Science Friday - Vaccine Process, Hubble Space Telescope Anniversary, Alchemy Of Us. April 24, 2020, Part 2

Episode Date: April 24, 2020

Over 50 pharmaceutical companies and biotech firms around the world are now racing to develop vaccines for the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19. Anthony Fauci has said that it might be possible to develop a vaccine in as quickly as 12 to 18 months—but so far, researchers still don’t know which of several approaches might be most safe and effective. Paul Offit, head of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, says that usually, the standard time to develop a new vaccine and move it through the multiple phases of clinical trials required for FDA approval is measured in years, not months—and despite the need, he worries that shortening the path to a vaccine means that developers will skip critical parts of the testing process.  He joins Ira to talk about the path to a vaccine, and how it might fit in with other parts of the coronavirus response, including community testing and the development of therapeutic drugs to treat patients with COVID-19. Think about the breathtaking images you’ve seen of space—swirling, multicolor galaxies, shining star clusters, and far-off planets. There’s a good chance these photos were taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched into space 30 years ago today.  Over these decades, Hubble has helped researchers better understand space mysteries, like black holes, warped space, exoplanets, and the expansion of the universe. While it had a rough beginning—it was deployed with a miscalibrated mirror—Hubble has long maintained its status as the premiere telescope.  Joining Ira to celebrate this anniversary is Dr. Jennifer Wiseman, senior project scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope in Greenbelt, Maryland. When you think about how the telephone was invented, you probably think of Alexander Graham Bell. But what about the people who made the telephone effortless to use? For example, you might not have heard of Almon Strowger, a Kansas City undertaker in the late 19th century, who feared he was losing business thanks to poorly connected phone calls—at that time, calls relied on women known as “hello girls,” who manually operated the switches. Strowger’s frustration led him to invent the automatic switching system, which led to modern telephones, transistors, and eventually, computers. His name, however, is still less well-known. Strowger’s story is one of dozens documented in The Alchemy of Us, a new book by materials scientist Ainissa Ramirez, who explores the way human foibles and flaws have shaped our inventions—and how those inventions have changed us. Take, for example, Ruth Belleville, the Englishwoman who literally sold time until accurate clocks were ubiquitous, a story Ramirez uses to describe how industrialization and industrialized time have shaped our sleep. Producer Christie Taylor talks to Ramirez about her unexpected stories of innovation in time, light, photography, and telecommunications—inventions that all helped shape modern culture.   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 Flato. A bit later in the hour, a salute to the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched 30 years ago today. Seems like yesterday, right? But first, a key part of plans to return to normal post-pandemic life is the availability of a vaccine against the coronavirus. Many drug companies and biotech firms have plunged into efforts to rapidly develop and test potential vaccines. Experts such as Dr. Anthony Fauci say it may take 12 to 18 months to bring a working vaccine to market. But is that timeline overly optimistic? Is it real? What about it? And just where does having a vaccine fit into our overall response to the coronavirus pandemic? Joining me now is Dr. Paul Offutt, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Welcome back, Dr. Offutt. Thank you, Ira. Good to be back. First, walk us through the process of what needs to be done before a vaccine can be available.

What is the testing process, the research process? What goes on here? Well, typically what's done is, and this is a virus that we just got in hand a few months ago, is you have to make a decision about how you want to make the vaccine. Do you want to take the virus and inactivated as the way that the polio vaccine or hepatitis A vaccine is made? Do you want to take a virus and weaken it the way the measles vaccine is made? Do you want to just take part of the virus as one protein from the virus, which is the way the hepatitis B vaccine is made? Or do you want to use a completely different strategy, like a genetic strategy, DNA vaccine,

messenger RNA vaccine. So once you've made that decision, then usually you do extensive animal model studies, so-called proof of concept studies, where you have an animal that, for example, get sick with this virus, and then you try a variety of different strategies to see if you can protect them from getting sick. With that, then you go into phase one, phase two trials, which are progressively larger safety immunogenicity trials, remembering that you don't really know exactly what immune response is protective yet. The only way really to know that is to do a large placebo-controlled safety efficacy trial, which often involves tens of thousands of people.

The typical length of time it takes to make a vaccine is 20 to 25 years. I mean, our vaccine, the rhodovirus vaccine, was made in 26 years. So that's the typical amount of time. When you're talking about trying to get a vaccine out there in one to two years, you're definitely talking about skipping parts of this process. So the question is, which parts are you skipping? Is this risky? Are you saying now by skipping these parts of the process that we're doing with this vaccine? I guess what I'm saying is I can't see how it would be possible to know in 12 to 18 months that you have in hand a vaccine which has been tested in tens of thousands of people pre-licensure, then submitted to the FDA for licensure and then licensed and then commercially available.

What I would imagine is that a much smaller number of people would be tested pre-licensure if the vaccine even was to be licensed. I mean, is this vaccine going to be licensed by the Food and Drug Administration? I guess we'll see how this plays out because another option is that you just do sort of very small safety immunogenicity trials. You find that you get an immune response that you think is likely to be protected. but you don't know that yet, and then you just slowly roll it out. And then once as a commercially available product, that's when you see to what extent it works

or to what extent it's safe, which I hope we don't do it that way. I'd like to think we're going to do large-scale placebo-controlled safety efficacy trials before we roll it out because if not, then we're taking somewhat of a risk. But again, it's always risk benefit. I mean, if this virus is COVID-19 is still a scourge then and it's still killing thousands of people, you know, the risk-benefit ratios change. It seems like there's so many different companies, so many different vaccines being tested. Is there no standard way to make a vaccine?

No. You know, you see what works for that particular virus. You're right, though. There's more than 50 companies across the globe that are making this vaccine. That's the good news. There's clearly a lot of interest and money in doing this. So that's not an impediment. But, you know, how are we going to make it is still not clear.

And if we choose the DNA, messenger RNA approach, so the way the messenger RNA approach, So the way the messenger RNA approach, which works, which is now a barter, which is part of health and human services, just put $483 million behind this vaccine. So that's obviously a strategy they like. What that does is you inject the person with messenger RNA, which is then translated to the protein of interest. In this case, the protein is that spike protein that sits on the surface of the virus. That's the part of the virus that attaches to cells. So if you can prevent that virus from attaching to cells, you can prevent infection. that's the good news. And so you'll see whether or not this approach could work in people. But again,

we don't have a messenger RNA vaccine. This would be the first vaccine like it of its kind. And so you would like to test it in tens of thousands of people before licensure. But if you're going to do that, then we're not going to have a vaccine as quickly as people would like. Why not take something like the Ebola vaccine, which we have developed and just chop off pieces and use that? Right. So the Ebola vaccine was made by a so-called vectored vaccine approach, which is you take, in this case, a different virus. In the case of Ebola, it was something called vesicular stomatitis virus into which was cloned then, the gene that coded for the surface protein of Ebola. So your argument is do the same thing here. Just take vesicular tomatitis virus and clone into it the gene

that codes for the surface protein. That's actually being done by a couple companies. One of them is using not vesicular stomatitis virus, but a different virus called adenovirus 29. I think that's Johnson and Johnson's approach. Again, it's all to be determined in terms of whether it's safe and effective because you never really know whether a vaccine is safe and effective until you do a large-scale safety efficacy trial. So hopefully that will be done for these vaccines so the public can have as much information as possible before being asked to be injected with it. There was a study that has not been peer reviewed, but has been published that shows a study of blood samples of 3,300 residents who live in Santa Clara, California, which is Silicon Valley,

and it concludes that the infection is much more widespread than indicated by the number of confirmed cases. I'm just quoting from the conclusion. That means up to 4% of the population has been infected. What do you make of these results? Not surprising, because who do we test? We generally test people who are mildly or moderately or severely ill. We don't test people who have no symptoms. But we know that certainly from the data that initially came out of China, that as many as 80% of people who are infected with this virus either have no symptoms or mild symptoms. So that a much larger percentage of the population has been infected than we think makes sense. And that those data have also been confirmed by studies in Germany, studies in Iceland.

So I don't find them at all surprising. I think some people may be falsely reassured that that's the best. way to develop a population immunity is just to have people naturally infected. But the only real way to develop true population immunity is with a vaccine. We've learned that with measles. I mean, every year, measles would cause two to three million cases in this country. The only way we eliminated measles from this country was with a vaccine. And remember, when you're naturally infected with measles, which people who are as old as me were, you're protected for the rest of your life. Yet still that wasn't enough to stop the spread of that virus until we got a vaccine.

Yeah, that would also mean that there are many more people walking around than we thought who are not showing any symptoms. Right, and who are immune. And so it would be great, I think, as we're trying to avoid the second part of this nightmare, which is the massive joblessness and massive homelessness that comes with massive joblessness and all the health problems associated with that, to get us back to work. And one way to do that is to do wide-scale testing to see who's infected, wide-scale testing to see who's protected, so we can be much smarter about getting back to work, which is, basically, I think, what Governor Cuomo is trying to do in New York. And it's what people have done in Germany as well. It's what Angela Merkel has done in Germany. So that's the best way to do it. So then testing is still really a great priority? Definitely. Absolutely. Key. And how fast do you think we can actually get enough tests out there? Right. So we have the capacity

to do that. I think what we need to do is make sure we have all the reagents like the viral transport media, the swabs that needed to be out there. And that's where the federal government can help a great deal. I think the president is right when he says that the governors or people locally should make the decisions because they know their districts and territories the best. But the federal government can clearly play a role in making sure that everybody has what they need in terms of getting the testing done. If we do get people and we do test them and we find out that they have been exposed, how sure are we that that means that they're protected from getting it again? Right. So there were studies done with human

coronaviruses years ago looking at, they were actually experimental challenge studies, looking at people who were challenged with one of the four types of human coronaviruses that circulate every year in our country and then challenged them a year later to see whether they were protected and they were. So I think it's fair to say, given this the type of virus that this is, that if you're naturally infected with the virus, that you're probably going to be protected against it for years. And the good news also about this virus is that although it's a single-stranded RNA virus, it doesn't appear to mutate, that this is not flu. I think this is going to be more like measles or moms or German measles where it's going to be sort of a single-serotype disease, which then can be prevented. We don't have to worry about it being a moving target

like influenza is. We're seeing some governors who are now opening their beaches and they're taking off their restrictions. Is that possible in this? Or are they just playing with fire here? We'll see. I mean, you do have sort of control groups, if you will. I think New York is taking more of an approach similar to Germany where they want to do testing to see who's infected, see who's immune before you send people back out. And when you send it back out, you sort of test the water with one foot, if you will, you know, that you just send back, say, one particular segment of an industry and see what happens and then move forward slowly and slowly. As distinct from just reopening things, as seemed to be happening in states like Georgia or

Florida or Texas. And so I think in a few months, we're going to know what the right approach was and how better to do this. But it's in a sense, it's like an uncontrolled natural experiment. So I was going to say that we're just having a human population experiment. Right. And we'll learn from it. I suspect in some ways we're going to learn the hard way.

What would you have done differently than the way we're doing things now in terms of developing a vaccine or in terms of developing therapeutics? I think there's an enormous amount of interest and energy in looking both at antivirals. I think we can say now that hydroxychloroquine is not what it was hoped to be. But other drugs like remdesivir or phapurivir or lopinivir, antivirals, which should work, here. We'll see whether they work. There are a number of National Institute of Health Associated Trials, prospective control trials. I think we'll know really in the next week or so to what extent those antivirals are of value. Regarding a vaccine, again, I think there's an

enormous amount of interest in doing it. The CDC, the Food and Drug Administration, academics are very interested in making sure this vaccine moves forward and we'll see how it plays out. Moderna, which is this MRNA vaccine, seems to have the lead. the DNA vaccine made by Anovio, which is a Plymouth Meeting Company, also is now in human clinical trials. I think we'll see how this plays out. There certainly is a scientific expertise to do it. There certainly is the money to do it. The question is how much testing do we want in hand before this vaccine is commercially available? And that is to some extent going to be determined by, to what extent this virus is still to scourge six months, 12 months,

18 months from now. Dr. Raffert, thank you very much as always. Thank you, Ira. Paul Offutt, Director of the Vaccine Education Center and attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we will celebrate 30 years of the Hubble Space Telescope. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break. Hey there, Ira here. You know, as the world continues to adapt due to COVID-19, getting accurate information is crucial to protecting our sales. our loved ones and our communities.

This is where Science Friday comes in. We are here to deliver the facts, to combat misinformation, to have the right conversations with trusted experts who offer a unique voice in this confusing noise of news. Our goal is to get you the information you need. But, you know, we can't do this alone. Science Friday depends on donations from listeners just like you. So please, if you can, I'm asking you to help to chip in a few dollars right now to support our programming.

Go to ScienceFriday.com slash donate to make a donation. Every little bid helps. Again, that's sciencefriiday.com slash donate. Stay safe, stay healthy, and thanks. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Think about the breathtaking images you've seen of space, swirling multicoling multicolored gallows. galaxies, shining star clusters, far off planets.

There's a good chance these photos were taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble has helped us better understand space mysteries like black holes, warped space, exoplanets, and the expansion of the universe. 30 years ago today, Hubble was launched into space and through multiple repair jobs right from its very beginning, it's the orbiting observatory that just keeps on going. To celebrate this anniversary, we're joined today by Dr. Jennifer Wiseman, senior project scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope in Greenbelt, Maryland. Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you. Do you remember the beginnings of Hubble? When it was launched in 1990, you were studying to become an astrophysicist, right? Must have been exciting times. Oh, it was exciting. I was studying for a graduate degree in astronomy up at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, And we were all very excited about this new idea of having a telescope on a space-based platform. So it would be above the Earth's atmosphere and would provide much clearer views of deep space.

We were in high anticipation. Tell me what the anticipation was like. What were you expecting to get out of this new telescope? Well, we weren't sure, actually. We were excited because we didn't know exactly what it would bring us. We just knew it would bring us more. better information, perhaps even change the kinds of questions we'd be asking about the universe. Now, I myself was studying a different kind of astronomy.

I was using radio telescopes, the big dish kinds of telescopes that collect low energy radiation from regions where stars are forming. But all of us, no matter what kinds of astronomy we were specializing in, we're really excited about this new platform that was going to open up vistas and new questions. we were particularly interested in what the telescope would tell us about deep space, very distant, faint galaxies that had been impossible really to see up to that point. But we were also curious about what it would tell us about our own solar system and nearby star systems as well.

You know, to me, Hubble is one of NASA's greatest triumphs, because it brought outer space closer to everybody here at home. and some of the images, virtually all of the images, were just fantastic, things we had never seen before. Do you have a favorite Hubble achievement or discovery or an image? I have many favorites. That's like asking someone which child is your favorite, right? But I think the one that actually always stirs my soul when I look at it

is something we call the ultra-deep field. Now, this is an image that was taken by, pointing the Hubble Space Telescope in a direction of the sky where there aren't many nearby stars to kind of drown out the image. And just collecting light for many days so that the faintest objects would show up in the resulting image. This resulting image is basically a collection of thousands of galaxies, these smudges of light that when you look at them, you see spirals, you see sphericals, you see all kinds of galaxies. in this tiny little field in the sky and realize that our universe is magnificent. It's enormous.

If you can kind of extrapolate in your mind that image over the whole sky, you realize visually what it means when we say there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in our observable universe. And I like to imagine being able to suddenly blink my eyes and travel to any one of those galaxies and look around. you know, if we were that far away looking back, our own Milky Way would look like one of those spiral smudges of light. And then, of course, some of those galaxies are more distant than others. So one of the big challenges of astronomy is to measure distances to different things in space. And astronomers have very carefully been mapping out the distances to these various galaxies and finding out

how the universe has changed over time. Because, of course, we're looking at these galaxies. as they were when the light left them to begin its journey across vast distances of space to get to our telescope. And so some of these galaxies are millions of light years. That's the light year is the distance that light travels in one year. Some of these galaxies are shining to us from millions of years in the distant past and some are shining from billions of years really toward the very beginning of our universe when galaxies were first starting to form. So we can compare those very distant galaxies in the way they look and they're composed, their nature with galaxies like our own and really see how the universe has changed over time. And that to me is fascinating. You know, the

idea of putting a telescope in space, it's an observatory in space, I guess offers advantages over right, having one on the ground here. Of course. So the whole whole idea of putting this telescope in orbit around the earth is just, is not to get it closer to the things we're observing, but to get it above the Earth's atmosphere. It's only about 340 miles above the surface of the Earth, but it's high enough to get it above most of our atmosphere and above the clouds, and we can get much sharper images. Light coming through the atmosphere, the turbulent atmosphere of Earth can get blurred. And also our, our atmosphere actually, filters out some types of light that we would like to receive for astronomy. I mean, that's good

for us. The ultraviolet light cannot get through the atmosphere, and that's helpful for our health. But we want to see ultraviolet light in astronomy. A lot of objects in deep space emit interesting radiation in the ultraviolet range of light. And Hubble can see that above the Earth's atmosphere. So that's what's been the transformational change that we've had with the Hubble Space Telescope and subsequent space telescopes. What are the questions that Hubble is still investigating now? Well, that's a great question because some of the questions that Hubble was originally tasked to address are still being investigated. One of those is, for example, the expansion rate of the universe. You know, the namesake of Hubble, Edwin Hubble, helped us understand that the universe itself is expanding, space itself is stretching.

But what is the rate of that expansion? And how long has this been going on? How old is the universe? That was one of the original goals of Hubble. And Hubble did, in fact, refine our understanding of that expansion rate of the universe. And we're still measuring that and refining that with Hubble to this day. In fact, Hubble helped provide us with a surprise, along with some telescopes on the ground, when it deduced that in the last few billion years, that expansion rate of the universe has been increasing.

The expansion is accelerating. We didn't expect that because matter tends to pull things together, not push things apart. But there's something we call dark energy kind of accelerating that push of the universe's expansion. So that's something we're still studying with Hubble. And we are also doing things with Hubble now that we didn't anticipate or even imagine when Hubble was designed, such as studying exoplanets. These are planets not in our own solar system, but planets orbiting stars outside of our solar system. These exoplanets were not known when I was starting graduate school, but now we know of thousands of these systems because our technology has improved. They are generally detected by other kinds of telescopes. Telescopes on the ground and space telescopes like NASA's Kepler and Tess observatories. But then Hubble is the pioneer at studying the composition of the atmospheres of some of these exoplanets. And right now we're using Hubble to look at many of these exoplanets to discern

what's in their atmospheres. And we're finding even water vapor in some of them. So these are early steps toward really understanding what other star systems are like. Those are just a couple of examples of what we're using Hubble for these days. Speaking of exoplanets, there's this story about a spooky exoplanet that Hubble found and now is not there anymore and it wasn't what we thought it was. Explain that one. Oh, this is just a great story of how science is dynamic. You know, we discover things, but when we keep studying them, we find out more and more. And this is a really intriguing exoplanet, or what we thought was an exoplanet system, around the star FOMALHOT. And FOMO hot is a star that has a kind of ring of debris around it.

It's always shown some evidence of having material, perhaps planets orbiting that star. But FOMO Hot B, which was, we thought and might still think, is one of these planets in the FOMO hot system, was detected some years back with Hubble. it was observed in an image, and it's very hard to image exoplanets because they're generally very faint around other stars. We typically detect exoplanets in more indirect ways. But this one we had an image from Hubble, and it's a really beautiful and striking picture of an object orbiting the star, or so we thought. But over the years, a team of astronomers have been looking at the data and looking at more Hubble observations and seeing that this object seems to be fading over time,

dissipating in a sense. It's always been a little unusual because it didn't shine as brightly in infrared light as we would have expected for a true exoplanet. So this new team is hypothesizing that what we might be seeing is actually the result of the debris, if you will, of a collision in that system of two smaller planetesimals and that kind of dust cloud that was kicked up by that collision,

is what we were seeing, and it's now dissipating over time. And so that is a very cool finding. And, of course, we'll be looking at this system more and more just to see what's happening and to further understand what's happening in that other dynamic star system. You know, a lot of technology has changed in the, what, 30 years that Hubble's been up there. Is Hubble still good enough for 2020? Well, this is the amazing thing. We've had Hubble for three decades now, and yet truly Hubble is more scientifically powerful and productive now than ever before in its mission.

And we anticipate Hubble will keep giving us cutting-edge science for the next decade, maybe beyond. The reason for this good news is at least twofold. One is that we've had a series of astronaut servicing missions over the years. You may remember the dramatic launch of Hubble, which was via the space shuttle back in 1990, and then it's dramatic first servicing mission that corrected some errors in Hubble's optics in 1993. Since then, we've had wonderful vision with Hubble, and we've had several servicing missions with astronauts repairing equipment or putting in new and improved cameras and instruments on Hubble. that's kept Hubble at the forefront of capability. So it's like getting a new observatory every time.

The last time we did a space shuttle servicing mission was in 2009, and this mission was extremely successful. We had new refreshing batteries and gyroscopes. A couple of science instruments were repaired, and then we had two new science instruments installed. So we have a wonderful observatory now that's still in fantastic technical shape. And also astronomers are using those instruments and the observatory

in kind of new, clever ways to get better and better science out of it. So because of that, we're getting new and more interesting results, perhaps than ever before. We're getting more professional peer-reviewed science papers out of Hubble than ever before. And we have a real positive sense of what we're going to learn from Hubble in these coming years. Got my replato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. How many more years you think Hubble can operate for?

Well, that's, you know, the question of the hour, and that's hard to give a firm prediction. NASA has committed to supporting Hubble as long as it's being scientifically productive, and right now it's very productive. We are entertaining proposals from astronomers, around the world every year. We think that the batteries and gyroscopes are in good shape,

and we have a real clever, wonderful team of engineers and technical experts on the ground here at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and also at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore that are constantly monitoring these instruments and using them in the most productive ways. And from the kind of rough predictions of looking at how healthy these components seem to be, we're hopeful that Hubble will be giving us a very good scientific return for throughout this decade and maybe beyond. And this is really good news because Hubble is terrific on its own,

but it's also very powerful when used in complement with other observatories and probes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, which is another space facility with different capabilities that we anticipate launching in 2021. Why do you think with all the wonderful telescopes around the world that Hubble is the one that people talk about? That's a great question. So the Hubble Space Telescope has really become a household, a friend for people around the world. And I think there are several reasons for that. One is its kind of dramatic beginning back in the early 1990s. Its launch from the space shuttle was momentous, and then it was quickly realized that at first, Hubble's images were disappointing. There was a realization that the magnificent 2.4 meter mirror inside Hubble was slightly misshapen. It was beautifully ground, but slightly misshapen in its formula.

And so this was kind of embarrassing for NASA. It was a disappointment to astronomers, and this was a bad way to get your name known around the world. But because of that, its dramatic repair mission in 1993 was watched by people around the world. And when the results of that mission were so successful, people were cheering around the world so that, again, reinforced the name of Hubble around the world. And then the early images after that first repair mission were surprising and dramatic. One of them was when Comet Shoemaker Levy 9 collided with Jupiter. You know, it fell apart into this series of fragments that impacted Jupiter one by one,

and the Hubble telescope caught this dramatic impact. And how memorable is that? That's something that really only Hubble could capture in that kind of detail. So that reinforced the name of Hubble. And then the most dramatic images that are of most interest to the public, are easily accessible also in the galleries on our websites. And I think that people appreciate that. You know, they're able to share in the awe and wonder

of looking at these images of galaxies, of stars, of these beautiful, colorful nebulae where stars are still forming. And I'm pleased that the mission has kind of set a standard for making these observations and data easily available and enjoyable worldwide. Wow. We have run out of time. There's so much stuff to talk about with the Hubble. I want to wish you and congratulate you and wish everybody a happy 30th anniversary for the Hubble.

Thank you. Check us out on social media at NASA Hubble. A lot going on there. Dr. Jennifer Wiseman is the Senior Project Scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope in Greenbelt, Maryland. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. My pleasure. When we come back, artificial light, precise timekeeping, rapid railways, how the technology we invent has shaped us, from how we sleep to where we live.

Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Modern technology rests atop some long-storied inventions, the telegraph and later the telephone, the railroad with its tracks of Bessemer Steel. the incandescent light bulb, photography, from glass plates to color film, even the humble clock. You may think you know who invented those things. Lone geniuses, flashes of brilliance, people who seem a lot smarter than the rest of us, right?

But our next guest wants you to look closer at the whole picture. Telegraph inventor Samuel Morse was a painter whose broken hearts spurned him on. And what about people who might never be considered scientists, but who, nonetheless, belong in the story of science, like Ruth Belleville, an Englishwoman who sold time. Yeah, you heard that right. Material Scientist Anisa Ramirez writes about all these stories in her new book, The Alchemy of Us, How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another. Producer Christy Taylor spoke with Ramirez. Welcome to Science Friday, Dr. Ramirez. Oh, thank you so much. So I'm going to jump right for the title of your book first, which is how humans and matter transformed one another.

And you're talking about the way our values and stories get baked into what we create. But you're also talking about how what we create changes our habits, societies, and even our biology. So what's your favorite example of this? Oh, I have so many. It's sort of like you're asking a mother who's her favorite child right now. But the thing that really fascinates me is actually light. When we think about the light bulb, we think about Thomas Edison. Of course, he was not the first, but he was the most popular inventor when it came to electric lights.

And, you know, he succeeded. and what did that do to us? It ends up that they change our biology. We are actually two organisms. We have a daytime mode and a nighttime mode. And how we know which mode to be in is based on the lights. When we're in daytime mode, we have growth hormone going through our bodies, we have higher temperature, higher metabolism.

At nighttime, all of those things go down. And so if we're under artificial lights and that's putting us in growth mode or in daytime mode all the time until we fall asleep, that will actually stimulate ourselves to grow. So the positive thing is that one researcher told me that we are slightly taller than our ancestors. There's many contributing factors, nutrition, water, mitigation of diseases. But another contributor are artificial lights. Now, when he said this to me, I said, hold it right now. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking too.

I'm like, you're joshing me. But yeah, this is what he studies and this is what he's also proven. But he said, all right, so that's great to know. But there's also a downside because if our cells are overstimulated, both growth, hormone, well, we're going to have cells growing in ways that we don't want. And so there are a range of different diseases, cardiovascular diseases, obesity, and also some forms of cancer, which are late to artificial light. And so for us, we wake up in the morning, we can either have the sun, hit our eye and put us in daytime mode, or we can have blue LEDs or compact bulbs, compact fluorescent

bulbs to tell our bodies to be in daytime mode. As the sun sets, we should actually change the type of light to red LEDs or incandescent bulbs and also dim the blue settings that are on our phones so that we too can enter into nighttime mode. This sounds nothing like what Thomas Edison might have intended when he first invented the incandescent light bulb. That's right. I mean, he was on a mission, which was to push back the darkness. And this is definitely a good thing because I don't know about you, but I'm afraid of the dark, so I'm glad to have lights. But he never would have known that our bodies are connected to lights. We've only found out this connection. in the last 20 years.

So there's certainly an unintended consequence to his invention, and that happens all the time. I want to go back to the beginning of your book, which starts with a story that also sounds kind of fantastical, which is this woman Ruth Belleville who sold time. Who was she? Ruth Belleville is one of my favorite characters. There's a woman in the late 19th century, and she had this unusual job of selling time. She would wake up early in her home and maidenhead, make her way over to London, and then make her way over to Greenwich to the Royal Observatory, she'd be carrying her special pocket watch.

She would show her watch to the folks at the Royal Observatory, and they would compare their scientific clocks to her clock and tell her the difference and certify it. Then she'd make her way back to London, and she would show her watch to different businesses that needed to know the time. You can imagine train stations, newspapers, banks, they needed to know the time. And she seems like she came right out of a book from Charles Dickens, but this was a real woman. What year was that? And why was it so hard for everyone else to tell what time it was? She had been in the business for some time. And this is the early, like say, 1910, this is when she had this business of selling time. Knowing the exact time, if I were to ask you what the exact time is, you would just be able to pull out your cell phone.

You can tell me exactly what the time is. And that time is actually coming from an atomic clock, but it's being transmitted through the internet. In Ruth Belville's day, the precise time was located at the Royal Observatory, but there weren't any cell phone towers or internet to transmit it to. other people. And so they had to go to the Royal Observatory to get it, but they didn't have that luxury. So Ruth, that was her business. And her family had been doing this work of selling time for about 100 years. So she lived at this time where people couldn't really take for granted that they were operating with an accurate clock. What about that precision that she was able to offer was so important to the way we live now? You know, what changed when we could start taking time for granted? Well, the reason why I find that.

Ruth to be so fascinating is because I'm trying to impress upon readers how important time became that a woman could actually have a business based on it. If I told you I'm going to start this business and I'm going to sell time, you'd say, Nisa, that you're crazy. But in Ruth's day, timekeeping became very and very important. In fact, in The Alchemy of Us, I list all these words with the word time in it that were created in the 1800s. So time was certainly on our mind. we became very time conscious and we wanted to live by the clock and so this is the reason why Ruth had

such a successful business. Staying on the topic of time for just a moment we're in this time where so many people are isolated this age of self-quarantine and a lot of people myself included are dealing with this fuzziness of time and yet we have some of the most the most precise timekeeping tools in history.

Does this say anything about the limits of technology in shaping us or is there something else going on? Well I talk about that in the alchemy of us too that our technologies are more and more precise, but we as humans, we tell time very differently. If you remember the summers of your youth when you were learning how to ride a bike

and you were learning how to swim, you had all these activities. So if you think about your childhood, it feels like it was a long amount of time. The summers would be very, very long. But now when I think about my summers, I'm like, well, I sent a lot of email and I commuted. And so the brain will think about time differently.

it measures time by our experiences. And so we are all in our houses wearing the same clothes, eating the same food. It's kind of hard to know what day it is because we don't have some kind of structure, some periodicity to tell us that time has moved forward. And so, and that's what I talk about in the Alchemy of Us, that although we've created these wonderful clocks, our bodies are still, have a different type of clock. We talked about how technology shapes us, but there's this flip side that you mentioned, which is how we and our values shape technology. And one of the big examples you have of that is in photography. You write about how when color film was first developed, for example, there was this huge blind spot. Tell us about that.

Well, early photography, early color photography, people didn't think there was a problem with it because people were living within their own communities. But it ends up when schools were desegregated. Black mothers would notice that the class picture didn't do their child justice. And what they found out is that actually the camera film was tailored for white skin. So what I can say is that when people were making the film, when they were testing it, they were testing it on their own demographic or people of a similar demographic.

They didn't do a wide swath of people to test their film to see if it would capture them equally. And so African-American mothers petitioned a camera film manufacturers to change the formulation because their children were just being left in the shadows. And nothing really happened. But it ends up when advertising money came from chocolatiers and also furniture makers saying that, look, this camera is not picking up dark chocolate and dark woods. You need to fix this formulation that the camera film manufacturers changed their tomb and changed the formulation.

And it took commercial interests to make this change, not human interests. Well, yeah, yeah. Money talks. Money talks. You also have this amazing story of how these two African-American employees at Polaroid caught on that Polaroid was selling camera technology to South Africa's apartheid government. What did they find out and what were they able to change? The most important thing I've written is in The Alchemy of Us, and it's this chapter that you're just talking about. It's about these two employees at Polaroid who were just kind of minding their business. And when they were leaving for lunch, they saw on the wall a mock-up that was an ID card for, the Department of Mines from the Republic of South Africa. This is in the early 1970s. And at that point,

the UN had said companies in the United States should cease and desist from operating in South Africa. And so they're wondering, what's our company, what's Polaroid doing in South Africa? It ends up that all black South Africans had to carry a passbook. It said where they could go, who they could be with, and what time they had to be back home. And anybody could ask for their passbook. And if they didn't have their passbook, they could be sent to jail. So it was definitely a way of monitoring and controlling a population. Ends up that at the heart of the past book was an image created by Polaroid film. And so these two employees, Caroline Hunter and Ken Williams, went on to push for Polaroid to remove their presence in South Africa that stopped selling film to South Africa.

It took seven years of protesting and networking with other activists until Polaroid finally withdrew from South Africa. And that was one of the steps to dismantle it. the apartheid system. Anisa, you have another story that you tell about an undertaker who, whose ire at the switchboard system of phone operation led him to invent automatic switching, an undertaker. An undertaker. Well, this is another one of the stories within the alchemy of us that I had never heard about. There are little known people who've made our world the way it is.

And it ends up that there was this undertaker named Amin Stroger, who was so angry at the switchboard operators. They were known as Hello Girls because he was a mortician and he was absolutely sure that the hello girl was directing business to his competitor. The legend has it that he's looking at the newspaper and he sees in the obituary section that his friend had died. And we don't know what he was more angry about, that his friend had died or that his competitor had embalmed the body. And it was that moment he said, well, look, I'm going to get the switchboard operator out of the formula and I'm going to make an automatic switch so that when people call, they can call me direct. and not have this person intervene. And so he put us on the path to an automatic switches

which eventually led to the transistor, which eventually led to the computer. So this hot-headed undertaker is part of the origin story of the computer. That's amazing. And so ordinary in so many ways that he took a very petty, almost gripe and turned it into a technological solution.

Well, I talk a lot about people in the Alchemy of Us who are just regular people who they want to solve a problem, maybe they're just passionate about something or they have a problem that need to solve. And that is enough for them to pursue something. A lot of books will talk about genius and they'll just make it seem like, well, I can't do that because that person is a genius. But actually, if you read the Alchemy of Us, you'll say, oh, that guy just had a problem. I can solve problems. And I tried to really make the people who I was talking about in the Alchemy of Us seem approachable because they really are just ordinary people solving a problem. And it ends up that that, that, problem impacted our modern day. Just reminder that I'm Christy Taylor and this is Science Friday

from WNYC Studios talking to Anisa Ramirez about her new book, The Alchemy of Us. Someone more famous but also maybe acting from something very understandable is Samuel Morse, whose wife died and that led him to the telegraph. How did that happen? Samuel Morse was a painter. He wasn't an engineer. He was a painter. And he was a painter. And he was a painter. He had one of the biggest commissions of his life in Washington, D.C. And he lived in New Haven, Connecticut. And his wife had just had their third child, and he's writing a letter to her in D.C. because he's partying.

You know, he's met the president. He's like, I wish you were here. I wish you would send me a letter back. He sends that letter. It takes a couple of days to get to her because it's by stagecoach. This is before his invention. But three days after he sent that letter, he gets a letter from his father. And he's like, well, that's strange because there's no way that that letter could have made at home and back.

His father says, your wife has died. And so he runs back and when I run, he means takes the stage coach. It takes him four days to get back to New Haven. By the time he gets there, his wife has been buried for four days. So you can imagine that he's fairly heartbroken. And in a sense, he is the person who's most prepared to want to create a way for communication to be fast. And later on in life, he learns about electricity. and he finds that he can send messages by sending small and long pulses of electricity

creating his Morse code. So the origin story for the telegraph comes from a person who's experienced some serious loss. So one of the things that you do with Morse and other people in this book is you're telling us about their flaws and foibles and downright unlikable things about them too. So Thomas Edison was inspired by someone else's idea. And Samuel Morris was vehemently opposed to immigration and he thought slavery was great, right? Yeah. He he wouldn't have, I don't know, I don't think he would have appreciated me writing this book about him. I'm African-American, but I think I show him for his humanness. He ran for mayor of New York City on a anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic platform. That's not debatable. And so that just shows you about what he was thinking.

He was a Protestant man. There was an influx of people coming in. He wasn't happy about that. He felt like his slice of the American pie was getting smaller and smaller. This may all sound familiar to what the age that we're in right now. And I just wanted to show people that, you know, inventors, although we put them on a pedestal, we should really look at their humanness as well. We often think of technology as being precious and neutral. But technology just picks up whatever someone is thinking or whatever is part of their experience. You know, there are a lot of blind spots in technology because there's a lot of blind spots in

the human experience too. So that's the reason why I always emphasize people's humanness. Maybe that humanness isn't translated into that technology, but we should always know what the origin story, where things start from, so that we can just appreciate where things come from. Looking forward, we're in a time of great change right now, thanks partly just to the technology that we use, but also this virus. Have you seen any connection to history and how we may respond to new kinds of innovation and technology and materials? That's a very good question. I know that there are many cases that's been explored on the Twitterverse about how during times of pandemic, this is where there's a lot of creativity. And they said that calculus was created and the laws of gravity were understood by Newton during this time. I think that material science requires a lot of laboratory work. And since people are shuttered in, they're not able to do that. But I think this is a good time for people to think. And I also think this is a good time for people to learn about materials in context.

And so I hope that with the alchemy of us, if we can't think about materials of the future, we can at least look at materials in the past and use them as a gymnasium to make better decisions about the materials in the future. And that was the purpose for writing this book. Well, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you. Dr. Anisa Ramirez is a material scientist and the author of the new book, The Alchemy of Us, How Humans and Matter transformed one another. This is Science Friday. I'm Christy Taylor.

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