Science Friday - New Prosthetic Arm, CAR T Cell Therapy, Climate Games. August 12, 2022, Part 2

Episode Date: August 12, 2022

Some Grasses Can Stop Lead From Spreading In Soil Lead left behind in soil from mining and smelting poses a major health risk to people who live nearby. Researchers in Nebraska and Kansas believe plant life and organic material can limit lead’s spread.In parts of the Midwest where lead mining and smelting lasted for over a century, communities are still dealing with toxic waste left behind by the industry. Lead, a dangerous neurotoxin, persists in the environment, including in water and soil, where it can pose a threat to the health of people living nearby. The risk is especially acute for children, who can unintentionally ingest lead by putting their hands in their mouths and whose brains and bodies are still developing. It can be spread to other areas, like yards and schools, by rainfall, and can also taint aquifers or vegetables in gardens, making them harmful to consume. Now researchers are working to limit the impact of lead in the environment on people, and they believe they’ve found a promising solution: Plant life. Phytostabilization involves moving lead from soil into the roots, stems and leaves of plants to prevent it from spreading and to limit people’s contact with it. “One of the goals of phytostabilization is to take the site with lead and put it in a stable state, so that the risk is reduced, and the issues related to lead in the soil can be managed,” said Larry Erickson, a professor emeritus at Kansas State University and former director of the university’s Center for Hazardous Substance Research. Read the rest on sciencefriday.com.   A High School Student Invented An Affordable Brain-Reading Prosthetic Artificial limb technology has come a long way since the first prosthetic—a big toe made of wood and leather developed in ancient Egypt. Today’s cutting-edge robotic limbs use mind-control and even give users a sense of touch, helping them feel sensations like a warm cup of coffee or a mushy banana. Still, these state-of-the-art prosthetics often involve invasive brain surgeries and can be exorbitantly expensive. Hearing of these issues, one teenager set out to create a solution. Seventeen-year-old Benjamin Choi has developed a non-invasive, affordable prosthetic arm. His Star Wars-inspired technology reads a user’s mind with only two sensors—one on the forehead and the other clipped to the earlobe. And he doesn’t plan on stopping there. He sees his work in artificial intelligence expanding to help ALS patients, wheelchair users, and beyond. Ira speaks with Benjamin Choi from McLean, Virginia about how he developed this arm and what it means to be a young innovator.   New Immunotherapy Shows Promise Far Beyond Cancer CAR T cell therapy, a type of immunotherapy in which a patient’s own immune cells are modified to create a hybrid immune cell that destroys cancer cells, was first developed over a decade ago. Now, researchers are continuing to find success in treating new types of blood cancers with the therapy, and are working on applying the technology to solid state cancers like those of the pancreas and brain. Scientists are also at the early stages of testing CAR T cells to treat autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis (MS) and lupus. Ira talks with Dr. Carl June, one of the pioneers of CAR T cell therapy, a professor of immunotherapy and director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies at the University of Pennsylvania, based in Philadelphia.   Feeling Hopeless About Climate Change? Try Playing These Video Games Five years ago, Stephanie Barish was tired of the public’s attitude about climate change. “Most people at that time were just so negative about climate,” she said. “It was doom and destruction, and I thought, wow, to make positive change, you have to really look at this from a solutions perspective.” Stephanie is the founder and CEO of Indiecade, an organization that supports indie video game developers and hosts events like the Climate Jam—the goal of which was to change the gloomy public narrative around climate change. So, with the help of organizations like Earth Games, participants around the globe gather every year to make video games about climate change optimism, solutions, and justice. Teams can also consult with subject matter experts, like Dargan Frierson, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, and also a judge for the Climate Jam. If teams wonder what climate change would look like on a different planet, they can go to him for answers. “We always look for scientific accuracy,” he said. “I think it’s very important to keep things within the realm of possibility, even when you’re looking at fiction.” Read the rest of the article and check out some of the games at sciencefriday.com.   Analogue Animation: Turning The Pages Of A Flipbook Machine Brooklyn-based artist J.C. Fontanive is a master of the moving image—but in analogue. As an animator, he creates mechanical, perpetual motion ‘flipbooks,’ with help from old clocks and colorful illustrations of flying birds, butterflies, and other scenes from nature. Fontanive joins Ira to talk about the act of invention, the ‘primal’ language of art, and how to create visceral work in a digital age. See the flipbooks in gorgeous action at 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 Aerofletto. Now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio, KK&D News. Local science stories of national significance. Lead mining and smelting, a process to extract metal, lasted for more than a century in some parts of the Midwest. And where you have mining, you have waste. Lead is still being detected in the water and soil, posing a serious health threat. But now researchers are turning to plants for help.

Here to tell us more about it is Niara Savage, a fellow with the NPR Midwest Newsroom and the Missouri Independent based in St. Louis. Welcome to Science Friday. Glad to be here. Nice to have you. Okay, first of all, how did the lead from these mines spread out? So after the mining industry left states like Kansas and Missouri, the mine tailings were left behind for many years unstabilized. And so in places like Missouri, there's mine piles that span more than a thousand acres.

And so there's a couple of ways that it was spread. And one of those is actually people mechanically transporting those materials and taking them to use, you know, for their own yards, there's gravel and things like that for home projects. And another way is that when it rains, of course, the soil is wet and that can create runoff that can cause that contaminated soil to spread. So it's a very urgent problem, obviously, to. solve. Tell me the idea of using plants to help solve that problem. Larry Erickson is the former director for the Center for Hazardous Substance Research at Kansas State University. And so he published some research last year that shows that plants can actually form root systems that are complex

enough to contain the lead in soil. And so if you plant a specific plant they refer to in the study is mscanthus grass. And so this is a really great candidate because it produces a lot of lot of biomass. It only needs tillage in the first year. Planting that into contaminated soil sites in Fort Riley, Kansas, yielded root systems complex enough to actually maintain and contain the water that fell onto that land in just a two-year period. And so that keeps the contaminated soil and water from running off into different locations. Wow. And how's that affecting what people can eat and drink? Lead could contaminate the drinking water. And so that's especially true for communities that depend on well water. And another factor is also that plants or crops that are

planted in contaminated soil can actually absorb and take up that lead into their roots and leaves, and that can become another threat. A lead hazard for people who are consuming crops that may have been planted in contaminated soil. Are some people living in higher risk areas than other people? There's definitely people who are living in higher risk areas. So regions that are near places where the lead mining industry was taking place, so that could be lead smelting or mining. The soil in those areas is definitely associated with higher levels of lead. And then as a result, the people in those communities typically have elevated blood lead levels as well. Riley Thomas was inspired to do research on how to prevent crops from taking up that lead. She noticed that in Lincoln, there's

an organization called community crops that is purposed with trying to serve people who might live in food deserts by planting vegetables, but she noticed that a lot of the locations where that organization was planting vegetables were tainted with lead. They tried to create community gardens where people can go and have fresh produce. So unfortunately, a lot of those areas also have higher contamination of soils just by location near highly trafficked areas or railroads. As the case in the soil that we sampled, it was near a railroad. So that's why I have the high lead.

Could any of these projects be scaled up? So there are definitely efforts to scale up the projects. Specifically, the research in Nebraska focused on biochar. Michael Kaiser is a professor of agronomy and horticulture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and he explains what biochar is. It's basically charcoal, right? So it's transforming organic feedstock by pyrolyzers means combustion under low oxygen, into charcoal-like material, which you actually put on your, if you do a barbecue, right,

we just put it in soil. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln is working with the city and money from Bloomberg, philanthropies that they received earlier this year to establish a biochar plant to produce more than 700 tons of biochar a year. One of the applications of biochar is to prevent the crops that are planted in perhaps lead-tainted soil from actually taking up that lead and absorbing it into the plant. and becoming a hazard for the people who might eat them. Niera, thank you for sharing your reporting with us.

Thanks for having me. Naira Savage is a fellow with the NPR Midwest Newsroom and the Missouri Independent based in St. Louis, Missouri. Prostatic limbs have come a long way since the very first one from ancient Egypt. By the way, it was a big toe made of wood and leather. Now the most high-tech devices are mind-controlled, translating brain waves into movement.

But these state-of-the-art prosthetics often involve invasive brain surgeries, and they come with a hefty price tag that can exceed hundreds of thousands of dollars, making them wildly inaccessible for most people. But now, 17-year-old inventor Benjamin Choi is doing something about it. He set out to create an affordable mind-controlled prosthetic. Ben's story is part of our series of impressive young inventors who are taking on big problems. Ben Hemp. from McLean, Virginia. Ben, welcome to Science Friday. Hey, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Nice to have you. Tell me what inspired you to create a cheap prosthetic arm. I was initially inspired when I watched a 60 Minutes documentary on brain-controlled prosthetics. I was super amazed by the amazing potential impact of this technology to improve lives, but alarmed that the form of mind control used in this documentary required this really risky open brain surgery and costed over $450,000. So after conducting a lot of extensive research into the many shortcomings of current upper limb prosthetics, I was inspired to come up with a non-invasive solution.

Can you walk me through the basics of how it works? Sure. So my solution employs this electrode that's placed on the center of your forehead. And essentially all the time when you're awake, you have these electrical signals. And essentially the underlying theory behind my project, which is that these electrical signals are correlated to your underlying brainwave activity. And so if we can decipher these electrical signals, we can ultimately figure out what you're thinking and then use that to control a prosthetic arm. The problem with this is that these electrical signals on your forehead, because they're not invasive, because they're one step removed from the actual brain itself, they're very complex and hard to decipher. And so what I used to decipher these very complex

electrical signals was this new AI algorithm that I created. I collected brainwave recordings from this wide slate of human participants, and then I used those recordings to train this new artificial intelligence model that essentially learns to decipher those electrical signals and figures out what you're thinking. Wow. So were you successful in controlling a prosthetic using that kind of technology? Yes, the AI algorithm is very effective. The structure of the model, actually, is that it's designed to tailor itself to each individual user over time. And so the more brainwaves it gets from a user, the better the AI gets at reading those specific brainwaves.

So your AI is basically teaching itself. It's getting better the more it gets used. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And what kinds of prosthetics can it control now? So right now it's just optimized for this upper limb prosthetic arm, but definitely one of the things I'm super interested in exploring in the future is this AI algorithm for brainwave interpretation could have so many more applications beyond just upper limb prosthetics. I think it could be used for so many different brain computer interface applications, like, for example, helping patients

with ALS communicate. Right. But now we have heard of other people working on such projects. What is your competitive advantage in the way that you do this? One of the advantages of my system is because I'm using AI to interpret brainwaves and sort of fill in some of the gaps. The system can work with very little data. So I actually only need one sensor on the forehead and then one baseline sensor versus conventional EEG setups require hundreds and hundreds of electrodes, making them really impractical for everyday use. In fact, my system has achieved the highest ever accuracy on interpreting EEG data from just one sensor. It's at over 95 percent. The previous best was around 73.8 percent, I believe.

Wow. Wow. So why do you get such better results? I think the main thing driving the success is not only the fact that I'm using this AI algorithm, but this AI algorithm I've developed has a very special structure as well. Essentially, what I'm doing is I'm taking different AI models that have completely different structures, and I'm giving them each the same packet of data. And each of these new AI models essentially outputs their own prediction independently of the other models. and then they conduct like a bit of a vote. And so what I'm trying to do here is I was trying to fill in the potential gaps that one AI model might have at predicting brainwaves through these other models that approach the problem completely differently and think in a completely different way. So you haven't invented a different kind of sensor. You've actually created much better AI to interpret the brainwaves. And what's your next step with this?

Sure. So I definitely want to make this something that amputees can actually use and, you know, see this all the way through. One of the things that's been really inspiring for me is I've been able to work with an upper limb amputee who's provided a lot of feedback on my work, which has been super cool and definitely really motivating in this process. Next, I'm definitely hoping to test this device on actual upper limb amputees and continue to get more feedback. And so I can keep improving it until it can be something that people can actually use. How has the response been to what you wanted to do? Has it been supportive?

or have people sort of said, oh, yeah, you, yeah, go ahead, try to do that. Yeah, I think the response has been very positive, especially I've had so many members of the ampute community actually reach out and talk to me and give feedback and advice that's been just so helpful for me throughout this process. And so, yeah, I think I received a lot of support from them. Now, I understand you're going to Harvard next semester. Congratulations. Are you going to be continuing your work there?

Yeah, definitely. You know, there are tons of ways I really want to continue to. improve this project. One is specifically with the actual physical model of the prosthesis itself. Designing it was a very lengthy process, but there are still so many ways I'd like to continue to upgrade the design. And some of these will require, you know, investments in new materials or new socket fitting that I'll really want to do. I was fortunate enough to receive a lot of funding from this company in California, PolySpectra, who really helped me on the material side. But still, there's a lot of work that needs to be done in sort of creating a socket and also

Another thing is the clinical trial process is a very lengthy process. It can be very expensive. And so that's another thing I would really like to get more funding on. And then just, of course, continuing to improve my algorithm, advance that even further. Benjamin Choi, inventor and student in McLean, Virginia, heading to Harvard this coming semester. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Last week, we were talking about cancer vaccine research. We're continuing our look into the latest in cancer therapy, and this week, CAR T-cell therapy, in which a patient's own immune cells are modified to create a hybrid immune cell that destroys cancer cells. Car-ticell therapy is not new. It's been around for over a

decade, but researchers are continuing to find success in treating new types of cancer with the therapy, and they're working on many more. And on top of that, scientists are starting to investigate the utility of this therapy for conditions other than cancer, autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis and lupus. Joining me now is Dr. Carl June, one of the pioneers of CAR T-cell therapy. He's professor of immunotherapy and director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies at the University of Pennsylvania based in Philadelphia. Welcome back to Science Friday.

Thanks, Ira. It's great to be back. Nice to talk to you. Okay, let's start with a quick refresher course. Tell us about what car T cells are and how the therapy works. Well, sure. So a car T cell is a chimera and all those Greek mythologists out there. A chimera was a fusion of three animals, a lion, a goat, and a serpent. And a chimeric T cell is a fusion of a bee and a T cell. You know, over the years, the public didn't know what a bee in a T cell was. We first learned about T cells when HIV came out and HIV kills T cells and then people lose their immune systems. And then B cells, I think we've all learned about what they do over COVID.

You know, B cells make antibodies and we've all learned about how, for instance, your antibody against spike, protein, for instance, can protect you against COVID. So B cells make those antibodies and T cells don't. A CAR T cell is a chimera, a fusion. of a B and a T-cell, so that now you can have a T-cell that can do what T-cells do, but they also can have an antibody in there as normally what would be done by a B-cell. So these are sort of designer cells that each individual patient has. You have to create that from the patient's cells, correct?

Yeah, that's one of the parts that's a big paradigm shift of this. You know, the pharmaceutical industry here to four has always made drugs, you know, where one shoe size fit all, which has a lot of economy of scale. You can make one drug that's for everyone. In this case, the CART cells are made individually or bespoke for each patient. So the patient actually donates blood. The cells are shipped to the manufacturing center and then shipped back after the manufacturing as CART cells and then given as a simple blood infusion. And the last time we had you on the show, we discussed the exciting milestone that two patients you treated with carty cells a decade ago are still in remission, a cure even. And now there's a new generation of cart cell therapies that are more potent and attack different cancers beyond the blood cancers. Is that correct? Yeah, that's correct. I mean, it's rapidly evolving from what was basically an academic experiment in a few laboratories to now it's an industry that's worldwide.

You know, initially the CART cells we made were approved for leukemia, acute leukemia, which is not a common disease, and it's a blood cancer. And as you mentioned, you know, those initial patients appear to be cured. Now, over this last year, CART cells have been approved also for myeloma, which is the most common blood cancer and adults. The major significance of this is it shows that it's not a one-trick pony. So this shows that it's a generalizable strategy that you can change the warhead that comes out of the B-cell at will and then target virtually any cell in your body. Even cells in your brain like glioblastoma? Yeah, that's a very exciting area. And in fact,

Marcella Mouse, who's at Harvard now, has had trials targeting glioblastoma. And there's a recent trial from Stanford targeting another molecule called GD2 in a childhood brain cancer. So there's even into the brain, as you mentioned. What about one really deadly cancer, pancreatic cancer, any hope there? Well, pancreatic cancer has been, I think, safe to say, since my days in medical school, the worst of the worst. You know, it has not responded to so-called checkpoint therapies that have previously revolutionized cancer therapy and now our first line for lung cancer and melanoma and other cancers. They just don't work in pancreatic cancer. And now there are carty cells that work in mice in laboratory models for pancreatic cancer. But as of yet, I mean,

the responses are still disappointing in humans and there's a large need for research there. And I understand that carty cells are now being tested in, early clinical trials to treat autoimmune disorders too. Yeah, that's a really exciting area. You know, autoimmune disease was found to be an overreaction of the immune system against your own normal body tissues. And that's, in fact, at some level, what we try to provoke with cancer immunotherapy, you know, to destroy a body tissue, in this case a cancer tissue.

autoimmunity is up between 10 and 20% of adults in the U.S. You know, it's been treated but never cured before. The great news has been that biologics have come out to treat diseases such as arthritis and multiple sclerosis, but they haven't been curative. That adds up to a significant expense and frankly just the patients would prefer cure therapies. So there are exciting trials open now in lupus, which is one of the systemic autoimmune diseases. And, you know, a very intriguing case report published in the New England Journal of Medicine about a year ago showed a 20-year-old Asian woman who was treated with a single infusion of carti cells and her disease went into remission.

And, you know, I've spoken to the investigators in this, it's a, you know, first inhuman phase one trial. that complete remission is ongoing and they now have multiple other patients like that. So this is really an important early stage area of research. Is that because, as you said before, the success is because these are designed specifically for a person's genetic makeup? Yeah, so they come from our own T cells, which each person has. And unless you have an identical twin, the only person who can ever be a donor for, you at this point is yourself. So it's not like red blood cells where, you know, we have, if you're O negative, you can be a universal donor. So T cells at this point all come, have to come

from the patient themselves. And then they can now be modified at will with gene engineering, you know, either genetic editing using technologies such as CRISPR and Cas9 or with insertion techniques to knock in genes that make the T cells you have to be weapons that can target virtually any cell in the body at will. It's really a remarkable new advance that came from the confluence of many new genetic technologies. Does this mean that we can develop new drugs a lot faster than, you know, the over a decade long time periods we have now? Yeah, that's been something we've learned. So, you know, what now that we have, for instance, a lens looking back 10 years from the initial patients we treated with leukemia. So they were given a single infusion

of their own T cells that were car modified cells. They've lasted 10 years in those patients. And they have not caused any adverse responses, meaning they've been safe. And now thousands of patients have been treated with car T cells, you know, where they're manufactured from their own cells. as a group, cell therapies, if they come from your own cells, appear to be very safe. I mean, we've known for many years that cancer drugs that are cytotoxic and have, you know, break DNA as a mechanism of action, they actually can cause cancer. And so far, that has not occurred with, you know, the patient's own T cells. So when you go back to the drawing board to make a new car T cells,

as was done for myeloma that I mentioned, that was just approved in this last year, that took less than five years to go from the drawing board to an FDA-approved product. And, you know, the usual pharmaceutical cycle, if you look it up, would say it's 10 to 15 years to make a new drug. So now that we have technologies that are validated with, you know, manufacturing cells, I think the drug cycle time for the first time is going to be shorter than the actual patent duration. That's bad news for drug companies. It is, you know, but it's great news for the patients. It means that it encourages innovation. And in the past, many drug cycle, you know, the competent pharmaceutical industry could rely on patent protection before they needed to have a new drug come out.

And now what happens is it's more like cell phones. Each year, if your iPhone's better, you'll switch to that one. And it doesn't matter how much Apple has on patent protection because what drives innovation, in the battle between Samsung and iPhones is, you know, is innovation. So let's talk about how expensive all of this still is. How much does a typical carty cell therapy cost? So that's, you know, that's right now the Achilles heel of this area. Because they're made one by one for each patient, they're much more expensive than previous drugs,

which are made in batches for, you know, all patients at one time. And so the initial carty cell trial prices for leukemia were around $400,000 per patient. The one bright side on that is that it actually came with a guarantee that it would work. So normally when you get treated, say, with cancer therapies, there's no guarantee that it works. And the hospital and the patient's insurance companies pay for this regardless. Now, car T cells are given, there is a, in leukemia, a guarantee that it will work and if you're not put in remission then the price is rebated. I never heard of anything like that. Yeah, well, and that's because these, you know, the initial

remission rates were in refractory patients where they literally had weeks to months to live. There was an 80 and 90% complete response rate, which hadn't really ever happened in refractory cancers like that. So when you have expensive therapies, they need to be, have, you know, very potent effects to make them worthwhile. And so there's a lot of research now to make them cheaper so that they're not so expensive. But the sad fact is now that even patients with myeloma, which used to, when I was in medical school,

the survival was two or three years. Now it's eight to ten years, but the textbooks all still say it's incurable. And over that time, patients spend over a million dollars or their insurance companies do before they unfortunately have demise. from the cancer after many different kinds of therapies are given. And so if you have an expensive therapy that's $400,000 now,

it still can be economically cheaper than what we do right now, which is death by 1,000 cuts from many different therapies given month by month over the years. Interesting. Interesting. I imagine since this is basically handmade for each patient, there's got to be a long line of patients, right, who have heard about this and are waiting online to get their car T cell therapy? So unfortunately that's true.

And I think this is many new technologies often are limited in production. So at this point, the manufacturers of car T cells on this one-by-one manufacturing cannot meet the demand, and there is a waiting list. You know, car T-cells are in some ways similar to the, I think, automobile manufacturing, where those cars initially made by Henry Ford were put together, you know, initially by hand, you know, one by one on assembly lines. And then now most automobiles are mostly assembled by robotics. And this is, you know, the most expensive part of manufacturing car T cells is human labor

with highly trained technicians and scientists. And this needs to become automated, just as automobiles have. Does this manufacture, the individual cartis cells, do we send them overseas to laboratories, or do we do them in the States? So at this point, they're done in the States, and then there are manufacturing centers in Europe. There may well be economic competition. I mean, right now, as you know, we outsource a lot of our IT needs overseas to Asia, and, you know, labor may be cheaper and similar in South and Central America.

This is Science Friday from WNIC Studios. You know, listeners to this show know that we hear at Science Friday can't get enough information about the microbiome. And I understand that some recent research from your colleagues at UPenn and Memorial Sloan Kettering shows that the microbiome may actually play a role in how well car T-cell therapy works. That's a remarkable response, I mean, and results. So Melody Smith, who is a.

Memorial Sloan Kettering and Marco Ruella, a colleague of mine here at the University of Pennsylvania, looked at our patients between New York City and Philadelphia and found that their microbiome had a major impact on how they responded to CAR T cell therapy when they had various blood cancers. And so, I mean, this was astonishing to me because, you know, this is something, we grow these cells in the lab and you say, how can the microbiome in your GIase? tract affect these cells that are given to patients. And we've now found in mouse models that, in fact, it validates what we found in the human patients, you know, treated in New York City and Philadelphia. So if you have a better microbiome, in other words, a better kind of bacteria

growing in your gut, you might do better with cartesal therapy? That's exactly what, you know, research suggests and published in nature medicine. And I think, you know, there will be now attempts to modify, you know, there are various probiotics and other things to do this at will that may well improve the response rate in patients. You know, I'm reminded because I'm of a certain age, I remember when antibiotics after World War II were called miracle drugs, you know. Do you feel that excited about carty cell therapy, the potential for them, that we are in a paradigm shift on that scale? I think without a doubt, I mean, my colleagues here earlier this year published, I think, quite remarkable responses in repairing heart damage with carty cells. And so there's now been several studies on that that, you know, normally if you have a myocardial infarction that leaves a scar,

in your heart, and if it's a big enough scar, your heart really doesn't work as a pump anymore. And now it's been found that you can make the regeneration of the heart muscle much better. This is in mice. That's just one example. I think we're going to see cell therapies that fix scars in the lung, you know, and hopefully as we've talked, autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis and lupus and arthritis. Well, I can only wait and hope. and look around for that date to come, Dr. June. Well, I think it's a very exciting time, and now it's global. It's gone from, you know, just an academic curiosity to, it's really been exciting to see this in evolution.

Dr. June, thank you for taking time to talk with us about this exciting research. It's all my pleasure. Thanks, Ira. Dr. Carl June, Professor of Immunotherapy, Director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. You know, we talk a lot about climate change on the program, but we also like to talk about the people who are coming up with solutions to fight it. Sci-fi producer Dee Peter Schmidt is here to tell us about a community of video game developers. I want to hear this, who are taking this challenge to the virtual world. Hi, Dee. Hey, Ira. Yeah, so before we start, have you heard of something called a game jam before? A game jam? I don't think so.

Okay. Have you heard of something called a hackathon? That I have heard about. Okay. So, yeah, you're working on a team to make something in this case like a video game in a very short amount of time. And there's this one that I found out about called the climate jam. It's put on by this organization called Indycade. And the goal of this jam is to make games about climate change. Our goal of having a climate jam has always been to have climate solutions. and to be positive, like we're not looking for some kind of like death and destruction jam. So that was Stephanie Barish.

She's the CEO of Indicade. And she and some other partners started the climate jam five years ago. We're really interested in challenging our community to create something that could potentially make a positive difference. Most people at that time were just so negative about climate. Like it was doom and destruction. And I thought, wow, to make positive change, you have to really look at this from a solutions perspective. All right.

She says you have to look at it from a solutions perspective. So you make a game. Have we got a game that won? Yeah, I want to know how that turned out. Yeah. So the game that won is called Roe. And we're actually going to play together. Ooh, all right.

Let's do that. But before we go, since this is brand new to me, you got to give me a. hint of what the game is all about. Okay. All right. So basically, Rose set in a future where the effects of climate change are a lot more exaggerated. Drought is a much bigger problem. There are these two neighboring

cities, and when it stops raining, one city builds a dam to hoard all the water, and it leaves the other one in a pretty tough spot. So there's drought. People are getting sick because of dehydration, including her character's grandmother, and the other city is unwilling to share the water.

So your character takes a robot, boat to get some fresh water from the other city to get your grandma healthy again. But the rain suddenly start again with a vengeance and a huge flood ends up submerging and destroying both cities in like kind of the middle of your journey. So through all of this, you have to become rowing partners with someone from the other city who's basically your enemy and you have to work together to survive. So yeah, let's get started. Should I hit the play button on there? Yeah, let's go ahead and hit play. Okay. I see it says,

Welcome to your rowboat. Okay, now I'm rowing. Oh, that was a good stroke. I see how to do this. Yeah. It takes shorter strokes. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking, too. Oh, really?

Whoa, I'm going zipping across. Wait, there's another item. It's a fun game. This is a fun game. All right, so we're going to put down our oars for a second. We'll come back to the game later, but I just wanted to tell you about some of the other games that were made for the climate jam this year.

So there's one called Denial. network. And in that one, you play as a group of activists fighting against climate change misinformation. There's another called ChangeWaker, where you play as a cute little sentient blob sailing around an archipelago, helping other cute little sentient blobs solve environmental problems impacting their islands. And sometimes Stephanie says these games actually break outside the boundaries of the jam. Last year, a group did a game about garbage collection and recycling, and they ended up going to their city government and creating a game for the city based on the prototype they had created. And having social impact isn't the only unique thing about the climate jam.

When you join this game jam, you don't just have access to people who can help you make the game. We have people who are content experts. I'm Dargan Frierson. I'm a professor of atmospheric sciences at University of Washington. So Dargan was actually one of these content experts, and he was also a mentor and a judge for the jam. We always look for for scientific accuracy. I think it's very important to keep things within the realm of possibility, even when you're looking at fiction. Having science mentors as part of our jams is completely unique.

Most jams, honestly, aren't about serious topics. When you have a serious topic, you try and bring in experts. In this case, when people are making games, they really need to understand the information. They need to understand, you know, how wind turbines work or what the real situation is for sea creatures. You get a lot of pretty off-the-wall questions. They're questions like, what would climate change be like on a different planet?

We're just trying to make sure that the games are as accurate as possible. Probably most folks who were listening were like me and thought that most games were sort of violent-oriented. But there is this growing movement of folks making games. for social change. We're trying to sort of acknowledge that we humans as a species play one of the biggest roles in causing the climate crisis, and at the same time, we also hold the key to solving it. So I also talked to Jay McGregor.

He's a film production student at USC, and part of a team of seven who worked on the game, and he was one of its narrative designers. The game is focusing on the human dimension of the climate crisis, like in terms of our relationships with each other and how that'll help us deal with it. I love that immediately with row, you're thrust into this very cinematic situation with a lot of drama. And you're clearly a very impoverished community that, as it turns out, has been dealing with environmental justice, threats. And that on top of just gameplay that's pretty fun rowing, you know, it's really fun just to move your boat slowly and steadily. It gives you time to ponder the deepness of the narrative.

Okay, so there's this feature in the game Ira called the trust meter. So I think that's on your screen right now. Can you read those instructions? The trust meter measures the level of trust between you and Nico. The value affects how easily you're able to row with him. Oh, so we have to row together. Right, so there's going to be these moments where you have to make a decision through different dialogue options you get or actions you take

that'll affect your trust level with your enemy, Nico. So what's your level of trust with him right now? 82%. Oh, nice. I have been choosing some other dialogue options. I'm at like 45% right now. Ultimately, the idea of that was like the way you interact with each other either increases your ability to cooperate or can entrench the level of animosity between

you two. And if you guys don't trust each other as much, you guys are going to go slower because you're going to be in sync and you have to kind of try hard to work together. And so if you make a choice that increases the trust between you and Nico, you can build human capital, which is an important resource to escape the crisis you guys are in. So I've known about the climate jam for a couple of years, and before I fully played through it, I was kind of surprised a game like Roe that on its face really leans into these classic climate dystopian themes, won the grand prize for a competition that's focused on

climate optimism and solutions. So I asked Jay why his team wanted to focus on dystopia so much. Yeah, it's kind of doom and gloom with the whole dystopia world. But at the same time, I think if you just stay in that place of just feeling hopeless, it can often translate into apathy, which I can see a lot among people who are my age, because it's such a daunting thing. And so we wanted to go through that emotion of feeling hopeless, but then having conflict occurred that would make people have to change in some way. We can't really solve this issue of the climate crisis,

without some form of collective action. And then in order to have collective action, that requires us to work with each other, including those that we might not necessarily agree with. And so hopefully, I think that's a power of video games. They have a very sort of interactive participatory element to them that can not only change people at an intellectual level in terms of making them aware of these issues,

but also can touch people at an emotional level. And I think that's a powerful thing. Roe is kind of dystopian in certain ways, But the fact that they ultimately create a situation where opposing characters can connect and have to work together is an incredible statement. And they bury you deeply into that antagonism that's going on. So I think it's really effective. And I think those are the tools that narrative games really give you to work with. I think it's so important because, gosh, don't we live in a world where it's very hard to cross the island.

and work together, we all do kind of have a common cause. And if there's ways, even in our differences that we can work together towards it, that's how we'll have a bright and beautiful future. Well, I think this is an interesting game to play with kids. Yeah. Right. So then you could have a discussion about hopefulness and making decisions about your future and who do you trust and how to trust people. Because, yeah, a lot of things we see are dystopian and a lot of things that are you now make you think that the future is going to be dystopic. Maybe this is a kind of game that you can have as a teaching opportunity to play with kids. And maybe they can talk out their fears by playing this game.

What did you feel about being on the raft or surviving or making a choice or who to say? Yeah. And I know not everyone plays video games. Not everyone's going to get a chance to play these, but there is something Dargan said about why he thinks this matters, and I thought it was a great point. As a climate scientist, I spent a lot of time just looking at data, computer model simulations, and you see a lot of red dots meaning drought or really strong rainfall events. But I think to see that through artistic eyes, you realize how much story there is behind

any of those data points, behind any kind of extended drought. There's always going to be winners and losers and those fighting over scarce resources. and then the approaching flood in this game also is just really dramatic. It makes you think that all data should be analyzed with an artistic eye in that way. And that kind of reminded me of what you just said about kids talking about their fears, playing through them. It's like basically the appeal of a horror movie, to me at least. You're able to like experience these kind of intense emotions in a controlled, safe environment and have a little removed from it. and maybe process them in a way you wouldn't be able to if you were too close to it.

Yeah. Well, thank you. I enjoyed it. I loved it. I'm going to play it again. Can I play it again? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay. I'm going to try the other options to see what happened. Okay, great. Well, other people can play Roe and the other games from this year's climate jam. And you can even listen to a song that Dargan wrote and sang about his love of science, which is amazing. That's all at our website at ScienceFriiday.com slash games. Yeah, thanks again, Ira. SciFri Digital producer, D. Peter Schmidt.

I'm Ira Plato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Remember flip books, those little handheld paper books that were like a small movie in your hand, an image just a little bit different on every page. And if you flip the page is fast enough, you could see a bird fly out of a cage

or a cartoon character walk around. maybe you even made one in school. Well, I want you to meet an artist who does something like that. But his flipbooks are mechanical, they're self-powered, and they loop like perpetual motion machines, creating beautiful animated images of birds and insects flying, complete with satisfying clockwork clicks. J.C. Fontenive is a Brooklyn-based artist

and subject of our latest SciArts video. Welcome to Science Friday, J.C. Hi, thank you. Nice to have you. You know, to describe what it looks like, you basically have photographs that are hanging that flip over, like those old clocks that go from, you know, 105 to 106 and they kind of flip over. Yeah, it's the split-flap mechanism, which was invented in the 50s by an Italian. They were called Solari signs and train stations and were made into clocks and things like that. I think they call them analog digital clocks, where, It was like the step between analog to digital. It's the same mechanism sped up with a film on it. And you almost have to think like an inventor and an artist then, right?

That's true. I think art is a type of invention. And you're constantly coming up with new ways of working with materials and things as an artist. So for me to make machines a type of art or language was interesting. for me to do that. That's gorgeous stuff. You mentioned your art being a language. What do you find yourself then trying to say? Well, I'm interested in a lot of different things, but abstraction is one of them. And for me, using movement in an abstract way has been something that I've tried to investigate for a long time. It's kind of like classical music where there aren't words or narrative,

but there's some kind of primal thing that you understand about it. The imagery is figurative. There's still an abstraction with colors and shapes and the way things move, different rhythms that I feel like are more of a primal thing that we can understand. Speaking of primal, I mean, you're really a throwback to the original days of animation, right? With everything being digital now,

do you feel like you're recreating a more romantic period? in this mechanical way instead of just everything digital? It's definitely a response to that. And when I was drawing thousands of drawings and had a stack of paper a foot high that I made on a light table, I didn't want to just photograph those and throw them away. I liked the drawings. I like the physical object and being in the physical world.

The material aspect of it is definitely something that to me is soul satisfying. Yeah. And your work depends on something, you know, we used to call persistence of vision theory. You begin by actually seeing each individual card, right? But as you speed it up, your eye then connects all the cards together. Yeah, the persistence of vision is theory. And it's just trying to explain the illusion that happens when you see any moving image,

a cinema screen or a television screen or a flipbook. They're all based on the same thing, which is there is no such thing. as a moving image, really. It's just still images shown in succession. Persistence of vision is a theory, so it's not really sure how it works. It either there's a latency on the retina or maybe it happens in the brain where the images persist once they're beyond a certain frame rate and start to blend and become motion. What do you hope that audiences who look at this work, since it is really such a throwback, take away from seeing it, or are you, hope that they see. I like the idea that it's a very visceral thing. It has sound, it has image.

I mean, there's even wind coming off of it. I think it's something that is more basic and gets back to a more rudimentary part of the visual world and experience in general. Well, thank you very much for taking time to be with us today. Great stuff. Thanks so much. Thanks for me. J.C. Fontanivae is an illustrator and installation artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Of course, as I say, radio just doesn't do enough justice to these flipbooks. You can see J.C.'s Gorgeous animated flipbook machines in a video by Luke Groskin. It's up there in our website, ScienceFriday.com slash flipbook. That's sciencefriiday.com slash flipbook. And that's about all the time we have for this week. If you missed any part of the program or we'd like to hear it again,

subscribe to our podcast or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Of course, we're active all week on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, send us feedback. Tell us what you'd like us to cover. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.