Science Friday - Ralph Nader On 55 Years Of Car Safety, Spinal Cord Research, Omicron And Travel Bans. Dec 3, 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: December 3, 2021

Travel Bans Do Little To Slow Spread Of Omicron After South African researchers first detected the new COVID variant Omicron last week, it’s already been found in dozens of countries around the world, including in the United States. Travel restrictions imposed by the Biden administration and others have done little to slow its spread. Instead, experts say that increasing global vaccination rates is critical to stopping future troubling mutations from occurring and spreading. In other news, scientists are re-testing a foundational piece of science, the Miller-Urey experiment, first conducted in 1952, which simulated how life on earth could have originated. Scientists are questioning their old assumptions that the glass container in the original experiment was inert. Joining Ira to talk through these and other big science stories of the week is Sophie Bushwick, Technology editor at Scientific American.   Ralph Nader Reflects On His Auto Safety Campaign, 55 Years Later It’s hard to imagine a world without seatbelts or airbags. But five decades ago, it was the norm for car manufacturers to put glamour over safety. “It was stylistic pornography over engineering integrity,” Ralph Nader, prolific consumer advocate and several-time presidential candidate, tells Science Friday. This winter marks the 55th anniversary of Nader’s groundbreaking investigation, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” a damning look at how little auto safety technology was in vehicles back in the 1960s. The book had a massive effect on auto safety in the U.S., setting the groundwork for laws about seatbelts, and the creation of the United States Department of Transportation. Nader joins Ira to discuss what’s happened over 55 years of auto safety advances, and what kind of work is needed to make sure new technology, like self-driving cars, have the safety checks they need before going out on the roads.   New Drug Reverses Paralysis In Mice With Spinal Cord Injuries Nearly 300,000 people are living with spinal cord injuries in the United States. Currently, recovery or effective treatment remains elusive. Researchers haven’t yet figured out a reliable way to knit back together severed spinal cords or nerves. Now, a new study in mice shows promising potential to prevent paralysis after injury. Researchers gave paralyzed mice a specially formulated injection that uses a novel technique called “dancing molecules.” And after a month, the mice were walking again. Joining Ira to better understand this new development in spinal cord treatment is Samuel Stupp, professor of materials science, chemistry, biomedical engineering and medicine, and director of the Simpson Querrey Institute for BioNanotechnology at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. Coming up later this hour, we'll talk with consumer advocate Ralph Nader about the history and future of auto safety. But first, it's been a little more than a week since we first heard about the Omicron variant of COVID, and it's already been found in dozens of countries around the world and in several states and communities across the U.S. Despite new travel restrictions imposed by the Biden administration meant to slow its spread. Here with the details and other news of the week is Sophie Bushwick, Technology Editor at Scientific American. Welcome back, Sophie. Thank you.

So let's talk about this. A few days ago, we heard about the first U.S. case of COVID-19 with the Omicron variant. But today we're hearing reports of cases in different parts of the country from people who have traveled and those who have not. What do we know about the spread of this variant? So we first found out about the first case of Omicron in the U.S. being in California, but almost immediately afterward, we started hearing about more cases. There was a man from Minnesota who had traveled to New York for a convention, who was then found to have Omicron. So it's very possible that he interacted with people there, and it could have spread there as well. The idea that we haven't found people yet doesn't mean that it's not already here. it's probably much more widespread than we are aware of at this point in time.

Among the policies that the Biden administration rolled out in response was a push for insurance companies to reimburse at home rapid tests. This is something that European countries have already been doing, haven't they? That's right. European countries have rapid tests available for very cheap prices, only a few dollars. So that makes it a lot easier to do frequent testing and testing. yourself from home. In the U.S., where the tests are more expensive and they're not as accessible. So even this new push to have insurance companies reimburse people, that's great. But getting

reimbursement from an insurance company is not most people's favorite thing to do. It's not as convenient as it could be. So that will probably still be a slight barrier to people buying these tests, although it does make them more available to people who really want them. The administration has also increased travel restrictions, including from Southern Africa, where the variant was first found. Is that the best policy if we clearly already have the variant spreading in the U.S.? It reminds me a little bit of the very beginning of the pandemic where people were talking about travel bans, but at that point, the virus was already in the U.S., and that's probably what's happening here. Omicron, just because we haven't had many detected cases of it yet, doesn't mean it's not

here. And so travel bans aren't necessarily going to keep it out of the country. Sophie, instead of the travel ban, what would be a more effective plan? So if we want to stop variants like Omicron from arising in the first place, it's vital to make sure that people all over the world have access to vaccines. So on the continent of Africa, it's estimated that only about 7% of the population is fully vaccinated. And so when you've got a large unvaccinated population, this is an opportunity for the virus to mutate. and for new variants to arise. So it's really important that wealthy countries like the U.S.

make vaccines available to countries in Africa and other places where vaccination rates are very low. And, of course, we'll have more coverage as the situation warrants and also coverage on our website at ScienceFriday.com. I want to move on to another story that is really dear to my heart. The Miller-Urie experiment, that's a piece of science history that's back in the news this week. It's a famous experiment from 1952 that was meant to demonstrate how life on Earth could have originated,

sort of what they used to call chemical evolution. Now researchers want to do it again, a redo? Sophie, remind us about that original experiment and why they want to redo this. The original experiment, they put some chemicals that represented the kind of chemicals that were available on the early earth into this glass flask. And then they shot sparks at it in an imitation of lightning hitting those minerals. And what they found was they did end up getting organic compounds arising, including amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. So this experiment was groundbreaking and demonstrating that life could have arisen through that type of interaction on early Earth. But the problem was that glass container that they put their materials in. A lot of science experiments, use glass because it's considered inert. You know, it doesn't interact with what's inside it. But what was inside it in this case, it had a basic pH, and that means it could have leached some silica from the glass into the container, and that would have interacted and contributed. So this new experiment tried to see how much the glass contributed. So they tried the Miller-Yuri experiment with a glass

flask, but also with a Teflon flask that wouldn't interact as much with the material it was containing and with a teflon flask that just had a little bit of glass in it. And they found that sure enough, they got the most organic compounds when they had that glass container, which suggests the glass was contributing to that formation. Does this mean we change our view about chemical evolution and the early formation of life on Earth? Not really. This is more a case of changing the conditions slightly. We're still kind of expecting to see the same result out of the experiment. Just a more accurate idea of how life on Earth originated, but not a radical change. Let's move on to something else we've been talking about a lot lately, and that's battery

technology as the U.S. tries to expand renewable energy and put more electric cars on the road. But that means we'll need more lithium. And there's a new plan to get it domestically from power, plant waste? Tell us about that. That's right. Right now, the U.S. imports most of its lithium from overseas. But one side effect when you have geothermal plants. So geothermal power plant is pulling water up from deep inside the earth. And that water, when it's done being harvested for power, you've got wastewater, which still has a lot of minerals from underground, including lithium. Just one geothermal power plant in California ends up having 600,000 tons of lithium per year in its wastewater. And that would be enough to supply the entire U.S. The question,

is can we get all that lithium out? And can we do it cheaply enough to make this process of harvesting lithium from wastewater more cost-effective than importing it? And we get our lithium now from sources that are really not very good pollution-wise, correct? Right. A lot of lithium is mined in China, and a lot of lithium mining processes produce a lot of waste. So the idea of using this water that is already wastewater and then harvesting the materials from it is really appealing. Our next story also has to do with electric cars, but it's not about the batteries that power them. It's about the microchips that run them. And we know we don't have enough lithium for batteries or enough microprocessors, the chip shortage.

That's right. The chip shortage has been a problem for a while now. And a lot of semiconductor manufacturers have prioritized getting chips to electronics companies and not to automakers. But a car, even a non-electric car, can have a thousand semiconductor chips in it. And so without those chips, there's been a lot of issues in the automaking industry. In particular, because electric vehicles use more chips than the standard car, they could use as much as twice as many, a lot of car companies are saying they're going to have to delay their ambitious plans to roll out electric vehicles and to have a greater number of these

on the road because they just don't have enough chips for it. And this is also part of a plan by the Biden administration and also other technologists who've talked about America becoming sort of chip independent, right? We could produce our own chips and not rely on China or other countries. That's right. There has been a push for that. There is an act called the Chips for America Act. Chips stands for creating helpful incentives to produce semiconductors. And the idea is that you would put money into a domestic semiconductor chip industry. And we could bring some of that production to the U.S. where it wouldn't be subject to the same volume of supply chain issues. Finally, we love space news, especially when there is the chance we've located a new exoplanet,

and I understand that there is a new one that's almost pure iron, actually molten iron, really hot stuff. Yes, this is a really cool planet that orbits its star at a distance of just a million kilometers, and it's also tidily locked, which means the same side of the planet is always facing its star, and that side is incredibly hot. They think it's 1,500 degrees Celsius, and so it's got this ocean of magma on one side of the planet. And they also think that the bulk of this planet is made of iron. So it could be this molten iron planet orbiting this strange star.

And we haven't seen anything like this before, right? This is kind of a unique exoplanet. We actually have seen some small iron-rich planets, But the discovery of this one gives researchers another opportunity to try to figure out how do planets like this form? So some of them think it might have been, it might once upon a time have been a gas giant. But because it's so close to its star, that gas could have burnt off and left only this hot iron core behind. Or it could have been formed like some researchers have theorized our own mercury formed with the idea that there was a collision that helped create it. And I understand it really orbits quickly.

quickly around its sun? It is zipping along. It doesn't orbit in about eight hours. So it is a molten iron planet with a magma ocean just speeding around in space. Wow. This is really cool. Or I guess I should say this is really hot. It is the definition of really hot.

Thank you, Sophie. It's always great to have you. Thank you. Sophie Bushwick Technology Editor at Scientific American. And in other news this week, Alvin Lucier, one of the giants of experimental music, has died. Science Friday's John Dan Kosky has this remembrance of a composer known for making the inaudible, audible. Few artists straddled the line between science experiment and musical composition more often or more nimbly than Alvin Lucier. One example is 1965's Music for Solo Performer, where the composer attached electrodes to his head using

rain waves to trigger percussion instruments. I think of Alvin as an archaeologist rather than a creator, where he's just basically making the listeners aware of the world around them. That's percussionist Trevor Saint, Lucier's assistant near the end of his life. We talked to him earlier this year after a 27-hour performance of Lucier's most famous work, I am sitting in a room. I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. That simple piece of text is recorded and played back into the same room until the voice is reduced to ghostly whispers, and the room's resonant frequencies remain.

Trevor St. says it's music that requires a lot of patience on the part of the listener. You need time. Like, you've got to be in this space and let nature do its thing. And then if you're patient enough, you get to enjoy it. Just that approach to life in general is, ah, it's beautiful. Alvin Lucier died at his home in Connecticut this week at the age of 90. For Science Friday, I'm John Dankoski. Thank you, John. When we come back, another icon of the 20th century, Ralph Nader,

talks about his early battles with the auto industry and why they still are not making cars as safe as possible. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Irafledo. If we're talking about cars and highways, and I mention the number of 55, what would you say? 55 miles per hour out bed, right? But this year, 55 has a special meaning in the car industry. It's the 55th anniversary

of the publication of the automotive game-changing book, Unsafe at Any Speed, by Ralph Nader. It was a deep analysis of how car manufacturers rejected safety features like seatbelts in favor of looks and comfort. The publication had a massive effect on auto safety in the U.S. and federal oversight of the auto industry was never the same. The success of that book propelled Ralph Nader to become one of the most influential consumer advocates of his generation. And since then, cars and what we expect from them have changed tremendously. We want our cars to keep us safe, and the bells and whistles of safety are a plus, not a minus. But rather than have me tell the story, how about the man himself? Ralph Nader, renowned consumer safety advocate, several-time presidential candidate based in Winstead, Connecticut,

Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you very much. Nice to have you. Ralph, let's go back in the way back machine to the mid-60s with the publishing of your groundbreaking book. A lot of people who are younger than 55 may not realize just how little safety technology was in cars at that time. Run down some of the problems with auto safety that were pervasive in the 60s. Oh, certainly. It was a period of technological stagnation by the auto companies.

They were making money. They were comfortable. General Motors was the pace setter, and there was very little criticism. I remember one, Donald Fry, the vice president of Ford, made a speech in the mid-60s, and he said the last significant innovation in the automobile was the automatic transmission back in the 1930s. So there were no seatbelts, no airbags, no padded dash panels. The steering column could be driven rearward into the driver's chest fatally. Door locks were trivial.

Often cars would pop open if you hit a curb. It was stylistic pornography over engineering integrity. And when unsafe and any speed came out, it was a time when all crashes, deaths, injuries were blamed on a driver. The auto companies had this pejorative description of the driver as, quote, the nut behind the wheel, end quote. But I learned from studies funded by the Pentagon, no less, at Cornell Medical School, Harvard School, Public Health,

and other insider engineers, that the motor vehicle could protect you in a crash, just like kids were protected in theme parks when they bump into each other, the five-mile-an-hour maximum speed. And I also learned that there wasn't enough innovation in preventing crashes in the first place. And so I wrote this book,

and General Motors put private detectives on me. They made the mistake of following me up to the Senate office building. I was slated to be testifying before Senator Ribokov's committee, and they got in trouble. They were caught by the guards. There was big publicity, a lot of media. They ordered the head of General Motors, James Roach, to come, along with the detective Vincent Gillen,

to testify for the Senate committee. The place was packed. And just within a few months to show you how fast things were done in those days, from the March of 1965 hearings in Congress to the signing of the Motor Vehicle on Highway Safety laws by Lyndon Johnson in the White House in September. And it was done. And the result up and down, depending who was president, was the saving of millions of lives and serious injuries.

hundreds of billions of dollars in property damage, family anguish, and more fuel-efficient cars and less polluting cars. So those were the years where technological stagnation was the big problem and how to force-feed innovation through government regulations that actually worked. And now the difference is completely the opposite. There is massive innovation, heavily by the automotive suppliers who often complain about the non-receptive auto manufacturers the way consumer groups do, and by the push from the high-tech companies in Silicon Valley, and we're in just a reverse now, got all kinds of safety improvements on the shelf or only for high-priced cars as standard equipment, not for lower-priced cars, but the Congress and the government

are just not moving. You talk a lot about in your book about how the Chevrolet Corvair was a particular death trap. Can you explain some of the problems with the Chevy Corvair you wrote about in the book? Yeah, it was a car that was

pretty, but it was deadly. For example, in certain cornering maneuvers, it would flip over. Its engine was in the rear, not in the front. It had a leading surface placement of the driver's shaft that could be driven right back into the driver, impaling the driver.

It leaked carbon monoxide. General Motors actually had a recall late in the era of the Corvair to recall them. In all that sense, it put a heavy burden on drivers. I once was invited to talk to the Corvier Club of America. Can you imagine? They had 6,500 members, an annual Convention. And as I walked into the room, I could feel the tension, Ira. And I got up to the deus, and I said, I have to say something to reduce the tension. And I said, you know, there's only one thing. Maybe we agree on when it comes to the Corvair. And they said, what? And I said, that you must be among the best drivers in the world. It put a heavy burden on the driver. Yeah, I watched a few of them spinning out in the snow in Buffalo when I was going to school there.

That was an amazing sight. Did you think that it was just the Corvair that was unsafe or other cars? No, so all the motor vehicles were way beyond the curve of applicable, readily available crash prevention and crash protection. Systems like seatbelts, for example, were available on the World War I airplanes in World War I to keep the pilot from falling out of the plane. Padded dash panels go back to the ancient Roman chariots, for heaven's sake.

And so all cars were failing. And, you know, we had all kinds of brakes and tires technologies that were way behind Western Europe, auto manufacturers. The Corvair had unique disabilities, including its lack of safe handling and cornering maneuvers, which were preventable, but Chevrolet wanted to save a few bucks per car and didn't put the fix in.

And so I thought, since it was produced by the biggest auto manufacturer in the world, that I would devote the first chapter to it. Do you think now that safety sells cars? Oh, yes. That's another myth. Back in the 1960s, they said, safety doesn't sell, style sells. Well, it was false then because when Ford Motor Company put some options like seatbelts and padded dash panels in their cars in 1955, they became the fastest selling options in automotive history.

But General Motors, unfortunately, didn't agree, and they clamped down on all of this. Now, safety is on the minds of families in part because they know how safety does save lives, safety standards. For their children, for infants, seatbelts. We have now airbags and cars. We have better braking systems, better tires. We have rollover protection on the side. and there's a lot of other things that have been improved. But not much projects since Reagan took over, surprising,

almost 40 years or so where the Department of Transportation was asleep under the gaze of auto-libbists in Washington. The Congress would harass any effort by the Department of Transportation because they were under the influence. And inaction, inaction, Ira, is not. news. So when the government didn't fulfill in 40 years the requirements of the national motor vehicle safety laws, when they didn't recall cars in action, when they didn't issue long overdue safety standards inaction, when they didn't release consumer information by

make and model inaction, the media didn't report it because inaction, when action is required isn't viewed as newsworthy. And this is what we've got to get over, that it's when government does nothing that so much bad happens, not just when government does some things that are wrong. Well, what could government be doing now that they are not doing? Well, there's a whole raft of readily available practical safety features. They're under certain clusters. One of them is called... the assisted driving systems. For example, automatic emergency brakes.

The single most important, it's in some high-priced cars. It's not required yet on big trucks. That's coming in the infrastructure bill. European Union requires it for big trucks, but not in the U.S. That could prevent the crash. It could prevent from 25 to 40 percent of crashes. Because when truck drivers are sleepy,

or they're not attentive, this system kicks right in and breaks the truck. Another one is lane-changing warnings. So if you start drifting into another lane, there's a warning there. Others are impaired driving prevention systems. The detection systems that have been developed are spectacular. They just have to be put in motor vehicles. This is to deal with the alcoholic drivers who are the cause of, thousands of deaths every year. Then there's

distractive driving prevention systems. And of course, the update on all the traditional, better brakes, better tires, better roof crush prevention and rollovers, and the update on all the crash protection. So if you enter crash, you can walk away without injuries. We need airbags that protect at higher collision speeds. We need better systems in cars.

They're a lot better than they were. I mean, the old days, Ira, the cars are like a room full of knives, sharp edges on the dash panel that could crush a skull at a 10-mile-an-hour impact. Cars are much safer now, but they could become almost invincible

to all but the most high-speed collisions with all kinds of internal automatic airbags between seats and side protection, rollover protection. What are we waiting for? We need the media to get onto it. We need the Congress to wake up and realize they represent motorists, not motor vehicle manufacturers. And we need the professional engineering societies to protect the engineers inside these companies who we sometimes call whistleblowers. Let's talk a bit about self-driving cars. I get the sense that you're

probably not a big fan of them. Is that a correct read? Oh, yes. We're not going to see fully autonomous motor vehicles for years, if not decades. Number one, they can be effectively hacked. And no matter what, the auto companies Ballyhoo it or the high-tech companies, they haven't come close to providing systems to protect against remote hacking. They could now remote hack thousands of vehicles of the same model that are on the highway. And that sort of disturbs motorists who like to control their motor vehicles. If they lose trust in the concept of autonomous driving, the auto companies can't get anywhere.

So they're not dealing with hacking. They're not dealing with the human machine interface, electronic control systems, and you have to change all the highways. You have to make sure the signs are not removed. You've got to make sure there's a bright white paint, yellow paint, all kinds of multi-billion dollar adjustments with the highway, and how do they interact with people who are driving?

Let's say you come and you want to go to a driving slot on the road, and an autonomous vehicle arrives at the same time. There's tremendous problems. Toyota knows that they're not barely hoeing it. there have been comments from motor vehicle executives Ford and otherwise saying, hey, slow down. We're not going to see this for a while. But we can see semi-autonomous systems like automatic emergency braking systems, which are on some high-priced motor vehicles. They are working their way down, are they not? I mean, people are demanding it. I've seen them on

Toyotas, on Chevys. They really are working their way down. Will people demand this that they get These are even on the cheaper cars? That's right. And the more their standard equipment, the lower the cost of mass production for each one of these safety systems. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. But speaking of self-driving cars, there are more than 32,000 people killed every year. There are 2 million injured each year from motor vehicle crashes. How much worse could a robot do?

Oh, tremendous. You could, for example, see remote hacking from criminal elements that would move thousands of cars off the road at once, the same model. All kinds of things can go wrong in terms of the human machine interaction. The electronic controls, after all, remember, Toyota had great problems with sudden acceleration because they weren't on top of the increasing automation of cars, as most other companies. All kinds of problems can occur. On the other hand, we have readily available practical measures, which we outlined in this 55th anniversary report of unsafe any speed

that are either on higher-priced cars now, which could be put on all cars, or they're ready to go. The automotive suppliers have tested them. They're all ready to go, and that could reduce by 70-80% of the 38,000 or more, fatalities a year. And it's now not some hyped science fiction futuristic dream about fully autonomous vehicles whose technical problems remain after years of false assurances and hopes of the auto

companies and the high-tech companies. Do you worry that people might engage in riskier driving behavior if they think that the car that is equipped with all these safety features is going to save them? I don't think so. That was posited by some of the Milton Friedman free market types. I don't think so. That has been borne out by the studies. But you raise an interesting point in the Tesla autopilot vehicles, which have not been driven that much, there already been 10 fatalities on the roads. The Auto Safety Agency in Washington is investigating it. There are lawsuits against Tesla. These cars' systems have not been recalled.

And some of them are due to the drivers relying on the autopilot excessively and not quickly reacting when the autopilot fails and there's about to be a collision. We have to take a break. I'd want to me to come back more with Ralph Nader about the state of auto safety in the U.S. Hey, Ira here with an exciting message. Science Friday currently has a dollar-for-dollar donation match in effect. This means that any donation made through December 31st will be doubled, including yours. Now, I don't have to tell you that the need for Science Friday is stronger than ever.

So please head over to ScienceFriiday.com slash support to make a gift. We depend on the generosity of fans and listeners. Again, that's ScienceFriday.com slash support. And thanks. This is Science Friday. I'm I Refledo. We're continuing our conversation about auto safety in the U.S. with my guest, Ralph Nader, renowned consumer safety advocate, several-time presidential candidate. He's based in Winstead, Connecticut. Are there any safety features that could be added to self-driving cars that would make you feel more comfortable with them? Because don't you believe that ultimately, and you have said this, that it's not going to happen within the next few years, but ultimately, don't you think we're going to have self-driving cars?

cars? And what kind of safety features should be added? Well, I must say the best self-driving transit vehicles are called public transit. And you're just sitting there looking at your cell phone, reading the paper, snoozing on your way to work. Those are the best self-driving systems. And autonomous vehicle height is distracting attention from investment in super modern mass transit systems all over the country. As far as the actual self-driving vehicle, yeah, I mean, you could try to solve the hacking problem. You could simplify the electronic controls. You could put super-duper airbags all over inside the vehicle in case something goes wrong. But we have tested conventional improvements

outlined in the possession of the industry, of the government, in some cars already, that will save lives and prevent injuries now much faster, much more predictable, without the horrific complications of hyped up automated, multi-layered software, which has all kinds of vulnerabilities. Turning to what's going on in our country now, and I'm speaking about mandates for vaccination, Do you think today, if the seatbelt law came up to be ratified, would there be a successful pushback against mandatory seatbelt wearing? Well, sure. There was when it came up in the 60s and 70s. There was tremendous opposition. I was accused of chaining Americans to their vehicle. That all kinds of horrible hypotheticals, in addition.

to an ideological resistance. But we pointed to the auto racing drivers at Daytona and elsewhere and how they were belted in. They had strong rollover protections, and they would find themselves in spectacular collisions, and they'd walk away. So that was a first step in convincing people of the importance. The second one was focusing on the children.

So you may not want seat and mouth, but you've got little children in the car, and they need to be protected. And that reached a lot more people. And then as more seatbelt lives were being saved and reported in the media, more and more people came around. But not in New Hampshire is the only state left in the country,

Ira, that does not require use of the three-point seatbelt, not just installation, that's in all cars. But I guess in New Hampshire, it's live free or die, or is that the motto, or is it live-and-die? without seatbelts? We got a question on our sci-fri Vox Pop app from Matthew from Washington, D.C. In the 1980s, when state laws requiring drivers and passengers to wear seatbelts came out, and my father fought against them tremendously,

my question is, when it comes to consumer safety in the age of new technology, what can we do with the sociology or psychology part of ensuring that, those that use these new technologies are willing to accept the new safety requirements? Well, obviously it's the old phrase, you've got to engage in very wise public education and start moving on all fronts. I thought in this vaccine situation, the government dropped the ball. They should have used the word contagious more. They should have used, you don't want to have a vaccine, but your children are being vaccinated when they're a very young age from diphtheria and measles, and you didn't object to that. It just wasn't done right.

Madison Avenue is able to sell people almost anything. I was surprised they didn't enlist Madison Avenue. But remember, about 25% of the people are still opposed to vaccination. And some of them are opposed because they don't trust the drug companies. You know, some of that as well-merited. There have been a lot of drugs killing people with side effects like Viox years ago. Other millions of people are afraid of needles, terrified of needles, and others are just procrastinators. So they're not all ideological people against vaccinations, per se. And we've got to address those wisely, kindly, persuasively, and increase the number and keep testing the longer range effects of the vaccines that are applied to tens of millions of people.

Do you see any parallels between the giant social media companies of today and the giant automobile companies of the 60s? I mean, today we have giant social media companies who are being accused of putting profits over people. I mean, and that's what I hear you saying about the automobile companies. Is that a valid comparison? It is, but they're worse today because the social media companies like Facebook, Google, Instagram, all the rest. They can get into your minds 24-7. There's no time restriction here, especially children's minds.

With the auto companies, they got into people's head by selling them style and horsepower and totally ignoring safety and not letting people know how much safer their car can be for their families in a practical and efficient and non-costly manner and actually reduce their insurance premiums. But they only got into people's minds on ads on TV and radio and in print. But these social media companies are into these kids' minds. They're into adults' minds, insidiously, just nonstop. So I think the focus here has got to be on the advertisers. About 95% of Facebook's revenues come from advertisers, 80% of Google's revenue. And this hasn't been enough media focus on these advertisers.

and how they use the personal information of hundreds of millions of people in the U.S., and Canada and all over the world, free. Speaking of nonstop, what does the future hold for Ralph Nader? Where are you focusing your energies these days? Well, building new citizen groups around the country. We're not keeping up with the autocratic movements, the Trump movements, the corporate supremacists and control. You know, 20 years ago, Business Week had a poll, and they said,

does big business have too much control over your lives? And over 70% of the people said, yes, that includes a lot of conservatives. And, of course, it's only gotten worse with social media companies now. So we need a proliferation of citizen groups, and we need better coverage of what existing citizen groups are doing. A lot of people to local, national level, are doing great work as citizens. They're accomplishing great things in cities, suburbs, rural areas. They're not getting on the evening news.

They're not getting in the newspapers. So I'm trying to make the media more aware of that as we encourage our schools to teach practical civics, civic skills, and connect children under adult supervision with problem solving in their own community. If we don't do that, this young generation is going to be lost to the metaverse and to the whole social media alternative virtual reality. And you know where that leads.

Yeah, well, Ralph, I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today. You've reached 2 million people with your message. So thanks for joining us, Ralph Nader, Consumer Safety Advocate, several-time presidential candidate based in Winstead, Connecticut. Thanks again for taking Tep to talk with us today. Well, thank you. And you can get this report on auto safety. Just go to Nader.org.

It's online and free. With nearly 300,000 people living with spinal cord injuries in the U.S., recovery or effective treatment has been elusive. No one has found a reliable way to knit back together severed spinal cord nerves. But now a study in mice shows promising potential to prevent paralysis after injury. Researchers gave paralyzed mice a specially formulated injection that uses a novel technique called dancing molecules. And after a month, the mice were walking again. So what are dancing molecules and how did this all work? To help us understand what it means for the treatment of spinal cord injuries is Samuel Stoop.

He's a professor of material science, chemistry, biomedical engineering, and medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago. He's also the director of the Simpson-Quarrie Institute for Bio-Nanotechnology. Welcome to Science Friday, Dr. Stoop. Thank you. How does this engage? Injection, reverse paralysis, and mice. Can you give us some details on that? So the novel therapy is an injection at the site of injury in the spinal cord, composed of invisible tiny nanosized filaments and formed by hundreds of thousands of molecules carrying signals

to cells in the tissue to initiate regeneration and repair. And why does your technique work when others have not? Well, there is a key innovation in this therapy, and that is the discovery that when the molecules that carry signals to the cells are undergoing lots of motion within the filaments, they are much more effective at signaling the so-called receptors in cells. You've given a name to this called Dancing More, molecules? Yes, yes. Are they really dancing around? I'm moving? Not exactly dancing,

but we thought that was a good metaphor to describe the fact that the molecules within these tiny filaments are walking, translating, they are jumping up and down, and so they are moving a lot. And the reason this is important is because the signals to initiate repair and regeneration are initiated by the so-called receptors on cell membranes, and the receptors move around a lot. So in a way, the signals have a moving target, if you will. And thus, if the molecules are moving around a lot, they have a much better chance of touching the receptors in the right spot when they are also moving. Interesting. And so the idea is that someone with a spinal cord injury, would get this injection right after the injury, right?

That is correct. So in the model that we investigated, the therapy was administered to the mouse 24 hours after the injury. So that means the therapy is designed to treat a new injury to the court. Could it treat an older injury, too? Well, in principle, yes, it could treat an older injury. and we are, in fact, working on that objective right now. So the therapy itself may be the exact same one, but what has to be different is the way in which it is delivered to the cord,

and this will also require some innovation in the surgical technique to administer the therapy. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Well, that's really interesting. And I'm wondering, could you apply this therapy, harness it to help treat patients with other types of conditions like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or people who've had a stroke? Is there a common thread here that would make this new technology useful for a wide range of degenerative diseases? Absolutely, yes.

And this is something that we are very excited about because we have developed a therapy for the central nervous system, which includes the brain. and the spinal cord. And therefore, the types of tissues that we have regenerated and repaired in the spinal cord are very similar to those in the brain. And so we are very interested and excited about considering our therapy for stroke, considering it for brain injuries, or for neurodegenerative diseases. And all of those terrible diseases that we're all terrified off because they impair our

cognitive abilities. And so we would like to make a contribution there. And how soon would we know if this would work in humans? Are there any tests or any planned studies about this? Well, we are going to start, of course, with the spinal cord injury and specifically with the acute injury for new injuries, treatment of the new injuries. And we will present our case to the FDA next year. So we are getting ready to go to the FDA in 2022 and present what we have and to ask them what they would like us to do before we can gain approval to test this in human trials. You know, up to this time, we've heard about treatments for spinal cord injury or for other kinds of neurodegenerative diseases using stem cells. Is there any advantage to your technique over

using stem cells in experimental form? Well, the advantage of our therapy is, in fact, that is very translatable to the clinic in principle because it does not involve the use of cells. I mean, when people think about regeneration, they normally think of stem cells these days. And cells are difficult to translate as a therapy into the clinic, and there are lots of problems and hurdles to overcome.

It doesn't involve genes, genes either, you know, gene therapies, which sometimes can be unsafe. It does not involve the use of proteins and antibodies that might be very unstable or expensive to produce. This therapy is made up of molecules that can be easily manufactured and therefore has great chance of translation to the clinic. One other point to make is that the molecules that make up those tiny filaments, the hundreds of thousands of molecules that carry the signals with dancing capacity, I should say, those molecules are made up of the structures of things that we eat every day. So they are made up of amino acids and lipids. So things that are in our foods. And therefore,

within a few weeks after the therapy is delivered, the tiny filaments basically biodegrade in nutrients that in turn feed the cells that are in the court. Does this mean it might be affordable for patients? Because, you know, some of these treatments are really pricey and out of the reach for patients. Yes. Because of all of those reasons I just gave you, I think this will be an extremely affordable therapy especially compared to the cost of other treatments that are necessary after severe trauma. Well, Dr. Stoop, we wish you great.

luck and great success. I think a lot of our listeners will be interested in following your research. Thank you very much. Dr. Samuel Stoop, Professor of Material Science, Chemistry, Biomedical Engineering, and Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago. He's also the director of the Simpson Query Institute for Bio-Nanotechnology. And time has run out for this hour. Here's Lauren Young with some of the folks who make our show possible. Thanks, Ira. Johanna Mayer and Ella Fetter are our podcast producers. Kyle Marion Viterbo is our engagement producer. Danielle Dana is our executive director, and I'm Lauren Young, digital producer. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks, Lauren. And we are sad to say that this is Lauren's last week at Science Friday. She's the brains behind some excellent deep dives

you can find on our website. She's investigated Valley Fever in the West and created our Science Friday rewind newsletter. We wish her the best of luck in her next adventure. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato.