Science Friday - The Effort To Save Thousands Of Donor Kidneys | Ocean Liner Will Become An Artificial Reef

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

Last year, 9,000 deceased donor kidneys were discarded due to storage and time limitations. A kidney “life support” machine could change that. Also, the SS United States will join Florida’s 4,300 artificial reefs—human-made places for fish and other marine life to live. How do these reefs work?The Effort To Save Thousands Of Donor Kidneys From Being WastedSylvia Miles was diagnosed with lupus in 2006, a chronic autoimmune disease that causes the body’s immune system to attack healthy tissue—including her kidneys.Miles, who lives in Indianapolis, was later diagnosed with advanced kidney disease, and was in need of a kidney transplant.Kidney diseases are one of the leading causes of death in the United States with 37 million people living with chronic kidney disease. Together with advanced kidney disease—the later stage of CKD—it cost Medicare billions of dollars in recent years.People like Miles, who need a kidney transplant, wait an average of five years—often on dialysis.But despite the long waitlists and organ shortages, around 9,000 kidneys from deceased donors last year were discarded due to perceived issues with their viability. A new Indiana-based organization, 34 Lives, is working to limit that waste and rehabilitate the organs.Read the rest of this article on sciencefriday.com.Ocean Liner SS United States Will Become An Artificial ReefThis week, after a notable career, the SS United States, a 1950s ocean liner, took her sunset cruise. Like many retirees, the ship is heading south—from Philadelphia to Florida—where she’ll be reinventing herself. In this next chapter, the SS United States will have new passengers: fish and other marine creatures. The ship will be sunk to the bottom of the sea and turned into an artificial reef, joining more than 4,300 artificial reefs off the coast of Florida.Other sunken ships have become artificial reefs in the past, which have helped boost marine life as well as scuba diving and fishing tourism. Host Flora Lichtman speaks with Scott Jackson, a regional specialized agent with the Florida Sea Grant and University of Florida IFAS extension, about the science behind artificial reefs, and what has been learned from decades of research.Transcripts for each segment will be available 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 Flor Lichten. Today in the podcast, we're diving into artificial reefs. Some of the first artificial reefs were shipwrecks, and so shipwrecks kind of gave a little clue that we might be able to put down these materials on purpose. Last week, after a notable career, the SS United States, a 1950s ocean liner, took her sunset cruise. Like many retirees, the ship headed south, from Philadelphia to Florida, where she'll be reinventing herself. In this new chapter, the SS United States won't be a ship at all. She's taking up a new vocation at the bottom of the sea.

The ship will be sunk and turned into an artificial reef, hopefully providing a new home for marine life. So how do these artificial reefs work? Are ships good candidates for them? What are the risks? Joining me now to dive into the science of artificial reefs is Scott Jackson. Scott has served Northwest Florida with the University of, of Florida Sea Grant Extension since 2000, as Bay County Extension Director and as a regional

specialized agent, he focuses on artificial reefs, fisheries, and coastal resiliency. Scott, welcome to Science Friday. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. What is an artificial reef? Artificial reefs are man-made materials that we place in the ocean to create hard substrate. They mimic some of the natural things that we find like a northwest Florida limestone, but as you go further south, some of the coral reefs, those were we place. will be some good things that we're trying to mimic.

What is their purpose? The purpose is to create additional places for marine habitat to develop and grow. They also provide really great places for people to fish and dive, and so it benefits both the economy and also our ecology. When did artificial reefs become a thing? Like, when did we first start experimenting with them? It's kind of an interesting story of some of the first artificial artificial. Reefs were shipwrecks. And so shipwrecks kind of gave a little clue that we might be able to put down

these materials on purpose and not just wait for Mother Nature to have a impact that resulted in, you know, some type of tragedy or damage so that we could actually see some of the same things that we solved from these shipwrecks. And so in the late 1800s, I believe, it was South Carolina that started putting down log huts and some other things, but they quickly deteriorated. The original artificial reef was a log hut. Okay. I would say after a shipwreck, then we started to look toward things that we could make. And so logs and timber were readily available. And so that was what some of the first artificial reefs were made out of. They just don't have the longevity or the durability that we need

for a really successful reef. I understand that Florida has really pioneered artificial reefs. How many do you have? Right now, Florida Fish and Wildlife estimates over 4,300. Where I live in Panama City and Bay County, we have over 700 spots that we have curated and put down. We continue to add to those numbers on a daily basis across the state of Florida. But we also work to monitor and keep up with what is going on with the reefs that we put down and learn from those monitoring trips. and just make things continually better. So where is the SS United States heading exactly? It's about 20 nautical miles or so offshore, and some of that may vary over time

as they work with regulators and finally come to a spot. But ideally, it would be available to a number of resource and recreational users. It is going to be more of a, I think, in this case, an economic boost is what we're looking at. We try to prioritize and look at different purposes for artificial reefs, and sometimes we prioritize the economy over actually creating marine habitat, although they do both. Well, what about the marine habitat version?

You know, what's the sort of ideal for a marine habitat artificial reef? The marine habitat artificial reef, which we have studied over decades now in Florida, with help from researchers, is patch reefs. It's smaller, usually made out of concrete. reet materials that kind of mimic some of the limestone or some of the corals that we might see that are easy populated by encrusting or fouling organisms, you know, like shellfish, barnacles, tunicates and some other things that start the parade that we see as the artificial reef develops. What do you mean the parade? Tell me about it.

So the parade kind of starts as soon as you put it down with usually baitfish that start to adopt this new substrate that's been added to the. sandy bottom in our area in northwest Florida anyway. We start to see after the baked dish show up, some of the predatory fish show up too because the artificial reef habitat is providing homes for predators to ambush from, but it's also providing protection for these small fish. So it just allows for everything to grow and take care of everything. And, you know, what we have seen over time is the presence of invasive species too. And so sometimes some of the first fish that we see

are artificial reef or lionfish. And so over the years that we've been putting out reefs, we've seen an increased number of lionfish. And now we actually see the number of lionfish start to stabilize and in some cases be reduced. And that can be attributed just to general ecology as things adapt to the naturalization of lionfish, but we also have a robust group of people that easily are diving

that go out and target lionfish. In fact, you can go on a dive trip and actually go and get lionfish, and they're very tasty and very good to eat. When you're doing this for marine life, do you need to think about where you're putting it? Like, are you creating a reef where there was no reef before? In northwest Florida, the predominant sediment on the bottom is usually unconstolidated sand.

And just like you see on the beach, you see under the water throughout our area, some have called it a desert. I think it's interrupted more by limestone ledges that come and go with storms and tides and such, and we have more than what we thought. But we try to purposefully put these down in areas that we want to increase that hard substrate and increase the productivity with the price fish and marine life that we want to, either go visit and see or eat or provide additional resources back to our coastal environment. I mean, but is it sort of biologically complicated to create a structure where naturally there was no

structure? Like, are people worried about that upsetting the ecosystem in some way? First of all, Mother Nature is very equipped to adopt such things, even just some of the things that we would consider like bottles or trash or marine debris, which we don't want to see in the ocean quickly gets adopted and taken care of by Mother Nature with the things that start to form on that. We're just doing more of a purposeful seeding of life to make sure that there are no things that we would consider trash or pollutants to try to create that art substrate so that things can start to grow and start that chain that we talked about earlier. So how do you make sure that there are no toxic materials?

or chemicals that would end up polluting the water. There's a prescribed cleaning process that's set forth by the Environmental Protection Agency. We also have local regulators in our state offices here that work with the Department of Environmental Protection, also with Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission to help us make sure and ensure that we don't have those types of things like hydrocarbons, where we have oils, hydraulic fluids, diesel fuel, gasoline, those are. the ones that we most think of, you know, as far as potential pollutants. But then there's also things that we address with potential paint appeals. In some ways, that's why we look at not only ships, which tend to be preferred by the public as far as artificial reefs, but as people that

manage coastal waters and those types of things, having something engineered specifically to be an artificial reef from the get-go is what we're looking for. That helps us best, because we can tailor that to specific species that we want to try to enhance. We can put it in different locations for different purposes, whether that's to address shoreline erosion in some cases, help us soften and increase the complexity of structures along sea walls that maybe have been there before and kind of complement living shoreline projects near shore. And we can also do a number of different things,

offshore with these engineered reefs. You can tailor them to the needs of the ecosystem and the habitat. Have you visited any of these reefs? Have you scuba dive to see them? Yeah, I don't scuba dive. So I come at it from a different angle. And so a lot of things, what I do is fish on top. And we go out and we'll actually sample using hook and line for the types of things

and the activities that I participate in. pull the fish up, measure, and then return those fish so that they can, you know, be caught by somebody else in the future. But we do look at the productivity, how many fish we catch, and then oftentimes we'll tag those fish. You know, we know coral reefs, corals are threatened by warming seas. Is there anything that we can do for corals themselves with artificial reefs? That is one of the benefits that has been studied over time with some other reefs. were placed in South Florida, and they were able to show that they were able to spare some of

the pressure on the natural reefs and the coral reefs as far as a number of visitors and those types of things. There is a large segment that enjoys visiting wrecks, and that can provide additional opportunities so that everybody's not on the same precious coral all at the same time. Oh, that's fascinating. So you can divert traffic from coral reefs to these artificial reefs, ease some of the pressure on the natural habitats. Right. Those were some early studies that were done probably decades ago. That's about all the time we have for now. I'd like to thank my guest. Scott Jackson has served Northwest Florida with the University of Florida Sea Grant Extension since 2000.

As Bay County Extension Director and a regionalized specialized agent, he focuses on artificial reefs, fisheries, and coastal resiliency. Scott, thanks for joining us. You're welcome. Thank you so much. We have to take a break. And when we come back, Why it's so hard to get a kidney transplant? So only about 100,000 people actually make it onto the transplant list. And only a quarter of those people get a kidney each year. We'll talk about an organization trying to improve the system.

And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. 37 million people in the United States live with chronic kidney disease. An illness where your kidneys, whose job is to filter waste from the blood, gradually stop working. At the end stage of the disease, patients rely on dialysis or a kidney transplant to survive.

But there aren't enough donor kidneys for all the patients who need them. And even worse, for various reasons, some of the donated kidneys from deceased patients are thrown away. Around 9,000 of those donor kidneys were tossed last year. But a lab in Indiana is trying to fix that. My next guest reported a story on their efforts. Elizabeth Gabriel is a health reporter for WFII and Side Effects Public Media based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having me.

Okay, so the wait list for getting a donor kidney is on average five years long. Tell me about the state of kidney shortages. So over 700,000 people have kidney failure in the United States. The National Kidney Transplant List gives patients an opportunity to receive a kidney once it becomes available. Someone's placed on the list depends on their condition. But a national kidney shortage makes it hard to serve every patient. So only about 100,000 people actually make it onto the transplant list. And only a quarter of those people get a kidney each year.

Where did the donor kidneys come from? Kidney donations come from two sources, living donors and living donors. deceased donors. It's possible to get a kidney from a living donor like a family member or a friend. But only 6,400 living donations were made last year. Yeah, so why are so many kidneys thrown away? Great question. So about 9,000 deceased kidney donations were discarded last year. Partially because transplant surgeons feared they wouldn't work efficiently once transplanted. Transplant surgeons can get a small biopsy of the organ, run imaging, and collect medical information from the donor. But that isn't always enough information. That's what Leonardo Riella told me. He's a transplant

nephrologist with the Massachusetts General Hospital. These biopsies are processed very quickly, meaning we cannot do all the stains to look at all the different aspects of the kidney. So we may not be able to actually say what's going on with the rest of the kidney, because sometimes things can be spotty in terms of how they affect the kidney. So you talk to a group of researchers in Indiana who are trying to solve this problem of some kidneys being thrown away. What are they doing? So 34 Lives is a company in West Lafayette, Indiana, and they're leading an observational study to try and salvage seemingly unusable kidneys. They hook kidneys up to a life support machine for 120 minutes, which allows 34 Live staff to run nearly three dozen tests.

Then they can determine how much sodium, potassium, and urine a kidney is producing. They also provide a kidney with nutrients like sugar so it's able to heal itself. Here's what Chris Jane's, the co-CEO of 34 Lives, said. That allows us to warm it back up to body temperature. We almost trick it into thinking it's still inside a body, and it can start working and functioning just like it was inside a body still. A typical kidney can stay outside the body for just 24, to 36 hours. But the company has added nearly 20 extra hours to that time frame. Wow, that's

amazing. So these changes seem pretty straightforward. Why has it taken so long to make them? Yeah. Hospitals don't have the funds or resources to repair damaged organs. The food and drug administration hasn't actually approved a process for repairing kidneys. So if a hospital wanted to do something like this, they would have to conduct a research study, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's why 34 Lives is conducting this work under an observational study. They've received funds from donors, as well as a $44 million award from the federal government. The federal government has drastically cut research funding recently, but as far as they know, their award is still intact. Did you talk to anyone who benefited from these changes? Yeah, I spoke with Sylvia

Miles, who lives in Indianapolis. She has lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease that causes the body's immune system to attack healthy tissue, including her kidney. Miles used to be in so much pain that she couldn't even move, which meant she also couldn't go to work. But she said everything changed once she got a kidney saved by 34 lives. I tell you, I feel amazing. I haven't had a flare up since I had transplant, which is a great deal for me. How much of the donor kidney shortage does this address? Like, if the methods that 34 Lives are using were more widespread, would we solve the kidney shortage issue?

Yeah, so 34 Lives hopes to salvage 50% a seemingly unusable kidneys over a five-year period. But even so, that's only a fraction of the kidneys needed to serve all patients. So even though this could be a huge step forward, Riella believes there needs to be an increase in other kidney transplant methods. That's about all the time we have for now. I'd like to thank my guest. Elizabeth Gabriel Health Reporter for WFYI and Side Effects Public Media based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. One last thing. Have you ever wondered what goes on inside your head?

Teachers, parents, and anyone into brain stuff, which is everyone. Join Science Friday on March 7th for our live stream kickoff of Hack Your Brain. You'll dive deep into the workings of the brain with experts. RSVP today at ScienceFriday.com slash hack your brain to unlock the mysteries of your mind. And that is about all we have time for. Lots of folks helped make the show happen, including... Santiago Flores. Emma Gomez.

Diana Plasker. Sandy Roberts. I'm Flore Lickman. Thanks for listening. Thank you.