Carl Zimmer
On this episode of The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast, we delve into the complex relationship between science, journalism, and the public. Our guest, renowned journalist Carl Zimmer, shares valuable insights on the importance of ethics and accurate information in scientific communication, highlighting instances of scientific discoveries being inaccurately reported by journalists and later retracted.
We explore the challenge of defining and resolving issues related to autonomy over one’s own body or termination of a fetus, emphasizing the stakes associated with this debate. The conversation also touches on the difficulty of defining what it means to be alive, referencing examples such as brain organoids, brain death, and the age-old debate of when life begins. Additionally, we discuss the importance of verifying scientific findings, with anecdotes including the NASA arsenic life debate and the need for scientists to maintain a PR budget for retractions. Join us as we explore the fascinating world of biology, physics, and the intricate questions they raise concerning life and death.
Resources and transcript here and below.
Carl Zimmer [00:00:00]:
Ask biologists themselves and be like, so what’s your definition of life? And they’d just be like, well, they might have some definition, and then the next person would have a different one. Or more often, they would just want to answer the question, be like, oh, I just study pythons. That’s what really fascinated me. And maybe that’s what made me sort of equip about astronomers having it more easy. All these people study the same thing they all study life and theory either don’t know how to define it, or they come up with definitions that are pretty different from each other. And I found that that has really stuck with me. And eventually I just sort of felt like I need to dive deep into this. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Brian Keating [00:00:44]:
Welcome, everybody, to a very promising and lively episode of the into the Impossible podcast. I started this podcast in earnest in 2020 during the Pandemic, when I said I was your fearful host. But I’ve become a lot less fearful and a lot more fearless since the advent of things like the maybe, perhaps the end of the COVID-19 Pandemic. We’ll talk with today’s guest, who’s renowned communicator writer, thinker journalist it’s Carl Zimmer, joining us all the way from the Nutmeg State on the East Coast. I think I got that right. How are you today, Carl?
Carl Zimmer [00:01:24]:
I’m good.
Brian Keating [00:01:25]:
It’s great to meet you. And today we’re talking about your latest book, your most recent book, A Life’s Edge, which kept me on the edge of my seat for a variety of reasons. And it’s somewhat remarkable to me that perhaps of all the authors who have graced me with their presence on this podcast, this book has perhaps the highest number of intersectional networking nodes with people both located here in San. Diego or former guests of the podcast or folks that we did not get on the podcast because they passed away and other sort of assorted connections that really makes this conversation unique. But I always like to have my author guests go through an exercise which you’re not supposed to do, but we don’t have anything else to go on if we have not encountered your work, and that’s to judge your book by its cover. Carl, I want to ask you, what is the genesis, the origin story of the title of the book, the illustration? And I always find the subtitle fascinating. And as I said, you can’t say my publisher forced me to do it.
Carl Zimmer [00:02:38]:
This is all mine, I’m happy to say. I mean, sometimes my editors, Steven Morrow Dutton, is very good with titles and so on. So if it’s not working out for me, I know he’ll have my back. But this time around, yeah, life’s edge. I think what I wanted to convey with that was that we have this idea of life being a thing, and there’s sort of a border between life and whatever isn’t life, whether it’s life and death or living things and inanimate things. And I wanted to in a way, I’m sort of playing with that, that there’s this edge, like it’s sharp and I wanted to sort of make the point that it’s actually not and it’s very hard to find and you can get kind of lost looking for it. And that sort of leads to the subtitle, which is this search, this search for what it means to be alive. Because there really has been a struggle for centuries and it’s one that I think biologists themselves sometimes don’t even really acknowledge just how much of a struggle it has been and how much longer there is to go. And we were trying to figure out what would be a good thing to put on the COVID And there are lots of critters that I talk about in the book, lots of cool things and weird things. And we settled on a picture. I’m just going to hold it up here to show you. This is this strange rainbow colored blob. This is a brain organoid. It was started from a volunteer who provided skin cells and then biologists, actually at University of California, San Diego coaxed that skin cell with some chemicals through a series of steps and developments to become a neuron, a brain cell. And not just any brain cell, but the kind of early brain cell that would form in an embryo which then multiplied and grew into something like a brain. And so one of the names that people give this thing is a brain organoid and it sits there in a bath of chemicals. The neurons release electrical signals and there are these deep questions that something like that creates. I mean, these things have only been around for a few years, but they can grow to the size of a sugar cube, a sand grain, maybe even a little bigger, getting towards rice grain size. Are they alive? Are they living things? When we think about ourselves as being alive, we really think about it in terms of our brains. Like, well, of course I’m alive because I’m conscious. And we actually have come to define death by brains death. So here you have this thing that’s made of human brain cells that behaves very much like a human brain. It’s not connected to a human body, but the cells metabolize and they can divide. So what is it? Is it alive? I think that would be a very hard thing, a question to answer. And I look at other of these hard cases in the book.
Brian Keating [00:06:19]:
Yeah, the book is really sort of the exploration of the edge of the boundary between living and nonliving. And I always find those things get us into trouble and things are kind of ambiguous. The human mind, as you point out in the book, is not so simple to really model or predict even. And now with the advent of large language models and chat GBT type things. And past guest on the show, Max Tegmark has made the argument that Life 3.0 is really basically here and will be abundant and perhaps supersede Life 2.0. I think we’re like 2.1 in his cognition scheme. But yes, the brain organoid was a fascinating episode. With my colleague Alison Mochi, we did a conversation, I’ve solicited a question for you from him, which we will talk about. He raves about his experience getting to know you and there are many connections here at San Diego that we’ll get into, including the Miller Uri experiment. Harold Uri and Miller were eventually here at UC San Diego. Romeo Marrow, who’s a renowned professor in chemistry, theoretical chemist, who’s here, who did a lot of contributions to some of your piece in the New York Times from a year or two ago when the pandemic was sort of fresh and it was vital to get that information out. But I want to start with maybe a surprising connection, which maybe you didn’t know about or maybe you wouldn’t have agreed. Actually, you agreed to come on the podcast after a very cheeky and perhaps annoying tweet of mine where you said, imagine if astronomers couldn’t agree on what a planet was and here we are. We can’t agree on what life is. I said, Carl, I have news for you. I have good news and bad news. So we don’t agree. And it’s not so simplified or simple to really ascertain what is a planet, what is a star, even? What is the universe, what is the multiverse? These are all sort of ambiguous things which relates really to the first topic that I encountered in the book that had a nexus with this podcast. And surprisingly, Carl, that’s with Ben Shapiro, who is a friend of mine and has been on the podcast three times and you talk about life. His quote is one of the opening chapters of the book. You talk about Life begins at conception. The conservative pundit Ben Shapiro declared in 2017 that’s not a religious belief, that’s science. And I want to ask about that because I think these essence of some of the polarization that we suffer in science and society is because of the difficulty the human mind has with ambiguous states. So Schrodinger type states and Schrodinger will play a big role in this podcast, as you undoubtedly are aware. So when you have a superposition of possibilities, live and unlive fetus, a baby machine gun and anti tank weapon, you straddle the spectrum of reasonableness ranging from life begins at conception, as one person might believe, to life can be terminated up until the point of full, full term birth. So what do you think? Is that sort of border? I mean, is it something that we’re fundamentally doomed to never really be able to resolve because of the ambiguity in these matters? In other words, because the human brain is so bad at dealing between things that aren’t exactly black and white. Is that part of the difficulty, or is it deeper than that in the definition of what life is? Just a quick pause to ask you for a small favor. While my thumb is occupied with old albert on it, yours is presumably freed up to leave a thumbs up on this video really helps me a lot with a good old fashioned YouTube algorithm. Thanks a lot. Now back to the video.
Carl Zimmer [00:10:05]:
Well, I think in the case that you provided, I think one of the fundamental problems with these sorts of slogans like life begins at conception is I’ve looked it’s very difficult to actually figure out what people mean when they say that. There are, as I explained in the book, hundreds of definitions of life. But I never actually hear somebody actually like, really? It’s hard to find anyone. Lay it out what they really mean when they say that life begins. At conception because and and you know, if you know, there are plenty of ways in which you can think about life and that would not begin the beginning of conception because the cells that gave rise to that zygote were themselves alive. Now, 1 may want to say, well, there’s something special about that life, but now all of a sudden, we’re in a different ballgame. I mean, that’s different than saying life begins. It’s saying, well, this special life begins. Or when I say life, I mean this saying life begins as a conception. It’s a catchy slogan, but if you really try to analyze it, it falls apart. And as a society, as a democracy, we need to come to agreements about these things in agreements with people we may disagree with. I think it’s telling that we have ended up with, I’d say, a fair agreement about talking about life and when it ends. The idea of brain death in the history of understanding life, it’s pretty recent. It really only started to emerge in the 1960s, and it emerged because of technology. It wasn’t because of some philosophical issue or so on. It was basically that there were ventilators that could keep people their heart still beating when otherwise they would have been dead. And transplant surgeons were figuring out how to save people’s lives by giving them transplants. And they sort of felt like, we need to like, for the good of everybody here, we need to figure out what we mean to say that someone is still alive or someone is dead. And that definition that was hashed out very clearly, explicitly with philosophers and bioethicists and so on, and that definition is brain death. Now, that can be controversial sometimes. And I write in the book about there have been cases where people are like, no, I don’t want to accept this, and I don’t want to accept what the state of california says is dead, right? But it’s nothing compared to the conflict over the beginning when we talk about embryos and fetuses.
Brian Keating [00:13:42]:
Yeah. And that that kind of, you know, is is a hybrid of a hybrid or a superposition because you’re keating of life and then an abortion, you’re dealing with the potential termination of a life or potential life. The potential termination of a potential life. But in terms of but just to.
Carl Zimmer [00:14:03]:
Point out how complicated this all is, what do we mean by a potential life? You just use that phrase as if we all know what it means and we all agree on what that means. And I would just say we all need to stop and really think more carefully about these things because it is a lot more slippery than we may appreciate, and it’s getting more slippery. And so this actually brings us back to those brain organoids. Just as technology has created a new challenge in terms of understanding when life ends, in terms of, you know, brain death, ventilator, ventilators transplantation and so on, technology has made it possible to start creating organoids. And so these are just like from skin cells, as I said. So every one of your skin cells has this potential life. Maybe not a life of someone walking around and being on a podcast. Sure. But if we define life in other ways by saying, well, brain activity would appear to be brainwave oscillations, development of different layers of the cortex, it’s all there. So if every skin cell in our body has potential life, what is our obligation to our skin? Because we are sloughing off countless skin cells every single day.
Brian Keating [00:15:45]:
Sure.
Carl Zimmer [00:15:46]:
Are we getting rid of potential, all those potentials lies every day? And I’m not trying to be facile here. I’m just sort of saying, let’s think and rethink about all these terms that we’re using because they’re not as simple as we tend to think they are.
Brian Keating [00:16:01]:
Yeah, I mean, I’ve had on several eminent scholars, philosophers of consciousness and the brains and activity related to that domain, which you just mentioned is sort of the cynical non of lively, maybe human life or termination of the right to terminate. Although you point out in the book case of a young girl who basically goes through puberty and menstruates and so forth, and she’s brains. But again, getting back to what I think is not the explanation, the resolution of the difficulty, but I think the origin of the problem when we talk about, well, pornography is something that, you know, when you see it okay, that affects people. But it’s very different from autonomy over one’s own body or a living, a baby. I mean, nobody ever comes up to a woman who’s carrying determinants, has the fetus or how’s your embryo? And they usually say, how’s your baby? When’s the baby due? So again, it’s something you know when you see it. But with pornography, it doesn’t impact, again, your astronomy, your freedom, possibly big made criminal in certain locations. So I guess the stakes are so much higher and even with gun rights, you don’t have to own a gun, right? There’s no mandate. And I think even reasonable people, members of the NRA, would say, look, you can’t operate a portable thermonuclear device and call that part of a well regulated militia. On the other hand, having some mode of self defense might be applicable to even David Hogg or some activist on the opposite side. So I guess I’m saying is the stakes are so high combined with this particular topic, and I think that combined with the human being’s inability to deal with these questions because we are classical creatures, we live in a quantum world. And I think it’s appropriate we should turn to Schrodinger, who did approach this topic way back when, in the 50s, when he was an eminent Nobel laureate, coming up with the canonical equations of quantum mechanics that govern the behavior of essentially all of chemistry and part of physics. And obviously, chemistry is very deeply related to life and its existence and its definition. Now, Schrodinger like these people that I talk to, like David Tralmers, like Nick Ballstrom and other people, when I ask them, what is consciousness? I get a 20 minutes definition, Carl. And that’s okay, because, look, if we can’t define what it means to be a bat, that doesn’t affect some woman’s right to do something with her body or with a fetus or with a baby, right? But in this case, it does. So I think Schrodinger’s question basically has not been definitively answered. But I think your book is an approach to surveying the landscape both from the macroscopic down to the quantum. And I wonder you’ve done a lot of work. She has. Her mother’s Laugh is genetic in nature, the history of her edibility planet of viruses. You’ve done a lot in this field. What is it about this question that seems to fascinate you so much so that you’ve dedicated a considerable amount of your professional career to issues of the biological sciences, life chromosomes and viruses, et cetera.
Carl Zimmer [00:19:09]:
So I started out as a journalist at a magazine called Discover, and I was just an assistant editor there doing some copy editing and some fact checking. And then they let me start to write little articles, and I would write about all sorts of different things because we couldn’t be too precious about what we would or wouldn’t write about. So I was writing about physics and technology and astronomy and all sorts of stuff, and I was enjoying all of it. But it just felt like when I would write about biology, I would just be reading a study and say, like, wait. What? Really? This exists? This is how this works? I would just continually be surprised every week. There would be at least one thing that just blew my mind once I was at the point where I could gravitate towards when I wanted to write about features at Discover and then working with other magazines like Natural Geographic or The Atlantic biology was really what I wanted to write about. And you could also just write about so much, and yet it was all interconnected in interesting ways, most importantly through evolution, that this principle just helps you to understand how everything there are these themes to how living things work. And not only that, but it all comes from the same common ancestors. And I’ve had the luxury of, well, I started in the so I I didn’t realize it, but I was going to be riding this wave of, you know, the modern science of genomics, of molecular biology, which just took us down to this incredible level of detail that I really couldn’t imagine before. I’m writing stories now that are regularly about people who are analyzing the genomes of hundreds of different species in one study. And that’s just standard. There’s so much information, and the insights are really profound. But along the way, I have to say that every now and then I’d be like, okay, clearly what really I’m interested in is life. Okay, what exactly am I writing about? I had read Schrodinger and Other Things, but then I would start to think, like, well, have people really sorted this out very well? And I would ask biologists themselves and be like, so what’s your definition of life? And I’d be talking to someone who studies pythons or somebody who studies crabs or somebody who studies Venus fly traps. And they’d just be like, well, they might have some definition, and then the next person would have a different one. Or more often, they would just really not want to answer the question, be like, oh, I just study pythons. That’s what really fascinated me. And maybe that’s what made me sort of quip about astronomers having it more easy. Like, all these people study the same thing. They all study life and either don’t know how to define it or they come up with definitions that are pretty different from each other. And I found that that has really stuck with me. And eventually I just sort of felt like I need to dive deep into this. And it was so interesting to see just how long of a history there’s been to this and how the struggles that people have today in the 21st century are very they echo things in the 18 hundreds, the 17 hundreds, the 16 hundreds. This is a long struggle, and we’re not done with it.
Brian Keating [00:23:12]:
Yeah. And I wonder how much of that is driven by something I call the academic media Hype complex, which is that we researchers need to depend on funding sources, which depend on our ability to get results and drive research publications, obtain funding, obtain students to work with us and collaborate with other researchers. And I wonder if your journalistic kind of neck hairs ever really stand up on edge when you’re dealing with people. I’ll just say my friend Lee Cronin features very prominently in the book, and especially at the very end, I don’t think it’s a spoiler about the book for a little while. It’s not like I’m revealing who done it, but his assembly theory. And he was asked famously, and my audience would be quite annoyed at me if I didn’t at least press you on your opinions about it. But they pressed me on why is it that he said in 2010 at his Ted Talk that life would be created in the lab in the next 22 months, or whatever he said, and here we are 13 years later, and we can’t seem to come up with it. I wonder, what do you believe is the job of a journalist communicating to the public or a popular science author, both of which careers you’ve enjoyed? What role do you have to sort of call out like, this doesn’t really I mean, you guys have been saying similar things, as you said for decades now, and this is true in the alien extraterrestrial intelligence hunting field that I’m tangentially involved with at times. So what point do you ever inject yourself into the story? You do a lot of this is like a memoir of this book in a part. You’re doing experiments, you’re creating compounds. You’re meeting with faculty here in California and elsewhere. What is your responsibility as a journalist or on a mission and a popular science book to maybe expose and call out BS when you see it? Do you ever have that as a conflict?
Carl Zimmer [00:25:12]:
I don’t see it as a conflict. I see it as one of the jobs that science writers and journalists more generally should do. And I think that when writing about science, the challenge is that there’s a lot of work to be done to explain the ideas and the experiment, the research, the concepts in these areas. That takes a lot of work and a lot of space. But at the same time, I think it is important, if people are trying to hype up the stuff that they’re doing, to take a skeptical look, especially if people are sort of setting their own goals. I mean, I’ve done that a lot. I’d say I’ve done that trying to think areas where I’ve done that with the genome, the human genome. When Francis Collins and others, James Watson, were lobbying for the money to do the first draft of the human genome, it was a big ask. They were wanting billions of dollars, and they were trying to justify it. They were promising that there would be a lot of medical benefits that would come out of it. And I would say, like, five years after the draft genome was published in, I guess, was that 2001, 2002? It’s not like people were getting cured of cancer or something like that. And there were years were going by where critics were saying, what about those promises that you made? I think it’s important to quote those promises and look at what’s happened. But I also think that even when you remember the history of these things, it’s also important to recognize the complexity, because if I would go say to a cancer biologist and say, you know what? They made a bunch of promises, and in five years, there weren’t any great cancer drugs that came out of it. So I tell you what. You can’t use the human genome anymore. They say whoa, whoa, whoa. No, I’m sorry. I’m not giving this back. This map of the human genome is a tool that I cannot live without. And the fact is that there are a lot of really promising treatments today. We’re talking, like, two decades later. Having that map of the human genome was just essential. It just was. So if you were expecting things in five years and you started getting them in 20, what is that? I think it would be wrong to say, like, it was a complete waste. It wasn’t. There is a contrast between people’s expectations when the project started and how things really played out.
Brian Keating [00:29:05]:
Right on the hype side, you feature a lot of very interesting anecdotes that I’ve drawn upon many times in my career, both to illustrate the kind of nexus between promotion and publication and scientific research and funding. And one of those is very famous because it appears in the movie Contact, featuring past guest avatar Jill Tarder, played by Jody Foster. And it was written, co written, by Carl Sagan and his wife andurian who’s been a guest on this podcast along with her daughter. I think I’m the first podcaster to have both of them on the podcast. And when we discuss that particular movie, there’s a science in there where Bill Clinton is on the White House lawn. He’s talking about how revolutionary this discovery of the signal from alien extraterrestrial intelligence is. Now, of course, that wasn’t real, but the actual footage is real, and he’s really talking about the discovery of these microbes found on a meteorite that landed in Antarctica, where I’ve been twice, and that discovery, and you go through it. So here’s a meteorite. And by the way, if you have a email address, you sign up for my mailing list and I will send you a meteorite. That’s Briankeating.com list, because I love distributing materials. But it was kind of bespeaks of not the origin of life itself, but the origin of life perhaps on Earth or some form of life coming from Mars. And I like to point out that it took a very long time and was really if you survey even scientists and you say, what’s the status of the proof or dispositiveness of the Allen Hills meteorite in terms of life for Martian microbes? And even scientists will tell me that, oh, it could be. Still hasn’t been definitively ruled out. It was published in Science. As you point out. It was leaked, and then Clinton talked about it dan golden used it as a motivation to get more funding for NASA’s nascent astrobiology. The point is, a lot of people in the public never know the inside baseball unless they read this book or have seen in another format. So what obligation do you think a scientist has to maintain a budget for publicization of retractions and sort of to come clean about this thinking also of the discovery of arsenic life, also published in Science, also shown not to be replicable. These are huge things, and it impacts the public’s understanding. So do you think scientists I’ve called for scientists to maintain some PR budget for retractions as sort of a lockbox.
Carl Zimmer [00:31:45]:
What do you think?
Brian Keating [00:31:46]:
How do you think we can handle this so that the public is not left with a sense of mistrust of what scientists actually do?
Carl Zimmer [00:31:55]:
Well, the arsenic life example is a really interesting one. I mean, that was a case where people had found bacteria in a lake in California that seemed to be using arsenic to build their DNA, which would really just be just something that we have never seen before. And I remember that Hype was really kind of mind blowing for from the Journal and from NASA, and they were just ready to launch with it. At the time, I was writing a fair amount for Slate and my editor and I, Dan Engber, who’s a great science writer in his own right, he’s at The Atlantic now. We were saying, like, just emailing back and forth, like, I don’t know, this seems kind of funny to us. This is back in the age of blogging, and there was a very small blog that I a couple of small blogs that I like to read that I mean small just in terms of they had small audiences, big ideas, small audiences. But I was one of them, and then they were like microbiologists and such, and they were like, this doesn’t seem right. So I just said, look, let me just go, like, check with a bunch of experts. And so I think I just emailed like a dozen top people and pretty much they are all like, this is terrible. Like, okay, that’s the story. So that’s what I wrote. I think the headline was like, this paper should have never been published. I think that was in quotes. That was what one of these people said. I think that accurately reflected this sort of feeling of a lot of scientists. And they actually then published their own studies saying, like, look, no, this was all an artifact. You didn’t control for things carefully, and so on and so forth. That is a part of science, like getting ahead of your skis. And it’s not a judgment, it’s just an observation. And I start the book with someone who got way ahead of his skis about 100 years ago, James Butler Burke, this physicist who thought that he had created life in the lab and. People believed him. He was being celebrated around the world, like newspapers are calling him. He published a book shortly afterwards about this incredible experiment he did with radium and protein broth. And people are saying this is like on par with the origin of species. This is artificial life. They would use these terms. And it was all wrong. It was completely botched. And a few scientists doggedly proved that that was the case. But I agree that it’s important to put some focus on what happens after the big flashy paper. Do the findings hold up? Do they not? Where does science go? Because science is not just one flashy paper at a time, but the fact is that it’s a lot harder to capture people’s interests about a retraction of a paper they may barely have remembered reading about if they read about it at all five or ten years ago. So it’s not easy and it’s not just doing it doesn’t necessarily fix that problem you’re identifying.
Brian Keating [00:35:41]:
I wonder if it’s a journalism problem as much as a scientific problem in that, as you say, we’ve had my own encounter with front page above the fold in the New York Times discovery, which then later had to be rescinded the claims that we made. Not that we didn’t make a blunder, we didn’t leave the lens cap on the telescope, but we misinterpreted the signal as coming from the inflationary origin of the entire beginning of time. And in fact, we had seen just specks of dust in the cosmic interstellar wind. And when that was finally retracted, to the extent that it was thanks to a reanalysis of our data that was on page 816 of the Saturday edition, that it’s the least read edition of newspaper. So I wonder yeah, if we can sort of have both in terms of ethics and in terms of publicization, there are many kind of ethical edges as well as life edges. For example, I did an interview with James Toure, who’s actually, how shall I say he’s a messianic Jew, which means that he was actually born Jewish, became Christian, and he’s extremely devout but highly cited, named Distinguished Chair at Rice University. And he presented a survey that was done independently. I think it was done by the National Science Foundation. And it said, ask the public what is the most advanced form of life that scientists have been able to create? And the majority of respondents said something like a frog. There was admittedly only a few different choices. There was a cell DNA. And of course, you know, there’s nothing even really close to that. But I wonder and it reminds me of a talk of another study by the National Science Foundation that asked Americans, which habit does the sun orbit the Earth or not? And 25% of Americans said, the sun does orbit the Earth. Now people aren’t publishing papers anymore that say the sun orbits the Earth the way they might have done in Ptolemy’s day, in the Ptolemy Times or the Alexandria Times. But people like La Jolla denizen Craig Venttner, who’s I don’t believe he makes an appearance in this book, maybe didn’t, but he’ll come out and say, well, he created artificial life, the first artificial life. And even closer to home is the case of the Miller Uri experiment. Because if you ask people, even scientifically well inclined people, people I’ve had on the podcast, they’ll say that the Miller Uri experiment definitively showed that we could create, if not DNA, precursors to DNA. And as you point out, it’s really not true. Right.
Carl Zimmer [00:38:26]:
So.
Brian Keating [00:38:29]:
How do we combat that? Because I think the light of Truth should be most prominent and we should become clean about what we are able to do such that when we do make life in the lab or do discover extraterrestrials, that people will be appropriately appreciative of it. So I don’t know if there’s really a question there, but I’d love to hear your take on it. What do we make of the very large incentivization to make these bold claims and the lingering aftertaste in the public that may redound to the detriment of the public?
Carl Zimmer [00:39:05]:
Well, I do think that a big challenge with all this is just that there’s just a lot of science that gets done and it’s hard to we come up with these sort of shorthands to remember what’s going on. Certainly, in my experience, like talking to scientists, if we move out of their field of expertise, they’re kind of castarniglial fuzzy on things as well. And I don’t begrudge them. It’s challenging. And I think the way that the human mind works is to go from like, okay, here’s this interesting but complicated set of results to being like, okay, here’s this quick, simple story. And I’ll remember that instead. I don’t think we’re going to solve the problem of the human brain anytime soon. But I think that if you’re bringing up fundamental things about the sun and so on, I don’t see a place for journalists to be. Like, the way that news works just makes it difficult to address those sort of fundamental issues. I mean, there’s another there’s another number. I think it’s maybe the same survey that you looked at. My one that really caught my eye is that actually the majority of people think that electrons are bigger than atoms. I mean, that’s like a majority. And I’m like, that’s interesting because I have no idea why people would think that. But most people do. Most Americans who are surveyed at least the format of news is not such that we will, like, have a headline saying, like, newsflash electrons are smaller than atoms. Like, that’s just not that’s not going to work. You know, the best that I can think of is just redoubling an emphasis on better science education from kindergarten through high school. I keep coming back to that. Most people are not science PhDs. Most people don’t even take a college science class. This is where our focus needs to be.
Brian Keating [00:41:42]:
Yeah, just a quick closing anecdote about that survey about the sun orbiting the Earth. So I cited that statistic on the occasion of Galileo’s 450th birthday, I believe it was, and at his actual final resting place, prison in Archetri, Italy, outside of Florence, and there was a crowd of astronomers gathered there. And at first I showed the statistic because it was kind of pertinent. It said, 25% of Americans believe that the sun orbits the Earth, and all the Italians, stupid American. And I said, but guess what? And I showed them. The European Research Council did the same survey, and 33% of Europeans believe that. So they’re really not in a position to judge us Americans. One of the best, most enjoyable parts as a physicist was the kind of delineation and the history of how physics has really informed biology. And I wonder if you could comment on that. What were some of the surprising things you learned about? I didn’t really realize. Della Brook obviously, I knew Schrodinger, but della Brooke obviously. Lisa Meitner was an x ray. Crystallographer, I believe Watson was also trained as a physicist. Crick was trained as a physicist. Perhaps there are many, many crossovers between physics, which is reputed to be the science of the 20th century, and biology, which is reputed to be the science of the 21st century. So what were some of the surprising findings and learnings that you encountered along the way of writing this book?
Carl Zimmer [00:43:18]:
I think it was very interesting to kind of get into the perspective of people like Delbrook and Schrodinger and these other physicists who were and crick and just thinking from their perspective as people looking at life and from their experience studying radioactivity, studying quantum physics and so on and saying, like, okay, like quantum physics, I think I get quantum physics, but life okay. That’s weird. And I want to think about life. It’s very different than the main sort of trunk of the main channel of the history of biology, where you had naturalists, you had starting with Aristotle just splashing around lagoons and dissecting aquatic creatures and so on, all the way on through Linnaeus, marching around in Lapland and capturing every living thing he could find. Obviously, biology has taken in all of the tools of physics and a lot of the concepts of physics at a kind of a lower level in the sense of, obviously, thank you, physics for the electron microscope. Thank you for crystallography. Oh, my goodness. And now we have fancier things like cryoEM and so on. And that’s all great, but for a day to day biologist, I might be like, okay, great. So now I can really look at the ribosome and how it makes proteins, and that’s all I care about. That’s all I want to do. I love looking at ribosomes, and that’s all I care about. But the fact is that a lot of these physicists were actually, like, saying, no, wait, I don’t care about the many, many details of life and there are many details of life. I want to know this big question, the question the shorter manager asked. What is life like? I want to ask as a physicist and it’s really neat to hang out with the physicists today who are still asking that question and still working on these theories and doing some experiments to try to get at that. Maybe these physicists will actually build a theory of life and then maybe someday we will look at life as just a property of matter in the same way we think of superconductivity as a property of matter. Not everything has superconductivity, but there’s not just one thing that has superconductivity. You can have a theory to understand how under some circumstances, some materials will have superconductivity. Maybe we can say the same things about life someday. We can’t do it now we don’t have a theory of life, right?
Brian Keating [00:46:37]:
And maybe, like superconductivity, it’ll emerge as a consequence of deeper complexity that’s hard to understand by merely breaking it into the sum of its parts. I wonder as we’re coming up on the hour and I have several questions from the audience and also my existential questions that I love to ask my guests, if you’re willing to answer one or two of those. When we think about the discovery of extraterrestrial life, moving from the generation of life on Earth, perhaps, but extraterrestrial life, what do you think it would mean to discover there’s some other form of life? Perhaps there’s life here, as past guest Paul Davies might hypothesize that there might be a shadow biosphere hiding in plain sight or lurking on some minor body in our solar system. What would you think would be the impact of a discovery? Let’s not say Ellie Arrowway discovering 5D tesseracts and whatnot, but let’s restrict it to the slime, mold planet orbiting around proximal century b and that’s all there is. What do you think that would mean for our understanding not only of life but of ourselves?
Carl Zimmer [00:47:55]:
Well, I mean, scientifically, I think it would be a huge deal because either it will be a lot like life as we know it or it will completely expand our concept of what it means to be alive. All of life on Earth is kind of boring in the sense that it’s all DNA as far as being yourself.
Brian Keating [00:48:21]:
You’ve never babysitted my kids.
Carl Zimmer [00:48:23]:
Carl well, there might be interesting abstentions. Yeah, no, I mean boring, just not in the phenotype. But when you get down to the genotype, when you get down to those molecules that are carrying on life through the generations, it’s all DNA. And it’s like, I mean, the code is pretty much the same. So it would be amazing, as Paul Davies has suggested, like, maybe there’s RNA life that’s lurking in the tiny pores of rocks where DNA life can’t go and eat it, maybe or something a fifth base. But I think what’s interesting is it’s been interesting to look at how astronomy have been looking at and discovering exoplanets. And I think we kind of looked at our own solar system and said, like, oh, yeah, I guess we get planets, so it’ll be just like this. Well, no, it’s like it turns out like planets around other stars are kind of mind blowing. They don’t play by quite play by the rules we thought the planets played by so you just have these huge planets right next to their sun or you’d have just planets going around dead stars or just all sorts of stuff. And so it would be exciting if life elsewhere in the universe challenged us that way. Even if it doesn’t, just finding it would be amazing. But I think that to a culture where we watch science fiction movies and the aliens are all bearing a very striking resemblance to Hollywood extras, bigger forehead. Yeah. I just think people might feel I hope people will be able to feel some of the excitement that scientists will feel. Even if it’s just slime molds or bacteria. I still think that things like that single celled life will be amazing. If it’s out there, maybe it’s not, right?
Brian Keating [00:50:44]:
Yeah. My basic prediction is that we won’t find intelligent life because simply, the argument always goes as made by Carl Sagan and Andrew and in that apocalyptic contact where they say if there’s not life out there, it’s an awful waste of space. But, Carl, I’ve been to Antarctica twice, to the South Pole even, and Antarctica is one 7th of the Earth’s space in terms of continental shelf, and there’s not much life there. There are a couple of penguins near the ocean, some seals. There aren’t even very many microbes and certainly not a lot of flora. And so just saying that there is surface area, other planets perhaps, which is undoubtedly true, has no bearing on whether or not it’s probabilistic. And in fact, I’ll run this argument by you. Tell me what you make of it. It’s not something I’m really an expert in, but the fact that we haven’t really discovered well, we certainly haven’t discovered life in our solar system outside of Earth. We’ve set in the thin kind of veneer that covers the Earth’s surface or tardigrades that float around, I guess, but that’s about it. And yet the Earth has been exchanging material. Just like the Allen Hills meteorite came from Mars and this meteorite came from the asteroid belt, so too are pieces of the Earth potentially carrying base pairs and DNA enzymes and maybe even microbes and tardigrades landing on presumably on landing on Mars, Enceladus and other places. So the fact that we don’t see any evidence for it, of course, you can’t say lack of evidence is evidence of absence, as Carl Sagan also said. But I wonder it has to tell you something about the prior probability distribution, the fact that if you did see some form of life, you’d say, okay, it is. Once life gets started anywhere in the solar system, it immediately spreads. That can’t be true, because we don’t see it anywhere else but Earth. So, anyway, you can react to that if you choose. But I have a series of audience questions that I love to also ask you.
Carl Zimmer [00:52:46]:
Well, we haven’t looked all that hard for life, put it that way. We could have potentially contaminated Mars already with our spacecraft, but we don’t know yet, because it’s not as if there’s a microbiologist up there who is doing the kind of research to find those things. There could be subterranean life in Mars, and our probes have not yet really done the work to find it. They found some odd plumes of methane that might or might not be life. We don’t know. But as you say on Earth, we have Antarctica, we have the oceans, which we’ve barely explored. And if you’ve never seen a blue whale and you go take a swim and you don’t see a blue whale, that doesn’t mean the blue whales aren’t out there, right?
Brian Keating [00:53:43]:
Or a giant kelp ball like you encounter here in Lawyer Shores at the very outset of the book. Okay, some questions if you would give me your forbearance to ask of you. So I asked our friend Alison Mochri, who reminder, we did a podcast with him in studio here at UCSD a couple of months ago, and that title of that episode is to help his autistic son, He Grows brains in Space. A little bit of hype on my part, but it is true he has a very personal mission, as you know, to conquer autism and to explore the deeper regions of the human brain. Allison says, oh, yes, I would love to hear from him if his concept of life has changed after he wrote the book and what he would call life now, even outside of Earth. Enjoy the conversation. He is very nice to talk to.
Carl Zimmer [00:54:37]:
Yeah, I I was kind of, you know, life concept agnostic before. I think I’m more so now. I think that I think I the philosopher Carol Cleland, I think really makes a very compelling case. I feel it more compelling now that it’s just the wrong way of going about understanding life, that that scientists should be trying to to find a theory that explains what we call life. It’s fine if we sort of have sort of placeholders for what life is, but life transcends all that. I feel that more so than ever, having worked on this book.
Brian Keating [00:55:26]:
Good. And next, turning to a question tangentially related to future guest on the podcast, hopefully Professor Romeo Amari here at UCSD. And that’s your work on COVID. This is sort of kind of update from audience members. And then I have a follow up sort of what is the best current thinking about the origin of COVID You’ve written definitively about it in the New York Times and elsewhere. What do you think is the origin of we started off with, like, religion, so now we got to pivot to something very contrary. We won’t get into anti vaccination though, don’t worry. But tell me, what is the best thinking or perhaps your best understanding of how COVID in fact, originated?
Carl Zimmer [00:56:11]:
Well, there’s been a group of virologists who have studied the emergence of viruses for a while, and they have published a couple papers in Science where they make the case that there was a spillover, multiple spillovers, at a market in Wuhan. And they marshal evidence just in terms of distribution of samples in its marketplace and an analysis of the mutations in the virus. But if people want to have video footage of a raccoon dog, that’s like coughing, and then that person next to that raccoon dog inhaled it, and that person tested positive, and then you can trace from there, they don’t have it. We would never be able to get that the animals that were there were all killed. So we’re in a tough situation now. There have been certainly in congressional hearings talking about raising questions about what was happening miles away at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Other people have pointed out this Chinese center for disease control had a facility that was closer to the market. If somebody were to say like, okay, here we have this lab data that shows that here’s this virus that was collected from, I don’t know, let’s say southern China, and it’s the sequence of almost SARS CoV two. And then we did this to it, and that was the SARS CoV two genome. Then you could say, AHA, but you’d still have to explain why it is that a lot of the early cases appear to have been not just people associated with the market, but just people who lived near the market. Those things have been challenged by people who say, oh, well, you can’t trust those early cases. Well, that’s what we’ve got so far. So I’m sure this is not a satisfying answer for anybody. It shouldn’t be. And we could certainly stand with looking at more information. And, you know, I do think that, you know, it’s, it’s also important to, to recognize that spillovers are a regular part of, ah, the world of pathogens. And, you know, we’ve seen it with HIV and SARS and influenza and so on. And so regardless of the specifics of what happened here, we know there are lots of coronaviruses and bats. We know they get into other hosts, we know there’s influenza, we know there’s knee provide, blah, blah, blah. There are a lot of viruses that are knocking at the door.
Brian Keating [00:59:33]:
And also the gain of function type behavior. I’ve had COVID only once, thankfully. Somehow my wife’s managed to avoid it despite the numerous children running around and all of us having gotten it. But I got it, Carl. I dropped £5. And I always joke I dropped £5 from my chin to my stomach. But no, I lost weight. I lost my sense of taste and smell and it was clear to me there were some benefits. I mean, I hate to sound callous at all, but I could envision after that. And especially maybe you’ll be sorry I’m saying this but after reading your book I almost thought, well, what if, like some alien civilization is using us for gain of function for them? I mean it’s pretty far fetched, especially for someone that doesn’t believe there’s advanced extraterrestrial intelligence that’s regularly visiting us here in Southern California. But I wonder, Carl, is it not true that gain of function has potential utility? And to say that we weren’t pursuing that in some level wouldn’t that be kind of negligent on behalf of people that support scientific research and so forth? That maybe there are not COVID especially it killed a million people plus worldwide. But this concept of gain of function, do you see it as having value?
Carl Zimmer [01:00:55]:
Well, the term gain of function is not quite as slippery a term as life, but it is pretty slippery. When people talk about gain of function in a sort of casual way, I think like, okay, well what are you talking about? Are you talking about I think people are like there’s tons of science that goes on that might be described as gain of function where, you know, cells are being manipulated so they start doing something they couldn’t do before our insulin. Where does our insulin come from? Our insulin largely comes from bacteria that were engineered with human gene, human insulin genes. That’s where we get our insulin from that’s gain of function. If what you’re saying is like manipulating the genes of an organism so they can do something they couldn’t do before bacteria were not making human insulin before. Now they make it in huge quantities now. People wouldn’t say like, oh, human insulin is a bad thing. They just think it’s too expensive. That’s the real controversy about it. The reason that we’re not concerned about that is because we don’t think that these bacteria are going to kill us all. However, in the 1970s I write about this in my book Microcosm. Some people did think that those insulin bacteria were going to kill us all when they were first invented. They either get out of the fermentation tanks and they would put us all in the diabetic comas. Like this was real arguments people were having. It didn’t happen again. We have to really be careful about what we are talking about when we talk about gain of function. And so what a lot of the debate has focused on among scientists and in government circles is specifically about doing experiments on pathogens or potential pathogens or I should say pathogens that have the potential to become pandemic, which sounds more precise, but what do we mean by potential? How do you know in advance if something is going to become a pandemic or not? And so I think that when people are outraged that anyone is doing any gain of function, I think they need to look more closely at all of the complexity of all this. And there are trade offs here and there are fundamental trade offs here that I think we’re just going to have to make a call on in a democratic process and a real deliberation. Because on the one hand, we are very concerned about I’m certainly concerned and I think a lot of people are concerned about these strains of bird flu right now that are getting into a lot of people and a lot of mammals and a few more mutations, and one of these things could really take off and could be worse than COVID. Our best understanding about the mutations that we should be concerned about, actually, we know about them because somebody did real gain of function research on bird flu viruses back in like 2012, 2013. Their research freaked everyone out so much that we sort of had the whole that’s when the whole gain of function debate actually started because there were people, scientists who were saying, what are you doing? They were basically trying to make these bird foods so they could be transmissible between ferrets and other people. Scientists were saying, like, whoa, we should not be making these things. It’s like evolution is already like, doing this, why are we risking this? Ferret adapted flu could get out and make people sick. But the fact remains that that research went forward and it told us a lot. A lot of what we know about in terms of the risks we are now facing with bird flu, we got from gain of function research, but was terribly controversial and a lot of scientists in the field thought which shouldn’t have never been done. That is the real trade off that we face. It’s not a simple choice to be made. If we don’t do gain of function research, there are going to be things we don’t know about, right?
Brian Keating [01:05:44]:
In principally, we could head off or develop vaccines in advance and there’s a lot of curative properties that could be invoked, but a lot of people have said, well, look, it should be done, but it shouldn’t be done. And things that can lead to human pathogenic response. Carl, what are you working on now? You’ve done a lot in the genetic space. Can we entice you to write about what is a planet next or what can we do to get you to move into the astronomical realm?
Carl Zimmer [01:06:16]:
I had a little taste of that as I was sort of coming out of my sort of 120% COVID coverage all the time. It was really nice to sort of in the past year or so to kind of start to branch out again into areas that I handwritten about before. And now that James Webb Space Telescope is up and eye is open, it’s fascinating. And I’m understandably drawn to their work on planets and on possibly finding habitable planets. And I’ve written one piece on that, and I’m keeping an eye on that research because I just think that it’s incredible to be alive when we have tools that can let us see those things for the first time.
Brian Keating [01:07:02]:
Yeah. So, Carl, I always end my conversations with a quote from Arthur C. Clark. One of his many quotes. He’s very quotable. One quote I love to quote to my department chair frequently is for every expert, there’s an equal and opposite expert that usually shuts them up pretty quickly. But I’m going to ask you a different one to comment on the following statement made famous by Sir Arthur C. Clark, that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And I ask you, if you look at the whole of human history, what is the most magical technology that human beings have ever been able to create?
Carl Zimmer [01:07:50]:
Interesting, I have to say that the first thing that comes to mind is the technology that is making it possible for me to look at you in California right now and have a conversation with you. This is kind of bizarre. I think a lot of people got accustomed to what the Internet could provide in terms of connection during the pandemic with Zoom, and that was a drag. Anybody who’s tried to teach by Zoom as we have, knows what a nightmare can be. But still, this is kind of amazing to me. I think things that make communication possible, maybe because I’m a writer, maybe that’s what I’m prone to, but I’d have to vote for that communication technology.
Brian Keating [01:08:45]:
Very good. So, Carl Zimmer, author of many, many renowned Arthur, of many, many wonderful books, from Life’s Edge, we spoke about today, to she has her mother’s laugh. We’ll talk about that. I think that came out the same month that my first book came out, in April of 2018. So it’s the fifth anniversary. Happy anniversary, carl book, which is lauded around the world. And this book, of course, received rave reviews. The New York Times called it shimmering and zipping with his phenomenal prose. And I just want to thank you for sharing your time with us today and I hope to see you back in the future and I hope you have a magical rest of your day from here. At the Arthur C. Clark center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego. Brian Keating, your formerly fearful host, signing off. Thank you, Carl.
Carl Zimmer [01:09:36]:
Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.
