Science Friday - The Wonders of Moss, Clean. Sept 11, 2020, Part 1

Episode Date: September 11, 2020

These Moss Are Living Their Best Life—Under Rocks Desert mosses live a much different life than their cousins in lush, water-rich forests. In fact, they spend most of their time dormant: dried out, waiting for the rare rainfall to bring them to life so they can grow and reproduce. Once exposed to water, though, these same mosses can re-animate quickly—within minutes they’re back to photosynthesizing. And in research published in PLoS One this summer, scientists working in the Mojave Desert discovered another bryophyta trick. They found some moss species were using rocks as sun shades, preventing them from drying out as quickly. But not just any rock will do—with the help of semi-translucent quartz, moss are still able to receive small amounts of sunlight, thriving in small shady oases for weeks past the most recent rainfall.  Science Friday producer Christie Taylor talks to Jenna Ekwealor, a co-author on the research and PhD candidate at the University of California-Berkeley.  An Argument For The Benefits Of Not Bathing  If the idea of not showering every day makes you feel icky, how about not showering for years? Writer James Hamblin says he stopped showering five years ago and never looked back. He says his skin has never been better, thanks to his healthy, well-functioning skin microbiome. Hamblin joins Ira to talk about his new book Clean: The New Science of Skin, breaking the rules when it comes to cleanliness, and discovering the benefits of skipping that shower.  COVID-19 Vaccine Developers Promise Not To Rush Testing Pharmaceutical companies are racing to find a vaccine for COVID-19. And there is a huge financial incentive to be the first to produce the first vaccine. But as President Donald Trump promises a vaccine “very soon,” nine of the biggest pharma companies signed a letter that pledged not to put profit—or politics—over sound science.  Science writer Maggie Koerth talks about that letter, as well as bad news for a vaccine clinical trial, which paused this week after an unexplained illness in a participant. 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 Ira Plato. As you know, the pharmaceutical companies are racing to find a vaccine for COVID-19. And of course, there is a huge incentive to be the first one to make one. But nine of the biggest pharma company signed a letter that pledged not to put profit or politics over sound science. Maggie Kerth is here to fill us in on that story and other science headlines for the week. She is senior science reporter at 538, out of Minneapolis. Welcome back, Maggie. Hi, thanks for having me. Pharma companies usually don't come all together to do this. What does this all mean? So this is all part of a response to some statements that President Trump has been making, which have kind of put the push to get a COVID-19 vaccine out as soon as possible into the realm of politics. So he has been claiming that a finished vaccine is coming very soon, possibly before

election day, and also arguing that his opponents, are the ones who've politicized the issue by not trusting him on that. Meanwhile, the CDC has started laying out these scenarios to help states prepare for distributing vaccines as early as November. And these are timelines that a lot of scientists are calling unrealistic. So let's just say that up front. It is extremely unlikely that you will have a vaccine for COVID-19 before the election. You know, it's even pretty unlikely that you'd be forced to decide whether a hypothetical vaccine released before the election was safe enough to try. That's because the president's statements have resulted in a lot of pushback from people in charge of this whole vaccine production process. It's not just the pharmaceutical companies.

It's also the scientific head of Operation Warf Speed and the director of the National Institutes of Health. So it is important, though, to point out that what they have said is not, we will not release a vaccine before the election. Instead, the general message has been kind of what you were saying, that speculating on timing is a pretty bad idea. And we are not going to release anything without thorough and complete safety testing. This timeline is going to be set by science, not by politics. So the letter says the companies are making a pledge to do this together. Right. Yeah. They're all kind of banding together. And it includes the three companies whose vaccines are in stage three trials right now. Although part of the other news about vaccines this week is that these pledges around safety have turned out to be pretty important because just a couple days after that pledge came out, one of those three companies announced that it was putting the brakes on its trial.

in order to reevaluate safety because one participant had developed some serious neurological issues. And this is not necessarily bad news, is it? Because clinical trials are supposed to test to see if people have reactions. Right. This is exactly what clinical trials are supposed to do. We don't even know whether this reaction had anything to do with the vaccine yet. But this is kind of how this process works.

If something serious pops up, we pause things. we go back and look through all of the data and try to make sure that we know that the safety is there. You know, that's sort of good news and bad news about this because the public is watching this, and they're worrying about whether they should get an early vaccine. And now the company says, hey, we're stopping putting out the vaccine because we're worried there is a possible problem with it. You could look at it either both ways. One is, I'm not going to get that because it's too early or, oh, good, they're being responsible. Yeah, exactly. It's very much a thing where, you know, this is sort of how we want the process to work. It's working the way it's supposed to. The problem is that the way it's supposed to can also be unnerving, right? Because it's catching stuff.

For your next story, there's a lot of talk about public gatherings and the effects on COVID-19 infection rates. There was a study that looked at the big Sturgis motorcycle rally that happened in August. But there was so much. much misinterpretation of the results. Can you talk about that? This entire pandemic, you know, these papers that haven't been peer-reviewed yet and getting into the media and then it becoming confusing about like what's being claimed and what's not. So this particular paper was trying to estimate how many people got COVID because of the Sturgis motorcycle rally that happened in South Dakota last month. This was the largest public gathering that has happened since the pandemic began. It was almost 500,000 people. Previous reports had clocked at least 260 cases, including one death in 11 different states, and that's as of early last week. Epidemiologists,

however, were already cautioning that that was probably an undercount. This week, these health economists tried to get a better estimate of the actual case count associated with the event. So their paper put the number at higher than 250,000 people, accounting for 19% percent. of all the COVID cases diagnosed in the country between August 3rd and September 3rd. That is obviously a pretty big difference between 260 and 250,000. To get there, the researchers had tracked anonymized cell phone data from the Sturgis rally back to where the attendees came from when they left, and the counties that contributed the most rallygoers, including the county that hosted it,

also saw corresponding increases in COVID cases. the diagnoses increased between 7 and 12.5% more in those counties compared to counties that hadn't sent anybody to Sturgis. So that's where kind of the background of this is coming from. It does have a basis in data. It's not fiction made up from whole cloth, but it's also not an exact science. Yeah, let's move on to your next story, and this is about another COVID-19 model. This one looks at reopening universities and infection rates. Right. So back in the first, spring, a couple of physicists agreed to spend their time helping the University of Illinois

Urbana-Champaign come up with its reopening plan. And that included using models to estimate how COVID might spread around the campus and what steps would be needed to prevent that. In May, they gave an interview with the American Physical Society that kind of talked about how, well, you know, while this work is important, epidemiological modeling just didn't provide much of an intellectual thrill. It wasn't complicated enough for them. And if that sounds like, like the setup for a Greek tragedy by gosh, it sure is. So here we are in September, and that same university had to put its entire student body under a lockdown, including confining them to the campus over Labor Day weekend. This is despite having one of the biggest

and most highly touted testing and tracing programs in the country. So what went wrong? Turns out that the physicists, while they did account for people not wearing masks and going to parties, failed to anticipate the breadth of how students would not follow the guidelines on COVID isolation. So what happened was, you know, they had students who weren't isolating. They had students who would ignore health officials' efforts to get in touch with them for contact tracing. And they even have situations where students who had been recently, diagnosed positive had actively hosted parties. And those were all things that were not factored into that model that the physicists put together. It's just another example of how, you know,

the math on this may be simple, but the humans are a mess. I can't imagine that. Not knowing that college students are going to go to parties and put that into your model. Yeah, I mean, had parties factored in there, but just, gosh, I guess not enough. All right. And there are some stories of universities not quarantine their students on campus, they're sending them home. I mean, how could you send all these students home to spread it to where they come from? Yeah, that's been generally, I think, agreed on as a bad idea. There have been a couple of cases, though, where students have actually been expelled from college for not following the rules on COVID. There was one university that I think sent home 11 kids and didn't refund their tuition.

Let's move on to something different, although it's not a happier story. And I'm talking about the California wildfires having burned more than a million acres in the state. And the intensity of the fires have created a pumpkin-colored sky. I mean, if you've looked at the news reports of San Francisco and other places where it's actually all orange all day long, and I understand that the fires are also creating their own weather phenomena. Yeah. So, you know, Labor Day weekend in California had some of the highest temperatures ever recorded in this country. It was 121 degrees Fahrenheit in L.A. County last weekend. There are 25 major fires burning throughout the state. One of those fires, the creek fire, has created its own pyro-cumulonimbus cloud. And basically what that is is a great big thunderhead produced by the fire itself. because of the heat that the fire is generating and all of the moisture from the water that it's evaporating. All those things kind of coming together into the air creates a storm.

And this particular one was visible from space. And it's all particularly bad news considering the fact that, you know, other than the one fire that was lit by a gender reveal parting on wrong, most of these fires in California that are burning now were started by lightning. So you have the fire generating its own source of new fires. We don't know if that's actually happened with this particular case, but it's creating the stuff that could cause another fire. All right. And your final story is sort of a mind-cleasing one. It's about the moon is rustic.

That means we're going to have to send a lot of WD-40 with the next rovers or astronauts that we send to the moon. Right. It's going to get all squeaky up there. You're going to have to loop it up. So it turns out that, you know, these researchers have discussed. that the moon probably has other ways of getting these necessary ingredients. So what they think is going on is that the oxygen is coming from the time each month during a full moon when the moon is sitting directly in the pointy tail on the backside

of our planet's protective magnetic field. So, you know, we have this field all the way around the planet that we kind of think of as, you know, protecting us from this damaging radiation of the solar wind. But it kind of goes to a point on the side opposite the sun. And one of the things that it does, as it's kind of doing that big wide cloud at the front, narrow point at the back, is that it's picking up some traces bits of oxygen from our upper atmosphere and sort of flowing them to this little point. And so the researchers think that when the moon is lined up with that tail of the magnetosphere, that it's a it's getting some of the oxygen molecules from our atmosphere.

Then the water, meanwhile, is possibly coming from tiny molecules of water that are contained in this lunar dust cloud that's constantly engulfing the moon. That dust cloud also contains bits of iron from rock. So there are times when that iron and the water in the dust cloud can combine with oxygen from the Earth's upper atmosphere, and the result is rust that is not so mysterious after all. We all know that from leaving nails outside in the backyard. Thank you, Maggie. Yeah, thank you so much.

Maggie Kerth is senior science reporter at 538. She's based out of Minneapolis. We're going to take a break, and after the break, we're talking about moss, and we're going to explore their tiny world. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. You know, life in the desert is tough for everyone. But imagine being moss.

Yes, a plant we associate with rainforests and other wet places, trying to make it in a dry, hot, and sometimes cold climate, with high amounts of deadly UV radiation. One way they've learned to survive, going dormant, much like a tardigrade, until the next rainfall wakes them up. But you know what? They've got another trick up their sleeves. Science Friday's Christy Taylor talked to a researcher and self-described

moss evangelist about how moss have learned to thrive in these harsh climates. If you look under certain quartz stones in the Mojave Desert, you can find something unexpected. Moss, green and thriving, in the middle of one of the driest climates on Earth, using the rocks as a kind of parasol against the harsh sun. And it turns out there's a lot more that we can learn about how these plants survive. Here to explain more is Jenna Aqualo. She studies these mosses and others as a PhD candidate at the University of. of California, Berkeley. Jenna, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Christy. Thank you for having me.

So the first thing that threw me off in reading about your research is just the phrase desert mosses. I think of moss and I think of lush, I think of forests, I think of wet places. And it sounds like I should be expanding my mental picture of this creature. Yeah, exactly. That was surprising to me when I first learned about it too, which is why I became so interested in them. But actually, their mosses are pretty abundant in deserts. There are a few species that have adapted to it, and they're really common in deserts. What are they like? What is the life of a moss in the desert?

Well, there's two kind of big categories. There's ones that live on rock and ones that live on soil, and they have pretty different habitats in that regard. I study the soil mosses. And the thing that makes them really unique is that they live in the desert, where it's potentially hot and dry by definition. But they really only live, come alive when conditions are better, when there's lower light and more water. And they can do this by going completely dormant when they're dry

and rehydrating and coming back to life when it rains. You had a video of this. It is really fast when they do that. Yeah, it's really fast. I love to film it and show people or show people live if I can. And inevitably, people don't believe me that it's real time. And I have to tell them, no, it's really real time. It's fast. It's within seconds. They open back up, actually change color before your eyes. When they're dry, they're kind of a dark, brown, almost black color.

And they turn green when they are hydrated again and begin photosynthesizing within a couple of minutes. So they're really fast. So this was sort of already known that we We've already seen desert mosses dry out and rehydrate. But then you, in this research, you and your team found they're doing something even more complicated than that, some of them. And it's like they have, I'm picturing like moss with beach umbrellas. Is that how you would describe that? Yeah, it actually is. It's interesting.

As I mentioned, they really only live when the conditions are right. But they also find smaller microclimates within the larger desert climate. And one of these that we found is by living completely. under rocks. And it's only a particular type of rock because they are plants after all and they need light for photosynthesis. So it's these quartz crystal rocks that are semi-translucent. Some light can get through and they live under there with less light and actually more water. So it is really, like you said, a little like having an umbrella for reducing the light and water gets trapped under there and stays for longer. So it's a totally different microclimate. So is it any rock that

these moss will be able to get this light from, or is it a rock that, like, lets light through? What is a moss's perfect rock? It's maybe dependent a little bit on the area, but in this site, it had to be around an inch thick or less, and it had to be milky enough, kind of white and cloudy to let only a tiny amount of the light through really as little as as 1% and maybe up to 4% of total sunlight. So very little light. And we found if it was too small, it would get blown around by the wind and water and wouldn't, you know, stay as their umbrella. But if it was too big, not enough light got through. And so they couldn't live under that either. So there was this Goldilocks zone of rocks about an inch thick and cloudy. We also think that if they're too clear,

that they also let too much light through and can act as a greenhouse effect where it just heats them up even more under the rock. I mean, how did your team find this in the first place? Were you setting out to look under rocks for moss or something else? No. It was during my master's project actually with my collaborator, Kirsten Fisher, and we were there studying these desert mosses but for population genetics and reproduction and other questions. And my advisor at the time had been researching this site for a number of years. And actually her advisor had been researching this site for a number of years. And they had never found these mosses growing under the rocks until this moment. Kirsten, during field work, she's very curious and she's constantly looking at plants and looking at rocks.

And I mean, she also knows what plants you can eat. So I would turn around and see her chewing on a leaf that she just picked up. You know, she's very interactive with the environment. And so she was looking at all these rocks. This is a pretty rock. This is a pretty rock. This is what she does. But she picked one up and, and we, We both went, whoa, because it just jumped out of us. There was green, bright green, hydrated moss perfectly under that quartz rock. So at first we thought it was a one-off, you know, maybe this rock landed on this moss. But then we set up a little study and tested how frequent it is and measured the rocks and everything. And it was pretty consistent.

If the rock was the right size and shape and clarity within this Goldilocks zone, then there would be moss growing under it, and it would be greener, and it would be bigger than the other mosses. How does a plant figure out a trick like that? How do you, if you're a plant, you don't have a brain, your moss, you know, you somehow encounter this perfect environment and decide to make that part of your, like, evolutionary strategy. Like, how does that work? Yeah, it's hard to imagine it working like this because we lived such different lives. And I think of these mosses as clever, but of course, it's not clever in the way we are. it's really just taking advantage when there's opportunity. So mosses in the desert will, they can clone and spread into new areas.

They can clone by fragments that break off and land in somewhere new. And so what probably happens is really just survival of the fittest. The ones that are there in the good conditions grow up and live in the good conditions. And the ones that land in an area that's too harsh will. not survive. And so it's kind of a Darwinian survival of the fittest on a smaller scale. We've talked on this show in the past about hypolifts, you know, the Arctic and Antarctic organisms under rocks. Are these moss a cousin? Are they related? Can we call them hypolifts? What's the connection there? Yeah, they are hypoliths, but it's not a natural group. It's sort of

just a description of their habitat, but they live under rocks. And, that makes them hypolith. As far as biological relationships, they're very distantly related from the cyanobacteria that we usually see under rocks as hypoliths. And there aren't many plants that are hypoliths. So this was a really surprising find. It has been noted a couple of times in Antarctica and even in the desert once before. But it again seemed to be a little bit of a rare one-off event, and we've found that it's actually when you have a lot of courts, it's pretty common. Huh. Are heat and dehydration the only extreme conditions that these mosses have to deal with, or are deserts harsh for other reasons? That's a good question. Actually, we studied them from summer through winter, and so we saw two periods of harsh conditions in the totally opposite direction. During the summer, the temperatures on the soil service were really hot, really dry. And under the courts where the mosses were living, it was cooler and wetter. During the winter and even summer nights, the other extreme was problematic and that it got really cold. And in

even two periods, it was completely blanketed by snow. And we found under the courts rocks, it was warmer than the soil surface conditions. And it showed us that this quartz rock provides a buffering effect that just protects the mosses from the extremes, whether hot or cold. You find mosses inspiring. Does this mean you have like you're at a party and you want to talk about mosses like you have favorite things to blow people's minds with? Yes, absolutely. And I hope I think that I, that it's well received. I think people are actually excited to find out about mosses because they are, they're just cool. And I think part of what makes them cool is they're generally really small and easy to overlook.

You know, we're meters above them most of the time, the soil ones especially. And they look green and soft and a lot of people appreciate them for that. But when you look closer, maybe even just with a magnifying glass, you don't need a whole microscope. You see that they're actually tiny plants with leaves. And, you know, they resemble trees even. And when they're all together in these cushions, they resemble a forest. And animals live in these forests, moss forests, just the way animals live in tree forests. So it really is a tiny world that once you see it, it reminds you that the way we see things from our own perspective and how seeing things from smaller perspectives and different perspectives, it's really enlightening, actually.

Can mosses teach us anything? I mean, you mentioned like looking at this tiny world. Is there a lesson for the larger world, you know, from these tiny ecosystems? Yeah, I think so. I think it's really important as scientists and as people to remember our own perspective and really what that means our own bias. And I don't mean that even in a negative way, but just how we see the world affects how we interpret the world. And we learn that from this study even when we find these mosses, they live in the desert, but they're actually living in this very different environment under the rocks. And to us, that seems like a small little place to live, but to the moss, that's a whole habitat, you know, a whole little ecosystem under that rock.

It just reminds me how really large and weird humans are. There's so much more in this world. Just a reminder that I'm Christy Taylor, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking to Ph.D. candidate Jenna Echwalo about how tiny mosses survive life in the harsh desert. Going back to sort of more of a fundamental biology question, but if these mosses are all scattered under rocks that are very far apart, possibly, how do they find each other to reproduce? How do we get baby moss out of this whole process? Yeah, that's an awesome question. question and a bit of an open, we don't know, but we know some things. Mosses reproduce with swimming sperm that has to find an egg to fertilize. And especially in the desert, there aren't a lot of

opportunities to swim. It only rains a few times a year. And then they have to somehow know where to go. And for whatever reason, it's not very effective in the desert. It doesn't happen very much. We know part of it is that they don't make their reproductive organs very frequently, but maybe also because it doesn't, even when they do, it's not successful very frequently. But it does happen. We've seen evidence of reproduction, and they miraculously and rarely find opportunities to produce their reproductive organs, produce millions of swimming sperm, and the sperm go out and find an egg, and baby mosses are formed. The other way that is really common in deserts and other ecosystems is that they clone.

They can just make new copies of themselves from leaf fragments or sending out structures kind of similar to roots and just sending up another stem of moss. What are your questions still about moss? You know, what don't we know enough about that you are dying to figure out? Well, my PhD research and my research going forward is still under this umbrella of how do they do it, because we see evidence that they live in the desert and they live under these rocks. But like you said, we don't really know how they get there or how they survive once they're there because while these hypolithic habitats are much better than the broader desert climate, they're still harsh. And there are also mosses that live out in the open in these harsh habitats. So I'm still trying to figure out just what is the actual mechanism that they're protected from desiccation and from UV is what I'm really focusing on.

And I think that's because of relating. And I know how damaging UV is to us. I know I've left my research equipment, like in this study out in the desert. And after a couple of months, plastics even just crumble, you know, things break down in the UV. And I remember leaving toys out as a kid and they would fall apart. So UV is so powerful. And yet these mosses are out there for months at a time, completely dormant, not doing any metabolic activity. no ability to repair damages, and somehow they're okay.

They survive it, and we don't know how yet. So that's one thing I'm curious about, but I have a lot I could say. Do you think we'll find moss on other planets at some point? Oh, man. That's such a hard question. I think that the lifestyle mosses live is a good candidate to find on other planets. I think what moths have figured out, this ability to just go to sleep and ride out the hard times is really important for life in extreme environments. And many other planets are extreme compared to Earth.

So I don't know if it would be a moss, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that it was something that has the same ability to go dormant. Well, thank you so much for the time. It was really wonderful talking to you. Thank you, Christy. It was awesome to talk to you, too. Jenna Echwalo is a PhD candidate studying bryophytes at the University of California at Berkeley. You can see photos and even videos of the moss we've been talking about on our website, science friday.com slash moss. For Science Friday, I'm Christy Taylor. We have to take a short break, but when we come back, a fresh look at the science of skin, soap, and your microbiome,

and why you may want to reconsider your daily shower. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. These days, now that I'm working from home, my morning shower routine is really the only thing that gets me feeling like the day has begun. I mean, one day to the other, feels like all one day, right? So without the daily ritual, I risk kind of feeling unmotivated and unclean. But for some, staying home during the pandemic,

has them rethinking their hygiene routines, including not showering. Hey there, Seifrey. I want to say that I do shower less often, which I think is a good thing, and I don't wear deodorant as often as I used to. I'm showering less because I don't go so many places. I also changed my hair routine to using baking soda and apple cider vinegar. I'm very happy with the results. My hair is soft and feels even more clean. Thanks to listeners James from Denver and Margaret from California for sharing their stories with us via the Science Friday Vox Pop app. If the idea of not showering every day makes you feel icky, how about not showering for years?

Writer James Hamblin says he stopped showering five years ago. Imagine the gook and the grime caked on the skin after all that time, not to mention the smell. But no, Hamblin says his skin has never been better thanks to his healthy, well, well-functioning skin microbiome. So joining us now to talk about the benefits of not showering and the future of medicinal products for our skin is James Hamblin, staff writer for the Atlantic, author of the new book Clean, the new science of skin. James, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much for having me. I have to admit that this is a strange topic to be talking about right now with all the focus on hand washing and sanitizing, but you were questioning the benefits

of these hygiene rituals for years before the coronavirus hit. Your first line in the book is actually how you stopped showering five years ago. When and why did you stop showering? Yeah, it's something that I have been dabbling with for a very long time, and I started working on the book years ago. So I should say I never stopped washing my hands. That's very important. That is an evidence-based behavior that saves lives,

and that's not part of anything I'm questioning here. And I still occasionally rinse up with water, but showering in the traditional sense, washing your hair, using a bunch of body wash, using moisturizers and deodorants and anything else has gone away. And that came together in my life for complex reasons, part of which was just reporting on the science of it, on the skin microbiome,

which about five years ago I started seeing a little. lot of scientific papers on just how many microbes were all over us, very similar to what's in our gut. And that kind of made me question what, what is the point of a lot of what I thought was good and necessary. And what of it could possibly be left behind and save time and money and water and plastic bottles and just simplify things. You have a medical and public health background, so tell us why using soap and other products on our skin, they don't help us very much as much as we think they do. Well, you know, it's a tool like anything else, like a medication or like a hammer. On your hands, soap is an excellent tool.

And if you have something grimy or greasy, you know, some oil on your skin that you need to get off, soap is a great tool for that. But just like everything in medicine and health, more doesn't mean better. And just because it's good on your hands doesn't mean it's good everywhere. You know, if you suggest to someone that they put hand sanitizer all over their entire body, it would find that ridiculous. And I think of soap similarly. And, you know, I think most people probably have fine, healthy relationships to showering, but there are also people who overwash and strip the oils from their skin to

would agree that dermatologists recommend that they cut back. You know, the first thing that people talk about, right? I'm sure you've been asked this. The first thing that people want to know is, how much do you smell after not washing for five years? Yeah, that is a concern. So I wash, I rinse off, I just don't use soap on my body or shampoo on my hair or deodorant. I think it's a gradual process. So everyone has the experience of having gone a,

day or two or three without showering and people that's the gut reaction is I yeah I know what that's like I feel gross I look gross I smell gross doesn't work for me but um in my experience and and I'm far from alone in this everyone who has gone the minimalist route um it happens gradually you just sort of wane yourself off either people are taking shorter showers using less products using fewer products using less of those products um and over time or the course of months and years, your body just sort of adapts. And the idea, at least, is that you are reaching a steady state with the oils that your skin is secreting, the microbes living on your skin, wherein you just sort of, the whole

environment is less volatile. So you do smell. Humans naturally smell, but you don't smell objectionable. You don't have a classic body odor type smell. Let's talk about the microbes on our skin, because you're right that, like the microbes that fill our guts. The microbes on our skin rarely cause disease. If anything else, they may help protect us from disease. Tell us more about that. Yeah. I think it's a similar concept. And this is very much emerging science. But the basic theory is that I always used to think if there are germs on

your skin, you know, microbes, you just want to get them off. And the point of showering is to just remove them all as many as possible. And once we got this sequencing technology to kind of begin to learn about the microbiome, we saw that the skin is never without microbes. There are many, many microbes all over us all the time. And so the point can't be to sterilize ourselves. You'd have to bathe in iodine or something like that. And even right when you got out, you'd be repopulated again. So similar to the gut microbiome, we don't know how to do this exactly. but you ideally want a diverse, harmonic, well-balanced system in you. And we do know that simply trying to eradicate the microbes in your gut or on your skin

categorically is not the best approach. And so that's why you say we're overwashing ourselves. We're too concerned with having these microbes on our skin when we don't realize that some microbes are good for us. Yeah. I think not everyone is overwashing, certainly, but that we should think more strategically about it. You know, it's like saying we're taking too many medications.

You know, obviously many people are taking medications that are life-saving and important to them. And we just need many of us could be more strategic about why exactly we're doing what we're doing. And our hygiene practices, you know, really necessary or are the things that if we, don't, if we don't enjoy them, if they don't bring us joy, could we, could we do less or go without them? Let's talk about efforts to turn bacteria on our skin into drug delivery systems. Yeah, that's one of the exciting things. So toward the conclusion of the book, I tried to figure out where this is all going. You know, we have basically had the idea for a hundred years that you just want to get all the microbes off your skin. Now, we're just starting to understand

that, you know, maybe the goal should be to have a healthy balance of non-disease-causing microbes on your skin. So how do you do that? And some people are, you know, this is not supported by evidence yet, but selling skincare products that are labeled as probiotic or prebiotic, similar to the products you see for the gut. And drug companies are actually working on selling what would technically be a probiotic, a bacterial creams or sprays, topical drugs that are essentially genetically modified bacteria

that can deliver drugs like you might want to help you modify, say, eczema, such that, and this is all still very hypothetical, but that if the skin is populated with these microbes, they would stick around longer and deliver an active compound to the skin in a way that would make the person not have to be constantly reapplying something. But we're talking about GMO bacteria here. How do you convince people? Yeah. When you talk to people who have lived with severe eczema or other sort of inflammatory skin conditions, there are, there's a lot of frustration right now. So people are pretty open-minded to approaches because we have really not.

proven able to cure eczema, acne, psorias, things that people, for some people are major deals in their life. And so this is, you know, the science is not there yet to say that this will definitely happen, but the basic concept of shifting our microbes, of trying to shift the ecosystems, repopulate, move things around is a conceptual change in how we'll approach. these diseases that is exciting. Is there any evidence that we are washing away some of the beneficial bacteria that might be overcoming some of these skin illnesses you're talking about?

I think it's more likely what we're doing when we aggressively wash. And when, you know, people who are fighting, you know, bad acne as I have tend to get into cycles of just really doing more and more, using more products and washing and washing, is you're at least changing the amount of oil that's on the same. the skin, which serves as sort of soil that feeds the microbes on which they live. So when you change that, you change the ecosystems. You're never getting all of the microbes off of you, but you can shift their balances and change the soil in which they grow. And we know that changes in the proportions of microbes do correlate with flares of these skin conditions.

Is it possible that the biome on our skin is also interacting with the microbiome that's inside our gut? Nothing would surprise me at this point. You think you might be exchanging them back and forth, right? We wash our hands, we wipe ourselves after we touch our mouths, we go to the bathroom, we exchange bacteria all the time. You would think that somewhere, there's some sort of conversation going on. Yeah, yeah. I think that's totally possible. And one of the things that we overlook, often we're talking about this, you know, skin health is we tend to think that it has to be addressed or created with topical products or by doing things that are modifying just the skin itself.

But we know that when people change their diets, when you're feeling less stressed, when you are sleeping better, these things affect the functioning and appearance of our skin. So it is really all one complex dynamic system, the body. There's a scary part in the book that I had not heard about, and that's something called a super fungus, you write, that no one even knew existed until a decade ago, but has emerged as one of the CDC's top concerns. Candida Oras, did I pronounce that correctly? Yeah, that was something that was starting to get a fair amount of attention for being picked up in the bloodstreams of people just before the pandemic. of coronavirus and now who's kind of taken a back seat. But the idea that we, you know, this is not to suggest that the microbes that populate our skin are good or bad or that we should give up on trying to identify and eliminate

the disease-causing ones, but that the microbes evolve as we are taking more antibiotics and we are trying to treat things and new pathogens are arise. constantly. And so it's an area of science where, unfortunately, we can't just say skin microbes are good or bad. And there will always be new challenges, and we'll have to be vigilant. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you're just joining us, we're talking with James Hamblin, staff writer for the Atlantic, an author of the new book Clean, the new science of skin. And this is a great read. It's got all kinds of of historical stuff about soaps and the evolution of the soap industry.

I never realized how far back soap goes and how it has the meaning of what it means to be clean has changed over the years. And you say that the skin care industry is growing, not shrinking. So why do you expect people will eventually discover the benefits of doing less with their skin? I'm not certain we will. The industry has successfully sold us more and more products and grown year over year for a long, long time. You know, in the middle 20th century, it was just normal for a family to just have one kind of bar of soap that would do everything for every member of the family.

And now showers and bathrooms are lined with many, many different products. And we have products segmented by gender and age and skin type and what colors and sense we like. And the shift that's happening recently is that people are wanting products that are milder or have fewer ingredients or more, quote, unquote, natural. So it does seem like these are often expensive luxury products. And the fact that people are investing in them means that the industry grows. But it doesn't mean that people are taking the same sort of clear cut, the forest approach to, the skin that we were in recent years. Do you think that COVID-19 and people who have changed their habits due to being at home

all the time and change their cleanliness habits, washing, showering, whatever, do you think these things will last past the pandemic? I wouldn't be surprised. I think it's a time when people are being more vigilant about, you know, where they're directing their breath and how we're covering our faces and not going out when we're sick and washing our hands. And that is the sort of thing that is really important we should have been doing all along. You know, the idea of being on an airplane with someone who's coughing right next to you

is terrifying right now and that we probably should have been the case before that we just stayed home and we were sick and that we were really vigilant about hand washing in a way that we are now. At the same time, people are working from home. they're feeling comfortable discarding a lot of the practices that they might have been doing just because they felt it was necessary in order to go to the office or because everyone does it. And so that includes showering and people are getting to a place where they're really just doing what they find to be beneficial to them.

Well, I have to tell you that after reading your book, I've been reading it for about a week and I have changed my showering habits. You have. I have. I mimicked something that you said in your book and that people were washing only their private parts and leaving the soap off their large major areas. Yeah.

And, you know, once we start talking about those things, it turns out that's kind of what a lot of people do. The billboards with people whose bodies are fully lathered from head to toe are made to sell a soap. And when you get down to it, a lot of people are just the armpits, groin, maybe the feet. The book is called Clean, the New Sons. Science of Skin, James Hamblin, staff writer for the Atlantic and author of the book.

You can check out an excerpt of the book on our website, Science Friday.com slash clean. James, good luck with the book, and thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you so much for talking with me. Charles Berkowitz is our director. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, Kathleen Davis,

B.J. Leaterman, composed our theme music. And if you missed any part of this program, or you'd like to hear it again, yeah, subscribe to our podcasts, or ask your smart speaker to play, Science Friday. You can also email us to our address SciFri at ScienceFri.com. I'm Ira Flato. Have a great weekend.