousness of this outbreak at this point, especially compared to other places this virus, has showed up in the past? I think we're at a very important moment in this epidemic. We have known for decades that monkeypox had the potential to spread in vulnerable populations. But I think it just managed to get itself into populations that have a lot of close contacts. It's spread very, very quickly.

And now we really have to come to the point of deciding, you know, what are we really willing to tolerate here for a pox virus spreading? Because the stakes are high. If this virus continues to spread, you know, it's very likely to become entrenched in human populations, spreading from person to person regularly. And we also have this very important piece to think about. We know that this virus is.

a rodentpox. And if it gets into rodents, rodents will transmit it very easily. It'll become very, very difficult to control. That doesn't sound like good news here. It's not good news, but there is good news here, which is that we have vaccines that work, we have therapeutics that work, and we have control measures that work. And we need to be hitting this very hard right now. We need to be making sure that we have all of these pieces together, working together, and doing so quickly if we want to avoid having monkeypox become a disease that we have to deal with regularly. One thing I'm hearing is that health care providers, and we just talked about this, are having trouble identifying patients because their symptoms are presenting so differently from textbooks.

What do you think and why do you think this is happening? That is absolutely a problem. This virus is presenting in a very different way than we've observed it in sub-Saharan Africa. And the textbooks all are reflective of clinical presentation that we've observed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, mostly. And the experience in Nigeria has not really made it into these textbooks in the same way. And I think that we're only beginning to truly appreciate that these focused lesions, this very different kind of clinical presentation is actually probably a lot more common than we were aware of, even in Africa. If you're not looking for something, you're not going to find it.

And so now that we understand that monkeypox can present in this manner, it's really important to even go back to places like sub-Saharan Africa to be able to truly understand, has this been spreading in this way for a very long time? And we've just never observed it. We must have really good clinical presentation descriptions, case definitions available for clinicians. We need to have excellent education out there without the kind of widespread testing that will allow people to be able to understand it very quickly. It makes it very complicated, to be able to diagnose it because this is a rash. And rash illnesses are fairly common. Clinicians see rashes all the time. So I think it's very, very important that this case definition and testing become

widely accessible. And then we'll have a much better idea of how far this is spread. I think another thing that you brought up was this issue of, you know, what about the textbooks? Well, I've been one of the people that's written the textbooks. We write about what we know. and the data that we have. And so all of these chapters are going to have to be rewritten. It's going to be a completely different chapter than what has been written in the past. And it's important to be able to update those things as quickly as possible with the new data. And because people use this as a reference.

And if you don't know what you're looking for and you don't have any testing for it, it makes it very complicated to be able to find it. You know, we mentioned this connection you were talking about. You use the word smallpox and monkey pox. The people who have already been vaccinated for smallpox at birth, do we have immunity to monkeypox? That's a very good question. And the answer is previous smallpox vaccination is likely to provide some protection, but the extent of the protection is hard to, hard to assess. So these are studies that need to be conducted right now. Right, right. I know more than 10 years ago.

You were publishing a warning that monkeypox cases were rising as vaccination to smallpox subsided. How does it feel as someone who has researched this virus for, what, 20 years, to see it suddenly so concerning to people in the U.S. right now? It's frustrating to see us repeating the same mistakes over and over again. You know, we know that it's important to have situational awareness. We've known that cases are increasing even in sub-Saharan Africa. So we've had some warning signs. And we've seen over the last several years importations happen somewhat regularly since 2018. And that should have been a warning sign as well.

It was fairly inevitable that eventually would start to, you'd see some person-to-person spread. In June, the World Health Organization said they wanted to rename this virus out of what that the name monkeypox with further racism and other stigmas against patients, does monkeypox need a different name? Well, I think it's really important to pay attention to how people are feeling. You know, the reservoir is not monkeys, it's rodents. So it is a misnomer in and of itself. So, you know, there's no benefit to keeping a name that creates stigma in any way, shape, or form.

because if the name monkeypox makes people less likely to seek care, if there's any stigma, if there's any feeling that makes them feel shame in any way, shape, or form, and if it hurts anyone, change it. And there you have it. Thank you very much, Dr. Ramein, for taking time to view with us today. It's my pleasure. Anne Ramein, epidemiologist at the UCLA School of Public Health. And now we go to a researcher we last talked to at the beginning of a very

different viral outbreak, the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo is an epidemiologist, director of the New Pandemic Center at Brown University and Providence, Rhode Island. Welcome back to the show. Thanks so much. Let me begin with you and your colleagues recently writing an op-ed essentially begging for better testing protocol for Monkey Pox. Can you explain why testing has been so slow and what makes it not good. Yeah, so for many people this may feel familiar, given what we went through with COVID-19, at the beginning stages of the pandemic, it was quite hard to get tested. Back then, it was because we didn't yet have a test, and it took some time to develop a test and send those to laboratories. At the early start of this monkeypox outbreak, that wasn't actually the problem. We actually had a test

for the orthopox virus, which is the family to which the monkeypox virus belongs. And it was a test that was already at public health laboratories around the country. But it was very hard for healthcare providers who were seeing patients to get specimens to those laboratories. It requires a different process than they usually use to send specimens to be tested. And it was just a cumbersome, hard-to-navigate process that was taking so long that it effectively limited who could be tested. And right now, given that we have limited other tools to, to use, there are, of course, vaccines and some therapeutics that we could use to treat monkeypox, but right now our main intervention is testing, diagnosing people who are infected so that they can

know that they have the virus and so they can stay home for as long as they're contagious and not inadvertently spread it to others. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking to epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo about the ongoing outbreaks of the monkeypox virus. let's roll the clock back to May. If you could rewrite the history of how we initially responded to this virus back then, what would have happened differently? Yeah, I think for me, you know, maybe in the early days,

the fact that we had a laboratory test already available and that we knew that we had some vaccines available, I think maybe ameliorated some of the early worry. But very soon after we started hearing that of the infections, that we found, a number of them, we didn't know necessarily who they got it from. And when you have a transmission chain and you can't identify all the links in the transmission chain, that means it's going to be harder to control the virus. So that was worry number one. Worry number two was when I started hearing some of the top infectious disease doctors in the country complained that it was

really hard to get their patients tested. And I thought if these folks who have a very high incidence of suspicion know a lot about monkeypox and know about the importance of testing their patients, if they're having a hard time navigating the system, then other busy health care providers who possibly have far less knowledge and perhaps less understanding of the urgency to test their patients. We're likely not going to be able to work within that system too. That should have told us that we need more flexible testing and more availability of testing through the regular processes that doctors and nurses use to other the way they usually diagnose their patients. That should have really happened within the first few

weeks. Do we have a window, a narrow window that's going to be closing before a much bigger problem happens? Yeah, we have a narrow window. I mean, right now we have an outbreak that is grown quite quickly in the U.S. And part of that is because we're just finally turning on the light to look for cases. And whenever you do that, you find a lot more than you saw before. But there is still concerns that this outbreak is growing in size. So that adds some urgency. But we also, I think, you know, have to worry that this could get out of hand if we don't act with more urgency.

And I think one of the things that worries a lot of people is that there's no biological reason why this virus will stay confined to any particular patient group. It's spread by very close contact. And so there is, of course, the worry that we could see it, the virus turns. up in patient groups that may have more severe symptoms. It's a blessing that we haven't yet experienced deaths in this outbreak. But, you know, I think we should act to make sure that doesn't happen and also act to meet the health needs of the patients that have been struggling with this virus. I know people are feeling very frustrated that they're still not able to access

testing, that they don't know how to get vaccinated, that there aren't enough vaccines available, that it's a black box in terms of who can get vaccinated and when, you know, we need to fix this. Yeah, that's really interesting. We still need to know a lot about the virus itself, don't we? Absolutely. And, you know, this is also a test of our larger preparedness system. And so far I am seeing some real worrisome signs that, you know, we have some gaps that we need to fill. You know, if we had a more transmissible, more deadly virus, I really worry about our abilities to control it. We saw the shortcomings of a lack of preparedness throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. One would hope that we would use those hard lessons learned to bolster our preparedness to get more ready for events like these that are going to become

increasingly frequent in our future. But unfortunately, I have not seen meaningful progress to suggest that we are taking a hard look at our public health and medical systems and making sure that they are ready to deal with the constant threat of new infectious diseases. Jennifer, unfortunately, that's about all the time we have. Thank you so much for your work and for filling us in. Thanks for having me. Jennifer Nuzzo, epidemiologist and director of Brown University's New Pandemic Center. And thanks again to Tyler Tremere, Caletzko, Makofane, and Remoyne for their time in helping us unpack this public health crisis. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.