Science Friday - When Life Begins, Open Access Research, Wasps. Sep 2, 2022, Part 2

Episode Date: September 2, 2022

Why Is It So Hard To Agree On When Human Life Starts? After decades of deliberations involving physicians, bioethicists, attorneys, and theologians, a U.S. presidential commission in 1981 settled on a scientifically derived dividing line between life and death that has endured, more or less, ever since: A person was considered dead when the entire brain—including the brainstem, its most primitive portion—was no longer functioning, even if other vital functions could be maintained indefinitely through artificial life support. In the decades since, the committee’s criteria have served as a foundation for laws in most states adopting brain death as a standard for legal death. Now, with the overturning of Roe v. Wade and dozens of states rushing to impose abortion restrictions, American society is engaged in a chaotic race to define the other pole of human existence: When exactly does human life begin? At conception, the hint of a heartbeat, a first breath, the ability to survive outside the womb with the help of the latest technology? To read the full article, visit sciencefriday.com.   Taxpayer-Funded Science Is Finally Becoming Public Last week, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced a new directive requiring federally-funded science be made available to the public for free, and faster. Set to take effect by the end of 2025, the new rule would do away with the Obama-era policy that journals can keep research with taxpayer funding behind paywalls for up to one year. In addition, more kinds of research would qualify than previous policies have required. So how does freely accessible research benefit the people who pay for it—or the scientists who do the work itself? Nobel Prize-winning medical researcher and open science advocate Harold Varmus joins Ira to discuss.   Why You Should Thank Your Local Wasp It’s late in the summer, meaning any outdoor gathering with food and drink has a good chance of being visited by a pesky, buzzing wasp. But don’t reach for that rolled-up newspaper or can of bug spray. The wasps in your world play an important role that’s often overlooked. Far beyond the social hornets and yellowjackets people think about when they picture a wasp, the wasp world includes thousands of species. Some are parasitic, injecting their eggs into unwilling prey. Others hunt, either paralyzing prey for their young to feed on, or by bringing bits of meat back to a nest for their young. Some are strictly vegetarian, and live on pollen. Some are needed for the pollination of figs and certain species of orchids. Dr. Seirian Sumner, a behavioral biologist at University College London, says that if people understood the services provided by wasps the same way that they understand the need for bees, they might be more willing to overlook an occasional wasp annoyance—and might even be thankful for the wasps in their lives. In her book Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps, Sumner makes the case for wasps as nature’s pest control agents, as important pollinators that should be celebrated.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm I Refledo. Just over 40 years ago, medical professionals came up with a way to define what it means for a person to die. What defines human death? Advances in medicine have made it possible to keep people alive in ways that, well, they were never possible in the past. So hospitals and doctors around the country adopted a set of standards which constitute what's called brain death. and those same standards were codified into laws in nearly every state. But there's no such medical consensus for another big question. When does human life begin?

And with the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the answer to that question has big implications. As part of our continuing coverage of the science behind reproductive health, meet Sarah Varney, senior correspondent for Kaiser Health News, who also focuses on reproductive health. She's based in Monterey, Massachusetts. Sarah, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks, Sarah. Nice to have you.

Okay, let's start off. Can you take me through perhaps a brief history of how our definition of death has shifted as medicine has advanced? So really until the 1950s, physicians in the United States and really around the world would do what you might think. They would feel for a pulse or listen for breathing. They might even hold a mirror up to a patient's nose to look for condensation. Then by the 1950s or so, scientists had developed. these mechanical ventilators. And they could really keep people, even with catastrophic brain injuries alive, almost indefinitely. So there was this big question about whether patients would even want to

stay alive under these conditions. And even in the most existential sense, this sort of raised this question of what it meant to be a human being. And then in 1967, there was a South African surgeon who performed the first heart transplant. And that ushered in a whole new error of organ transplantation. and these questions about whether some of these patients were truly dead enough to donate their organs, it took on a greater urgency. And then in the late 1960s, you know, there were a number of groups around the world that were starting to weigh these questions. That included also this ad hoc committee at Harvard Medical School. And it was a committee that was made up of doctors, a bioethesis, a lawyer, a theologian. And the central question that they were trying to answer was,

if someone is seemingly irreversibly unconscious, are they dead? So in 1968, this committee developed what became known as the criteria for determining what was essentially a new way to die. And it was called an irreversible coma, what you referred to as brain death. And these are patients who were unresponsive. They showed no movement or reflexes. And there was a test that registered their electrical activity in the brain called an electroencephalogram. And that test would show that their electrical activity in their brain was essentially flat. So was this codified then as to what death was, this brain death? So by 1981, there was this presidential commission established.

What they wanted was a uniform definition of brain death across all the states. And they decided that the entire brain, so that included the brain stem, basically irreversibly ceased to work. So the person at that point could be declared brain dead. And so the committee reached this conclusion after it had studied it intensely with medical professionals and experts, right? That's right. I mean, they had neuroscientists, they had bioethicists, and they spent months and months and months and months debating this and essentially came to a medical definition of what it meant to be brain dead. And even with the uniform definition of brain

death, there have been cases high-profile legal fights over brain dead patients that challenge this notion of brain death. And it's all been based on religious or moral and ethical grounds, Talk about the case. This one case is the story of 13-year-old girl named Jehai McMath. So she suffered an irreversible brain damage after a complex tonsil surgery, and she was declared deceased in California. Now, McMath's family, with the financial support from pro-life groups at the time, moved the girl's body to New Jersey. Now, New Jersey is a state that it differs from these other states around the country and that it allows families to contest a declaration of brain death. When McMath's body was moved to New Jersey, she became legally alive again. Really?

She had no detectable brain activity for nearly five years. And during that time, here's what's so fascinating, Ira. She actually went through puberty and started menstruating. And she did eventually die in 2018. Wow. So how might this case help us better understand how hard it is to draw the line when someone has died? So the case of McMath is really fascinating. And part of the reason she was able to go through menstruation is because,

because of the hypothalamus. And the hypothalamus, while it sits in the brain, it really wasn't something that was covered by this total brain death standard. So about half of all brain dead adult patients, there's hypothalamus can actually be stimulated and you can get a response. And so now, actually, there is this committee that is meeting once again to refine this definition of brain death. And one of the things that they are considering is how do we treat the hypothalamus when we're declaring somebody brain dead. Right. Well, wouldn't you agree that despite some of the nuances we just talked about that, there is widespread medical agreement on what constitutes death? And, you know, we are now having trouble with the beginning of human life so much more complicated. Why is that so much

more complicated to reach consensus on? There has not been the same effort to really define what constitutes the beginning of life. I mean, in some extent, this is because there's a real religious belief based on when life begins. And really, perhaps medicine and science is not necessarily the best place to turn to even ask that question. So I spoke with David Magnus. He's on this committee that is determining and refining the notion of brain death. He's a bioethicist and the director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. And let's take a listen to what he said about how you define when life begins and even when life ends. Biological occurrences are processes, not events. It means that deciding where you want to draw lines is a decision to be made,

not something to be discovered. And so we have to decide where lines make the most sense. So what Magnus is essentially saying is that death and even conception are not moments in time. And it's a complicated process. When people talk about beginning at the time of conception, do they mean when the sperm first comes in contact with the sona pellucida of the egg cell? Is it when that actual nucleic material, that DNA actually starts to play a role, which isn't until a few cell divisions in? Somewhere in that process, we call that conception. You know, Magnus and some of the other bioethicists that I spoke to in reporting the story would say that biology really suggests that conception is just too early in the process to even consider that someone that a life is a person. Let's hear David Magnus again.

The fact that so many very early embryos are lost without women even knowing they're pregnant is informative and is relevant to figuring out where to draw the line. And Magnus really says, you know, asking doctors, what is life or what is death, may actually just miss the point, you know, that medicine can't really answer that question, when does a person begin or end? Because those are really metaphysical issues. And this gets really interesting. There are people who study medical ethics, including Ben Saraby.

He's a doctoral candidate at Duke University's Department of Philosophy. And he, when I was speaking with him, he offered me this example called the Paradox of the Heap. And it's essentially a thought experiment where a person places grains of sand one after another. And the philosophical quandary is this. When does that collection of sand become more than, more than itself, a pile? This is a direct parallel to the debate over abortion and also the right to die. So Sarby would say that many things count as. life. You know, a sperm counts as life. A person in a persistent vegetative state counts as life.

But does that constitute a person that the government should be protecting? Yeah, when Justice Alito wrote the majority decision overturning Roe in June, he did not incorporate the advice of medical professionals like you're talking about. And unlike the original Roe decision, which weighed medical guidance, it's now up to the states to determine when human life begins. So what kinds of laws have states passed as a result? There are a number of Republican-led states, including Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and others that have laws that have declared that life begins at fertilization. So this moment of conception that Magnus says is actually elusive. And those laws have really

profound legal implications. So there can be wrongful death lawsuits on behalf of the estate of the embryo or fetus by a disgruntled ex-partner or family against physicians. And we're women who even end a pregnancy or even miscarry. In Kentucky, for example, the law outlawing abortion uses medically inaccurate and really morally potent terms to define pregnancy as, quote, the human, female reproductive condition of having a living unborn human being within her body throughout the entire embryonic and fetal stages of the unborn child. Now, in that sentence, there are many inaccurate terms, a living unborn human being, for instance. Now, Now, several other states, including Georgia, they've adopted measures that equate life with the point at which an embryo's nascent cardiac activity.

That's when these sort of beginning electrical impulses start flickering, which is around six weeks of gestation. And these laws really mischaracterized the flickering electrical impulses detectable at that stage as a heartbeat. And recently, in fact, in Georgia, the Department of Revenue announced that, quote, any unborn child with a detectable human heartbeat, by which they mean around six weeks, can. actually be claimed now as a dependent on your taxes. You know, Sarah, we started off this conversation talking about the end of life, which feels like it comes with a different set of issues than the beginning of life. But there's some striking parallels in the debates around aid in dying legislation. Tell me more about that. There is ample connective tissue between the legal argument surrounding abortion and the right to die. So, for instance, the legal standard in Dobbs,

that there is no right to abortion in the federal constitution, which is what the Supreme Court just said, and that states can decide this issue on their own, was the same exact rationale that was used in 1997 when the Supreme Court said that terminally ill people did not have a constitutional right to doctor-assisted suicide. And there were other members of the court's conservative block that overturned Roe that have also been heavily involved in arguing against the right to die. That includes Justice Neil Gorsuch, who actually wrote a book in 2017 called The Future of Assangell, assisted suicide in euthanasia. And that was advertised as providing the most comprehensive argument against its legalization that was ever published. And supporters of Dobbs decision agree that it could

provide a means for challenging states like Oregon, which was the first state to pass a right to die law in 1997. Jim Bob, who's the chief lawyer for the National Right to Life Committee, who has been central in the efforts to overturn abortion, he also said that, you know, both abortion and medical aid and dime endanger society. Jim Bob, interestingly enough is also on that committee right now that is helping to refine the definition of death. I mean, he very much opposes this notion of brain death and allowing hospitals and families to essentially like, quote, pull the plug on their family members. Sarah, always interesting stuff. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Oh, thank you so much, Ira.

Sarah Varney, senior correspondent for Kaiser Health News based in Monterey, Massachusetts. And you can read Sarah's full story by heading over to our website, Science Friday.com slash life and death. We have to take a break and when we come back, Nobel Prize winner Dr. Harold Varmus joins us to talk about new moves to open up publicly funded research. Stay with us. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Last week, the White House made it much easier and cheaper to access taxpayer-paid research. Research you pay for but then have to pay for again to read it behind a paywall. The Biden administration said data from federally funded work should all be available to the public

for free immediately upon publication. Advocates of what's called open science celebrated. Publishers of scientific journals expressed some misgivings, as you might expect. And you may have been left scratching your head about what it all means. Well, here to help us unpack the new policy and its implications is Dr. Harold Varmament. He's a Nobel Prize winner, former director of the NIH, and co-founded in 2001, the Public Library of Science, an open-access publishing platform. Dr. Varmus is Professor of Medicine at Wild Cornell Medicine and a senior associate at the New York Genome Center. Welcome back, Harold.

It's been a while. Yes, Ara. Thank you very much. Glad to hear your voice. Thank you. You know, until now, as I say, most federally funded research has been available to the public, after, what, a year behind a paywall? Tell me what do you think this announcement from the White House means in practical terms for the public? Yeah. Well, first of all, IRA, this is a long-standing

battle between scientists who want to make work, especially work funded by citizens' dollars, much more available to all scientists and to all members of the public. So this has been going on for over 20 years, ever since the Internet was perceived as being an efficient way to transport. submit scientific findings. What specifically is endorsed, indeed, promoted by this new memo from the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House is a directive that says that all federal agencies, not just those that are heavily supportive of science, but any that support any scientific or research activities, must have a plan that allows their grantees to put their work

in the public domain immediately. upon publication. And what that means is the public has an easy way to see anything that has been published. It has been possible to see a lot of the work after a one-year embargo. The National Institutes of Health, the NIH established over 20 years ago a public digital archive called PubMed Central, which has the full text of articles submitted to it by its grantees. But that archive, was not nearly as useful as it might have been because of reluctance of journals to allow that to happen to articles on which they own the copyright, because investigators have been compliant with the desires of their favorite journals. And for many other reasons, until Congress said to the NIH

well over a decade ago, you must get this material into a public database at least within a year after publication. That happened, and now PubMed Central has millions of articles widely used every day by every investigator, but it's imperiled by not having adequate access to results when they're public. Is this only aimed at medical research, or is it every kind of research that's available? One of the things that's remarkable about the new memo that was just released is that it addresses all forms of research, even research in the humanities, and certainly research in social sciences and as well as natural sciences and in all fields of science. And I should say that you asked about where you can go to see things.

And in the biomedical sphere, it's PubMed Central. But there are other ways to see things. Some institutions maintain their own server of papers. Physicists and astrophysicists, mathematicians, computer scientists tend to use a different mechanism that's based on posting articles. at the time that they're written and even before peer review, preprint servers. Right, right. You put your article, and that's a phenomenon that's been particular to physics and the related disciplines as far back as 1991.

And that's been a remarkable feature, which now is affecting biomedical work as well, because especially during the pandemic, scientists in my own field have been posting their results in the form of preprints. and that allows scientists to see work even before it's gone through what could be a lengthy process of peer review. So Creaklin servers are another way to deliver the goods, but in this case, the OSTP memo specifically addresses articles that are peer reviewed and published. Now, this memo, as you say, is saying that making research more available will make science itself also more equitable and more effective. How do you view that? How does that work? Well, in several ways.

And the article, we've emphasized a major thing, which is the elimination of an embargo. But the memo does have many other things in it that are particularly appealing. It requires that a detailed plan be made, not just for displaying published articles, but also for making the materials useful in machine-based, learning exercises so that the format is compatible with extracting as much information as possible. And it also addresses some social issues that have become quite important during the pandemic. That is the credibility of science, the reliability of science, openness of science. Science is a positive public good.

And I think those are very important issues in this time. Can you unpack the connection and the importance? Let's talk about this, between research published and its impact on fields, like medicine. Why does publication and how it's paid for or accessed actually affect the way research is done and touches our lives? Publication really is the lifebutt of science. If you do the science and you don't tell other people about it, it's as though it weren't done. It's useful in many ways, most obviously in allowing the growth of scientific ideas and validation of those ideas, extension to new

things. So scientists communicating with each other is probably the primary mission, but even more important mission, though perhaps not quite as prevalent, is the translation of what's been done into practical products. And that, of course, is one of the strengths of American science, the remarkable relationship between academic basic science and science and industry that results in important products in the fields of health and energy and everything else that was first articulated by the U.S. government 75 years ago. I think it's often unappreciated how important a moment it is in the life of every scientist when a paper they've written describing their results actually gets published. Speaking of which, a lot of has changed with

the data sharing policies we saw when COVID-19 appeared in 2020. I'm thinking about how did data sharing allow us to respond better to the pandemic? You bring up an important point because that is also embedded in this memo. That is the intention that all agencies have policies that allow the data that's relevant to the conclusions drawn in these published papers be accessible for reading and for machine learning. It's obviously important when data sets are limited to have access to data from other sources that can be amalgamated in a simple way, there's no doubt in the minds of almost everybody that the rapid development of the RNA genome of the coronavirus was essential for, first of all, identifying what the agent of COVID-19 was, but then also in developing the vaccines that have

been so important in trying to control this pandemic. And developing various kinds of tests that allow us to detect the emergence of the variants that have plagued efforts to do public health control of the virus. So I think there are many ways in which it's obvious that sharing data at the very, very earliest stages through sequence databases and the speed of communication has been remarkable. And of course, helped by the fact that many of our leading periodicals have followed this so closely and so well. At some point, somebody has to pay for it. Who winds up picking up the tab for the public here? So this is important.

And one of the things that some people accuse advocates like me of neglecting is the fact that there are real costs for publication. I mean, nobody's saying that the publication is free. It's just we're trying to promote access. But someone's got to pay the costs of doing peer review. The costs are much less than they might otherwise be because the authors and the reviewers don't get paid. Nevertheless, there are costs.

And how do they get covered? Well, the cost should be born. and are largely born by the funders of research. And if you view the publication process as an element of the research experience, which certainly is, it's a very small element. As I mentioned, just a couple of percent. And of course, essential if you're going to make use of the work that gets done with the money. So in general, it's the funders who pay. I should step back here just a minute and say that one of the things we haven't discussed is the rise of open access journals like the Public Library of Science journals. These are journals that make their work

immediately available without restriction at the time of publication. They don't hold the copyright. The copyright's held by the author, and these articles are freed everybody and placed in repositories like PubMed Central. The cost of publishing is supported by payment by the investigators who use some of their grant money, a very small amount of it, but a significant amount, to pay the publication fees. And those journals work, they make money and they do fine. They don't make the kinds of profits that have been made by traditional subscription-based publishers like Elsevier and many others. But if you look at this from the point of view of the funder of research, one of these most essential elements in the whole research process is publication, because that gets the word out

and shows that the money they've invested is actually used to generate results that are meaningful to the public and to the scientific community. I want to take this time to change gears a little bit because I have you here and I want to take advantage of the decades you have in public service and in research and ask you about the time we live in where huge conflicts and outright scientific disinformation is circulating. What is your opinion on this? How have you seen this arc in your career? And is this something you're increasingly worried about?

Well, I am worried. Of course, it's hard not to be. I think we see there actually a number of things. One is that science has become incredibly more powerful, certainly in my own field. The kinds of things we can do today with modern genomics and biochemistry and gene manipulation and computation and a variety of other things just makes the kind of work we do so much more exciting and penetrating that it's hard not to be enticed by a career. doing this kind of thing. The second arc I see is that responses to some of these temptations to do science has resulted in a large influx of talented people without a commensurate increase in the amount of funds that are available or a number of positions available to do this kind of work. And although there's been some outlet through the biotech and pharmaceutical industry, in general, people entering our field feel a strong sense of competition. And that has affected the mood in the community to a significant extent. And it actually has an effect on the kind of directive that we're talking about today because it increases the value of publishing in the

very best journals and ensuring that your name goes to the top of the heap when people are considering folks for promotions and appointments and grants and prizes. And then the third issue, which is one that I think is linked to a number of things, not simply to the pandemic, is a fairly large measure of distrust of scientific work, which is why many of us feel that by becoming more open and transparent, that scientists have a greater chance of having the process of work they do be understood. Science is hard. Science is an effort to understand the way the world works, and it's not so easy to figure it out. Just by seeing a new disease has occurred, you don't instantaneously know what all the answers are.

And working these things out, it's going to be a course that is riddled with dead ends and reversals and misunderstandings and mistakes. And these things need to be explained and understood, and not always so easy. But it seems to me the process is basically an honorable one. And the more open the process can be, the more likely it is that we will expose misunderstandings

and very rare deviations from normal practice. in science that can result in non-reproducible results. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking to Dr. Harold Varmus about the value of publicly accessible scientific research. Now that we're into this pandemic, or three years or more into this pandemic, and watching as an observer and with your experience, have you noticed any strengths and weaknesses about how we have all handled? this and what would you change or handle differently?

There are several things. First of all, I think in the U.S., we have undervalued practices in public health. And it's been very clear during this pandemic that we have underinvested in our public health infrastructure, that schools of public health needs strengthening, that public health investigators need more funds for the kind of research they do, that we need a stronger level of sustained surveillance for infectious diseases. new methods have emerged and some are now being used almost in a conventional way like the monitoring of sewage here in New York to detect, most recently involved the detection of poliovirus in our sewage.

Secondly, I think most people in the public domain have seen that science can move incredibly fast in response to a pandemic, much faster than ever as occurred before. That's a very healthy thing too. Thirdly, I see people understanding some deeper issues in thinking about how virus, evolution has occurred, that affects their thinking about evolution in general and about the way in which genomics can be used as a tool not only to monitor and understand infectious diseases, but to think about many other diseases as well. So the general interest in science in the general public is incredibly high right now. It's just that there is a very lively and sometimes

almost despicable debate when it comes to attacks on individuals that undermines confidence in science in a way that we'll have to address by other means. Hopefully, making the scientific literature more open will be one of the ways in which that happens. And no weaknesses that you would try to shore up or might change about how this all went down or is going down? Well, yeah, sure. I mean, that's a different question. But I do think that there are ways in which the atmosphere in which science is being done can be changed. One of the things that we're all terribly concerned about is the fact that our historical minority populations, blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, so forth have been woefully underrepresented in the scientific community. And many of us are

making efforts to try to reverse that. There's no doubt that the pandemic has illuminated some of those discrepancies. Indeed, just today, the evidence that life expectancy has been particularly shortened in those disadvantaged communities, again, an illustration of the fact that science is not served our disadvantaged populations and are economically less secure populations as well as it does the current majority, white affluent population. That's something that needs attention, and it's a different topic, but it's one that's incredibly important to me and to many of my colleagues who are seeking ways to increase representation of black, Hispanic, and Native American populations in the scientific community. Well, Dr. Varmus, I want to

Thank you for taking time to be with us today. My pleasure. Always good to hear from you, Ira. Dr. Harold Varmus, Professor of Medicine at Wild Cornell Medicine in New York, former director of the NIH and co-founder of the Public Library of Science. We have to take a break on when we come back, a look at a late summer nuisance wasps. Ooh. And why you shouldn't be so quick to reach for that fly swatter?

We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Do you have a picnic plan for Labor Day this weekend? What's the most annoying thing about eating outside in late summer? I'm saying it's wasps, wasps circling your food and your head. But before I reach for the rolled-up newspaper, SciFrize Charles Burkwurst is here with another viewpoint. Hi, Charles.

Hey, Ira. I got a chance to talk with Professor Sarian Sumner. She's a professor of behavioral ecology at University College London. and she's also author of the book Endless Forms, The Secret World of Wasps. And she says you should be thankful for the wasps in your life. Thankful? You're going to have to make a pretty strong case here, Charles. Well, Dr. Sumner calls wasps nature's pest control agents. In fact, she says there are factories that read thousands upon thousands of wasps for use in agriculture.

Really? Yep. And if you want to control your clothes moths, but you hate that mothball smell, there's a wasp for that too. Okay, now you've got me interested. Maybe she can convince you. I started by asking her where wasps fit on the evolutionary tree. Well, actually, everything is a wasp. That's what I'd like to start with this.

So the hymenoptera encompasses the wasps, bees, and ants. But the wasps are root of all of those. So bees are wasps that have forgotten how to hunt because most wasps are hunters. and ants are just wasps that have lost the ability to fly, at least, and most of their life cycle. It's only the sexuals that fly. So everything is a wasp, really. So I kind of feel that the wasps, which are generally overlooked,

and everybody applauds the bees and the ants, says, well, actually, there would be no bees or ants if it weren't for the wasps. So all the things that we call yellow jackets, hornets, any of these specific things where you see them and say, oh, there's a flying stingy thing, there are wasps. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. So, but there are many different kinds of wasps. Most people think of wasps as the yellow jacket and the hornet, as you've just mentioned.

And those are social wasps. And actually social wasps represent a very small proportion of the total number of wasp species that have been described. There's over 100,000 species of wasps that have been described. And yet there's only about 1,500 species of social wasps. And in fact, the yellow jackets that come to visit you at your picnics, even across the entire world, there are only about 70 species of those vestbines, the yellow jackets and the hornets. So actually the social wasps that we encounter and we think of as wasps and we identify that kind of yellow and black striped, buzzy thing at picnics, they are a tiny, tiny proportion of what wasps are. Most wasps don't stink, actually. They are parasitoid wasps which lay their eggs in or on other. organisms like a caterpillar or a beetle larva.

And they don't have stings. They have a long egg laying sheets called the ovipositor, which they were used to lay the egg in their prey. They won't move the prey. They'll basically find the caterpillar that's buried in a under some bark or something. They'll lay the egg and then they'll leave and that's it. There's no more parental care. But it's the hunting wasps, the stinging wasps that we think of as being,

and we recognise as being a wasp. And there are only about 33,000 species of those. I say only, actually, let's get that in perspective, because there are only 22,000 species of bees. And yet people think that bees are amazing and so diverse and incredible. Well, there are at least 33,000 species of stinging wasps. So the scales need to be balanced up here. It's getting towards the end of the summer here. Tell me about the life cycle.

What are my local wasps likely to be doing? Yeah, so your local wasps, I guess we're talking about your yellow jacket wasps. They will have come out in the early spring, and the queens, the mated queens who had hibernated, will have built their own nest on their own, and they will have done all the nest buildings. They collect wood from your garden benches, your sheds, your fences, bits of dead wood, and they will mix it with saliva, and they'll spread it out into this beautiful, thin, papery material, and they'll start to build what will be an incredible citadel by the end of the summer. and the first brood that are reared will then be the workers.

And once the workers have emerged as adults, they're all her daughters, and they will then be the foragers and the nest builders and the maintenance staff. And the queen herself will never leave the nest again. And so the nest grows exponentially over the summer. And then as you get towards the end of the summer, the early autumn, then things do start to change. And the main thing that changes is that the queen starts, laying sexual broods. So she'll be laying what will be next year's queens and also the males,

which will mate with queens from other nest. And the workers, she'll stop producing quite so many workers. And the nest kind of moves into a sort of reproductive mode. And this is also the time when lots of the larvae start to pupate. So actually I should say, even though these wasps are hunters, the adults are actually vegetarians. It's the larva, which are the carnivals. So the babies and the meat eaters. And so the wasps that you see at your picnic and barbecues will be catching the prey or a bit of your sausage. They're quite happy with a bit of carrion. And they'll bring it back to the nest. They'll feed it to the larvae. And the larvae will often reward the worker with a sugary excretion from its mouth. We call it trophylaxis. And this contains a lot of

nutrition for the adult wasps. And so that kind of keeps them going during the most of the summer. But when the larvae start pupating, there's less need for hunting by the workers, and there's also less nutrition provided to the workers by the larvae. And so what that means is that we start to get wasps bothering us a bit more at our private spaces, our picnics, our patios, our barbecues. And the reason is that they're looking for sugar because they're no longer getting it from the colony. And ordinarily, they would go and visit some flowers because wasps pollinate as well, and they will get nectar from flowers. But your beer, your prosceco, your sugary drinks are just as good a source of sugar as anything. And that's why we start to encounter them a lot more towards the end of the summer,

because they've basically been furloughed from their kind of hunting tasks into, they're still doing a bit of hunting, but they're just, you know, there's still thousands of wasps alive that are trying to sustain themselves. And then ultimately, all the workers will die at the end of the autumn, the first frost or So the sexual brood, so that's the new queens and the males, will have gone off from mated. The males all die. As soon as they've done their bits and mating, they die. And then the mated queens go into hibernation in your shed or your attic until the following season. But the entire nest will cease to exist. The old queen dies. Everybody dies. So if you've got a big papery nest in your loft or your shed, don't worry.

It'll be gone by the end of the autumn. Interesting. Let's talk about the PR aspect. I guess wasps have a bad reputation as being somehow meaner than bees. Is that accurate or is this just they have a bad publicist? I think you're absolutely right. They do definitely need a PR makeover. They get their bad reputation from this end of summer misdemeanors that they cause us at our picnics.

And so that really gives them a bad reputation. And it's only at that time when people start to notice them. and then they start to swat at them and they get stung and then they go, what's the point of wasps? They're only here to bother us. And people don't really have a good understanding of what wasps do. And I think the stark contrast with the bees is incredible because the bees have, we have done such a good job

in educating the public in terms of what bees do. Most people understand that bees are pollinators and that they do a really important service in both our farms ecosystems, our natural ecosystems, our gardens, and where would we be without bees? And therefore we tolerate the fact that we sometimes get stung by bees. Whereas wasps, without that kind of body of understanding amongst people, the public and even the scientists about what wasps do and why they matter, we just don't want to tolerate the

fact that they get a bit pesky at a very small time of year. So wasps are nature's pest controllers. They are regulating the insect populations in your garden and your local, you know, a local park in your farm field, in your forest. And so in a world without wasps, we would have a lot of other insects that we possibly find almost as irritating as wasps are, and that we would have to use more chemicals to control them. So we should be really celebrating the wasp and thanking them for the services that they provide us with. So you've mentioned their utility as a pest control agent, but talk to me a little bit more about their pollination aspects. Are there specific plants

that if we didn't have the wasps, we wouldn't have whatever this plant is? Yeah, so wasps as pollinators is almost entirely unstudied except for a few specialist groups who, as you say, are the only things that pollinate these particular plants. So figs is a really good example. So some species of figs have a mutualism with fig wasps. These are tiny little wasps whose life cycle. pretty much depends on the fig, apart from dispersal from one fig to another.

So what happens is this tiny little wasp, a female who's mated and she's covered in pollen from the fig that she's hatched from, she will bury into a fig fruit and she'll spread the pollen around inside the fruit and then she'll also lay lots of eggs and then she'll die. And lots of people say to me, oh no, our fig's actually vegetarian friendly because you're eating wasps. And the truth is that you're not eating wasp. You'd be very unlucky if you ended up eating wasps by eating figs because figs produce an enzyme called phiking, which breaks down the bodies of the dead wasps. So there are no dead wasps inside your fish. But anyway, then the eggs hatch, and of course they're all the offspring from a single female, so they're brothers and sisters.

The brothers mate with the sisters. It's all very lovely. And then the mated sisters then kind of jump around the fruit, covering themselves in pollen, and then they will exit the fruit through a little exit entrance that their brothers have kindly dug for them. And the males never leave the fruit. They just die inside the fruit. And then those mated pollen-covered females will then move on to another fruit, and so bringing the pollen from one fruit to another, which of course is what pollination is. So that's a really well-studied system, and there's over 900 species of fig wasps, and they were thought, actually, until quite recently, to be quite faithful to particular species of figs. But actually, more recently, genomic analyses have shown that it's a much messier picture,

and there's a bit more of crossover and a bit more infidelity than we thought there was. So the fig wasps are a great example of wasp pollination. The other really good example of wasps as essential pollinators is for orchids. So there are some orchids that mimic a female wasp. So they smell like a female wasp, they look like one, they even feel like one. And so male wasp, male thinnidye wasps get attracted to these gorgeously sexy flowers. And they try and mate with them very vigorously. And in the process, they get dollops of pollen stuck on their back by the flower, which has evolved to be not only mimicking the female wasp, but also be really efficient. at depositing a package of pollen onto the wasp. And then the male just goes on his way to the next flower, which he also thinks is another female. And he's oblivious to the fact that he's mating with flowers, not females,

and he's carrying pollen from flower to flower. So unlike the fig wasp story, which is a beautiful story of co-evolution where both the plants and the insect benefit, in the case of the orchids, the orchids are completely manipulating the wasps and the wasps get nothing out of it at all. But apart from those two examples, there is another group of wasps actually

who are actually called the pollen wasps, the Masary. And they're so understudied. There's a group in South Africa who study them. They're actually found all over the US, you lucky people, and yet hardly anyone has studied them. So if there are any listens out there looking for a research project, then the pollen wasps is definitely something that should be researched more. And what's fascinating about the pollen wasps is that, as the name suggests, they don't hunt, prey.

They collect pollen instead, just like a bee. And they will use it then to provision their cells, which will then, they'll lay eggs in and their offspring will feed off the pollen in the same way that a bee larva does. So they are remarkable. It's like a parallel form of vegetarianism alongside the bees amongst the wasps. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm talking with Professor Sarian Sumner about the secret world of wasps. Do you have a favorite pet species? I do. I always get asked this.

People normally say, oh, I'm sure it's a really hard question. You can't possibly have a favorite. But yes, I do have a favorite. My favorite wasp is Plystis-Canadensis, which is found in the neotropic, so in sort of Panama and south of Panama. And the reason it's my favorite species is that I studied it for many years. It's quite a big wasp. It's about two centimeters long, has a big sting.

It hurts quite a lot. But fascinating social behavior. And it was also the first hunting wasp to have its genome sequence. So we're quite proud of that. For people who have listened to all of this and still aren't quite sold on the wonderful world of wasps, What tips do you have for people to coexist, at least, with wasps? Yeah, that's a really good question because, you know, even I don't like, I don't like getting stung by a wasp. Nobody likes to get stung.

And it is inevitable. It's an inevitability of summer that wasps will visit you at your picnic. And so what I try to get my family and friends to do is when a wasp comes along to visit you at your picnic, check out what she's doing. Don't flap around because flapping and shouting at her will basically make her think you are a predator. Because certainly in the UK, the main predator of yellow jacket wasps are badgers. And the way that they predate on the wasps is that they will dig them up from the ground. So there's lots of flailing limbs and the badgers breathing heavily in the nest. It's carbon dioxide.

So you flailing your arms around at the wasp and breathing over it, shouting, obscene words at it. It's only going to make them think that you are a badger and that you are going to be attacking them. So they will attack you. So just watch the wasp. See what she wants at your picnic. Is she going for sugar or is she going for some meat? And then whatever you can work out that she wants, give her a little bit of it, make a little wasp offering. And there are people in parts of the world where wasps are an enormous nuisance where they're an invasive species.

So, for example, the yellow jackets are invasive species in museums. Zealand, South Africa and parts of Latin America like Argentina. And what the people do there is they go out for a picnic and they'll bring along a wasp offering with them. So they'll bring along some really smelly bit of fish and they'll stick it 10 meters away from them and the wasps will go to that bit of fish and they'll leave them alone. So I think we need to be learning from this a bit more and learning to live well with wasps rather than trying to constantly be combating them because they're not going to go.

away and we don't want them to go away because they are nature's pest controllers and we should be valuing them and not hating them. This has been fascinating. Thank you so much for taking time to talk with me today. Oh, thank you so much for having me. You're quite welcome. Sarian Sumner is a professor of behavioral ecology at University College London and author of the book, Endless Forms, the Secret World of Wasps. You can read an excerpt of the book on our website at sciencefriiday.com slash wasps. For Science Friday, I'm Charles Perkwist. Thanks, Charles. And if you want even more reading, our book club is in full swing.

They're reading Rachel E. Gross's The Jaina Obscura this month. And you can join our club by visiting sciencefriiday.com slash book club. That's science friday.com slash book club. Have a great and safe holiday weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.