Science Friday - Year In Space Results, Citizen Science Day, Cherry Blossoms. April 12, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: April 12, 2019

To find out what was happening to astronauts over longer periods of space flight, NASA put together a 10-team study of twin astronauts Scott and Mark Kelly. Scott spent a year on International Space Station, while his brother Mark lived a relatively normal life on Earth—though both regularly sent the researchers samples of their blood, urine, cognitive test results, and other data to assess their physiology over time. Scott Kelly returned to Earth in 2016, and researchers have been studying and comparing the twins ever since. The conclusion? A year in space caused a cascade of changes in Scott’s gene expression and physiology—some of which remained even after he returned to Earth. Dr. Susan Bailey, a radiation biologist at Colorado State University, explains one surprising mystery: The average length of Scott’s telomeres, a part of DNA that usually shortens with aging or other kinds of stress, increased. And Dr. Christopher Mason at Weill Cornell Medicine explains how spaceflight ramped up genes associated with Scott Kelly’s immune system and what remained different even months after his return to Earth. Patients with Alzheimer’s disease can experience decreased blood flow in their brains caused by white blood cells sticking to blood vessels that can cause a block. Researchers at Cornell University have found that these stalls happen in the tiniest blood vessels, the capillaries. Understanding these capillary blocks could help find new Alzheimer’s treatments—and to do that, the researchers have to look through hundreds of thousands of images of blocked capillaries. Now, you can help. Physicist Chris Shaffer, who is on the Cornell University team, teamed up with Pietro Michelucci to develop a citizen science game called Stall Catchers that uses the power of the crowd to help identify these stalls. They talk about how Stall Catchers can help with their data—and the one-day megathon when you can participate. By 1918, the British naturalist and ornithologist Collingwood Ingram had tired of studying birds, but soon became obsessed with two magnificent flowering cherry trees planted on his property. He went to Japan and hunted for wild cherries all over the country on foot, horseback, and even from the sea, using binoculars to spot prime specimens. Throughout his travels, he became convinced that Japan was in danger of losing its multitude of cherry varieties, through modernization, development, and neglect, and he went on to evangelize for the wondrous diversity of flowering cherries in Japan, and back home in the western world. In The Sakura Obsession, Japanese journalist Naoko Abe tells Ingram's story, and the cultural history of cherry blossoms in Japan.   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, we'll talk about the cherry blossom hunter, English ornithologist and naturalist Collingwood Ingram, who gave up studying birds to devote his life to cataloging and preserving rare flowering cherry varieties, subject of the new book, The Sakara Obsession. But first, how many of you are twins? That many. Well, are you tired of being compared to your sibling? Maybe your parents dressed you a lot. or people keep asking you who was born first, right? But twins, you know, have been a boon to science. So many twins studies, examining the differences in their life stories, their ills, their diseases, the ultimate comparison. And now two famous twins, astronauts, have lent their lives to science, specifically what happens to your body after extended periods in the weightless, higher radiation levels of space?

We've been asking this question since, the beginning of human spaceflight, and there's still a lot we don't know. Astronauts have to exercise frequently to fight bone demineralization and muscle atrophy. Fluids shift in their bodies and microgravity, and some even have vision changes. But in 2015, NASA undertook a more ambitious project to study the physiological and genetic changes of an identical twin pair. and those twins were astronauts Mark and Scott Kelly. Mark stayed on Earth. Scott spent nearly a full year on the International Space Station.

And that time, they sent research teams samples of their blood, their urine. They took cognitive tests and put as much of their physiology under the microscope as possible to suss out what was going on in the space-born Scott cells that didn't happen to his brother. There's stuff that you don't see that, you know, the researchers at some point will publish papers on, you know, for instance, how, you know, my DNA looked one way before flight and how he's compared before flight and then maybe how mine changed over time while I was here where his, you know, in a certain area stayed the same. That's Scott Kelly talking to us in 2015 early in the experiment, and now the data is in, published this week in the journal Science. And we're going to talk about the results, some of them surprising, with the leaders of two of the research teams on the NASA Twins study. Dr. Susan Bailey, Professor of Radiation, Cancer Biology and Oncology at Colorado State University. Welcome, Dr. Bailey.

Thank you. Thank you so much. You're welcome. And Dr. Christopher Mason, Associate Professor of Physiology. and bio physics at the Wild Cornell Medical Center here in New York. Welcome. Thanks for having me. Let me ask you, Christopher, the study wrapped up. The data is in.

It's a 90-page paper. Can you sum it up? What happened to Scott that didn't happen to Mark first? Yeah, so it's a bit of a to tomb. There's a lot to read, but it's because we wanted to look at every molecule that we possibly could, really every sort of physiological, molecular, genetic, really cognitive, even vasculature change. We wanted to map it all as best as we could.

And we found that, you know, there's mostly good news because lots of things change, really thousands of genes change. There's many alterations to your DNA, to proteins, to your whole body. But most of it goes back to normal once you get back to Earth. And some of the things that, you know, did change include, you know, really alterations to some of those telomeres, which Dr. Baylor will tell you about. And then also we saw a gene expression, how what goes on and off in terms of how your DNA is basically transcribed and becomes active or deactivated.

Some of those genes also changed and persisted. So the early reports that said that 7% of the DNA change, that's not true. Right. If 7% of his DNA change, he definitely had different species. So he did not come back heavily mutated, at least to be a different species. But there were some things that changed fundamentally to basically how his DNA is packaged and really mapped out. And Dr. Bailey studied that in the telomeres. Tell us what you found, Dr.

Bailey. Yes, well, we were really interested in looking at telomeres or the ends of the chromosomes and what they might tell us about aging and how that might be influenced by spaceflight. So, we went into the study imagining that, in fact, all of the different stresses and exposures of spaceflight would really act to accelerate telomere loss. And so Scott's telomeres would be shorter than, Scott's telomeres would be shorter than Marks after the year in space. But in fact, what we found was pretty much the opposite. During flight, Scott had many more long telomeres than he did beforehand. And then when he came back to Earth, within 48 hours, the closest samples that we had,

his telomere length shortened dramatically. And so very rapid shift in telomere length. And then over the following months after he got back, his average telomere length, did stabilize, but he still had many more short telomeres than he did when he started. So some really, you know, dramatic shifts in the telomere length that we really don't quite understand, but it's fascinating. Do the longer telomeres mean Scott Kelly was healthier in space? No, and I don't think it really is the fountain of youth either.

What exactly it is, I'm not real sure. I mean, they do live, you know, pretty healthy lifestyles. Their diets are very defined. They exercise a lot. They lose body mass, so caloric restrictions. Scott lost about 15 pounds while he was up there. So, you know, things that we associate with healthy lifestyles here on Earth that influence telomere length. But even those things don't really make your telomeres longer.

They just help you maintain telomere length. So we're still really scratching our heads on this one and imagining that it could be something like the radiation exposure, for example, or chronic exposure could be triggering some kind of a response that changes the cell populations themselves, and perhaps it's something like that. Our number 844-8255 is if our listeners would like to get involved, and I'm sure they would. You can also tweet us at Cy Fry. Christopher, there are things we know happen to astronauts, bone loss, I said, muscle atrophy, vision changes for some. Did any of this seem to show up in Scott's gene expression? Yeah, very much so. So we saw a lot of the things you would expect right out of the gate.

So you can see bone loss, essentially all the genes that are activated for osteoblasts, or things are actually helping to maintain and create bone density, where it really ramped up. and then also in his urine, you could see the calcium sort of disappearing. So you could see a struggle in his body to both build bones and muscle, and then also as it was failing in a sense, it was being sort of degraded at the same time. So is it confused? The body was confused?

It's a struggle. It's a Sisyphian struggle. You're pushing a rock up the mountain. It's just trying to make it so you don't fall down the mountain, really. You have to keep building the bone density as it's being sort of degraded by the lack of use. And so we could see that, like, you're looking in this blood. We took, you know, blood samples, dozens of points. It was hundreds of samples at the end of the study, and we separate out the fractions of cells.

We'd look in the plasma of the blood, look in different kinds of immune cells, look at as much as we could from within the body. And it really serves as this molecular echo and sort of a scan of what happens in the body. And very much, you know, bone density, we saw really the building up of muscle and some of the atrophy at the same time. But really it was striking as also the immune system was ramped up. We saw one of some of the most significant changes were all in T-cell biology. You think of your immune cells that help scavenge through the bloodstream and also DNA damage, DNA repair. All these genes were really ramped up and more, especially in the last six months of the mission, than the first half. So there was sort of a switch after six months?

Yeah, very much. It seemed as if it was, it wasn't like he just got up there and adapted and was okay. I mean, by some measures he was, but in terms of how many genes are activated and really sort of responding to spaceflight, it's a continual adaptation. And so astronauts who are not up there for six longer months. They don't have the same sort of reaction. No, I mean, some of the pathways we've seen and some of the genes that were activated have been observed in previous missions, but nothing to this degree and nothing at this scale. Susan, you also looked at damage to the chromosomes themselves.

It makes sense, right, with the higher radiation on the space station? Yes, it sure does. DNA might, you know, might be. Yeah, and it also fit very nicely with the work that Dr. Mason was just talking about with the DNA damage response. They saw evidence of that in the gene expression, but we also saw it visually when we looked at chromosomes and how they rearranged. We know that those things are caused by radiation exposure. So we saw translocations, rearrangements between chromosomes, as well as inversions, rearrangements within a chromosome itself. And all of that was very, very consistent with space radiation exposure during flight in sky.

So when Scott got back to Earth, did any of the damage get repaired? The DNA movement moved back? Well, it doesn't really move back. But you do see, for example, elevated frequencies of chromosome aberrations in flight, of both translocations and inversions. When he came back, the translocation frequency went down. And again, that's usually because he loses those cells with translocation. they don't really survive.

So those cells drop out of the population. However, the story on inversions was a little different. They did persist and were still elevated after flight. So, again, just evidence of an ongoing kind of instability that continued even after he got back. One quick question from the phones from Joe in Gainesville, Florida, before we go to the break. Hi, Joe. Yes. I'm curious.

The samples took from Scott. urine, blood, et cetera. They were kept up there until they could be returned to Earth on a supply mission. The stay on the station changed the samples once they were taken from Scott's body.

So good question. I'll jump in quick first, I suppose. We did take two kinds of samples, some that were frozen and using a centrifuge on the space station that matched the speed and the angle on Earth. So we had some frozen samples

and they were kept frozen all the whole way down. But we also do what was called an ambient return collection. So Scott would draw blood and basically pop it into the Soyos capsule, it'd be dropped back into Kazakhstan, would be picked up, repatriated, brought back to Houston.

That's a verb I've never used, all this study is repatriated to a sample, and then sorted cells. And we needed live cells for some of the work that Dr. Bailey wanted to do, and also a way to sort purified cells. So we did as much as best as we could to make sure we could get rid of any batch effects, and we have two kinds of collection. Susan, any question before we have to go for the break? No, no, I'd just add to that that, yes, our samples also came back to us ambient on the Soyuz and then jetted back to Johnson Space Center.

And we did our processing and analysis at Johnson Space Center. All within 38 hours. They come back to her. Yeah, it's amazing. Just amazing. Just amazing. Yes, that's right. Now you know why the paper was so long.

We will take a break and talk lots more with Susan Bailey of Colorado State University and Christopher Mason of Wild Cornell Medicine right here in New York. Our number 844-724-824. 5-5. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. We're talking this hour about what life in space, microgravity, radiation, confined spaces, and more does to your cells and even the DNA in your cells. The Ultimate Twins study, Astronauts Scott and Mark Kelly. That study was published this week in science. My guests are Dr. Susan Bailey of Colorado State University

in Fort Collins, Dr. Christopher Mason of Cornell, Wyoming Cornell Medical Center here in New York City. On number 844-724-8255. Getting back to the bottom line on all of this, let me repeat for listeners who are joining us now. Chris is heard that did astronaut Kelly have any long-lasting, Scott did he have any long-lasting effects from this? Do we know yet? So most of it reverted back to normal as we described a little bit before, but there were some things that did persist. And so the, we, we, we, We'd lucked at a lot of genes that changed, they adapt to environments as they do here on Earth. And in space, we saw, you know, thousands and thousands of genes changed, and almost all of them went back to normal.

But about 800 of them were still looked as if he was still in space, even six months later. And earlier this week, we were chatting with Scott a bit more. And he said, you know, he really felt like he was a little bit off, even out until eight or nine months after he got back to Earth. So I think there was a continual adaptation that took at least six months for him to sort of revert back to normal, at least in terms of the gene expression. data. So we see, you know, but other things change really rapidly. So if you look, for example, in his blood, we saw some measures increased 4,000 percent with them as soon as he landed that are with inflammation markers, but almost all those went back away within a couple of days. And same with the telemars as we've heard from Dr. Bailey.

Susan, Dr. Bailey, what do we need to know more about before we allow people to go to, you know, to Mars where they're going to be in space a lot longer than a year, right? Yes, yes. Well, I certainly would like to know a lot more. about why these changes and shifts in telomere length dynamics are occurring. I think if we understood why they were happening, we could do, you know, do something, know what to do about it, or if there's any real concern there, as astronauts spend longer and longer periods of time in space. I do think that it alerts us to the fact as well when they come back that they do have a lot more short telomeres, which can put them at increased risk of aging and some of the

diseases that go along with aging like cardiovascular disease and some cancers. Tell us why the telomeres are so interesting to you. What do they do? Oh, they're fascinating because they are the ends of our chromosomes and that really kind of like the end of a shoestring perhaps that you could think of that it protects the end from fraying, from damage. And they shorten as we get older because they shorten with cell division. but they also shorten with all kinds of stress and exposures to things like radiation,

or at least that's what we think on Earth, that's what we see. So they can be a very informative biomarker of how quickly or how well a person is aging, as well as if there are a lot of short telomeres can also be very indicative or associated with some of the diseases that we associate with aging, like cardiovascular disease. Which do you think, I'll ask both of you, let me, let me, begin with you, Chris. Which was the greater hazard? Radiation or microgravity or weightlessness? Well, I think we can see evidence of both, definitely, in terms of what we know for human biology or what we looked at in mouse samples that have been sent as an analog into the space station.

And from what we can tell at least from the gene expression data, is like how much of your genome, of all the genes in your cells are adapting? You know, we see a lot more response to radiation. but frankly we know those networks of biology much better than we know like what is the microgravity or reduced gravity response to cells. We do see both, but I think the one that's still active and seems to be the most active from what we can tell is really the radiation because it propagates to all parts of cells. And it may even, you know, one of the things that happened after the mission is cognitive sort of metrics were worse off six months later. That didn't get better. No, no. And so that's another thing that's on the list of things that are not necessarily bad, but they're just.

just not the direction that you'd want them to be. But they were permanent as far as they could test six months out. He couldn't think as quickly? By speed and accuracy, they worked from Matthias Bosner's group that really showed that he really, for these 10 different cognitive tests, you know, solving puzzles, shape recognition, some quick math. He was not as good as he was when he's even in space.

Susan, what's that going to mean for somebody who gets to Mars and has lost his cognitive or at least some of his abilities? That's not going to be very good now, is it? So, yeah, I mean, it is definitely a concern and, you know, something that we really need to figure out. But I would certainly agree that, you know, I think radiation exposure is by far the greatest risk. And cognitive decline has been associated with radiation exposure, particularly to space radiation. So I think, again, you know, radiation is really going to be the thing that we need to learn how to deal with. And I think technology is going to have to be the thing that helps us there, you know, either.

get them there quicker or figure out some better shielding that they can take with them. But I think most of the health effects or the damaging things that we saw could be explained by radiation exposure. You know, Scott in his book and in testimony talked about how difficult it was the first few days, a few weeks. I mean, he just couldn't walk, couldn't function. I mean, if you're going to go to another planet and you can't walk off the spaceship or get off of it or function for a while. Yeah, I mean, his legs swelled up. He really felt like they turned into balloons, he said. You know, he felt like he needed to go to the emergency room.

Even just the simple weight of clothing on his arm, since he hadn't felt it in the ear, his arms broke out into a rash. And so, and we can actually see that in the blood. The inflammation markers were sky high. Like I said, sometimes several thousand percent higher than what they were before the mission or even during the mission. So, you know, it's interesting. Some things change as soon as you get to space.

You can see cortisol levels will spike up because your body's thinking, well, I'm in space, So it's surprising. But then they'll sort of settle down. And Scott, in general, it was cool as a cucumber. But, you know, the body didn't react well to gravity. Do we know, I mean, the Soviets have had their own cosmonauts in space? I mean, have they shared data with us? There was another Russian cosmonaut that was up for a year,

but not all the data has been shared that much of it, actually, that we've seen and that I know it exists. So that's still being negotiated. I see if he was still talking to them. Yes, yeah. I tried to call Putin last night, but he didn't pick up my call. So where do we go from here? Doctor, what would you recommend with that way you do?

I'll ask, let me ask Susan first, and Christopher, you can answer. Well, I think that, you know, there's certainly the twin study represents by far the most comprehensive study that's ever been done on the response of the human body to spaceflight. And as such, it's really a landmark, and it sets the baseline for going forward. You know, we now know a lot more about the questions to ask. We know more about the health effects to keep to monitor when our astronauts come back. So I think in that sense, it's been a huge step forward and really does set the bar and will help us as we go, you know, into future studies and get additional astronauts. Yeah, because we only have n equals one now. Right.

Right. It's N of one, but over hundreds of time points. So we know a lot about how things changed over time. But for sure, the most important goal is to do things with greater numbers of samples. There's only 569 people that have ever left Earth and gone to 100 kilometers. So the sample size can't get that big yet. But I think every cosmonaut, astronaut, every commercial space flight that goes up, we now know what to look for.

And I think it really, it's helpful for humanity to think more about what happens to other people at different ages and genders. Well, you know, the president has talked about going back to the moon. Yeah, 224. Forget about Mars for now. I mean, the moon has even less gravity than Mars does. Yeah, one sixth. And so one good thing is all the swelling and pain of returning to gravity.

You know, even though spaceflight's hard, gravity is much harder on the body from everything that we've observed. But, you know, the moon is one-sixth and Mars is 36% of the gravity of Earth. So even if radiation exposure there? It is hot and higher. Oh, yes. Much higher. because they're outside of the protection of the earth. The Van Allen Belt's atmosphere, all those things that protect us here.

They don't have on the moon or certainly not at Mars. So you'd want to solve that problem before five years. Yeah. And with that happy news, let me wind up and say thank you very much, Dr. Susan Bailey, Professor of Radiation Cancer Biology and Oncology, Colorado State University in Ford Collins, and Christopher Mason, Associate Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at Wild Cornell Medical Center here in New York. Thank you. Thank you both for taking down to view this today.

Pleasure. As a SciFri listener, you've been asked numerous times to put on your citizen science cap and do real research, meaningful stuff. And today you've got a chance to help solve a question about Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's, as you know, is a complicated disease. It can affect a person's brain and behavior in many different ways. There isn't one definition of the disease, but about 30% of people with Alzheimer's experience a decrease in blood flow to their brains caused by white blood cells clumping up in the vessels. And researchers at Cornell University have found that this blockage can happen in the tiniest blood vessels, in the brain, of course, the capillaries. And they're trying to figure out why this happens and what are the effects.

And to do that, they have to go through hundreds of thousands of images of hair-like capillaries, and that could take years for one scientist. That's why they're turning to the power of the crowd. They've created a game called stall catchers, and the aim is to go through one year's worth of data in a one-day megathon, as they call it. Here to tell us more are Chris Shackers. who is part of that Cornell research team, associate professor of biomedical engineering there,

and Pietro Mikaluchi, Mikalucci, who's a project lead for stall catchers and director of the Human Computation Institute based out of Ithaca, New York. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. It's great to be here. Yes, thanks. Chris, let's talk about your work is in mice.

How much do we know about why Alzheimer's affects the blood flow in the brain? So in mice that have been genetically engineered to get Alzheimer's disease, we found that this roughly 30% decrease in brain blood flow that's associated with Alzheimer's is caused by a certain class of white blood cells that are adhered and stuck inside individual capillary segments. When we gave a drug that interfered with the adhesion of those white blood cells, those stalled capillaries started flowing again. And after that happened, blood flow in the brain improved by about 30%. So kind of recovering the deficit that those Alzheimer disease mice had relative to non-Alzheimer disease mice. Do we know why the white blood cells clump in the vessels of the Alzheimer's patients? So again, in Alzheimer's disease mice.

But our thinking is that that's due to inflammation in the brain caused by the aggregates of this small, peptide called amyloid beta, which is the thing that aggregates into the plaques that are the kind of classic pathological hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. So those aggregates of amyloid beta, one of the things they do is they just drive kind of a general brain inflammation. And one of the things that happens in inflamed tissue is there's an increase in the number of proteins along the cells that line the blood vessel walls, the endothelial cells. There's an increase in proteins that white blood cells will stick to when they see them. Gotcha.

And when you have a cut or infection or something like that, those white blood cells crawl into the tissue and can, you know, do, you know, kill pathogens, help repair tissue, things like that. But it looks like in the case of Alzheimer's disease, it's a low level of inflammation. It's just causing these white blood cells to stick and block blood flow in individual capillary segments. And they don't seem to be doing something good. Amira Flato, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

Pietro, we have big supercomputers, and we have neural nets and AI that can analyze tons of data. Why are you turning to people for this project? What can they do better? Well, that's the million-dollar question. So, you know, AI is doing amazing things today. And in some part, that's due to advances in AI technology. But in large part, it's just due to having faster computers. And having even the fastest calculator doesn't make it more than a calculator.

It's how it thinks. And humans still think in ways that AI cannot. And so when I met Chris and we started talking about the kind of analysis that needed to be done on his Alzheimer's data sets, you know, the first question was, well, have you tried using machine learning and various forms of AI to do this? And he said, yeah, we have. It's just not quite good enough. It's about 85% accurate, and we need 99. So people are just better at this, is what you're saying.

Well, yeah, I think that's exactly right. We still have an edge on the machines. And one reason for that is that most of the AI approaches today are based on pattern recognition. And that means the answer has to be in the pixels. It has to be in the picture you're looking at. And sometimes the picture isn't enough. It takes a real-world context to understand what's going on. That's something people can do.

Okay, so if people are interested, our audience is interested, how do they sign up for this? Yeah, absolutely. So tomorrow is National Citizen Science Day, and we partnered with SciStarter to put on a nationwide event. And the featured citizen science project is stall catchers, and it's called the Megathon. So you go to megathon.us, and you register there, and then between the hours of 1030 and 1230, tomorrow morning Pacific time. And I guess if you're on the East Coast, add three hours to that.

Just tune in to our live stream and play the game during that time. And you will be analyzing data next to the scientists. You're not a subject in the experiment. You're a scientist participating in the analysis. Well, this sounds like a very important experiment or, I mean, analysis.

What if you're afraid of making a mistake? And, you know, I'm just a person. Right. And so, you know, this is when we developed the platform to pull in information from the crowd, this was one of our first concerns is, and there's a fair amount of skepticism in the scientific community about how much can you trust scientific analysis generated by members of the general public. And so we use this approach called wisdom of crowds. And that means that we'll show the same tiny capillary vessel to several different people, and then we'll combine their answers together in a sensible way. So when you get one wrong, then three other people are getting it right. And in the end, we validated the platform to ensure that we're meeting Cornell's stringent data quality requirements, no matter whether you make a mistake or not. All right, let me repeat how people can sign up. You can sign up for the Stall Catchers Megathon.

It's happening this Saturday. You can see a list of citizen science projects. It's up on our website at ScienceFriday.com slash catchers. And how many people are we looking for? Well, we're aiming for 100,000 people. Okay, we're going to melt your service. We have done that before with other. That's a good thing, I think. Absolutely.

We hope you will. We'll try to get you enough people. Thank you for taking time to be you today. Pietro Mikalucci, who is a project lead for stall catchers and director of the Human Computation Institute, based in Ithaca, and Chris Schaefer, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Cornell University in Ithaca.

And of course, you can go to our website at Science Friday.com slash catchers where you can help real scientists do an analysis of their data. We've had some great luck with this. Lots of people get involved. I'll give you that website again at sciencefriady.com slash catchers for a citizen science project

of the month. We'll be right back after this spring. week, we're going to talk about the history of the cherry blossom. Oh, the cherry blossom trees in Japan. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. It's cherry blossom season across the country. The famous tidal basin in Washington, D.C., of course, which has already hit its peak. And here in New York, those pink and white clouds of flowers are, well, we're getting ready for them to just about pop here. and our famous blooms, they have an interesting and little-known backstory, too.

Listen to this. Japan sent the first shipment of 2,000 cherry trees to the U.S. in 1909 as a sign of gratitude to America. But that shipment isn't what you see blooming today because it was infested with insects and the whole thing was incinerated. Now, a second shipment of saplings destined for New York, that sank on the steamer on root. So it wasn't until a full three years later that the first Japanese cherry trees arrived in New York and Washington safe from insects and shipwrecks. And that's just one of the many interesting tales in the Sakara Obsession, a book about the cultural history of cherry blossoms in Japan and around the world, and about a really interesting character, English orthologist and naturalist Collingwood Cherry Ingram, who devoted his life to cataloguing and

preserving these blooms. And boy, did he have opinions about cherry varieties, but we'll get into that. I want to introduce the author. Naoko Abe is a former journalist from Japan's Manichie newspaper and the author of the Sakara Obsession, the incredible story of the plant hunter who saved Japan's cherry blossoms. We have an excerpt up on our website, and we have some interesting cherry photos for you at ScienceFriiday.com slash cherry. Nowako, welcome to Science Friday. Yeah, hello, thank you. Let me get the obvious question out of the way about,

are you related to the Prime Minister of Japan at all? No, no, no, not so. Because our listeners are going to want to know that, but Abe is a very common name in Japan. Yeah, pretty common, yes. Let's talk about Ingram. He didn't start out as a cherry enthusiast, did he? You're right that his first scientific endeavor was ornithology,

studying birds? Yes. What happened? What happened? Basically, he got fed up with birds. That's pretty simple. Well, yeah, he was a true naturalist, and so he was very much interested in nature. He grew up in the nature, and he never went to school.

But it was the first World War that he went, which changed his views on life. So he saw lots of deaths. And it really changed his views on life. So when he came back from the war, well, he didn't fight. He went as a compass adjuster, but he saw lots of deaths and, you know, dark side of the human lives. So when he came back to England from the war, he wanted something new. He wanted to start.

He was having kind of a crisis, midlife crisis. We have those, yes. Yes, midlife crisis. So he wanted a new start. And also he was tired of ornithology. He thought there were too many onythologists. And so he bought a new house with his wife and four children to live in Kent, big house. But he didn't have a garden.

So he bought massive amount of mass vacu acres of land. So he thought, oh, maybe this is my new area that I can. I can build a new garden of dreams. So he thought he would become a plantsman instead of... But he chose cherries? He chose cherries. He chose cherry because there were two massive cherry trees in the new house, which were kind of rarity back then.

It was in 1919. They were not popular in Europe at all. Well, in Europe, people expected the cherry trees to produce. cherries. And these did not produce cherries. No, they were ornamental Japanese cherries, which were very rare back then. People didn't care about cherries who didn't produce, which didn't produce cherries. So anyway, that caught, those two big tree, cherry trees, caught his attention. And he thought, and then the following spring, they were smothered with pink blossoms, which were really beautiful. And he thought, this is a virgin territory

that, you know, no one explored before. So maybe I can be, you know, an expert of cherry blossoms. He was very passionate and very passionate man and very ambitious. So he thought he could be an expert. So he starts collecting different varieties of cherry blossoms. So within six years, he had a massive cherry orchard in his garden. He collected them and planted them in his garden and created a beautiful.

Within six years, he was a cherry expert, sort of. And he was a believer of diversity and varieties. So he was very important for him to have as many varieties of cherry trees as possible, which he did collect. And did he go to Japan and study cherry trees over there? Yeah, he went to Japan three times in all. And the third trip, which was 1926, he dedicated that trip to collecting rare varieties of cherry blossoms. Because he thought he collected as many cherry varieties as possible based in Kent in England.

So now he thought, you know, I need to go to Japan again, you know, for collecting rare varieties. But he had very strong opinions about which kinds of cherry varieties, didn't he? I mean, like the Kansan, for example, which he's. thought was obscene. Yes. He really had strong opinions about his cherry tree. He thought

Kandon was it's a dark pink, very showy kind of blossoms. He thought it was too showy and he called it like a prostitute. Sorry.

He thought it was too blousy and he preferred simple single petal cherry. You know, like mountain cherry. Proper cherry. They'd be very proper.

Very simple, but, you know, delicate and quiet beauty. And so he disliked Kansom, but he loved many other varieties. And he thought, so sort of thought of cherry trees like people. Exactly. They were like his children. Yeah. And he was talking to them and he was really loving each variety. loving each variety, each, you know, he was often asked by other people or, you know, media to write about cherries.

And what, which varieties do you like best? And it's, he would often say, it's like asking a mother, which child do you, you know, do you prefer? It's your favorite. So it was difficult. Well, while he was in Japan, he was invited by business and government leaders to give a speech about cherries. about cherries and he gave them a warning, right? Yes. He had high hopes in his 1926 cherry hunting trip,

but as soon as he got to Japan, he was deeply disappointed because he found out that at that time, especially Tokyo and Yokohama area, Canton area, was trying to recover from the, great canto earthquake which destroyed everything in that area and so all he saw was a huge western building concrete buildings and there was no nature so he was deeply he he doesn't like civilization he he loves nature so and then at the same time he discovered that the japanese people no longer cared about cherry varieties which had which had been developed over the past

2000 years or 1000 years. So he was deeply disappointed because he didn't know that. So he gave a warning, said, to the top leaders of government officials or politicians or royalty or business leaders. It was really the cream of the establishment gathering. He said, you must treasure. the past, you must treasure all these beautiful cherry varieties, which are in serious danger of extinction.

In fact, quite a few of them had gone extinct by the time he went. So he saw that as his mission then to help save the cherry varieties in Japan? Exactly. He thought that, you know, he said in his speech to the meeting that, you know, unless you did something about this crisis, you would have lost permanently in 50 years. You've lost all the cherry varieties. You would have to go to America or Europe or to the UK to find the varieties. Did they listen to him for this morning? Did they heed the warning? I think, I'm sure some did the naturalist, but they were business leaders. And the country

was focused on modernization, industrialization. Familiar stories. Familiar stories. They were the leaders of that, you know, trend movement. So unfortunately, he gave a stark warning, but I think it fell on deafiness. So it was he took it upon himself. He did. He did. The extraordinary thing about him is that he decided to save and preserve them himself in his Kent garden. Is that right?

Wow. And you write in the book about a transformation of Japan's cherry trees, the plant. of a single species, the Yoshino cherry, instead of a wide variety of species. And that's what we see in the Potomac. The Potomac cherry is the Yoshino. That's right, yeah. And so you've now, the word I'm going to use vanilla eyes. You've now taken one species and made it above everything else.

And then people don't start looking at the other beautiful varieties. Yeah. And what was happening in Japan was there. that Yoshino Cherry was developed. It's kind of a young variety which was developed at the end of 19th century compared to other varieties which had thousands of years. So you've overshadowed all those traditional varieties? Yeah.

What was happening was that the new government, the Japanese new government, which was focused on Westernization, industrial and modernizing the country. was looking for a new symbol, kind of a symbol of new Japan, and this cherry fitted that purpose because they were beautiful and they grew fast

and they were inexpensive to propagate and easy to propagate. So very quickly, they attract the people's attention and the authority's attention that it was very convenient to plan. And very quickly, the mass production system was set up.

And so they were, this variety, single variety, was planted en masse in thousands. Every time Japan won a major war, whether it was with China or with Russia or the enthronement of a new emperor, Emperor Taisho and Emperor Shoa, Hirohito, this variety was planted on mass, you know, like 2,000, 3,000 all over Japan. So, in essence, it took over the old varieties which had thrived over centuries. That's too bad. Yeah, so they were forgotten. People still love the cherry blossoms, but the single variety. That's why we see them in the Potomac. I'm Ira Plato.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Aneoka Abe about her book, the Sacro Obsession, the incredible story of the Plant Hunter who saved Japan's cherry blossoms. ask you read a passage in the book because it was so fitting. It was before environmentalism became a mainstream idea. Ingram was talking about these issues, modernism, as you say, progress and so on, coming at the cost of the natural world. And you have a passage to read us that reflects his thinking on that. Could you read that for us? Yeah, he said, progress, improvement, development, call it what you like, is rapidly reaching

even the remotest corners of the globe. Wherever modern man comes into contact with nature, he leaves a disfiguring mark. As his numbers multiply, so the fundamental beauty of the universe decreases. The passing of beauty and romance from the world is, to me, a source of endless regret. When the Victoria Falls have been harnessed

and Spitzburg and, turned into a teeming cold field, teeming cold field, it would be time to think of another planet. That's what he said, over 90 years ago, which is very relevant to modern times. Like a prophet. He could see that happening. He says, if this is going to happen to my cherry blossoms, we're going to have one variety for everybody. And we don't care about all the other details. And this could happen to the rest of the environment around the world.

Yeah. Yeah. Are you going to go out and see the cherry blossoms here? In the States? In the States? Oh, yeah. Yesterday. Yeah, where were you?

Yes, I went to Brooklyn Botanic Garden. And I saw Collingwood Ingram's creation, this variety called Okame. It was in Beautiful Blossom. It's his creation. He hybridized. Is that right? How did it get to Brooklyn? How did it get to Brooklyn?

It's interesting to look into that. Yeah, yeah. That's a beautiful garden. there. Yes, and quite a few of his cherry trees in his Kent Garden came over here to, you know, to the Washington's National Labaritan. Whether it was Taihaku Great White Cherry or Hocci is, you know, named after the great wood printer, which was the first cherry tree which attracted the ascension to become a cherry expert. So Hoksi, and yeah.

So if you want to find them, you can see them all around the country, his cherry trees. In the States? In the States, yeah. Oh, yeah. That's fascinating. Thank you for this book. It's a wonderful book. I'm a historian of science.

I love to read these books, and you've done a wonderful job in there. We don't have enough time to get into all the details, but it was very nice of you to come by and share it with us. Thank you. And Iyoko Abe is author of the Sakura Obsession, the Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter, who saved Japan's cherry blossoms. A really interesting tale. You would have never, never thought about this. And as you go out and look at the blossoms blossoming,

you can go to our website and see some of the cherry photos we have up there at ScienceFriety.com slash cherry. BJ Leatherman composed our theme music, and if you missed any part of the program, you like to hear it again. You can subscribe to our podcast. You have a speaker. You can ask it to play Science Friday. It's whenever you want to.

Every day now is Science Friday. to our website. We have all kinds of educational materials. We have educational videos. A lot of you bet you don't even know how many videos we have up there on our website. Science-related, education-related. They're all up there for you to use in school or just to surf through them and appreciate them. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato in New York.