JAD ABUMRAD: For Steve Strogetz, a mathematician who we sometimes have on the show, it all started with a pendulum. He was sitting in math class.

STEVE STROGATZ: Our teacher handed us a little toy pendulum.

JAD: Basically just a little device with a ball on the end of a string.

STEVE STROGATZ: That was retractable. That is, you could ...

JAD: Change the length of the string.

STEVE STROGATZ: Like an old telescope, you know, that the pirate stretches out a spyglass—click, click, click. You could make it longer in discrete clicks. And then the teacher gave us a stopwatch and said, "I want you to time how long it takes for this pendulum to swing back and forth 10 times." Okay, so I do the experiment. Ten swings. I record how many seconds it took. Then he says, "Now make the pendulum a little bit longer. One click longer." Click, do it again.

JAD: And as you might expect, since now the string is longer, takes a bit more time.

STEVE STROGATZ: To make the 10 swings. And I write down the number. Click, do it again. Click, do it again. And I do this five or six times, dutifully plotting the—the results on graph paper, which is what the experiment was really supposed to teach us, how to use graph paper.

JAD: So he's clicking, measuring, making a little dot.

STEVE STROGATZ: Click ...

JAD: Measure, dot.

STEVE STROGATZ: Click ...

JAD: Measure, dot. Soon the thing is filled with dots, and that is when he noticed something.

STEVE STROGATZ: This spooky thing was happening, which is that the dots were falling on an arc, on a curve. They weren't on a straight line. They fell on a particular curve. And I noticed that this curve was a curve I had seen before because I had just learned about it in algebra class. And it's called a parabola. And this really gave me the creeps. I had a sort of feeling of the hairs on the back of my neck standing up, because it was as if this inanimate thing, this pendulum, knew algebra. [laughs] My 13-year-old mind couldn't understand that. How could this thing swinging back and forth know something about parabolas? Or how could that be built in?

JAD: Then an even creepier thought occurred to him. Wait a second, this parabola on my paper, which is the same one as the math book, is also out in the world.

STEVE STROGATZ: It's the shape that water makes coming out of a water fountain.

JAD: It's also the shape of, you know, when you shoot a rocket into the sky and it slowly descends. It's that.

STEVE STROGATZ: It was in that moment that I suddenly understood what people mean when they say there's a law of nature.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Do you remember what it was that made your hair stand on end? Was it that you had peeked in and discovered a secret? Or that you just simply found the right answer?

STEVE STROGATZ: Much closer to the first thing you said, that there was this sort of veil over reality, a hidden universe that you couldn't see unless you knew math. It really felt like being let into some sort of secret society. And that wasn't so much the point. I mean, it's not like I cared about being in this priesthood. It was—it's a very intimate, personal thing, this feeling of wonder, of a sense of living in an incomprehensible and beautiful universe.

STEVE STROGATZ: But partly comprehensible. That's the beauty of it. I mean, if you're a lobster, you don't have this thought, right? A lobster doesn't get to think about the laws of nature. And so I've often thought to myself that it's a blessing that we live in a certain window of intelligence, that if we were infinitely smart, godlike, we'd have such powerful brains we could see every implication of everything. So math wouldn't be fun for a being that's too smart. And of course, for the lobster, that's not smart enough. Math is no fun for them either. It's in this intermediate window where math and science become something to rejoice in.

JAD: Today's program is about a kind of search—a search for order.

ROBERT: For patterns.

JAD: Hidden truths?

ROBERT: Hidden truths.

JAD: And it's about the scientists who go out looking for those things and sometimes find them. [ARCHIVE CLIP, scientist: Whoa, what's that?]

ROBERT: And sometimes don't.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, scientist: I felt humiliated. I felt stupid.]

JAD: Question is, what makes these people tick? And we're calling this show ...

ROBERT: Why Do I Love the Fly That's Eating My Brain?

JAD: That'll make sense later. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

JAD: Okay, you ready?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Off we go.

OLIVER SACKS: I think there's always been a desire to somehow categorize and classify the world around us.

ROBERT: Remember when you were in, I don't know when it would be, like in eighth grade, when they—when the teacher comes in in general science and he pulls down the periodic table of elements.

JAD: Oh yeah, sure. I mean, that was one of the first times where I was like, "Yeah, I don't want to be a scientist."

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: It's not for me.

ROBERT: But for kids who love this kind of thing—take Oliver Sacks, for example.

SOREN WHEELER: Jad, you should come in.

JAD: I should come in? Okay.

JAD: Yeah, so a couple years ago, we had went to talk to Oliver Sacks about something. Well, it was actually mostly you that was gonna talk to him and I was just tagging along for the hell of it.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: And for some reason, we ended up in his bathroom.

OLIVER SACKS: I tend to read a little bit on the toilet.

JAD: Maybe to look at a book or something?

JAD: He seems to have facts and figures in this as well.

JAD: There's a lot of us in there.

JAD: I'm sorry.

ROBERT: Sorry.

JAD: And that's when we noticed ...

ROBERT: Oh you've got the periodic chart in the bathroom.

OLIVER SACKS: In every bathroom.

ROBERT: He had a periodic table of the elements on the wall in the bathroom.

JAD: We thought, wow, how funny! Periodic table in the bathroom. But then he said, "Well, you know, if you go out onto the couch, you'll see ..."

OLIVER SACKS: Periodic table cushions.

JAD: ... some cushions embroidered with the periodic table. And then he took us to his bedroom.

OLIVER SACKS: Although I don't usually take people into my bedroom.

ROBERT: Oh, we'll come. [laughs]

JAD: Where he showed us his periodic table comforter.

ROBERT: [laughs]

OLIVER SACKS: I tend to sleep here, right under tungsten.

JAD: But the cool part was when he took us to the living room where you had this ...

ROBERT: Well, describe what is before us here. It looks like an altar.

JAD: It's like a little dictionary stand, on top of which was a beautiful mahogany box.

OLIVER SACKS: A fine wooden box.

JAD: About the size of a backgammon set.

OLIVER SACKS: Called periodic table of the elements.

ROBERT: It is a very fine wooden box.

OLIVER SACKS: And if you care to open it.

ROBERT: It's made of some sort of fine wood.

OLIVER SACKS: It comes from Russia.

ROBERT: Is there a trick to opening this? Ooh!

ROBERT: Okay, we've all seen the periodic table, you know, on a chart, but in Oliver's box, there, there were the actual elements.

ROBERT: These are all these—we have here, like, 90-some odd little—little tubes.

OLIVER SACKS: Little samples.

JAD: Little teeny vials.

OLIVER SACKS: Of almost all the elements. Silver, arsenic, bismuth, cobalt, oxygen, copper, hydrogen, phosphorus, iron, manganese, mercury, nitrogen, molybdenum, gold. Since I am, for example, having my 72nd birthday tomorrow, and element 72 is hafnium, there is a little hafnium.

ROBERT: Two little rocks. Here's what—here's what they sound like if you rattle them.

OLIVER SACKS: I have coming to me—I hope it arrives today—an ingot of hafnium, which will be very much more satisfying.

ROBERT: [laughs] What would you do with an ingot that you can't do with the two little pebbles?

OLIVER SACKS: I'll be able to hold it in my hand. My first love of chemistry had to do with the sensuous. Here, one of the liquid elements, bromine. I loved the colors.

ROBERT: Brown, faintly brown fluid-y thing.

OLIVER SACKS: The luster. Pale golden mercury. Very, very beautiful. The physical properties.

ROBERT: This is a gas trapped in a little vial?

OLIVER SACKS: Yes. One wouldn't want to drop that.

ROBERT: Why not?

OLIVER SACKS: Well, it's not good to breathe.

JAD: Can I just jump in here for a second?

ROBERT: Sure.

JAD: Because I—I really need to jump in. [laughs] But the thing that's really crazy about that box—and this you don't get from looking at a periodic chart on a wall, is that all those elements ...

OLIVER SACKS: Lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen ...

JAD: ... that's like the world. I mean, everything that we can see and perceive, this table right here, the teeth in my mouth, the sky, the ocean, the mountains, it's all made of some combination of elements from that box. And the box itself gives it all a deep, deep order.

OLIVER SACKS: I had noticed myself—one can't help noticing that the elements are organized in a very special sort of way. For example, may I?

ROBERT: I have managed to not notice. I find it a little odd that you could organize them at all. I don't even know how to begin the process of figuring out they're related in some way.

OLIVER SACKS: Well, then you are sort of recapitulating what everyone felt in the early days.

JAD: Of course, in the really early days, people thought there were just four elements.

OLIVER SACKS: The ancient notion of elements took the form of earth, air, fire and water. Basically, the thought that the whole world could be composed of these four ingredients in different ways.

JAD: But then, in the 18th century—we're skipping ahead a bit—chemists began to break things down into smaller pieces. Like, wind became ...

OLIVER SACKS: Gasses like oxygen and hydrogen and nitrogen.

JAD: And earth got divided up into things like ...

OLIVER SACKS: Sulfur, phosphorus, iron.

ROBERT: By the way, in order to do this kind of investigating, do you have to boil, and pull, and tug, and fry, and steam and do things like that?

OLIVER SACKS: All of the above.

JAD: So to fast forward, after enough of this boiling and tugging and frying and steaming chemists got all the way down to the root of it, which was the atom. That's really what an element is. It's a particular kind of atom. The problem was, though, when chemists began to start measuring these atoms, they found that they were all different sizes and types. Like, one would be heavy, another would be light, third one would be really friendly, likes to link up with other atoms, whereas the fourth would be a loner. And they would come in combinations like heavy-friendly, heavy-shy, light-friendly, light-shy. What was the pattern? That was the question. Could they fit all of these differences and similarities into one big schema?

OLIVER SACKS: Since we mentioned his name, let me here show you a picture of the ...

JAD: Here's where we get to Oliver's hero.

OLIVER SACKS: The siberian bigamist, as he was called.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: That would be Dmitri Mendeleev.

OLIVER SACKS: The great Mendeleev, whom we will talk about.

ROBERT: Oliver has a black and white picture of him on his kitchen cabinet.

ROBERT: This man is not gonna win any beauty contests.

OLIVER SACKS: No. He looks like a mixture between Rasputin and—who do I mean?

ROBERT: Well, you mean he has a big nose, a shaggy, slightly unkempt white beard, a mustache that goes all over the place, piercing eyes, thick eyebrows, and looks like he's in a hunchback position. Generally, if you met him on the sidewalk, you'd probably want to walk around him.

OLIVER SACKS: [laughs] Yeah. He didn't believe in wasting time going to a barber.

ROBERT: Let me just ask you as to the degree of your passion. When you look at this man, do you think he's a beautiful-looking guy, or do you see what I see?

OLIVER SACKS: I think Mendeleev had a beautiful mind. Okay, in 1860, around 1860, there were trains going all over Russia. And Mendeleev could afford to take trains, he was often on enormous journeys. And to while away the time, since he couldn't do chemical experiments or whatever, he would take playing cards with the name of various elements, their chemical and physical properties, and he would play what he called chemical solitaire.

ROBERT: Sorting them for likeness or sorting ...

OLIVER SACKS: I'm afraid I don't know the details.

JAD: But you know what? We can imagine, right?

ROBERT: Sure.

JAD: So let's just say he's sitting there on the train. He's looking out the window. He sees trees made of carbon, a lake made of hydrogen and oxygen.

OLIVER SACKS: Oxygen.

JAD: Behind that, a mountain.

OLIVER SACKS: Mountains here.

JAD: Made of silica.

OLIVER SACKS: Silica.

JAD: And he's shuffling ...

OLIVER SACKS: Their properties and their atomic weights in his mind.

JAD: Wondering ...

OLIVER SACKS: How do these things go together?

JAD: What's the pattern? And he's shuffling.

OLIVER SACKS: I'm shuffling.

JAD: Shuffling.

OLIVER SACKS: Shuffling.

JAD: Shuffling. Shuffling. Shuffling.

OLIVER SACKS: Shuffling.

JAD: And he did this for years. Until one night—and this we think is true.

OLIVER SACKS: In February of 1869, he is said to have had a dream.

JAD: In his dream, all the atoms of all the elements of all the world—the fat ones, the small ones, the dense ones, the heavy ones, the friendly ones, the shy ones, they all began to dance in his mind, and then they snapped into a grid.

OLIVER SACKS: He awoke with a vision of the periodic table.

ROBERT: This is one of those [angelic singing] dreams?

OLIVER SACKS: Which he then wrote on the back of an envelope.

JAD: The thing about what he wrote on the back of that envelope is that it starts out so simply. Left to right, the atoms just get heavier and heavier and heavier.

OLIVER SACKS: Heavier, heavier, heavier.

JAD: But every so often—and this is what he intuited in his dream, is that while they're getting heavier, there are other traits, like whether they're shy or magnetic or whatever, those traits repeat.

OLIVER SACKS: Periodically change back again.

JAD: And every time they do, they start a new row.

OLIVER SACKS: The properties repeat again.

JAD: Out of this simple, repeating structure.

OLIVER SACKS: Anyways ...

JAD: Hush, Mendeleev! You get a table that you can read in a million ways. There are so many ways to read this table.

OLIVER SACKS: I think I'm going to call this the periodic table.

JAD: That if you use your imagination, you can see yourself in there.

OLIVER SACKS: I was a rather shy kid with difficulty forming relationships, and I sometimes compared myself to the inert gasses.

ROBERT: Inert gasses are very isolated. They react with nothing.

OLIVER SACKS: Because I felt they too had difficulties forming relationships. But I did ...

ROBERT: He has now left the chair and has moved to the library. He's taking out a hugely thick—actually a dangerously thick book.

OLIVER SACKS: This is The Handbook of Physics and Chemistry. As you see, it has 5,000 pages. I had a smaller version as a boy. And from brooding in this book, it seemed to me just possible that one of the inert gasses—xenon—might be seduced into combination by the most active element of all, which was fluorine.

ROBERT: This lonely, lonely gas might find a partner somehow. Did they ever get together?

OLIVER SACKS: In fact, it came to me with great joy when I found out in the 1960s that actually a Canadian chemist had in fact made a fluoride of xenon.

ROBERT: Ah! Yes, elemental love.

ROBERT: And speaking of love, he then took us ...

OLIVER SACKS: I think let's come here one sec.

ROBERT: Where are we going?

ROBERT: ... to the living room. And he showed us a small painting. In the painting, there was this dramatic figure of a bearded, scowling character on the side of a mountain holding two stone tablets over his head. And the sky was filled with lightning. And who was it? It was Dmitri Mendeleev!

OLIVER SACKS: When I heard of how Mendeleev had discovered the periodic table, I imagined Mendeleev as a sort of Moses, going up to a chemical Sinai and coming down with the tablets of the periodic law. And when I mentioned this fantasy to Peter Selgen, my friend, an artist, he did this imaginative picture of a young Mendeleev, the peaks of a chemical Sinai behind him, holding aloft the tablets of the periodic table.

ROBERT: Which raises maybe the deepest question of all: did Mendeleev think this up and impose it upon the world? Or was this pattern always there? In which case, Mendeleev just removed the veil and said, "Oh, there you are."

OLIVER SACKS: Is the periodic table discovery or an invention? Is it a human construct, or is it a revelation of the cosmic or divine order? Is it, so to speak, God's abacus?

JAD: Radiolab will continue in a moment.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Message one.]

[STEVE STROGATZ: Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Science Foundation. Radiolab is produced by WNYC and distributed by National Public Radio.]

[Cheer squad: Hydrogen. Hydrogen! Helium. Helium! Lithium. Lithium! Beryllium. Beryllium! Boron. Boron! Carbon. Carbon! Nitrogen. Nitrogen! Oxygen. Oxygen! Chlorine. Chlorine!  Neon. Neon! Sodium. Sodium! Magnesium. Magnesium! Aluminum. Aluminum! Silicon. Silicon! Phosphorus. Phosphorus! Sulfur! Sulfur! Chlorine. Chlorine! Argon. Argon! Potassium. Potassium! Woo! Mendeleev, Mendeleev! Who’s got the order? Mendeleev, Mendeleev! Who's got the order? M-E-N-D-E-L-E-E-V!]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And we continue with our ongoing appreciation of the great Dmitri Mendeleev.

[Cheer squad: Mendeleev, Mendeleev! Who's got the order? Dmitri! Woo!]

JAD: And—and—and let's also get back to the question that Oliver Sacks asked about Dmitri Mendeleev before the break, which is ...

ROBERT: When a scientist looks out at the world and sees a pattern, is that the scientist's mind projected onto the chaos of the world? So is the discovery in the scientist, or ...

JAD: Is it out there in the world?

ROBERT: Right.

JAD: Meaning it just exists independent of us. Doesn't care if we find it or not.

ROBERT: Exactly.

OLIVER SACKS: Is it a human construct or is it a revelation of the cosmical divine order?

ROBERT: That's the question. And it can lead to some fairly—well, sad and riveting moments. This story comes to us from Alan Lightman, a theoretical physicist working out in Caltech once upon a time. Alan, when he was a scientist, he was working on a problem.

ALAN LIGHTMAN: A problem that had to deal with an astronomical object called a globular cluster, which is a collection of about a million stars.

ROBERT: So he's got a glob of stars.

ALAN LIGHTMAN: All orbiting each other.

ROBERT: And the question he's asked is, "How do they hang together? Tell me a little bit about the gravity that links them." And he—he thought he'd made a discovery that was brand new.

ALAN LIGHTMAN: So I was in the process of writing up the paper. I'd done the calculations, I was writing the paper and I was in the library, as one often does, putting in the footnotes and the references. And one of the things that you do in the references is you cite other people who've done similar things, and ideally you should do this before you start the problem. So I was flipping through some of the most current journals, and I saw a title that looked alarmingly like the title that my article would have been. I got this terrible pang of anxiety that went through me. So I opened up the journal, and these two guys from Japan had solved the same problem that I had. And I pulled out my notebook of results and started comparing my results against their results. And the numbers agreed to, like, three decimal places.

ROBERT: So what they found was exactly what you had found. 

ALAN LIGHTMAN: Well, they would have to find exactly what I'd found, because this is the world of science and the world of science has this terrible precision. I was crestfallen. I was so disappointed. I felt humiliated. I felt stupid. And then another sensation went through me. And that was a feeling of amazement that these two guys on the other side of the planet with no communication with me, sitting at their desks, worked on the same problem and had gotten the same results.

ROBERT: The exact same results.

ALAN LIGHTMAN: You know, all of the philosophers like Bishop Berkeley, who said it's all in our mind, they're all wrong. Any scientist anywhere in the universe solving this problem would have gotten that answer. There really is something outside of our bodies and independent of our minds, and this is both a wonderful thing and a terrible thing. It's a wonderful thing because there's a beauty to it. There's a feeling of power and control. But the tragedy of this, which I felt at the same time, is that what is the relevance of me as an individual person? If anybody else could have solved this same problem, then why was I needed? What is the meaning of my life? How do I leave my individuality on the world? Certainly not through science.

ROBERT: So here's what happened. Alan gave up the practice of bench science and became a novelist. Einstein's Dreams won the Pulitzer Prize.

JAD: Great book.

ROBERT: That's his word. It couldn't have happened without him.

ALAN LIGHTMAN: And that is a profound difference between the sciences and the arts.

ROBERT: So if—if the Ode to Joy had not been in Beethoven's head, you don't think it necessarily would have come around?

ALAN LIGHTMAN: That's right. The Tempest is not going to have been written by anybody but Shakespeare. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, which is the novel I just finished, is only gonna have been written by him.

ROBERT: So it's goodbye science.

JAD: But let's—let’s argue the other side for just a second.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: There's—oops. Okay, I'm back. But there's an idea floating around that gives the scientists a little bit more of a—I don't know, you’ll probably like it. It comes from another physicist.

JAD: Can you just introduce yourself?

PAUL DAVIES: In case you forget who you're talking to? I'm Paul Davies. I'm director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University.

JAD: So Paul Davies starts with a basic question which humans have been asking forever: why are we here? If you think about it, it's totally, crazily improbable that we are here asking these questions that, I don't know ...

PAUL DAVIES: 13.7 billion years ago ...

JAD: The universe is born in a shower of particles that somehow cool in just the right way to form atoms which somehow gather in just the right way to form stars and galaxies and a planet with sunrises and sunsets and just the right atmosphere to give rise to a creature that can look at the sunrises and sunsets and say, "Wow!"

PAUL DAVIES: If the fundamental laws of physics or the initial conditions of the universe were only slightly different then there would be no life and no observers, no one to say, "Wow." And the question is, is that a significant fact or just an incidental fact?

JAD: A lot of scientists would say, "Well, it's a fluke that we're here, that we have a mind, that we ask these questions."

PAUL DAVIES: And I think it's a big deal. We've been made privy to the fundamental nature of the universe, the rules on which the universe runs, its basic laws. If we're just accident, why aren't we just here looking at the universe surviving but having no clue? And the only way I can make sense of it is to suppose that there is some sort of link between the laws of the universe and the emergence of—of life and consciousness. That the existence of observers like ourselves is part of the explanatory story.

JAD: In other words, says Paul, the fact that we're here ...

PAUL DAVIES: Understanding ...

JAD: At least trying to …

PAUL DAVIES: ... how the universe works.

JAD: On some scientific level, he thinks that's part of the grand scheme, that somehow the universe, the atoms in the universe need to be understood.

PAUL DAVIES: Well, the universe has engineered its own self-awareness. The—the universe has thinking beings within it who can think, observe and ...

JAD: Wait, wait. If you were to compare the thinking beings, like on the one hand, maybe you had Cézanne painting a portrait, and on the other you had Einstein doing an equation, it sounds like if understanding is the key, as you just said, that this theory would put the scientists ahead.

PAUL DAVIES: Well, it does. And I—you know, I'm always wary about saying that for fear of infuriating my art scholars.

ROBERT: Me, for example. I'm for Cézanne.

PAUL DAVIES: That's not to diminish the value of art and poetry, but this thing we call science is a—is a near miracle. You know, I'm not using miracle in the religious sense, but the fact we can do it, I think, is stupendous. We are incredibly privileged. And I think there is some bigger, I want to say, agenda, but you have to be very careful with these words, but certainly a scheme and that we judge that scheme to be ingenious and beautiful for reasons we know not.

ROBERT: I love this idea because it seems to me that if the Earth were to have a beautiful day and there was no one around who could reflect on all that beauty, then what is it? It's there, but unappreciated. It's not quite there enough. You know, in the Bible, God creates a bit of the universe every day. But at the end of each day, almost as a necessary function, God says,

"And it was good."

JAD: He gives himself a grade.

ROBERT: He gives himself a grade. So maybe this is just the atom's way of admiring itself. Because what is a scientist? Just a bunch of atoms.

JAD: Yeah, you know, it's a nice idea, but actually, in the end, I don't buy it.

ROBERT: You don’t?

JAD: No, because he's saying that the purpose of the universe is to create thinking beings like us who examine it. And the best examiners of them all are the physicists. Well, guess what? Here's a physicist. He is the very thing that he's sort of ...

ROBERT: It's a little Miss Piggy, I guess.

JAD: Yeah. And I don't think anything that we've learned in science the past couple of hundred years would lead us to believe we are at the center of anything.

ROBERT: Well, I think most scientists in the world would agree with you.

JAD: And—and one more thing.

ROBERT: But, I don't care.

JAD: Just on the level of aesthetics, of beauty, isn't it more beautiful to think that all of this is an accident?

ROBERT: I hate that idea.

JAD: Why?

ROBERT: I hate—you think that—that all of this beauty coming into being by accident is better ...

JAD: Than it having some purpose? Yes, because if it has a purpose it means it's supposed to be here, and if it's supposed to be here, then it's just somehow a little less amazing, you know what I mean?

ROBERT: Yeah, I just think you're wrong. [laughs]

JAD: [laughs] Okay. Okay, let's keep it moving.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: If appreciating is the key, according to Paul Davies, well, in science, that is sometimes harder than it sounds, because what if you're out there in the world, you're on the cusp of a major discovery, it's right there in front of your face, but you happen to be looking the other way? For example, take this story.

JAD: So I'm very excited to hear about your journey. But first, tell me who you are.

ERICA LLOYD: Okay. I'm Erica Lloyd. I'm an editor and freelance writer.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Erica Lloyd: Testing. Looks like the mic is on.]

JAD: And Erica recently took a trip with a bunch of scientists.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Erica Lloyd: Everything is working.]

JAD: Very far away.

ERICA LLOYD: Quite a ways.

JAD: Where exactly?

ERICA LLOYD: Somewhere between Greenland and Siberia.

JAD: And all you're seeing every day is just lots and lots of ice?

ERICA LLOYD: Yeah.

JAD: What's that—what's that like?

ERICA LLOYD: Well, the ice is really beautiful.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Erica Lloyd: July 5. I'm on the deck overlooking the Arctic Ocean.]

ERICA LLOYD: I mean, it's just—well, one guy called it his cold campfire.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Erica Lloyd: Chilly here. It's—it's hovering around zero degrees.]

ERICA LLOYD: I mean, sometimes when the sun is up ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Erica Lloyd: A lot of wind.]

ERICA LLOYD: ... and it's just sparkling like diamonds.

ROB REVES-SOHN: When you look out ...

ERICA LLOYD: It's mesmerizing.

ROB REVES-SOHN: ... you get how isolated you are.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rob Reves-Sohn: Warmer clothes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Erica Lloyd: Warmer clothes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rob Reves-Sohn: Yeah man.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Erica Lloyd: Mittens. Maybe you can introduce yourself?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rob Reves-Sohn: I'm Rob Reves-Sohn. I'm a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.]

JAD: He's sort of the main guy of this expedition.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rob Reves-Sohn: We have extra shoes like this.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Erica Lloyd: Should I wear one?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rob Reves-Sohn:You're welcome to.]

ROBERT: So he raised the money?

JAD: Yep. Millions of dollars of government funding.

ROBERT: So for him, career wise, this is very important.

JAD: This is it. 

ROB REVES-SOHN: When I was coming out of graduate school, I was trying to think how was I gonna make my mark in the scientific world? And, you know, the more mature a field gets, the harder it is to do something important. And, sometimes in graduate school, it can feel like you're, you know, gnawing on bones as a—as a scientist. And the Gakkel Ridge has been a little bit of a, you know, in a sense, it's—it's one of the final frontiers.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Erica Lloyd: That's the ship hitting the ice.]

ROB REVES-SOHN: So we're going to the Gakkel Ridge.

ROBERT: And what's so important about the Gakkel Ridge?

JAD: Well, it's one of the great unexplored places on the planet. Basically, it's an arctic mountain range.

ERICA LLOYD: Two or three hundred miles from the North Pole.

JAD: At the bottom of the ocean.

ERICA LLOYD: It's like two and a half or three miles deep.

JAD: Making matters worse in terms of getting there is that the top of the ocean is covered in ice.

ERICA LLOYD: Really, really thick, this ice.

JAD: But the thought is, if you can somehow get there, get underneath the ice, get all the way down to the bottom of the ocean, you'll find volcanoes.

ERICA LLOYD: And, you know, where you have volcanoes, you might have hot springs.

JAD: Where you have hot springs, you might have ...

ERICA LLOYD: Life.

JAD: Just imagine!

ROB REVES-SOHN: Black smoke ...

ERICA LLOYD: Really toxic.

ROB REVES-SOHN: Billowing out of a chimney on the seafloor.

ERICA LLOYD: Hot enough to melt lead.

JAD: Geez.

ROB REVES-SOHN: With all manner of bizarre, biological organisms making a little oasis around it.

JAD: What kind of creatures were they expecting to see?

ERICA LLOYD: Weird kinds of ...

ROB REVES-SOHN: I mean, everyone wanted to see a three-eyed tube worm.

JAD: Yeah! Really?

ERICA LLOYD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Is there such a thing as a three-eyed tube worm?

JAD: No, not yet.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: But the point is that every time that they've seen these hot springs in different parts of the planet, they've found completely new things.

ERICA LLOYD: Something like 600 previously unheard of species.

JAD: Like really strange-looking shrimps.

ERICA LLOYD: With eyes that have moved to their backs.

JAD: And they have found tubeworms. Big ones.

ERICA LLOYD: They look sort of like plumes.

JAD: They're very cool looking and they're big. They have these little flower caps. In any case, this spot that they're going to, for various geological reasons that I don't really understand, it might be the most interesting one of all, but no one's ever seen it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, crew member: Hmm. Huh. It's too early in the morning.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Erica Lloyd: 3:20 am.] 

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Crew member: I just woke up 10 minutes ago.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Erica Lloyd: The sun is up. Of course.]

ERICA LLOYD: It took a few days to get to the first site.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, crew member: But this is probably our current location.]

ROB REVES-SOHN: And this is a place where there was evidence of ...

ERICA LLOYD: These vents.

ROB REVES-SOHN: So we thought, well, that's where we're gonna start.

JAD: Erica, how are they actually gonna get through the ice to go down?

ERICA LLOYD: Well, Rob Reves-Sohn thinking, "How am I ever going to get to the Gakkel Ridge?"

ROB REVES-SOHN: I had a newborn child. This is, I guess, 1996, but I was giving her a bath. And of course, a whole layer of bath bubbles, I mean, you couldn't see the bottom of the bathtub. And one of the toys that she had was a Sesame Street submarine, the Cookie Monster, and Elmo as the captains and all this kind of stuff. And we were playing around with it, so we dove the submarine under the layer of bubbles. "Oh, wait a minute. The submarine is underneath the bubbles. If we could develop robots ..."

ERICA LLOYD: Robots.

ROB REVES-SOHN: "That could go under the Arctic ice cap … "

ERICA LLOYD: … to the seafloor.

ROB REVES-SOHN: "That would be a way to move beyond, you know, gnawing on bones and maybe bring down some big game."

ERICA LLOYD: So finally, finally, they're gonna put this thing in the water.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rob Reves-Sohn: We're on the verge of history, man.]

ERICA LLOYD: Here we go!

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rob Reves-Sohn: What the hell?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, crew member: So we're ready to go?]

ERICA LLOYD: I'm in this shack that's sitting on the deck.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, crew member: A nice, small, heated enclosure.]

ERICA LLOYD: And it's tiny. There's a couple of grad students and, you know, I'm—I'm hanging in there and just kind of squeezed into a corner. Everybody's got these big exposure suits on in case you fall into the water. Pretty quickly it starts smelling like body odor and peanuts. You know, although people are doing laundry, you know, they're not washing their fleeces.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, crew member: How's the stress level?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Erica Lloyd: How's your stress level?]

JAD: And then they—they drop the robot in?

ERICA LLOYD: Mm-hmm. Letting the baby go.

ROB REVES-SOHN: That was like sending your child to preschool for the first time.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, crew member: Okay. The AV is free and on the loose.]

ERICA LLOYD: So they're watching it go down deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper. And it's going down, down, down. And they can watch on the computer monitor.

ROB REVES-SOHN: On the screen, what you're seeing is streams of data.

JAD: So it's just data. No pictures?

ERICA LLOYD: Right.

ROB REVES-SOHN: X-Y-Z, depth, time, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, crew member: 30 meters down. Coming up, we're dropping.]

ERICA LLOYD: This is taking hours.

JAD: Hours?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rob Reves-Sohn: We’re diving about a meter every five seconds. So 12 meters per minute.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rob Reves-Sohn: We're pretty close now at 187 meters.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rob Reves-Sohn: We're now at 220 meters.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rob Reves-Sohn: 373 meters.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, crew member: We're at what, 100 meters right now?] 

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rob Reves-Sohn: Isn’t this exciting? Well, the problem—the problem is that nobody put any music on.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, crew member: I've got my iPod.]

ERICA LLOYD: You know, they start playing music.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Erica Lloyd: Devo?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rob Reves-Sohn: It’s Devo, yeah.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, crew member: What is Devo?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rob Reves-Sohn: Of course it’s Devo. Working In the Coal Mine.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, crew member: Ah! [laughs] Down, down.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Devo: Workin' in a coal mine, Goin' on down, down, Workin' in a coal mine, Oops, about to slip down. Five o'clock in the mornin', I'm up before the sun.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rob Reves-Sohn: C'mon, c'mon, c'mon.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, crew member: That quantity was good. Okay. 641.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rob Reves-Sohn: Awesome. Two LBO are at 641.]

ERICA LLOYD: 641 meters.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, crew member: Yes. So that's the new record.]

ERICA LLOYD: That's the depth record for an AV in the Arctic.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, crew member: Why doesn't somebody go—somebody go for breakfast?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, crew member #2: I'll go in just a minute.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rob Reves-Sohn: I'm just not going anywhere. I wanna see this thing get to 1,000. So it's past the 1,000 meter mark and it's moved on ...]

ERICA LLOYD: It makes the first mission goal: 1,000 meters. Everything's looking great. It's moving on to its next goal, 2,500 meters. And then it aborts its mission.

JAD: What?

ROBERT: Oh!

ERICA LLOYD: The vehicle aborted.

ROB REVES-SOHN: [bleep]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Crew Member: The software died.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Erica Lloyd: Software bug.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Crew Member: Software bug.]

ROB REVES-SOHN: Software? What's the matter with you? Can't you test the software before we come up here?

JAD: So you're pissed off at this point?

ROB REVES-SOHN: No, I wasn't, because I knew how hard it was, but I was so stressed out, so stressed out. I had facial tics, tightness of my chest, labored breathing, eating my fingernails to my knuckles, you know, 10 years of effort.

JAD: Millions of dollars.

ERICA LLOYD: His entire scientific career.

JAD: All of that's on the line.

ROB REVES-SOHN: You know, people kept asking me, of course, you know, Erica, you know, had the microphone there. "How do you feel?" [laughs] Trying to kind of get me to take this kind of introspective look on it. And I even tried. I like sat there, you know, one night after things had kind of died down and went on the front with the stars and said, okay, you know, feel the moment, dude. I can't feel the moment. We haven't had comms from AV for two and a half hours. I've got to get back down there. You only have so many days on station to do what you've been planning 10 years to do.

JAD: And for it to abort ...

ROB REVES-SOHN: Yeah. You're burning the clock, you know. Tick, tick, tick.

ROB REVES-SOHN: And you feel it. You feel that. You can feel the fuse.

ROB REVES-SOHN: Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

ERICA LLOYD: We're not finding vents here. The clock is ticking. Let's move on to this next site. We went through five time zones to get there.

ROB REVES-SOHN: Took a week.

JAD: Took a week?

ROB REVES-SOHN: Yeah.

JAD: So you're back just chugging through the ice for a week?

ROB REVES-SOHN: Yep.

ROB REVES-SOHN: Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

ROB REVES-SOHN: And then ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Erica Lloyd: Whoa, that's—I guess we're hitting some ice here. Everything's rocking.]

ROB REVES-SOHN: ... a really, really big ice flow moved in and ran us out of town.

JAD: Meaning you were stuck?

ROB REVES-SOHN: Yeah.

JAD: In a big traffic jam of ice chunks?

ROB REVES-SOHN: Exactly. There's absolutely nothing we can do.

ROB REVES-SOHN: Tick, tick, tick.

ERICA LLOYD: We're just waiting in the ice. You know, and just, people are like [sigh].

ROB REVES-SOHN: We didn't come up here to wait. Let's keep working, let's make something happen.

ERICA LLOYD: So the CTD team drops in their equipment because that's what they do. You know, if you're just sitting around anywhere, drop the equipment. 

JAD: You mean, so they were just stuck there and they're like, "Let's throw it over the side, see what happens?"

ERICA LLOYD: Right. And they found remarkable signals, much stronger signals than they'd found anywhere else.

JAD: Oh, so they got lucky?

ERICA LLOYD: Yeah.

ROB REVES-SOHN: Yeah. I mean, it's like interesting stuff everywhere is what it is kind of looking like.

JAD: And this time did the robot have a camera?

ERICA LLOYD: Yeah. They got all this video footage.

ROB REVES-SOHN: Wonderful, wonderful, high definition video. Superb.

ERICA LLOYD: You know, and we could watch from the ship.

ROB REVES-SOHN: We're seeing it, you know, in the control van in real time.

PHIL FORTE: Is it gonna be tubeworms? Is it gonna be clams? Is it gonna be mussels? Is it gonna be snails?

ERICA LLOYD: This is Phil Forte, one of the engineers.

PHIL FORTE: Oh, over the next rock mound, there is gonna be—there is gonna be the next smoker. There is gonna be the next caleyfield with clams and mussels, and who knows what we're going to see. 

JAD: And?

PHIL FORTE: We go over this crater, the big rim, and then drop back down on the other side. And we found ...

ERICA LLOYD: These, like, fields.

PHIL FORTE: A whole hilltop. Fields just covered in this—this ...

ERICA LLOYD: It was so eerie. It was ...

PHIL FORTE: I haven't seen anything like that before. Yellow ...

ERICA LLOYD: Yellow ...

PHIL FORTE: Fluffy stuff.

ERICA LLOYD: Fluffy stuff.

PHIL FORTE: And it was really beautiful.

JAD: Yellow, fluffy stuff?

ERICA LLOYD: Yeah, it was just everywhere.

JAD: Floating around, or where?

ERICA LLOYD: On the seafloor.

PHIL FORTE: We were seeing ski slopes.

ERICA LLOYD: Like cotton candy or something that might be growing in your yogurt.

PHIL FORTE: Whoa, what's that?

ERICA LLOYD: Like, there would be like a waterfall of it. Or a ...

JAD: A waterfall.

PHIL FORTE: Wow!

ERICA LLOYD: Like—like it would just be coming down rocks off of scarps and. 

JAD: Wow!

ERICA LLOYD: Kind of beautiful, but eerie.

ROB REVES-SOHN: And it was really, really frustrating.

JAD: What?

ROB REVES-SOHN: There was a certain faction on the ship that was really disappointed and they were really angry with me.

JAD: But why? You just ...

ROB REVES-SOHN: Because they felt that I had failed them.

JAD: Really?

ROB REVES-SOHN: Absolutely.

JAD: In what way?

ROB REVES-SOHN: That, you know, the combination of the AUVs and our technology and my leadership hadn't resulted in finding three-eyed tube worms.

PHIL FORTE: That's what we all wanted to see.

ROB REVES-SOHN: Everyone wanted to see a three-eyed tube worm, something really kind of spectacularly new and creepy and weird. And instead, the new stuff that we found was, you know, this ...

PHIL FORTE: Yellow fluffy stuff.

JAD: So the fluff was just like, whatever?

ERICA LLOYD: Well, it was exciting because it meant, well, okay, what's gonna eat this stuff?

PHIL FORTE: We're on the right trail.

ERICA LLOYD: Right? There's gotta be something eating this stuff. And nothing seemed to be eating it.

ROB REVES-SOHN: No three-eyed tube worms. And of course, all of that is built on the supposition that there are three-eyed tube worms there to find.

JAD: Right.

ROB REVES-SOHN: You know, the world is the world, the Arctic Ocean is the Arctic Ocean. It doesn't care what we want to see. What's there is there.

JAD: So here's the interesting thing: Rob Reves-Sohn comes back all that way, thinking basically this trip that I've planned for the last 10 years was a bust. No vents, no tube worms, nothing cool and amazing, just this fluff, whatever it is. But then they get back and they look at it more closely and they realize, okay, this stuff is microbes, but not your run of the mill microbes.

ROB REVES-SOHN: These are some of the oldest-known living organisms on earth. We were the first to see it.

JAD: And what's funny is that, like, you didn't even know that until you got back. Like, you almost missed it.

ROB REVES-SOHN: Yeah, right.

JAD: Are you gonna be doing this again? Well, any more trips?

ROB REVES-SOHN: Well, that—that's a good question. I mean, I'm broke now. Money's all gone. The field program's over. I am, you know, freefalling a little bit, but the three-eyed worm is still out there. And it's still there for the taking.

JAD: The mythic three-eyed worm.

ROB REVES-SOHN: The unicorn of the Arctic.

JAD: Thanks to Rob Reves-Sohn, and Erica Lloyd and also before them Caitlin Wockenfuss and the Brooklyn Tech Cheer Squad. Radiolab will continue in a moment.

[LISTENER: This is Christine Stones from Maplewood, New Jersey.. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Hello, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And we're talking about how scientists think about the world.

JAD: And appreciate.

ROBERT: Yeah. Except appreciation, this is something that scientists do differently from the rest of us. And I think this next story is an act of appreciation so different from the rest of us that it makes me want to ...

JAD: Barf?

ROBERT: Gag.

JAD: Bring it!

ROBERT: Once upon a time, in a rainforest in Costa Rica in Central America, there was a little botfly.

JAD: What's a botfly?

ROBERT: Botflies are hairy flies that live in moist tropical areas on Earth.

JAD: So they're not like New York City flies?

ROBERT: No, no, no. What a botfly does is when a botfly is pregnant—and our botfly was a pregnant female botfly—she has her baby, flies up into the air carrying her baby. She sees a nice, hairy mosquito, actually grabs onto the mosquito.

JAD: Mid flight?

ROBERT: Oh, yeah. And drops her baby onto the mosquito.

JAD: Why the mosquito?

ROBERT: Well, because the mosquito's gonna do something very important for the baby. But the mosquito, of course, is a mosquito, so it's looking to bite somebody.

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: When the mosquito lands on a nice, warm, palpitating mammal so she can have some blood, the botfly baby is programmed to fall off into the mosquito bite and make a little home.

JAD: Wow, that's impressive!

ROBERT: Completely. Yeah.

JAD: That mosquito probably has no idea of any of this.

ROBERT: No idea at all. You got all that?

JAD: Got it.

ROBERT: Okay, so now I want to introduce you to a particular palpitating mammal who happened to be in Costa Rica on our very day.

JERRY COYNE: I guess I was about 24. It was 1973.

ROBERT: His name is Jerry Coyne.

JERRY COYNE: 30-some years, I guess. 35 years. But I remember it like it was yesterday. This isn't an experience that you forget easily.

ROBERT: You were working at Harvard as a grad student at the time?

JERRY COYNE: Yeah, I was. I was doing a laboratory experiment on flies, ironically. And there was a program for Harvard graduate students to go to the tropics for two months during the summer so they could get some experience in the field and learn something about the diversity of tropical nature.

ROBERT: So now we've got Jerry Coyne in Costa Rica walking through a forest.

JAD: Doing some research or something?

ROBERT: Doing some research. And through the air, you hear the distant sound of a mosquito getting closer and closer and closer 'til it bites Jerry right on the head.

JERRY COYNE: Not too far from the crown. And I scratched it. But, you know, it didn't go away. When it got to be about the size of a pea, I consulted one of my fellow students.

ROBERT: This friend of his happened to be an entomologist. She climbed up onto a bunk bed.

JERRY COYNE: And she looked in my head, pulled the hairs back, and she said, "Oh my God, there's something moving in there!" That's when I freaked out completely. I started running around the field station, just physically running in circles.

ROBERT: In his mosquito bite, there was a little hose or something protruding ...

JERRY COYNE: Through the top of the mosquito bite. And it was sort of wiggling around.

ROBERT: A breathing tube like a little straw.

JERRY COYNE: I was really completely freaked out. I mean, I had a worm in my body. Nobody knew how to extract it.

ROBERT: Why couldn't you just grab onto the periscope part and pull?

JERRY COYNE: Because like all marvels of evolution, the botfly maggot has devices to keep you from pulling it out because it makes its living in your body. So it has a pair of hooks on the anal end, the other end, that are dug into your flesh. So if you try to pull the thing out, it just digs in and you'll break it in two. That is the thing you want to avoid, because it can cause a serious infection.

ROBERT: Oh!

JAD: No, you don't want to do that.

ROBERT: No, you don't. But what you could do, however, is you could try what they call the "meat cure."

JERRY COYNE: Put a slab of meat over the wound, strap it to you. I would have to have strapped, for example, a steak to my head, which is not practical.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JERRY COYNE: And then the worm thinks that, you know, the worm's breathing tube, which is through the mosquito bite, gets cut off and it's deprived of air. So it thinks that the steak is part of your flesh, and it burrows up through the steak. And when it comes out almost all the way, you can just remove the steak with a worm in it.

ROBERT: What a clever idea!

JERRY COYNE: Yeah. The idea of toiling in the tropical heat every day with a t-bone strapped to my head was not something that I wanted to do.

ROBERT: Meantime, it's causing problems, this thing.

JERRY COYNE: It was a terrible itch. And from time to time, it would, like, move or twitch, and you'd feel this sort of sharp pain in your skull. Or you could feel it grinding up against there. And when I went swimming or took a shower, it would get sort of freaked out because its air hole would be cut off, and then it would really go nuts, you know, make a lot of pain. So I tried to avoid getting my head underwater. Meanwhile, the lump was getting bigger and bigger until it sort of got noticeable.

JAD: Wait, how does it—what is it eating in order to get bigger and bigger?

ROBERT: Well, it's, uh—um ...

JAD: Yes?

ROBERT: Um ...

JERRY COYNE: It's eating my muscles and tissue and my scalp.

ROBERT: It's eating your flesh, then?

JERRY COYNE: Yeah, it is.

JAD: Oh!

JERRY COYNE: It's turning human flesh into fly flesh.

ROBERT: This fly, it's eating Jerry. So it's more and more—well, it is Jerry.

JERRY COYNE: It is. And that's the part that made me like it.

ROBERT: So Jerry and the part of Jerry that is now the botfly leave Costa Rica, and it's time to head back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Harvard University, where Jerry's the grad student. And, you know, he has to check things out.

JERRY COYNE: So I went to the health clinic and, you know, in about 10 minutes, there was 20 doctors around me. Nobody had ever seen anything like this at Harvard. They were all curious and poking and prodding and looking at it and oohing and ah-ing but, of course, none of them knew what to do about it. And I just decided, you know, I'm gonna let it come out, make the best of it, you know, enjoy it as much as I could, and marvel at it. I mean, when you really think about it, it is amazing that an animal can take human flesh and turn it, using its own genes, into a fly. I mean, you have to marvel.

ROBERT: This is so weird of you, actually.

JERRY COYNE: You think this behavior might seem weird to the layperson, but to a biologist, it's sort of absolutely normal to be very curious about something. I make my living on flies. I work with fruit flies. I'm a geneticist. And here was a fly making its living on me. You know, I was getting more and more curious. I wanted to see what it looked like when it came out. I didn't want to kill it.

ROBERT: What about girls? I mean, assuming you're dating. So, like, wasn't this, like, a total turn off to say, "Hi, this is me and my maggot?"

JERRY COYNE: Well, I was—you know, I was dating a nurse at the time, and this is the good thing about it. The nurse was actually quite fascinated with this.

SARAH ROGERSON: I thought it was disgusting. [laughs]

ROBERT: Sarah Rogerson was Jerry's friend. She inspected the fly.

ROBERT: Did you give it a name?

SARAH ROGERSON: No.

ROBERT: [laughs]

SARAH ROGERSON: No. Jerry may have felt that way about it, but no, I didn't. This was more of a scientific experience.

ROBERT: Is this something that was okay with you?

SARAH ROGERSON: Well, I don't remember being informed that there were any other options. I thought, this is just what had to happen.

ROBERT: So a couple of weeks pass, and the botfly is just getting ...

JERRY COYNE: Bigger and bigger and bigger.

ROBERT: It goes from jelly bean size to something like ...

JERRY COYNE: The size of an egg.

JAD: An egg?

SARAH ROGERSON: Yeah, it was pretty big.

ROBERT: Like a quail egg.

JAD: Whoa!

ROBERT: He's covering it now with a baseball cap, which is maybe one reason why they decided to go to Fenway Park one particular evening.

SARAH ROGERSON: That is correct.

JERRY COYNE: Yeah, it was a Red Sox-Yankees game. I wasn't gonna miss that. And every once in a while I would rub my head, I mean, throughout this whole gestation of this thing just to check on it. And during the game, when I rubbed my head, I felt something coming out of the lump.

SARAH ROGERSON: Jerry kept saying, "Oh, my gosh! Oh, my gosh, it's coming out! I can feel it!"

ROBERT: So was this a little distracting?

SARAH ROGERSON: Yeah. A foul ball came up where we were sitting, and it hit in one of those wooden seats at Fenway. And we narrowly escaped getting hit because we really weren't paying much attention to the game at all.

JERRY COYNE: But it took a long time. I mean ...

ROBERT: It started at the game, and then it went on?

JERRY COYNE: It started at the game and then continued on until the evening.

SARAH ROGERSON: We went back to Jerry's apartment, and he kept reaching up and checking to feel the lump. We were just hanging out, and ...

JERRY COYNE: It was a bit more risque than that.

SARAH ROGERSON: [laughs]

JERRY COYNE: And I said ...

SARAH ROGERSON: ... he reached up and said, "It's gone! It's out."

JERRY COYNE: We gotta find it. [laughs] I turned on the light, and there it was on the pillow. And it was horrifying.

ROBERT: What did it look like? Is it a wiggly little wormy thing?

SARAH ROGERSON: It's sort of bulbous on one end, and then it tapers down to a little tail. It's white.

JERRY COYNE: Big, fat, white grub worm.

SARAH ROGERSON: An inch and a half long.

ROBERT: Wow!

SARAH ROGERSON: And it has little black teeth.

JERRY COYNE: You know, I thought, "Oh, my God. That's what was in my head. Had I known that, I might have been more freaked out."

ROBERT: When you are greeting your baby there, did you have a feeling of pride or just ...?

JERRY COYNE: Well, no. Extreme curiosity. The one thing that was extremely striking to me was that its exit was completely painless. You know, it's painful when it's in there, but when it comes out, it does so very painlessly. And that's another evolutionary phenomenon. Of course, if the worm did it painfully and exited, then the horse or the monkey or whoever it's infecting would just slap it and kill it.

ROBERT: So what did you do once you had the baby there on the pillow?

JERRY COYNE: Well, then I decided I was going to try to rear it into an adult fly. You know, I'm a scientist. That's what you do. So I had prepared a jar of sterile sand, and I took the worm and I dropped it into the sand and put the top on with air holes and hoped that it would pupate, but unfortunately it died.

ROBERT: Did you get sad?

JERRY COYNE: I was extremely sad. You know, in the temperate zone in Boston, a botfly is not gonna make it. It just can't live. And so it was doomed from the start. But I wanted to see it complete its life cycle. And unfortunately, it didn't quite make it. So I did the best I could with what I knew. You know, I think it's—it added some richness to my life. It really did. People still get completely horrified when I tell them the story, even though to me it's—you know, it's sort of a nice story. [laughs]

JAD: Jerry Coyne works at the University of Chicago, and his forthcoming book is called Why Evolution is True.

ROBERT: And we have time for one more story. A couple of years ago, I sat down with one of the great bug scientists—insect scientists in the world. His name is Tom Eisner. He teaches up at Cornell and has taught more scientists to love insects than anyone in the world, probably. And I guess I wondered if you spent your whole life having feelings and very sophisticated feelings about tiny, almost alien life forms, how does that happen? We spoke at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.

ROBERT: Your interest in insects, can you remember when it began?

TOM EISNER: According to my parents, when I first stood on my feet.

ROBERT: Really?

TOM EISNER: All I cared about was bugs. And the beetles, caterpillars, ants, termites, cockroaches. I picked them up. I learned quickly not to put them all in my mouth.

[audience laughs]

TOM EISNER: I kept them in my room. My room was a zoo.

ROBERT: You were born in Berlin.

TOM EISNER: Correct.

ROBERT: From a Jewish family.

TOM EISNER: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: You were about three years old when you left, or thereabouts?

TOM EISNER: Three years old. Went to Spain.

ROBERT: So you went from the Nazis in Berlin to Spain.

TOM EISNER: Yes, and the Spanish Civil War. Fled for France. My parents decided we should really start somewhere else, and we went to South America. And that was an entomological paradise.

TOM EISNER: Every living organism has some sort of odor. You can build these up in your memory, and I used to take a whiff of an insect and classify them in my mind's eye according to what they smelled like. Caterpillar? Ant? Beetle?

ROBERT: [laughs] And do you ever dream of insects?

TOM EISNER: Yeah, I tend to dream that I am an insect.

ROBERT: What does that mean, that you dream that you are an insect? You mean, you were scurrying?

TOM EISNER: Yes.

ROBERT: And walking upside down on the ceiling?

TOM EISNER: Indeed. Even escaping swattings. The weirdest situation that I ever got into in a dream was I dreamed that I was an insect, and I was telling another insect that I would occasionally dream that I'm a human.

[laughter]

ROBERT: That's your meta dream.

TOM EISNER: Insects were somehow my great love. I was very much a loner, and if I didn't have a room full of insects, live, I was unhappy.

OLIVER SACKS: No, I— Tom, I wanted to ask you ...

ROBERT: Now at this moment, Oliver Sacks, who was on the stage with us, he asked Tom this question.

OLIVER SACKS: ... whether you feel that insects respond to you? You know, whether—whether you feel them sort of purring, and whether they know that you're gentle and reliable and for them?

TOM EISNER: You know, it's a good question. I don't—I don't presume to read responses on the part of the insects. But the older I get, the more difficult I find it to experiment with them in ways that kill them. Bombardier beetles can live for one, two, up to three years in your lab. You become very attached to them. You give them names. And when they die, it's an event.

TOM EISNER: So you must somehow have moments where you feel that things are going on in that tiny little brain. That they have secrets hidden up their sleeves that they might reveal if you found a common language, I find that I can love nature no matter how distant the individual organisms are from me. But I reach out and hope that I can shorten the distance and create some feeling of co-existence.

ROBERT: Tom Eisner's book is called For the Love of Insects.

JAD: That's really what it's called?

ROBERT: Yeah. 

JAD: Well, we should go. Check our website Radiolab.org for more information, and you can always send us an email at radiolab(@)wnyc.org.

ROBERT: Radiolab is one word.

JAD: Yes, it is. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Message three.]

[JERRY COYNE: Hi, this is Jerry Coyne. The Botfly Man. Radiolab is produced by Amanda Aronczyk and Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Lulu Miller, Soren Wheeler, Jonathan Mitchell, Ellen Horne, and Jessica Benko, none of whom are afflicted with botflies. Other help, Ike Sriskandarajah, Hee Chang Lin. Special thanks to Pauline Davies and Kate Edgar.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

 

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