Latif Nasser
Appearances
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
I know, I was going to say, do economists have some kind of wonky name for this?
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
And why that? Because remember, do you remember Thomas Malthus? Yeah. And if I remember, his whole thing was like, you tell me what his whole thing was like.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Right. Right? What is like the green revolution or whatever, right? Is that right? The fertilizer revolution.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Please. I love the guano story. We can do it quickly. I know the guano story, but I love the guano story. And I want to hear you tell the guano story.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Guano. Guano. Which is basically just bird poop.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
So what she did is she took the average gross domestic product worldwide, and that's a rough measure of economic growth, and that had been growing recently around 3%, which for economists is like a happy little growth number.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
And that is on the order of like alchemy discovery. Like that is like this thing that is super abundant in the air all around us. It is literally the majority of the air. But it was unusable, and then there was a hack where we then figured out how to make it usable. That seems like—that's like a miraculous technological breakthrough.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
I like it. I like it. And the swerve—so the swerve is like—it's like when you say swerve, I'm picturing like it's like— A car about to collide into a cliff and then right at the last second, whoop, swerves out of the way.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
And Malthus is driving the car thinking that, of course, we're going to hit the cliff. Really, it's like the passenger who then just like yanks the steering wheel. It's like, nope, not going to happen. Right at the last second, we figured it out.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
I find this somewhat of a relief. It is sort of encouraging, but it also seems like there's so much drama here. Yeah. Yeah. there might be a time where we can't swerve in time. Like what happens if and when we can't swerve in time? And also I would argue sometimes the swerves Sometimes we swerve right into another cliff.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
So, for example, the example you talked about, from charcoal to coal, which is great for the trees, except after a while, it's also bad for the trees, right? It's like global rising temperatures lead to wildfires, lead to trees not able to grow where they once were able to grow. It's true.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
more time fair right we've bought ourselves more time but then we just always use that time to step on the gas to the next thing right and then maybe when we do swerve then we swerve into something worse something that causes you know war or exploitation or or or just messes up the planet in a way that you that is unswerve backable from i mean yes that is all totally right uh it is a mess
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
But Sandra took that 3%. And with some quick math, she started to just play it out year after year. And in her lecture, she's showing this chart where you can see this curve just shooting up.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Actually, first, we're going to swerve to break, but only for a minute. Then we'll swerve back and step on the gas directly towards a currently oncoming cliff.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Oh, we're in the middle of the Malthusian oil.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and even before that, like I think in the 70s and stuff, like it's like we keep having this conversation over and over again, peak oil, peak oil, peak oil.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Well, you just said it in 52 years or whatever. Like, you just said it.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
But is that a swerve? Like, I mean, if we're—now we just found another way to get more fossil fuels. Like, is that even really a—that feels like we swerved and swerved right back in the same direction.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
And she was basically like, look at all that growth. That's eating up Earth's resources.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
But in a way, running out of oil isn't even necessarily the problem here. The problem is the thing it's doing for everything else.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
It's a much harder sell, though. It's a much harder sell to tell people we have too much of this thing that's going to hurt you as opposed to we have not enough of this thing. So take care of it.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Necessity is the mother of invention kind of thing.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Desperation is the inventor's best friend.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
And so even though Earth should be good for 100 million years, we're going to just eat the planet up. We're going to devour the physical, material level of this planet. We're going to eat it up in more like a couple thousand years.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Yeah, but it just feels like a trap. And an especially capitalist kind of a trap where the only thing that will inspire us to innovate or to swerve, to use your word, is the immediate danger of the cliff. Like, I mean, we're talking about resources and economics, GDP, and blah, blah, blah. But really, this is all like a head game. It's like all like people's minds work in this very specific way.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
And long-term thinking is so hard for us. Yeah. And it's like we've got this system that leans into a thing that is already a problem with us and the way we think. It's like we're just going to use it as long as it's there. And when it starts to almost not be there, we'll figure out something else.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
But, like, we're all so smart enough to... Can't we figure out a system where we don't have to just drive into the cliff and swerve at the last minute every time? You know? Yeah. If this was your... And there was, I mean, this is such a weird analogy.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
There's only one car and you, whoever is in the driver's seat, really it's all of us, but whoever's in the driver's seat keeps driving pedal to the metal, accelerating faster and faster at cliffs.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
You would take their keys away. You'd be like, sorry, this, you are not fit to drive. It's scary. Yeah. I don't know. Why do we keep doing that then? Like, do you think growth is inevitable? Do you think growth is good? What do you... After all this, what is your take on growth in particular?
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
And when I heard that, that was breathtaking and horrifying. And honestly, I haven't been able to stop thinking about that number, 3%. It sounds like a specific thing, but also it's kind of abstract and mathy, and I wanted help. I wanted help to parse this out. Like, how bad is that really? How bad could that possibly be?
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
That's funny. That was probably the population of the entire Earth in Malcolm's time. Right?
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Yeah, I agree with that. Like, we all have needs and there are increasingly more of us. But I do think that taking, like, I still am sort of struck by the Sandy Faber's, like, stone cold, like, zoom out. Mm-hmm. There's nothing that's wrong about that logic either. She just has seemingly a different priority than most economists, which is like she's thinking at a different scale. Yeah.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
So I should tell you, we actually ended up talking to Sandy Faber.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
And telling her about your Malthusian swerve idea.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
And the thing that she was most concerned about was that energy is just so wrapped up in all these different parts of our lives, basically everything we do. And it has these huge effects on the environment. She says we're actually dealing with a bunch of different cliffs and a bunch of different kinds of cliffs all at the same time.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Basically, we're facing a crisis of crises.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
And so I turned to someone whose job it is to literally make sense of this exact kind of thing. Hello.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Hi, I'm doing well. How are you? And we had what I felt like was a kind of a roller coaster of a conversation. So I'm just going to play it for you right now.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
I need you. I need you to help me. It's more than scratch and itch. I need you to help me.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
I mean, well, she won the National Medal of Science, not the Nobel.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Yes, yes, yes. Oh, my gosh. I'm so excited.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
My favorite kind of math. My favorite kind of math. It's so hand-wavy.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Using copper and needing copper the same way that we are. Yeah, yeah, sure. T minus 70.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Okay. Okay. So then what, but then, so that's, this seems to point exactly to Sandy Faber's point, right?
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Oh, that's the end of it? I thought you were going to be like, but there's a giant, there's a copper thing that we're going to, no, there's no but, that's it. It's just like, yeah, she's right about copper.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Yeah, okay, okay, okay, okay, wait, you want to go through more of them before we get to the but? Is that the idea?
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, next one, okay, next one.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Okay, that sounds like a lot. I don't even know.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Okay. But it does seem like the whole point of sand is that it's like teeny tiny. It would take a lot of energy to turn that rock into sand.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Wait, so a quintillion based on the growth rate and the uses now. I would imagine this one is going to be, this one is not on Sandra Faber's side. I'm going to guess this one is like way, way, way far from now. Like this is going to be like a million years or something.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
That seems so short again. It does, doesn't it? That is way shorter for the whole crust.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasser. What got me thinking about economic growth was not all the stuff that's in the news, the tariffs, the fear of the recession, all that stuff that everybody's talking about. What started it was a lecture I heard a little while back by, of all people, an astrophysicist.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Oh, my God. That's not... Like, it's long, but it's not that long. Like, that's like... That is nuts.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
This is just making me more and more existentially worried. Okay, but keep going.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Okay, great. Good one. Good one. And lithium, you imagine there are like those giant deserts filled with those like sand flats or whatever, right?
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Yeah. Okay. So this one will be again... Like I think this one... I feel like there's going to be a curveball in here where you're like, no, no, no, we haven't had enough for millions of years.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Right. That's kind of... Okay, so that's like in phones, electric cars, da-da-da-da-da.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Which is good, which is good, which means like more electric cars, more da-da-da-da, right? More recyclable batteries and stuff. That's great. Yeah.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
That sounds... A lot less than the sand. Like, this doesn't sound—this is going to get worrying. Okay, keep going.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
I feel like you're going to say, like, I feel like you're going to say, like, so soon. Tomorrow.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Okay, 100 years again. Which is not bad. No, it is bad. It's bad, Jeff. It's bad. We need that. Like, we're going to need that later for even better stuff.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
But hopefully we're weaning off of this one. So maybe this one is a different.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Like it's going in the opposite direction. Hopefully.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
I don't think you have had a single piece of good news here. Just wait for it. Okay. All right.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Yeah, when you say it like that, it sounds quite alarming.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
But we do want to use less of it anyway. Right, yeah. I'm ambivalent about this. We're trying to. Yeah, yeah. Okay.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Wow. Maybe. Maybe. I was worried about when Sandra Faber said we had thousands of years and you're like, you're taking me even an order of magnitude less in that.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Her name is Sandra Faber. She goes by Sandy. Brilliant scientist. She co-authored the Standard Model for Thinking About How Galaxies Form. She won a National Medal of Science back in 2011. And she started the lecture by saying, we have a pretty happy little planet to live on.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
I was just imagining the bellows. I was just imagining the bellows. Yes. Okay, cool. Okay. So that's the key innovation here.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Which is charcoal is made out of wood. Is that right? No.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
So they're like slurping down forests, basically. Yes.
Planet Money
PM x Radiolab: Can the economy grow forever?
Because we have one tree left and everyone's about to cut it down. We got to save the trees. The tree.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Okay. Lulu. Latif. Radiolab. Hotworms. And the place where the hotworms went next, which nobody could have ever predicted, only really happened because of a drug-induced biological fever dream. What? And that's the story I'm going to tell you now. Okay. So maybe no surprise, we're going to leave Indiana and jump instead to Berkeley, California.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
We're still in the late 1960s. Only now I want to tell you about a guy called Cary Mullis.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
He's a PhD student in biochemistry at UC Berkeley. But instead of being a lab, he seems to prefer experimenting in biochemistry by synthesizing his own LSD.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
He's literally famous on campus for doing this. Anyway, so he gets his degree, gets a job in a bio lab, but then he just hates like how many mice they kill all the time. And then he gets a job in a cafe. He's like, he's like this floating guy. Yeah. Until one day he's working in the coffee shop and a customer is like, Aren't you that guy who used to make your own LSD? And they get to talking.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Now, just to give you a sense, at this point, we're in the late 70s. Today, science is on the threshold of a new era. And the thing that scientists everywhere, especially the scientists at Cetus, are obsessed with is DNA.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
They have this hunch that decoding DNA is going to unlock lots of secrets about the human body.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
And Cetus, the company where Carey Mullis got his job, they want to be on the cutting edge of this. And so they have teams of scientists trying to figure out how to read DNA. Okay. And their main problem at the time is that reading DNA is extremely, extremely hard.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
The whole process of trying to read or even just find and isolate, like, microscopically tiny little molecules of DNA, it was so inefficient that it was just not, it was non-starter. It was not feasible at all. So scientists at CETIS were scratching their heads trying to find a better way to do this.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Now, Cary Mullis, he was not doing any of that. He was stuck doing very slow, very repetitive, boring lab work. But one day, he's out on a drive after work. I was driving along one night. Kerry Mullis actually died back in 2019, but while he was live, he did a bunch of interviews where he talks about this moment.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Driving through the mountains on these windy, steep roads. It's super dark. It was really late at night. And in his mind, he's turning over the problems of reading DNA. The way he described it, he's like trying to read a piece of DNA at that time, was like trying to find a license plate on the interstate
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
From the moon. Okay. And then you still have to read it. So just impossible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And all of his colleagues are focused on basically devising a more powerful, more precise telescope to spot the DNA. And he's thinking, like... How do you fix this thing? I mean, what do you do? And all of a sudden... He sees DNA everywhere.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Blue and pink strands of DNA just floating in front of him as he was driving, like through the windshield.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
As he said it, they injected themselves somewhere between the mountain road and my eyes. He hadn't done any LSD that night, allegedly, but he says that he had done it so many times that he could almost get his mind there without having to take it. I mean, who knows? But like, it's almost like he's imagining himself riding a piece of DNA. And then he has this thought.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
that just snaps them right out of it. Everyone's working on a better and better telescope from the moon, right? Mm-hmm, right. What if instead you futz with the license plate? Like, what if you can make copies of the license plate?
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
A billion of them. It's as if the whole planet Earth now is covered in the license plate that you wanted to see. And all of a sudden, it's going to be way easier... To find it. Yeah, and therefore to read it.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
I think that's fine. I think that's fine. Like the only thing you need to know is he has this vision for a machine that's like kind of a DNA Xerox machine.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
And he's like, he's like, this is it. Like he talks about he had like deoxyribonuclear bombs going off in his head as he's driving. Like Eureka. Eureka. Yeah. Okay. He literally stops the car and writes it. He like looks in the glove compartment. He like finds an old receipt and he's like writing things down on the back of it. Oh my gosh. Okay.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
So he takes his idea into work, and everyone thinks it's really stupid.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
I think it's because it's such a simple idea. They're like, of course it's not going to work. But also, Carrie, he sucks. Oh. Basically, he sucks. He takes things very personally, gets into fights with colleagues at work all the time, literally a fist fight at one point. Allegedly, one day he brings a gun to work to threaten somebody. Oh, whoa.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Yeah, Cary, right. But the thing is, Cary's sort of already working out in his head how this DNA Xerox machine theoretically would work. So you have a piece of DNA. Imagine like a long zipper. Because remember, DNA is, it's made up of matching base pairs. C's go with G's, A go with T's, right? And they're all zipped together.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Now, in order to copy it, first you have to unzip it. Unzip it. So now you have two halves of it, right?
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Then basically you find new base pairs to match up with each side of the zipper. Oh, yeah, right. For every G, you find a C. For every A, you find a T. You can kind of perfectly recreate the other half. Right. And then it's like you can zip it up with a new zipper, right? Right, right. Okay, then do it again. Unzip, and then copy both. Okay. And then you keep doing that over and over.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
About what it would take for a microbe to survive on Mars. And he says he just fell in love with the university, with the science he was learning there.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Zip, unzip, zip, unzip. You do that 30 times, you have a billion zippers. Whereas you just started with one. Clever. By this point, he managed to convince his boss, who has assigned people by force to work with him, and they keep trying it and trying it. They're working on it for months, and they keep failing.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
One of the problems is to unzip it, for whatever chemical reason, the temperature needs to be really high. Okay. And then to re-zip it, the temperature needs to be lowered by a lot. Huh. And he notices this one part of the DNA zipper, like the slider, the thing that zips the DNA teeth together, is this enzyme called a polymerase. And he notices that any time he raises the temperature too high...
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
the polymerase falls apart without getting too in the weeds here. The polymerase is a protein. And typically, if proteins get too hot, they just sort of disintegrate. And so Cary and his team were like, oh, if only there was a polymerase somewhere that could live at this high temperature. So then someone from their team went to this library, this microbe library. Okay. And what did they find?
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Yeah. And as Hudson Freeze explained to us, Thermos Aquaticus has its own polymerase.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
And again, because every part of TAC is evolved to take the heat, this polymerase, when you heat it up... It can survive without falling apart. So Kerry and his team are basically like, oh, this is exactly the thing we were looking for. Yeah. And they plug it into their machine and it basically works like a dream. as if it was made to do that. Oh, my God.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Like, all of a sudden, they can add the Taq polymerase, run this reaction to replicate the DNA over and over. And before you know it, they have a billion copies of the gene snippet they're looking for.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Whoa. And so the process that they invent, it's called... Polymerase chain reaction, or PCR. PCR. PCR.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Because PCR made it so much easier and faster to read DNA. Suddenly, scientists everywhere start using it.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
They finally decode the human genome and all the knowledge that comes with it.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
To put that a different way, every major scientific breakthrough that involves DNA in any way in the last several decades, it's all run on PCR. To detect genetic markers... Like diagnosing genetic diseases... Diseases including cystic fibrosis...
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
And sickle cell disease. Determining ancestry. Like, think of like 23andMe, Ancestry.com. All of that. The whole industry.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
We have... Forensic DNA testing to identify the suspect's DNA. The whole world of forensics, solving crimes with DNA evidence, or... Recent DNA evidence exonerated him. Proving people innocent. Even identifying bodies for things like reuniting loved ones after wars or natural disasters.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Also another thing, this whole renaissance and learning about human origins.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
The PCR test is the very same PCR that we used during the pandemic to test for COVID.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Yeah, and it's hard to know how many more people would have died without them.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Now, obviously, the development of PCR was not just Carey. It was this huge team effort. But in 1993... Dr. Carey Mullis, I now ask you to receive the Nobel Prize from the hands of His Majesty the King. Carey Mullis wins the Nobel Prize.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
And, you know, I did ask Hudson Freeze, like, are you, like, bitter that you didn't win the Nobel Prize?
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Yeah. Like, I had a hand in this, like, amazing world-changing technology.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Yeah. Yeah, you're the scout. You're the talent scout who saw Michael Jordan. Yeah. Today, actually, Hudson Freeze works in an institute where they work on, like, rare genetic diseases, including and especially in children. Like, they use PCR all the time at his institute to help, you know, to help, like, to literally save lives, you know, make people's lives more livable.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
I find this like just a beautiful, beautiful story about what is life capable of? Like what can life even do? And in the end, like it really became this life-changing, life-saving discovery.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
So at the time, the scientific consensus was that nothing could live above 73 degrees Celsius, 163 degrees Fahrenheit. It was seen as kind of an upper limit on life.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Yeah, like, just idle curiosity paying off way more and in ways that nobody could ever expect. Yeah. All of that came out of one $80,000 grant from the U.S. government. That's why Hudson Freeze and Thomas Brock, they won the Golden Goose Award in 2013.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Well, I mean, when you put it next to what is going on in the news right now, which are all of these cuts, it feels like a tale of a thing that we are in danger of losing. Yeah.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Yeah, but Thomas Brock had recently vacationed in Yellowstone and he had seen these hot springs where boiling hot water comes up from the interior of the earth. And he knew that if you go to these hot springs, you see around the edges where the water cools down, there's stuff alive there.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Carl says a lot of the cuts to scientists and basic research are coming in the form of broad cuts at government agencies.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Like algae, bacteria, little spider mites, stuff like that. Okay. And he thought maybe this could be a place where he could find some little microbe that is defying that limit of life.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
I mean, is there some chance that businesses, like the private sector in general, would come in and fund all of this, like pick it up, pick it back up?
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
But I kind of saved, there's one extra detail from the Hudson Freeze tax story, knowing that we would need a pick-me-up at the end here. Okay. Because it's like one of my favorite little details about this story. Please. Well, okay.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
In the late 1980s, a Berkeley paleobiologist... started using PCR to find DNA in ancient weevils. Okay. And the ancient weevils were found in amber. Okay. And it counts very little bit, but the story goes that the novelist Michael Crichton heard about that.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
So he wrote Jurassic Park, which is amazing because when we interviewed Hudson Freeze, his takeaway from his research was like, Life finds a way. And you're like, yeah, that's from a movie that was inspired by the thing you discovered.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Yeah. Okay. Okay, so that's our episode for today. Big thank you, of course, to Hudson Freeze and our little friend Thermus Aquaticus. We didn't say this earlier, but his professor and co-author, Thomas Brock, died in 2021. And the song that Hudson Freeze sang at Thomas Brock's funeral?
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Thank you as well to Joanne Padron Carney. Also to her team, Aaron Heath, Valeria Sabate, Gwendolyn Bogard, Meredith Asbury, and Megan Cantwell at AAAS for being a tremendous help to this episode and for administering the Golden Goose Award. Thank you as well to Gregor Kavlik.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
and Derek Muller and the rest of the Veritasium team, who I actually collaborated with to do a YouTube video about this topic. They even go into how post-Nobel, Carey Mullis went totally off the deep end and lost all his scientific credibility. Check out that on YouTube.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
And also for a, you know, small town kid from Indiana, like this seemed like a great adventure.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Through the farmlands of Wisconsin, into the plains of the Dakotas. 20-some hours altogether. And he was like this doe-eyed kid just looking out the window. A lot of the Midwest is pretty flat. But then as he crossed into Montana... And I looked, looked out there.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Well, you're in luck because we're actually headed somewhere hot. Okay. Extremely hot. Can't wait. And our guide there, ironically enough. Hi. Hey.
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The Age of Aquaticus
They drive into the park and then hike several miles up to these very remote hot springs. Have you ever seen those pictures of like, or have you ever visited?
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The Age of Aquaticus
Oh, it's just beautiful. And there was one hot spring in particular that Brock and his team got interested in. Mushroom Spring. Mushroom Spring. At the center is a pool of water. It's about 30 feet across. Water at the center can reach 70 degrees Celsius, 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Steam coming off every direction. Surrounded by light gray rock and dead trees.
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The Age of Aquaticus
And so they'd walk right up to the edge of this pool, trying to get as close as they could.
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The Age of Aquaticus
Trawling, basically. Trawling for life. And the water is so hot that if they happen to fall into the spring... Oh, adios. Yeah. Luckily, no scientists were harmed in the doing of this research. But they got their samples. They took them back with them to their little shack lab.
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The Age of Aquaticus
And what they do is they would add these radioactive chemicals that would react with stuff in the sample, whatever proteins or sugars or whatever. And that would be a sign of something living in there. And we actually proved that the material was actually alive.
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The Age of Aquaticus
But what they still didn't know was if the living things in there had come from the center of the springs or, you know, if it had fallen from the outside or what exactly it was. So they took these samples back to Indiana University and it was HUD's job to see if the samples they got could really grow and thrive in super hot temperatures. Yeah, yeah.
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The Age of Aquaticus
So now HUD's got all these samples and they're sitting in these hot water baths on all these burners so that each one is set to a different temperature. So it's starting a little cool, getting hotter, eventually going past that supposed limit that is too hot for anything to be alive.
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The Age of Aquaticus
Because the water keeps burning up. Because the water keeps boiling up.
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The Age of Aquaticus
So anyway... Day after day, he's tending to these little vials, always checking on them.
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The Age of Aquaticus
So he's waiting, he's waiting. The liquid is clear. Day one, he's waiting. Day two, he's waiting. He's waiting a couple days.
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The Age of Aquaticus
So he takes a look under a microscope, and what he sees are these little worms, kind of like cut-up spaghetti. Just floating around in there. And they're moving? And they're moving. Yeah, they're alive.
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The Age of Aquaticus
Anyway. So the story that I brought Hud here to tell actually happened at the beginning of his career 60 years ago or something. But I've been thinking about this story a lot in the last couple months. Because, I don't know, every time, you know, like just a new headline comes out, which is like funding cuts to the National Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health or NASA.
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The Age of Aquaticus
You know, according to the current thinking, like nothing should be able to live in here. But they were growing, they were reproducing, they were making more of them.
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The Age of Aquaticus
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But then Brock was like, Oh, no, no, no. We're not going to do that.
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The Age of Aquaticus
Well, so usually in hot water, the water molecules are just jostling around so much.
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The Age of Aquaticus
But TAC has evolved proteins and enzymes that are more tightly structured. That's right. They can survive without falling apart. Which, beyond being a cool trick, opens up a door that life can do a whole new thing. Like, there's a whole new superpower that we didn't even know about.
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The Age of Aquaticus
So I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. Like, was this on the cover of Time magazine? Yeah.
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The Age of Aquaticus
And the rest of the world, the non-scientist world, was just like, well, who cares? And so they preserved a sample of TAC and they just put it in a kind of like a library of microbes. Yeah, yeah. It's a germ library. Beyond that, we didn't think about it. They moved on to other things. And then 50 or so years later, Hudson is sitting at his desk and he gets a call.
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The Age of Aquaticus
Thank you for joining us for the 11th annual Golden Goose Award ceremony. Right. OK, so you remember we did an episode about a couple of years back.
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The Age of Aquaticus
We even sent one of our producers, Maria Vaz Gutierrez, to cover it, like, in red carpet.
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The Age of Aquaticus
It was held in Washington, D.C. How? In a big, fancy building near the Capitol.
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The Age of Aquaticus
It's a statement. With this windowpane, hello. But anyway, basically, it was an award created back in the 80s, 1980s, when Congress was ridiculing a lot of the government funding of basic scientific research. And, you know, there were like headlines all the time about like, we're wasting money spending, you know, funding a study about snail sex or whatever, whatever it was.
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The Age of Aquaticus
And then the Golden Goose Award was sort of this tongue-in-cheek, nerdy response in the form of an award that goes to research that is funded by the government that sounds dumb or sounds useless, sounds absurd, but then turns out to completely change the world. Right. So now HUD is getting a call from them saying, tack. Deserves this award.
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The Age of Aquaticus
Yeah. I guess maybe for now it's enough to say that Hudson Freeze's story, it kind of feels to me like a parable for the moment we are in right now. Okay, so let's just start way at the beginning. How did you get involved in any of this?