StarTalk Radio - Solving Crimes with Science, with Patricia Cornwell

Episode Date: September 20, 2019

Neil deGrasse Tyson investigates the world of forensics with best-selling crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, comic co-host Matt Kirshen, forensic pathologist Dr. Rebecca Folkerth, MD, neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Newberg, MD, and Bill Nye the Science Guy.NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons and All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/show/solving-crimes-with-science-with-patricia-cornwell/Photo Credit: Brandon Royal. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

From the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and beaming out across all of space and time, this is StarTalk, where science and pop culture collide. Welcome to the Hall of the Universe. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And on our show tonight, our topic is forensics. Solving crimes with science. So, let's do this. All right. My comedic co-host tonight is Matt Kirshen. Matt, welcome back.

Thank you. It's nice to be here. You're one of the comedy writers on The Jim Jefferies Show. That's right. Excellent. Yeah, it's a fun gig. I like some of his jokes. No, I'm just kidding. They're my ones.

The ones you don't like are other people's. That's just... Also joining us is forensic pathologist Rebecca Folkerth. Rebecca, welcome. Yes, hi, thank you. You work at the office of the chief medical examiner of New York City. Yes, sir. And you specialize in brain trauma pathology.

Just so you know, just in advance, anyone from medical examiner's office has always just a little bit creeped me out. Yeah. Well, it was good reason. Well, we need your expertise tonight because we're featuring my interview with best-selling crime novelist Patricia Cornwell. because we're featuring my interview with best-selling crime novelist Patricia Cornwell. She wrote her first novel called Postmortem back in 1990 while working in a morgue. And she went on to write 24 New York Times best-selling books and sell more than 100 million copies of her forensic science novels. I think the Bible has only sold a few more copies than that.

So this is pretty serious. Yeah, and how many mysteries has the Bible sold? Almost none. So I asked her what sparked her interest in science. So check it out. You know, my chemistry teacher in high school was somebody that I've never forgotten because she was the real deal.

She loved it and she cared about science. She also was very patient with me because I was never forgotten because she was the real deal. She loved it, and she cared about science. She also was very patient with me because I was no good in chemistry. See, I fled from the sciences in school. I fled from all of them. I couldn't do math. You know, when I did astronomy, the only way, I couldn't get the relativity math problems. Every time I'd get it wrong. This interview's over.

It's awful. I mean, me, this is what I do for a living. And I skipped science in school because, first of all, girls didn't do science. They didn't. And my brothers did science, but I didn't do science. You know, and I wasn't encouraged to do science. And how I ended up falling in love with it, I'll never know. But it is, to me, it's everything.

All right, so do I understand correctly, you worked in a morgue? I went to work in one for six years. How old were you? I started there in my late 20s, mid-20s. Isn't that just completely creepy? Yes. Oh, okay. I don't like morgues.

People think I love morgues. I hate morgues. That's just really creepy. I mean, they're depressing, and it's hard work, and it's gross, and there's nothing pretty about it. But that's what I had to learn, technological study, hanging out in labs, learning about anatomy, learning about human nature, learning everything, what I call the, you know, the overview effect? Yeah. That's the underview effect.

The morgue. So I don't know if people know about the overview effect. It's come of age in the era of astronauts. You don't see national boundaries. You don't see ethnicities. You don't see religions. You just see sort of ocean and land and clouds. Just the overview effect.

So Rebecca, tell me about the underview effect. Would you agree with this? I think that's a tremendous concept, the underview effect. But what's interesting to me is that I think it brings us to a similar place as the overview effect. Because the overview effect here, the astronaut is out from far, far away looking at a tiny planet with 11 billion people on it and we're sort of we're headed there fast yeah yeah uh we're at the uh opposite end where we're looking at one individual and then looking with a microscope at their cells trying to figure out what's going on with them and it gives you this sense of um sameness among human beings and and a really sort of a wonderful humanitarian feeling to me.

So I guess we and you bookend the human experience. Yes, I think so. And so I like the idea that we're looking at it from so far distant, but we're kind of ending up in the same place. I do have to ask, because when Patricia just then said in the clip that, no, morgues are creepy, she doesn't like working there, you sort of, there was a moment I just caught your expression where you're like, no, it's not. It's not creepy, it's totally cool. No, it is creepy. It is. But... So what do you actually do? Well... Other than collect bodies

and pull them out? Is it like in the movies? The big drawers? You pull them out of the refrigerator? out is it like in the movies like the big drawers you pull them out of the refrigerator sort of like that yeah okay yeah but what we do uh we're medical doctors and um these uh people are our patients we're the last doctors to see these people so when you take the hippocratic oath and they say and above all else do no harm when you get a dead body you're pretty clear on that one, right? Well, yeah, we don't so much have to worry about that. But we're, you know, trying to figure out what happened to them so that their families have answers. And there are right ways and wrong ways about going. So what's the procedure? The body comes in. The body comes in. We examine it from head to toe. It's rather like a surgical procedure.

It's just more involved. And, of course, we're not fixing anything. We're just documenting everything that's there. But we use many of the same tools that a surgeon uses. And, as I say, we're medical professionals. And so it's done in a respectful way. So what's curious to me is that forensic science has become pop culture. I think in part

because of Patricia Cornwell. I mean, I think she's if you're on the bestseller list talking about this people are talking about you. And so I asked what her impression was about the role of her books as sparking public interest. Let's check it out.

Well, what I did is I inadvertently made forensics accessible to people, and it had not been before. Nobody knew what happens when somebody dies. They really didn't. It wasn't part of popular culture. But you want to know how that happened, though? You know what got me interested? It was one thing that somebody said.

The first time I had a tour of the morgue, after hours, all scrubbed and hosed off so it's nice and clean and sparkly, shiny steel, lovely warm place to be. And this medical examiner, she starts telling me, I said, what's new? What's coming down the pike for you guys? Because you've been doing autopsies for hundreds of years, it doesn't change very much. She said, well, there's this thing called DNA that they're just starting to play around with. And also we're starting to use lasers to look for evidence on bodies. And I'm like, ooh, DNA. I don't know what that is. Sounds interesting. Lasers. And now you got my attention. That was what hooked me. It wasn't the dead

people. It was the science that she told me. This was 1984. They would not use DNA for several more years. But that, and so I just arrived just and all this stuff was starting to happen. And I was just intrigued by it, using science to tell the truth. What happened to you? So Rebecca, so give me an example of how forensic science just tells the truth. Well, science itself is the business of uncovering the truth. That's the name, sure. Yeah, and so we're just applying it to the human body,

and especially in a criminal justice setting, our motto at our office is science serving justice, and that's what we're doing. Yeah. So what were some of the earlier methods and tools? Well. Before DNA, what would people? Oh, gosh.

Well, yeah, as Patricia said, DNA is a relatively recent development. We do rely on it a lot, but the time-honored tradition is the autopsy. And that's how we, as I say we uh get to the bottom of things we're we have to see with our own eyes with direct observation what happened uh what natural disease was there what the pattern of injury is but you could miss something if there's a chemistry test that you could do but don't think to do? Yes. Well, we have guidelines for running toxicology on cases just for that reason, so we don't miss them. So is that reliant on what the police officers who've done the initial investigation, will they then tell you, hey, we suspect this

might be going on, so you might want to check for it? Or do you look for other signs that are independent of what the police say? It's both. I mean, we have the evidence that the medical legal investigators and police... They can say we found drugs around them. Exactly, we have that. We can see for ourselves if they have evidence of self-injection,

and we can see changes in the body that are characteristic, for example, of drug use. But if you're talking about poisoning, we have to have, you know, more specific suspicion of that to test for things like arsenic or whatever. But it comes up. It does. And some poisons have other evidence manifest in the skin. Yes, in changes, sometimes in the brain,

different things that might clue us in to, hey, maybe that's what's going on here. So you're one of those people that put the brain on the meat slicer and look at thin slices of brain? No, we... No, no, that's considered... What's wrong with that question? We've all seen that, haven't we?

We all knew exactly what you were talking about. Yes, exactly. You said meat slicer, and everyone's like, well, that's probably not the name, but we know it. And so I don't know about this. We all saw the movies. But this is where the TV and the movies have it wrong,

because for us in neuropathology, we are very particular about how we examine the brain, and we do it freehand so that we can tailor it very carefully to try to get the most out of what we're looking at,

both on the outside and the inside brain. Yes, you have to be extremely careful. You don't want to destroy anything, and you want to be able to look through the microscope at the tissues later if you need to. So when DNA came on the scene, what's the biggest change that it introduced? Well, I would say it's had a huge impact in a couple of ways. Identification of remains is very important for individuals who don't have identification on them or who die in circumstances where it's not possible to ask their family members. So we do

about 100 such missing persons type cases per year. So I don't mean to get morbid, but in the day when they say, let me dispose of the body, but first remove the head and the fingerprints, and now you just have a headless body with no fingers, and that doesn't matter, the DNA will still get it. That's another circumstance in which we use it. Dismembered bodies, that sort of thing. And for example, after... I was creeped out by even that question.

But let me put it in another context. After 9-11, our DNA lab was at the forefront of trying to identify all the remains. And our chief at that time, Dr. Charles Hirsch, pledged to the city of New York that we would identify every last human remain through DNA testing. And we've been doing that. And you couldn't have otherwise done that? Could not have otherwise done it. They burned bodies and crushed them.

They've been there for months as they slowly recovered, dug out the site. Yes. Even now, I mean, we still have a permanent presence down at Ground Zero, our office that's staffed by forensic anthropologists for this kind of thing. So this is where DNA has done an immeasurable service to families. Is dental records still a thing? Do people still do that? Yes, dental records are very important, especially if you have an unidentified person. Okay, so Patricia Cornwell's books, they really birthed an entire generation of TV shows like CSI and Bones.

they really birthed an entire generation of TV shows like CSI and Bones. And I'm just curious, how authentic is the forensic science in those TV dramas? Because those are highly praised dramas. CSI even became a traveling museum exhibit where you would go in and, you know, for school groups, we'd go in and try to solve a crime using the scientific evidence. So how authentic is it? What grade would you give it? I would give it about a B+. That's good.

That's very high grade. No, it's very, you know, the tools they're using, they describe them with great accuracy. And they're certainly the same tools that we use. And, you know, Patricia uses them a lot, refers to them a lot in her novels. And I actually appreciate that. She's, in fact, been a great friend to our office over the years. And I think it's fabulous that the public is getting to know

a little bit about what it is that we do. Well, up next, we're going to explore the science of decomposing bodies when star talk returns you Bringing space and science down to Earth. You're listening to StarTalk. Welcome back to Star Talk from the American Museum of Natural History. We're featuring my interview with best-selling forensic crime novelist Patricia Cornwell. And I asked her about that creepy research facility in Tennessee called The Body Farm. Check it out. Well, it's not a health spa, and you don't want to go.

The Body Farm is two acres of land outside of University of Tennessee, near their hospital there, that people donate their bodies to science, and they let them decompose out there in all sorts of different circumstances. I saw a special on this. Oh, yeah. It's been around for about 40 years. It's a huge dead body laboratory. And why do we do that? Mostly it's to answer time of death questions. In other words, that is the biggest alibi in any murder trial, is could you have committed that crime in the period of time it would have taken?

When did this person die? Time of death is very tricky. It's like quantum computing. Every time you ask it, it gives you a different answer. And it depends on the wind and the rain and how clothed you are, how much body fat you have. I mean, everything is dependent on something. And it can dramatically change your answer.

So this just, this land and just dead bodies out there. Oh, well, there might be one in a car. There might be one in a pond. There might be one buried in a casket. There might be one hanging from a tree. One with maggots. Oh, the nature come, they have cameras set up.

And yes, because we are at lunch for these people. Okay, so it seems to me, you owe your body to the body farm. Nope. No, I don't. Listen, to be honest with you, the body farm is, I mean, I think it's a great utility for some of this stuff, but there are probably other ways that we could learn some of these things. Rebecca, that seems like an awesome way to get all the data you need,

but she's talking about other ways. What other ways might you gather these data? Well, we basically see these kinds of cases pretty much every day. Yeah, except you get a body that's partially decomposed that's brought in, but you don't know when the body started to decompose, which the body farm will know, because they know when they put down the body. So they have data that you don't have. That's right. But from those kinds of data, we extrapolate to our cases. But the kinds of data that we often do have are things like,

if someone has died in their home, we may have their newspapers piled up in front of their house and we'll know how far back that is. We'll have their mail. We may have the expiration date on their milk in their fridge. I mean, these are things that we use and we correlate. So every day we have those kinds of data. When the last person who saw them saw them, you know, when their family got the text from them. So we have enough data to often make those kinds of conclusions. That's a little weird now. Now that you're going to be looking in my refrigerator at my milk expiration date.

I don't know. Yeah, my milk. I've got some old stuff in my fridge. I think he died in, like, 1996. So I don't know what's going on there. So, Matt, would you donate your body? I would like to donate my body to science and I want to find out more about that from you after

the taping. You're not much of a meal for the maggots, you know? Exactly, so I might as well have some scientists have some fun. Although I think the main thing I want to do really is have some fun with the scientists. I'd rather try and confuse the coroners. Like, I think I want to die with a list in my pocket with a list of names crossed

off and mine's in the middle of that list. And I want to be with a list in my pocket with a list of names crossed off and mine's in the middle of that list. And I want to be covered in gasoline but not burnt. And clasping a locket next to a broken birdcage and dressed as a centaur. So that's my plan. I'll just be like, work it out. See what you can do with that.

Wow. Okay, well you just publicly announced this so we got you now well that's the first draft i'm gonna switch it up for the real deal but try and match that to something in the tennessee body farm like oh okay no we actually have that exact same thing as well it turns out it was a comedian trying to screw with us so we we did um we did a bit of research though i found out there are some other cool things you can do with your body after these are all real things. Okay, go on.

These are interesting ways to donate your body. Firstly, you can be buried in a suit made of mushrooms and composted, and you get turned into a tree. I think that's quite a nice green thing to do. It's the circle of life, but immediate. You can turn your body over to medical experiments, either officially or just find a well-meaning medical person online and say, give it your best shot. You can be turned into a diamond. I don't know if that's something that

appeals to, as a scientist in you. Or be turned into fireworks. I don't know whether you'd rather have that. You can become an exhibit at Body Worlds, the touring body exhibit. Oh, oh. And that way you're around for a while. Right? Yeah. You can be turned into a vinyl record, which sounds a lot better than being turned into an MP3. You can be cryogenically frozen.

You can be launched into outer space. I don't know if that's something that you might want. would like take bits of you or totally cremate you so that you're lighter. Right. I don't think they put the full bulk in there. They wouldn't want

the water weight. They'll dehydrate you or something. Right. Or you could be put into a haunted house or a regular house that just becomes

haunted because of you. Okay. That works. But those are all different options. I like the diamond one, I think. Pressure and time. There's plenty of carbon in our body,

and the diamond is pure carbon. So how would that work? They're presumably a mixture of heat and extreme compression. You have to break every single chemical bond in your body to just leave the carbon behind. And then there's just this pile of carbon, and then they turn the carbon into diamond yeah that'd be very cool so you can wear your dead spouse on your ring you know what that's the creepiest thing you've heard today yet no no i don't think so

you definitely get some strange facebook comments when people post that picture, like, guess what just happened? It's not what you think. So, Rebecca, are there stages of decomposition that you've broken it up into parts? Yes, more or less. I mean, it's a biological process. And how long does the whole process take? It varies a lot with the conditions. It depends on the heat, the humidity, if it's a dry environment, if you're in water, that sort of thing. But pretty much the human body is skeletonized by about six months to a year after death. Again, depending highly on circumstances. There's a verb.

I know, I was thinking that exact same thing. She's skeletonized. Whoa, that just rolled off her tongue. I know, I was thinking that exact same thing. She's skeletonized. Whoa, that just rolled off her tongue. Well, so I asked Patricia Cornwell what it's like on a personal level, emotional level, to visit a place like the Body Farm.

And so let's check it out. It is surreal because you think you're on a battlefield. Because there's all these dead bodies everywhere. Some of them clothed, some of them not. Some of them are just the way they came from the hospital in their gown. One guy had committed suicide, but he had donated his body and he was dressed in the suit that he killed himself in. It was just lying there on the dirt. In a suit? Yeah. That's surreal. That he dressed up to take his life. That's what I'll never forget. You see what I mean? That's where the heart comes from, is if you don't go and visit with these folks, the dead, you don't deserve to write about them. And so I had to do that for years going in the morgue.

And not just when I worked there, but the research that kept going on and on and on. And I have to tell you, I wouldn't wish that on anybody. It's really hard to do. It's hard. I mean, I could start crying if I think about it too much. It's hard, some of the stuff. And, you know, I've shown people what that is, and I sure as hell have shown them what it's not. And it's not all the fakery and it's not pretty. And when you see, you know, Shelley's sculpted, you know, sculpture in university college at Oxford, the drowned poet, and he's all beautiful with his flowing hair. That's not what you look like when they fish you out. Sorry. It's awful. But I learned such an important lesson because one day I was going down the elevator and there was a decomposed, a guy who'd been out fishing with his little boy. He fell overboard, probably had a heart attack. guy who'd been out fishing with his little boy.

He fell overboard, probably had a heart attack. And he'd been in, it was summertime, and he'd been in the water for about a week. And I'm telling you, the minute I got to that building, you could smell it on every floor. I'm on the elevator going down because this medical examiner is going to do this case. And I'm already dreading it because, and I said to her, I sometimes don't know how you do this. And she said, I tried to remember them before they were like this. And suddenly I saw that man in the boat with his little boy on a July morning fishing on the James River. And I thought he would be mortified literally if he knew he looked like this right now. So give it the poor guy a break. He can't help it. And I stood there the whole time and I scribed, took notes and did my job with him.

But I've always tried to remember that. Look beyond what's in front of you. Look at the person inside, that person who's not there on that table anymore. And this is what he's left. This is his bloated, stinky space suit. And let's see what we can find out about it. It would be respectful. Rebecca, what is, as Patricia noted, how important is it, maybe for your own psychological stability, to be respectful of the dead? Oh, absolutely.

These are our family members. These are our family members. These are our community members. And it's really key for us. If someone's father, mother, sister, brother. Yes, and we're the last physicians to see them. And that's part of our commitment to society and to humanity. To see this every day, so many times a day,

does it wear on you? Do you need to put a layer of distance between your emotions and what you're experiencing? Somewhat, but we more often support one another and help each other. You help people in the field? Yes, our colleagues in the field. And for me personally, I'm a Buddhist and it's a lesson in compassion for me every day

when I see them. And like you were saying before, it does feel like it's a level of everyone ends up like this. Everyone looks the same on the table to an extent. We're all the same on the inside. So has it changed your perspective of death? Yes, absolutely. I don't fear it. You embrace it more? You don't fear it? Yeah, I don't fear it. It's a normal part of life, you know.

Impermanence is what we have to deal with. Do you get to choose who would do your autopsy? You know, like the way hairstylists would be in the salon, they'd be like, Marco's the best, so I want to have him do mine. People do do that, you know, for their funeral hairdos and that sort of thing. Right. Sure. Oh, no. I've had colleagues who've specified these kinds of things.

Absolutely. Here's someone named Marco. Yeah. Well, up next, we ponder the scientific search for the afterlife when star talk returns this is star talk welcome back to star talk from the American Museum of Natural History. We are discussing the science of death, featuring my interview with best-selling crime novelist Patricia Cornwell.

Check it out. Science does show us that we really can't get rid of anything, can we? It turns into something else. Yeah, it turns into something else. That's right. So... It degrades, but it's something. Yeah, not all things are equal, but it does go somewhere else, right?

When you die, your body temperature, you know this, radiates to the air. The air then will radiate to space. That energy that was once you is still somewhere in the universe. I believe in eternity. I believe in infinity. I do not believe we end. And I would bet you my life on that now. I know my flesh is going to end, and it reminds me of it every day.

Because as I get older, like I don't know how, time goes so fast. And I've seen so many dead bodies, I can't even count. And one of the things that I was struck with year after year. Most people go their whole life never seeing a dead body. I've seen thousands, thousands of the worst thing imaginable. And I've seen people who are, that literally was just unstrapped from the electric chair and driven right over to the morgue and their body temperature is 106 degrees. And the blood is still kind of, their veins are still standing up on their arms. They look so alive, but they're not. And there's something so missing when that person's not there anymore

that you realize that the spirit or the essence or whatever this is that we are, our consciousness, our intelligence is not really the same thing as this. It's not. And it is not destroyed. It goes, I don't know where, but I'm telling you. Well, all you can really say is that it's not where it used to be. It's not where it used to be. So it could have disappeared or gone somewhere else. I also think it was. But you're saying it's just not there. I'm saying that the body is, your body is not the same thing as you. Well, joining us now to discuss the concept of mind, body, and soul is neuroscientist Andrew Newberg. Andrew. Thank you.

Thanks for having me. Welcome back to StarTalk. Thank you. It's been great to be here. So you're a physician at Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. Yes, that's right. And you're a pioneer in the field of neurotheology. Right.

Did you, like, make that a... I think so. You did. So what is that? It's basically the field that is trying to understand the relationship between the religious and spiritual part of ourselves and the biological part of ourselves and trying to understand how they interweave within us. So this would be a neurological thing. Well, it's both in this case. For me, neurotheology is kind of a two-way street. It's not just science or neuroscience looking at religion, but it's also religion looking at neuroscience and how they can inform each other about who we are as human beings.

So what have you learned about this concept of a separation? What do you have to say about this concept of separation of the body from the self? Well, it's a fascinating problem in neuroscience because, for the most part, today cognitive neuroscience sort of thinks of them as together, that the only way we can have thoughts is through our brain. But people have a lot of very interesting experiences that suggest just the opposite. When people have a mystical experience, they feel that they transcend themselves. They go beyond just their physical body, and they feel that they experience the universe in that they transcend themselves. They go beyond just their physical

body and they feel that they experience the universe in a completely different way. Does that relate to near-death experiences? Well, and that's another kind, which are these out-of-body or near-death experiences where the person literally seems to get outside of their body. They'll often describe themselves as floating up to the ceiling of the room and being able to see the hair color of the nurse in the room, or maybe sometimes even going down the hall and seeing a patient in the room and being able to see the hair color of the nurse in the room, or maybe sometimes even going down the hall and seeing a patient in another room and learning something about what's going on with them.

And people have corroborated these reports. So there's something to them. The question is, what does it mean? Right, right. When you mean corroborated the report, you mean more than one person has said this about their experience. There are actually thousands. Not that nurses saw

things floating above bodies, just want to be clear. That's a good correction. I just want to distinguish this. Yes, but when people go up and they have this experience and they'll say, there was an interesting report where they said they saw the doctor look like he was kind of flapping his arms like he was flying. And then when they talked to the doctor, they said, were you doing something like that? He says, well, yes, I was because I wasn't sterile and I had a point to the other doctors in the room what they were doing. So he was making this kind of unusual movement. So that kind of interesting way of looking at what it is that the person describes when they are outside of their body. Now, I thought there was an attempt to do a more formal experiment

on this where someone wrote something on a piece of paper, faced it up to the ceiling, and it was something that you'd have to have an outer body experience above the paper to read, and in all these cases, no one knew what the hell was written there. Absolutely. I mean, one of the interesting possibilities with near-death experiences is the ability to try to very systematically explore this. And as you mentioned, there are some studies that have been done

theoretically, if they go above themselves and they're resting in the corner, then if you put a shelf there above where their body is and you put a picture or something written, they should be able to see it. Part of the proper experiment. Not a doctor doing this. Exactly. And I agree so far from what I hear, there have not been any hits yet in terms of the accuracy of finding that. But just imagine what would happen if we did get one. That would be great. A new discovery, a new phenomenon. A new way of thinking about it.

So tell me about the perception we have of soul. Is that something we choose to believe in because of whatever religious affiliations we have? What do you think? So therefore it's a conscious psychological choice. Is that something we choose to believe in because of whatever religious affiliations we have? What do you think? So therefore, it's a conscious psychological choice. What do you think some of that might be hardwired in the brain? Well, one of the things that's interesting about the concept of a soul is that it seems to go back to the earliest origins of the human species, even to Neanderthals, the idea of burying people 100,000 years ago with trinkets and with beads and so forth, it implied that they understood that there was something more than just the biology of,

just the physical nature of who we are. So it seems like it's been something that's been in our brains for 100,000 years, maybe more. And if that's the case, we may not have much of a choice but to think about ourselves in a more spiritual way, not just what we see physically. So what's the history of research on this? Well, I mean, people have tried to see if there's a body's energy and maybe tried to use, you know, different modalities of imaging, whether it's through x-rays or other types of thermal studies. Because when x-rays were discovered back at the late 19th century, I mean, to the afterlife people's credit, they thought, okay, if x-rays see through the body

and somebody's ready to die, let's set up the x-rays to see if you can see something leaving the body and rising up. And they didn't find anything. But that presumes that you understand what a soul would be, that a soul would emit x-rays.

No, it's a first pass. X-rays see your bones and other things. They see through you. Right. And so I can't blame them for trying that experiment. Right. But it failed. When you talked about, with your first question, we can talk about how our brain thinks about a soul

and that that may be something that's ingrained within us, but whether or not that actually means that there is a soul, bigger question. So right now it's time for Cosmic Queries. We took your questions about the scientific search for the afterlife. So Matt, what do you have for us? Okay, first question comes from Nate Gaudiso from Facebook and says, could the afterlife and ghosts just be

reasonable science we don't yet understand? Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, what we can measure and what we can know is just what we know today. And every theory can be changed sometime tomorrow. So we have a long way to go to understand everything there is to know about the universe. Rebecca? Well, I... She means no. I don't believe... I've already told you. That's a no. I feel like that's the way you'd be leaning as well on this question, Neil.

No, I just think I haven't seen experiments to justify... The existence of those things. ...of ghosts. I'm open. Show me the data. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If the data's good, I'm good. But the question was, could there be a way of scientific investigation that will one day show if they're ghosts?

Fine. Possibly. I have no problems with that. And I just wonder if that's the case, about 100 billion people have ever lived. So you'd have like 100 billion ghosts just crammed in all these spaces. And you need some way to dispose of the ghost. You need the Ghostbuster. Because there's no room for all the ghosts.

If every dead human that ever was leaves a ghost behind. Unless they can stack in different dimensions. He's right, but I don't want to say he's right. We've got time for one more question. Go. We have one more. This is from Dan Latham. Says, will it be possible to use artificial intelligence to create an artificial afterlife?

If there's no heaven in the clouds, could there be an afterlife in the cloud? I got this. I got this. Once your consciousness is uploaded, then the concept of an afterlife is moot. Because there is no end of your life for there to be an afterlife.

As long as the data stays intact. Yeah, so as long as no one unplugs the... Well, up next, we dissect the mind of a serial killer when StarTalk returns. Here's a big Patreon shout-out to Ted Shevlin, Andrew Olquin, and Serge Rizzuto. That's right, Serge. We know who you are. Thank all three of you, and thank you if you support us on Patreon because you're helping to make StarTalk possible.

The future of space and the secrets of our planet revealed. This is StarTalk. Welcome back to Starkoff. We are featuring my interview with author Patricia Cornwell. She's written 24 best-selling crime fiction novels, but she's also taken a special interest in a real-life cold case. The infamous serial killer known as Jack the Ripper. Let's check it out.

What's this obsession you have with Jack the Ripper? This is, you know, I... Is it still unsolved? No, I know who it was. What? Of course not. It's solved, honey. Yes, Walter Sickert.

Really? The artist, absolutely. Really? I used science it was. Of course not. It's not old, honey. Yes, Walter Sickert. Really? The artist, absolutely. Really? I used science on it. Nobody ever bothered to try before. I looked at the only thing left is the letters. So you solved the Jack the Ripper question? I didn't solve it. The scientist that I brought into it solved it. And actually, it was Scotland Yard. You orchestrated the solution to that crime? Yes, because Scotland Yard came to me and suggested Walter Sickert, and I just did what they said, and I looked into it. They can't investigate that today. They don't even have enough cops

for the stuff that's going on now. So they can't be worried about a 104-year-old case, but he told me all about it. I didn't know anything about the case. And I asked who the victims were, and he told me the ones that we knew of, who the suspects, ones that we know of. I said, based on what? He said, nothing that we know of. I said, based on what?

Said nothing, based on nothing. I said, well, is there no evidence left in the case? It's time for Patricia to take over. And he said, well, there's just the letters that Jack the Ripper wrote. I said, I didn't know he wrote letters. I said, I'd like to take a look at those. So I went over to National Archives and they put me back in this vault, this room with vaults and all this. And I got scientists to look and we started finding paper matches between Sickert's stationery and Jack the Ripper's. Watermarks, measurements. I had the world's foremost paper expert involved. But it was Walter Sickert.

So Jack the Ripper, just to catch you up on this, is the unidentified killer linked to a series of unsolved murders in London during the 1800s. And Patricia thinks she cracked the case, but others disagree. Rebecca, you specialize in looking into people's brains to find out what happened to them. Is there anything about the brain of a serial killer that you might be able to extract from an autopsy? that you might be able to extract from an autopsy? Well, I hate to disappoint here, but actually an examination of a serial killer's brain is likely to show changes that any one of our brains could have or not have. What about the shooter in the University of Texas?

Well, he had a brain tumor, so that's one of the rare exceptions, a malignant brain tumor. And yes, that's what we look for, but one hardly ever finds it. Gotcha. Okay, this is the dead person's report. How about the live person's report? If you could put a psychopath like Jack the Ripper in an MRI or an fMRI, functional MRI, what do you think you'd find? They've actually done that.

They've actually done a number of studies looking at violent criminals and psychopaths. And to simplify the results a little bit, what has generally been seen is usually one of two basic kind of changes. We have a very strong emotional center, our limbic system, and we have our frontal lobe, which helps to control it. So when people are psychopaths or when they are violent criminals, our frontal lobe, which helps to control it. So when people are psychopaths or when they are violent criminals, either they tend to have overactive limbic systems, meaning that their emotions just really kind of run away with them and they can't control what they're doing because of that, or their frontal lobes are not working well. So even though they may have relatively normal emotional responses, they're just not able to control them well. But it seems to have

something to do with how they respond to their emotions, which then allows them to kind of commit these crimes. Now, there's lots of- That's a start. That's an important start. It's a start, right. I mean, it's not absolute, and there's certainly plenty of people who have limbic systems that run away with themselves and don't kill people. So we have a long way to go in terms of truly understanding, but we're making some inroads into it. So her novels center on forensic science, fine. It's a branch of all of science. But I had to ask her her thoughts on the wave of sort of science denial in America, something that I encounter in my everyday life and in my presence on social media. So I just wanted to get another

sort of perspective on it. Check it out. To me, it's like a virus or a malware that gets into human nature that makes people persist in believing nonsense like the flat earthers or believing that photographs taken at the gantry back in the 60s, that that was really the moonwalk, that we didn't go. I mean, what does it take to prove? I guess unless you put your hand in fire and get burned, maybe then you'll believe it's true. So I just feel this is a matter of life and death, that I have got to do something to get people to wake up to the importance of science and telling the truth and do exactly what the word autopsy means. If you go to the Greek root, it means autopsia, which means to see for yourself.

Science makes you see for yourself. It's clear and concise. Well, up next, my good buddy Bill Nye, the science guy, gives his take on the power of forensic science to solve a crime when StarTalk returns. of forensic science to solve a crime when StarTalk returns. This is StarTalk. Welcome back to StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History right here in New York City. We've been exploring the science of solving crimes. And my buddy Bill Nye the Science Guy has a dispatch for us from the Forensic

Science Lab. Check it out. Perhaps because life is so short, many of us are afraid of death, and a great many of us are fascinated with murder. Now, a forensic scientist can't always tell why someone would kill someone else. But using the modern tools of chemistry and biology especially, forensic experts are able to determine who, what, where, when, and how a crime was committed. The word forensic derives from the Latin to make public or get out in the open. Now, this works because almost any place you go in the present, a crime scene especially, is loaded with clues about what happened there in the past. So nowadays, forensic experts can pretty much tell who done it. So Rebecca, how hard is it to get away with a crime these days, thanks to the modern work that you do?

It's harder than it used to be, because we do have tools like DNA. But you could probably have always said that at any time. There was, oh, now we can use fingerprints. That's a new discovery. And now it's harder than ever before. So is there a point where you say, okay, we're plateauing here? It's not going to get... Well, I mean, we haven't reached 100% solving of every crime, so...

Do you feel like you could commit a perfect murder? Given what she knows, yeah. She knows. Good question. Be careful how you answer that one. Was that a yes or a no? Well, I would never be inclined to, but... That's a yes.

We need an interpreter for her under these situations. So, Andrew, what do you think in the future, like neuroscience could be used to help prevent and maybe even solve crimes well you know theoretically it's possible to do a better job you know get some very interesting ethical neuroethics they refer to it uh you know could you put a little cameras in our in our brains so that we can actually see you know they have cop cameras now i mean could we all have something like that in our brain maybe but is that is that okay? Is that okay to do?

But that would allow someone else to see through your eyes what you're doing. Right. That'd be a little invasive. How about a chip that prevents whatever neurosynapses would make you commit murder from actually firing? You know, it's also... If there's such a thing. Right. I mean, you know, it's a fascinating... I think about this a lot.

You know, why can't you go into the jails and go onto death row and, you know, do some kind of transcranial magnetic stimulation, this new thing where, you know, you try to. That's a thing? That's a thing. I thought you made that up on the fly. No. Did he make that up? I would never do such a thing here. That sounds like something out of Batman.

There's a transcranial stimulator off your utility belt, Batman. Believe it or not, and they're using it to help people with different psychological issues. So, you know, is it possible you could turn off those emotional centers of the brain? But now, how comfortable would we all feel? I mean, what if you could do some kind of chip or surgery on Adolf Hitler and say, okay, we're going to just send him back out into the world? I don't know how comfortable everybody would feel, even though we can prove scientifically that we may have changed the way the person thinks.

Do you imprison people to punish them, or do you imprison them so that they don't commit that crime again? And also, who gets to decide who has criminal intent? That sounds like it's very open to abuse. Ah, he looks a bit criminal. He better put the chip in. Yeah, well, like I said, there's a lot of very big neuroethical questions for us to deal

with, but they are fascinating. Well, crime author Patricia Cornwell is working on a new series about solving crimes in space. So I asked her about her process of writing stories by seeing for herself. If you're going to write a story about space, how are you going to see that for yourself? Because she likes being there. So I just had to get in there and find out. Let's check it out. I was on a rocket pad a couple months ago at Wallops Island. And you know what those things look like. They're just a bunch of grating and all this metal, right? And when I was standing there in this bitter, cold wind, I realized why you always have to show up.

Because I was hearing the sound the wind was making through the metal and it was playing like space music. All this eerie noises. And if I had not been there and stood there, I would not have been able to tell that full story of what it was like to be on that launch pad. This is my method. I have to sort of taste, touch, feel, smell what it is. I'm a primitive person. I pick it up and shake it and poke something with it and smell it and taste it and then realize it's arsenic and I shouldn't have. After the fact. But that's how I do things. It's like my world is a laboratory. And my job is to be like Cassini probe. I just gonna take in

the data and fire it right back to mission control. Only my mission control is the story it tells. You know, when I think of dead bodies, I don't like thinking of dead bodies, but when I do, no one wants to die, really? And why is that? Could it be because we fear death because we're born knowing only life?

And, okay, for me personally, when I die, I've thought this through. Don't cremate me. No. There's an energy content of your body. When you are burned, that energy is released from the molecules of your body. Molecules have energy contained within them. To burn is to break those bonds and release that energy. You then heat the air.

The air then radiates to space. Your energy is still there. It's just scattered into space. And nothing can really use it after that. It's in the lowest form of energy there is. Radiative heat. So I say to myself, hmm, I've spent my whole life dining on flora and fauna as an omnivore. and fauna as an omnivore. So for me, when I die, I want to be buried. Buried. I want to be consumed by the flora and fauna that I had spent my life dining upon myself. And in that way, I give back to the world

that had given me life and sustained me. That is a cosmic perspective. You've been watching StarTalk. I want to thank Rebecca Fulker. Andrew Newberg. Matt Kirshen. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. And as always, I bid you to keep looking up. Thank you.