[RADIOLAB INTRO]

SOREN WHEELER: Give everybody a level check.

JAD ABUMRAD: We're gonna start the show with this fellow. His name's Ben Zimmer. He's the On Language columnist.

BEN ZIMMER: For the New York Times Magazine.

JAD: 'Cause we figured since we wanted to do a show called ...

ROBERT KRULWICH: Oops!

JAD: Right. We thought we should call Ben. And so he came into the studio, and he brought with him a bunch of his favorite oopses.

BEN ZIMMER: As an example, I just wanted to give one of my favorite examples of ...

JAD: The first one that he hit us with began its life ...

JAD: Was it in an AP news article?

BEN ZIMMER: Well, it was an AP story, but the AP story was fine. When the AP story appeared on a news site from the American Family Association ...

JAD: Which, by the way ...

BEN ZIMMER: ... is a conservative Christian group. The headline, first of all, said "Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials."

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: Was it kissing guys, or something that they would be good at?

BEN ZIMMER: Well, if you read on, if you're confused by that headline ...

JAD: Very.

BEN ZIMMER: Here's how it starts. "Tyson homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the US Olympic track and field trials." And it goes on to say, you know, throughout the entire article, you know, "On Saturday, homosexual misjudged the finish in his opening heat." The entire article had the word 'homosexual' in place of 'gay.' The sprinter's name is Tyson Gay.

ROBERT: Oh my God!

JAD: According to Ben, this is a classic ...

BEN ZIMMER: Classic example of ...

JAD: ... of a search and replace oops. This group, apparently did not like the word 'gay?'

ROBERT: Because 'gay' makes homosexuality sound very nice and ...

JAD: Very gay.

ROBERT: Very gay. Right.

JAD: So what they did was they ran a search and replaced every instance of the word 'gay' with the word 'homosexual.' But then you get Tyson Gay becoming Tyson Homosexual.

BEN ZIMMER: This was just one that they were a little careless with.

ROBERT: Just to be fair, here's a contrasting example. In 1990, the Fresno Bee ran an article ...

BEN ZIMMER: About the Massachusetts budget crisis, and it made reference to new taxes that will help put Massachusetts, quote, "Back into the African American."

JAD: [laughs]

BEN ZIMMER: And they had to issue a correction saying it should have said 'back in the black.'

JAD: Now this one might have been a newsroom prank, we're not sure.

ROBERT: But it did get into the paper.

JAD: Right. Just for the hell of it, here's one last one. This one happened after the famous broadcaster Walter Cronkite died.

BEN ZIMMER: When the Chicago Tribune did their online obituary for Cronkite, what happened was every instance of 'Cronkite' got replaced by 'Mr. Cronkite.' You can understand the thinking behind that. They're deciding okay, for deceased males, they should be referred to with the title 'Mr.' But then what this turns into is an obituary where it says 'He was born Walter Leland Mr. Cronkite Jr.'

ROBERT: [laughs]

BEN ZIMMER: And it refers to his radio show, 'Walter Mr. Cronkite's 20th Century.' It's got things about his family. His son, Walter Mr. Cronkite III. His daughter—his daughter Kathy Mr. Cronkite.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [singing] Oops. My heart went oops.]

JAD: I'm Jad.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [singing] The moment that we met, my heart went oops.]

ROBERT: And I'm Robert.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [singing] I never will forget ...]

JAD: On this episode of Radiolab ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [singing] ... the moment that I met you.]

JAD: Four oopses, starting with a tree that ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [singing] Went oops.]

ROBERT: Then we've got a goose that ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [singing] Went oops.]

JAD: And an entire town that ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [singing] Went oops.]

ROBERT: And a Harvard professor.

JAD: That really went oops. Now we should just say before we start, oops—oops is—oops can be a misleading term. Really, what we're talking about here is something Greek.

ROBERT: [laughs] You try hard to prevent one thing, and then you get exactly what you didn't want to get back at you.

JAD: Right. And our first story falls into that category. Back a few seasons ago, we were doing a show on deception, and we ended up talking with a professor.

RUBEN GUR: Yes?

JAD: Named Ruben Gur.

RUBEN GUR: Hello?

JAD: Hi, is this Professor Gur?

RUBEN GUR: Yes, speaking.

JAD: He's a psychiatrist who works at the University of Pennsylvania. And I'd called him to talk about his research on self deception.

RUBEN GUR: Self deception.

JAD: It's fascinating stuff, and I'm not gonna go into it now because somewhere along the way, the conversation took a really weird turn.

JAD: No!

RUBEN GUR: Oh, yeah.

JAD: Get out!

RUBEN GUR: Yeah. Yeah.

JAD: And it happened when he began to tell me about some studies.

RUBEN GUR: Strange studies.

JAD: Done by a ...

JAD: What was the guy's name?

RUBEN GUR: His name is hanging on—I don't remember. Just a second. Murray was his name.

JAD: Henry Murray.

ROBERT: And the reason we want to hear about Henry Murray is what?

JAD: What? I built it up. Don't you want to know more?

ROBERT: Not yet, no. [laughs] Tell me more.

JAD: Okay, I'm gonna let it unfold because we were so interested in what Ruben Gur told us that we found the guy.

ALSTON CHASE: Hi, how's it going?

JAD: Who knows a whole lot about. Professor Murray's name is Alston Chase.

ALSTON CHASE: Very windy day today, isn't it?

JAD: And he lives in a remote cabin in Montana.

ROBERT: In the woods?

JAD: In the foothills.

ALSTON CHASE: Professor Murray was a very prestigious scholar. He had been a professor of psychology at Harvard before the Second World War. During the war, he went to work for the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which was the forerunner of the CIA.

JAD: And a couple of years into his government service, says Alston, something happened that really spooked him and spooked the country.

ALSTON CHASE: During the Korean War ...

JAD: There were some gis, he said, who'd been captured in Korea. And afterwards ...

ALSTON CHASE: After the Korean War ...

JAD: ... they refused to come home.

ALSTON CHASE: They appeared to have betrayed their country.

[NEWS CLIP: Renounced their own country, and disappeared behind Red China's bamboo curtain.]

[NEWS CLIP: Does anybody want to go home? No!]

ALSTON CHASE: The CIA and their military establishment was very much concerned that the Communists had found techniques for brainwashing.

JAD: And so Murray and other psychiatrists in the government were charged with preparing those soldiers to resist that kind of brainwashing. And Murray himself developed a style of interrogation ...

ALSTON CHASE: 'Stressful interrogation' was the term used.

JAD: ... that the army could use on its pilots.

RUBEN GUR: Yeah. They developed this method of kidnapping them before they were sent on the mission.

JAD: And then, says Rubin Gur, he'd run them through a battery of tests.

RUBEN GUR: To see if they'd break. And if they didn't break, then they were fine to fly.

JAD: This kind of psychological training was kind of a new front in the Cold War. And in the 1950s, Murray's back at Harvard, and he's thinking of ways to fine tune his techniques. And this is where things get interesting.

ALSTON CHASE: He took a class of Harvard undergraduates, 20-some-odd.

JAD: Sophomores, mostly.

ALSTON CHASE: Students were told to write an autobiographical essay.

JAD: Like a diary. And he told them, "You know what?"

ALSTON CHASE: "Make it very personal."

JAD: "Write your deepest thoughts in there."

ALSTON CHASE: "Highest aspirations and hopes."

JAD: "And while you're at it, write about your sexual fantasies."

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: "Go ahead."

ROBERT: Quite a class.

JAD: And after the students were done he said to them, "Now I'm gonna pair you up into groups of two."

ALSTON CHASE: To debate or discuss what they'd written.

JAD: And students were like, "Okay, we'll share. No big deal." But ...

ALSTON CHASE: They were duped. They were walked into this very brightly-lit room.

JAD: Which turned out to be an interrogation room with a one-way mirror in it.

ALSTON CHASE: Put in a chair, strapped in. Electrodes were attached to their arms, chest, their heart.

JAD: To measure stress, basically.

ALSTON CHASE: And they were also filming through the mirror.

JAD: And then instead of a classmate, in walked a total stranger.

ALSTON CHASE: Older man.

JAD: This guy was holding their essay. They didn't know it, but Murray had trained him ...

ALSTON CHASE: To do everything he could to anger and humiliate the undergraduate.

JAD: And he just tore them apart piece by piece.

ALSTON CHASE: Using the essay to mock the students' aspirations and thoughts. Then after this was done, these students have to come back week after week to view themselves on film being humiliated.

JAD: That, to me, seems like the worst part. After they'd been humiliated, they had to watch themselves being humiliated over and over.

RUBEN GUR: People became tearful and miserable. And he was proud how he destroyed people.

ROBERT: What kind of a person is this?

JAD: Like, why did he do it?

ROBERT: Yeah.

ALSTON CHASE: Why Murray did it? There are any one of a number of explanations, and they all could be true. One is it was grant grabbing. He was getting money to do these things.

JAD: Also, you know, this was the Cold War. He was fighting Communism. He may have thought it was justified.

ROBERT: Yeah, but he just said he was proud of this.

JAD: Well, it also happens to be the case that he was having an affair.

ALSTON CHASE: For about 30 years with a woman, not his wife. And they had a sexual relationship that bordered on the sado-mas—in fact, was sadomasochistic. In other words, Murray's interest in these was intensely personal.

JAD: Whatever the case, in those Harvard experiments, there was one student who was just not prepared for any of it.

RUBEN GUR: His codename was Lawful.

ALSTON CHASE: Lawful. They gave each of these students a code name.

RUBEN GUR: Because he was considered so conventional.

ALSTON CHASE: He was ...

JAD: Really still just a boy.

RUBEN GUR: Graduated high school at 16.

ALSTON CHASE: Was living a thousand miles from home. Two shirts and two trousers to his name.

JAD: And Lawful apparently was an especially lonely kid.

ALSTON CHASE: The notes I found of Murray did refer specifically to Lawful's essay, which he saw as highly alienated.

JAD: So when Lawful walked into that room, sat across from that stranger ...

RUBEN GUR: The guy really did a job on him. He was young, so he was barely growing a beard. So the first thing that the guy tells him is, "What is this on your chin? Something trying to look like a beard?"

JAD: Then the guy opens up Lawful's essay and lets him have it. Meanwhile, like all the students, Lawful had been hooked up to all these stress monitors.

RUBEN GUR: I analyzed his data compared to all the other participants, and he had far and away the strongest response physiologically.

JAD: You mean, like, his heart beat the fastest and all that?

RUBEN GUR: Heartbeat. Everything. Through the roof.

JAD: Amazingly, this experiment went on for three years. And decades later, a lot of the subjects were still upset.

ALSTON CHASE: And considered it one of the most traumatic experiences they'd had in their 20s

JA:. Lawful never forgot it.

ALSTON CHASE: That's right. He was resentful at the way he was treated at Harvard. He had nightmares about Professor Murray after he left Harvard.

ROBERT: So what happened to this guy?

JAD: Well, he finished up his four years at Harvard, got his degree, then got a PhD in math. Then he began to teach math, and then he became a household name.

ROBERT: What do you mean?

JAD: Well, I mean this.

[NEWS CLIP: The FBI raid began just after noon in a remote mountainous area called Stemple Pass, about five miles outside the town of Lincoln, Montana.]

JAD: Turns out that Lawful's real name.

RUBEN GUR: Theodore Kaczynski.

JAD: No!

RUBEN GUR: Oh, yeah.

[NEWS CLIP: Kaczynski was known ...]

JAD: Get out!

RUBEN GUR: Yeah.

[NEWS CLIP: The FBI dubbed him the Unabomber. In nearly 18 years, he found targets all over the country.]

[NEWS CLIP: His meticulously made bombs have killed three people and injured another 23.]

[NEWS CLIP: Blew my arm off to the side like this, and the first thing I thought was, "Why did they do that?"]

JAD: Do you think that this study had anything to do with Ted Kaczynski's subsequent, very infamous acts?

RUBEN GUR: Well, I think he probably would have—if it hadn't been for that experiment, he still probably would have been maybe reclusive, living somewhere in a cabin in Montana, regardless. But I think the evil twist was—was done there.

JAD: Years later, while he was researching a book, Alston Chase corresponded with Kaczynski.

ALSTON CHASE: In one of his letters, he mentioned that he participated in some psychological experiments conducted by Professor Murray. Of course, I was very curious, and I wrote him back to tell me a little bit more about it, and he said, "Well, you really don't—I don't know if you want to go into that can of worms."

JAD: Ruben Gur is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, and Alston Chase is the author of the book Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [singing] Oops. My heart went oops.]

JAD: Here's one more from Ben Zimmer.

JAD: What is the Cupertino Effect?

BEN ZIMMER: The Cupertino Effect is the name given to the phenomenon of when you rely on a spell checker too much, it will give you a suggestion, and very often it's a suggestion that you really shouldn't take.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: And why is it called the Cupertino Effect?

BEN ZIMMER: Well, in early spell checkers, if you wrote 'cooperation,' the word 'cooperation,' C-O-O-P-E-R-A-T-I-O-N, a perfectly typical spelling of the word 'cooperation,' In early spell checkers, that word was not there because it expected you to spell it C-O-hyphen. And so what it would do is it would give you a suggestion, and the suggestion was Cupertino, the name of the town in California. So if you look at documents that are still online from the UN, from the EU, from NATO, you'll find dozens and dozens of Cupertinos that have found their way in there.

BEN ZIMMER: For instance, here's a German NATO officer was quoted as saying, "The Cupertino with our Italian comrades proved to be very fruitful."

ROBERT: [laughs]

BEN ZIMMER: And then there was a proposal from the EU Scientific and Technical Research Committee. They proposed quote, "Stimulating cross-border Cupertino."

JAD: [laughs] Oops number two. You go.

ROBERT: The next—the next one is just a different flavor entirely. We're going to meet someone—I don't know. I can't really say that he did anything wrong.

JAD: Yeah. I mean, this one is more like, would you say, luck?

ROBERT: I mean, suppose you just picked up a toothbrush, and it was connected to a snake that was connected to a monster that was connected to the devil himself? You wouldn't—you're just picking up a toothbrush. So this is a case where really bad things happen. The story comes from our own reporter, Pat Walters.

PAT WALTERS: Yes.

ROBERT: It concerns. Go ahead.

PAT: Okay, so just to start, I want you to imagine you're on a mountaintop.

ROBERT: Okay.

PAT: This mountain is in western Nevada.

MICHAEL COHEN: The second highest peak in the state of Nevada.

ROBERT: Got a name?

PAT: It's called Wheeler Peak.

MICHAEL COHEN: And ...

ROBERT: Who's this?

PAT: This is Michael Cohen.

MICHAEL COHEN: I go by Michael P. Cohen.

PAT: He's a nature writer. And he tells me that up on top of this mountain ...

MICHAEL COHEN: There is a grove of old trees. You can see the trees from a distance, and their wood is so bright that it actually glistens in the sun.

ROBERT: What are they called?

PAT: Oh, bristlecone pines.

MICHAEL COHEN: Yes.

PAT: Can you describe what they look like?

MICHAEL COHEN: Sure. They tend to be shorter, broad at the base. They get very, very old, and as they get old, they become tortured or gnarled.

PAT: They sort of twist up towards the sky.

MICHAEL COHEN: The overall effect is sort of electrical.

PAT: They look kind of like what you'd see in a Tim Burton movie.

MICHAEL COHEN: [laughs]

PAT: So you have that picture?

ROBERT: Yeah.

PAT: On your mind?

ROBERT: Yeah.

PAT: Okay, so the story is about this scientist named Don Curry.

MICHAEL COHEN: I'm gonna take a drink of water. Wait, I'm gonna take a drink of water. Okay.

PAT: Story starts in 1964.

MICHAEL COHEN: Don Curry was a graduate student from North Carolina. And he was young.

PAT: Do we know how old he was?

MICHAEL COHEN: He was 30 years old.

PAT: And he'd just gotten a big grant from the National Science Foundation to do some climate change research. Not like climate change now, though. Climate change thousands of years ago. Because he learned that you could actually sort of travel back in time.

RON LANNER: Go back into the past using the spacing between tree rings, the annual rings.

PAT: This is Ron Lanner. He's a retired Forest Service scientist. And he says you can use the width of the tree rings ...

RON LANNER: To determine whether it was colder at one time, or rainier at one period in the tree's life or whatever.

PAT: So Curry's up on top of this mountain, up amongst these trees, and he needs to find one that he can look inside and kind of see what the weather was like way back in ...

RON LANNER: The past.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don Curry: Five minutes of looking is all that was involved.]

PAT: This is from a Nova documentary. Curry died a few years ago, and this is actually the only time that he ever talked about this story on tape.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don Curry: Literally ...]

RON LANNER: He found a tree there.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don Curry: ... the first old tree that we climbed to ...]

RON LANNER: That he described as looking super, super old.

PAT: So Curry takes out this special drill which scientists use to take, like, a core sample to look at the rings.

RON LANNER: Yeah.

PAT: Presses it up ...

RON LANNER: Against the tree. Give it a good push to get it through the bark.

PAT: And he starts twisting it in.

RON LANNER: Clockwise into the tree. But he wasn't having much luck.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don Curry: The normal approach to coring the tree wasn't working.]

PAT: It becomes harder and harder for him to turn this thing into the tree.

RON LANNER: And eventually, the bit of his drill broke off in the tree.

ROBERT: Oh!

PAT: This isn't just any drill. He ordered it from Sweden. And the whole time he's thinking, "If I can't get this thing out of the tree ..."

RON LANNER: That would mean the research project would be lost for the year.

PAT: So at this point he kind of lumbers back down the mountain.

RON LANNER: And ...

PAT: Dejected.

RON LANNER: ... he managed to find the district ranger and told him the problem.

PAT: "Guys, my drill, it got stuck in the tree. What should I do?" And they tell him, "Don't worry about it, Don."

RON LANNER: "We'll just cut the tree down."

PAT: This is one tree. There are dozens of these trees all around.

RON LANNER: So ...

PAT: They start slicing into the tree. It takes a while to cut it down, because it's really dense, full of knots and gnarls. And eventually the tree falls over.

RON LANNER: Then they cut some slabs out of the lower part of the tree.

PAT: Curry gets one of these slabs back to his lab, throws it on a big desk, finds a magnifying glass because the rings are really small. And he starts counting. One, two, three. And as he counts, he's making little ...

RON LANNER: Pinholes or pencil marks every 50 or 100 years.

PAT: By the end of the first day, he gets back to a thousand years. Like, the Dark Ages were in Europe eating raw possum. Day two. By the middle of the day, he gets back to like, Jesus, Roman Empire, gladiators and centurions. But even at that point he was only, like, halfway finished. He kept counting.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don Curry: We could begin to see that we were getting over 4,000 years, over 4,500, over 4,600. And we ended around 4,900 years.]

RON LANNER: It had 4,844 annual rings in it.

PAT: And at that point the oldest tree that anyone had ever found was 4,600 years old. In other words ...

RON LANNER: He had himself the oldest tree ever.

PAT: But he had killed it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don Curry: And you gotta think, I've got to have done something wrong. I better recount. I better recount again.]

PAT: But no matter how many times he counted the rings, the number never went down. The world's oldest tree was dead.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don Curry: It was—it was truly—it was horrifying. It was a—it was like a family tragedy.]

PAT: People had given these trees names.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don Curry: There was Buddha and Socrates and Methuselah.]

PAT: They called Curry's tree ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don Curry: The Prometheus tree.]

PAT: And the guy who named that particular tree was so angry that he wrote a magazine article where he called Don Curry a murderer.

MICHAEL COHEN: All across the country there's a tremendous uproar, saying what about killing the world's oldest living organism?

ROBERT: What? I thought we were just saying—I think it was the oldest living tree.

PAT: It's both. It's the oldest tree and it's the oldest organism.

ROBERT: Wait, wait, wait. You mean that the oldest continuously living animal, shrub, mushroom—are you making—are you sure about this? What you just said was this is the oldest living continuous individual alive on the planet.

PAT: I know what I said. This tree was older than any other tree on the planet. Older than the oldest sponge, which is like 1,500 years old. Older than the oldest animal, just some sort of oyster which is 405 years old. Older than any other living thing on the entire planet.

ROBERT: Oh God.

JAD: [laughs]

PAT: Where do we go there?

ROBERT: So where does that leave Mr. Curry? So what happened to him?

PAT: Well, right after this happened, Curry pretty much stopped doing research on trees. He basically studied salt flats for the rest of his career—big treeless salt flats. And aside from that little Nova clip that we played before, he hasn't really ever gone on record talking about this, so it's hard for us to say how he really felt about it. But there was this one moment. He was being interviewed by a TV reporter, like, about his salt flats research.

MICHAEL COHEN: And this would have been in the 19—probably the late '80s, early '90s.

PAT: Years and years after the whole tree incident.

MICHAEL COHEN: All of a sudden, out of a clear blue sky, the television reporter asked him, "Oh, aren't you the Curry who killed the world's oldest tree?" He was completely ambushed, and Curry just turned his back and ran away.

ROBERT: Oof! So that's a stain that's just never gonna wear off somebody. On the other hand, he did have the incredible misfortune to kill the oldest living organism on our planet.

PAT: Yeah, but this is 25 years later, and he's still getting hassled about this tree.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm?

PAT: We're talking about one tree here.

ROBERT: Well, no. We're talking about the tree here.

PAT: Right.

ROBERT: But the thing about a tree that lasts for almost 4,000 ...

PAT: More than that.

ROBERT: ... 5,000 years ...

PAT: Almost 5,000 years. Sure.

ROBERT: ... is that it is a repository. It is a talisman for 5,000 years of Earth's history

PAT: But I mean, would it be any less bad if the tree were three and a half thousand years old? This is just one more old thing.

ROBERT: No, it's the oldest of all.

PAT: You're taking, like, the Guinness Book of World Records perspective.

ROBERT: Oh, you keep making me into like a Ripley's Believe It Or Not guy, but no.

PAT: That's exactly where you're being.

ROBERT: No, no, no. There's a—when you've been around longer than everybody else, there's a sort of ...

PAT: Which I've never experienced.

ROBERT: Yeah.

PAT: Have you?

ROBERT: Well, I'm a lot older than you. [laughs] I walk in here and I look at you and I feel pity for all the things you don't know.

PAT: [laughs]

ROBERT: Consider what the tree must have felt.

JAD: Reporter Pat Walters. And we're happy to say that since our original broadcast of the story, a new oldest living tree has been found. It's also a bristlecone pine, also in the White Mountains. And its current age, according to Dr. Peter Brown of the Rocky Mountain Tree Ring Research Group, is just about 5,060 years old, which makes it actually older than Don Curry's tree when it was cut down. So Don Curry, if you're out there listening from the afterlife, you can now rest in peace. We'll continue in a moment.

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Chuck from Albany, New York. 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.]

ROBERT KRULWICH: And now to keep us in our oopsie mood ...

JAD ABUMRAD: Here's another Cupertino oops from language expert Ben Zimmer.

BEN ZIMMER: So back in October, '06, Reuters, the newswire had an article about honeybees. And there were some very interesting sentences in this article about honeybees. For instance, did you know, quote, "Queen Elizabeth has 10 times the lifespan of workers and lays up to 2,000 eggs a day?"

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs] That's why she's a very nice girl, but doesn't have a lot to say because there's all these eggs dropping on the floor.

BEN ZIMMER: "With its highly-evolved social structure of tens of thousands of worker bees commanded by Queen Elizabeth, the honeybee genome could also improve the search for genes linked to social behavior.

ROBERT: I get it. So every time a 'queen' reference came in, they were commanded to that particular queen.

BEN ZIMMER: Whenever the words 'the queen' appeared in this article, it had to be 'the queen.' So 'the queen' was being replaced with 'Queen Elizabeth.'

JAD: Ah!

BEN ZIMMER: Unfortunately, in an article about honeybees.

ROBERT: This next oop ...

JAD: Singular oop?

ROBERT: Wouldn't it be? I mean, if you have one oop, wouldn't it be ...

JAD: Never heard that.

ROBERT: That's just a new coinage.

JAD: Oop!

ROBERT: This next one, it raises a question of, I guess you'd say, of moral balance.

JAD: A question that I don't think any of us would want to have to answer.

ROBERT: Comes to us from our producer, Lulu Miller.

JAD: Okay, so set up this story. This story happens where?

LULU MILLER: It's in a little town in northern Michigan called Mio.

LULU: 7:00 am. Just drove through the Delaware water gap.

LULU: That's me on my way out there from New York.

LULU: The sun is rising, and ...

LULU: It's about an 800-mile drive.

LULU: ... and it's just gorgeous out here!

JAD: Ooh, listen to you.

LULU: Lush and ...

JAD: All into the outdoors.

LULU: Nauseating.

JAD: Yeah, a little.

LULU: I know. But I'm just one of those people.

LULU: I open my windows, and ...

LULU: When I get out into nature.

LULU: Sweet air.

LULU: I feel my place in the world. Anyway ...

LULU: Just crossed into Mio.

JAD: What was the reason you were going again?

LULU: To see a bird. A very—not just rare, not just the kind of bird birders get obsessed about, this is a bird—this is what they call a life bird.

JAD: A life bird?

LULU: Birders wait their life to see it.

JAD: Really?

LULU: Yeah. Only found right here.

JAD: And what's the bird called?

LULU: The Kirtland's warbler.

LULU: So now have you seen a Kirtland's before?

WOMAN: No, I've never seen one. This is my first trip up here.

JAD: And this right here. Where are you?

LULU: We're just outside of town on the edge of the forest about to go in. And I'm standing with about 15 people who've come from everywhere.

LULU: Where are you folks coming from to see this bird?

WOMAN: Toledo.

MAN: I'm from South Carolina.

WOMAN: Yeah.

MAN: We're from Oregon.

WOMAN: Wyoming.

PARK RANGER: We'll walk out to a spot, try to stay single file.

LULU: The park ranger leads us down a path into a little clearing, and pretty immediately ...

MAN: In the background there.

WOMAN: Way back there?

MAN: Mm-hmm.

LULU: ... a guy from Ohio spots a Kirtland's.

WOMAN: Oh, there he is! Yeah!

LULU: A tiny yellow bird ...

MAN: Back there.

MAN: Right there.

LULU: ... up high in a jack pine tree.

WOMAN: Oh, yeah! Oh, great! It's singing like crazy.

LULU: A lady from Dayton starts clapping.

LULU: Can you describe what you're seeing?

JIM COLEMAN: I see a lovely bird with a gray back.

LULU: This is a guy from Oregon, Jim Coleman.

RITA COLEMAN: A blue-gray back.

LULU: And his wife Rita.

RITA COLEMAN: Smaller than a robin. Brilliant yellow. In the sunlight, it's just an absolutely radiant bird.

LULU: Is this worth the trip from Oregon?

JIM COLEMAN: Oh, you bet. I don't know, it just makes me thankful that I'm here. And it makes me grateful that my wife is here. I know this is something she's wanted to see for a long time.

LULU: Jim actually starts to tear up.

JIM COLEMAN: This is a very special bird.

RITA COLEMAN: Hold my hand.

LULU: And that's what this story is really about: how special is this bird?

JAD: Meaning?

LULU: Well, how much is a species worth?

JAD: Um, and ...

LULU: Well, here's the backstory.

JAD: Okay.

LULU: In the early '70s, the warbler almost went extinct. The reason why, it was thought, was because of a little creature called the cowbird.

CHRIS MENSING: Want to go in?

LULU: Okay. That's just the sound of them.

CHRIS MENSING: It's a parasite, you know, on some ...

JAD: And who is this guy?

LULU: This is Chris Mensing.

CHRIS MENSING: Fish and wildlife biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

LULU: And we're standing in this cage full of cowbirds.

CHRIS MENSING: It looks like we've got six males and one female. Let me grab a couple.

LULU: He just reached out and grabbed two of them. You're good at that!

CHRIS MENSING: And the males ...

LULU: Can I touch that?

CHRIS MENSING: Yeah, go ahead.

LULU: Imagine a tiny little gnarly crow.

LULU: It's got really sharp little beaks.

LULU: But with this blunt, dagger-like beak.

CHRIS MENSING: It has a very drab body, very dull.

LULU: So here's what the cowbird does to the warbler: while the warbler is out of its nest ...

JAD: Like getting a worm or something?

LULU: Yeah. The cowbird lays one of its own eggs in the nest. To make room for it so the warbler doesn't know anything is up, it pushes out one of the warbler's eggs.

JAD: Oh!

LULU: Out of the nest?

CHRIS MENSING: Mm-hmm. And the timing is such that the cowbird egg will hatch first, and will double its size in 24 hours.

LULU: Wow!

CHRIS MENSING: So by the time that the host birds hatch, that cowbird may be up to four times the size. And when they start begging for food from the parents the loudest, most aggressive chick is gonna get fed, the cowbird chick.

JAD: So the warbler mom ends up shoveling food into this cowbird chick?

LULU: Yep. Oftentimes it gets so much food that another warbler chick will die.

JAD: Wow!

LULU: So when the cowbirds first showed up in this area ...

CHRIS MENSING: In the late 1800s, early 1900s.

LULU: ... the warbler population just started plummeting.

CHRIS MENSING: This huge drop.

LULU: By 1971 ...

CHRIS MENSING: There were only 200 males.

LULU: On Earth.

JAD: Whoa.

LULU: So what do you do?

JAD: Are you asking me?

LULU: Mm-hmm.

JAD: I guess you gotta kill the cowbirds.

LULU: Exactly.

CHRIS MENSING: This is one of 64 traps. It's a new one that we just built this year.

LULU: Which is why we're out in this cage. It's actually a cowbird trap.

CHRIS MENSING: Yeah, she's biting me. Just like anyone that's scared of someone larger grabbing you. they don't appreciate it too much.

LULU: And you want to know how they kill them?

JAD: I kind of do, yeah.

CHRIS MENSING: Thoracic compression is the term we use. We basically squeeze the bird, suffocating it, preventing it from breathing.

LULU: Just with your hands? There's no ...?

CHRIS MENSING: Yep. Yep.

LULU: Wow. Yeah, do you have to do that?

CHRIS MENSING: Yeah.

LULU: Like, all the time?

CHRIS MENSING: Yeah.

JAD: Did you see this?

LULU: No.

JAD: [laughs]

LULU: [laughs] But 1972, Fish and Wildlife Service sets up a bunch of traps. A few years and about 12,000 dead cowbirds later ...

CHRIS MENSING: It works.

LULU: Kinda. The population stopped dying off, but then it didn't start bouncing back.

RITA HALBEISEN: What's going on?

JAD: Yeah.

RITA HALBEISEN: Why aren't we seeing bigger numbers now that we're catching the cowbirds?

LULU: That's Rita Halbeisen. She worked with the Forest Service back in the '80s.

RITA HALBEISEN: And we thought, well, we finally concluded it must be just there is not enough habitat.

JAD: Like, they don't have enough trees? Is that what ...?

LULU: Well, no, there are plenty of trees. But the thing about warblers is they like a specific kind of tree. They like them very young.

JAD: [laughs]

LULU: That was weird! [laughs] I could feel it as I was saying it. "They like 'em young."

JAD: No, but they like young trees is what you're saying.

LULU: Yep.

JAD: And there aren't young trees in this place?

LULU: No. It's really weird. When they started looking around this forest, they noticed all the trees were really, really old.

JAD: Why? Why wouldn't there be young trees?

LULU: Well, us.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, public service announcement: Only you can prevent forest fires.]

LULU: Hey, hey, Smokey Bear! See, when humans began to settle in this area of Michigan in about the 1880s, they brought with them that certain human disdain for fire.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, public service announcement: Only you can prevent forest fires.]

LULU: But fire is exactly what's needed up there to make new trees ...

CHRIS MENSING: Yeah, this ecosystem is a fire ecosystem.

LULU: ... says Chris.

CHRIS MENSING: It burns.

LULU: Because when these trees burn, they release their seeds and make room for new trees to grow.

CHRIS MENSING: It is a fire ecosystem. It is made to burn.

LULU: So I ask you again, what do you do?

JAD: Do you start fires? Would that be the solution?

LULU: That would be the solution. So the forestry started doing ...

RITA HALBEISEN: What we call a prescribed burn.

LULU: Basically, says Rita, they burn down a little patch of forest.

RITA HALBEISEN: A few acres.

LULU: To regenerate it. And one windy spring day in 1980 at a place called Mack Lake, the Forestry Service started a fire that they probably shouldn't have.

DICK LORD: Okay, my name is Dick Lord. At that time of the Mack Lake fire, I was part of the ignition crew for the prescribed burn.

LULU: What is an ignition crew?

DICK LORD: They light the fire. [laughs]

LULU: So at 10 in the morning, Dick and his crew go out into the woods.

DICK LORD: Went out with a plan.

LULU: Start setting up perimeters, and they begin lighting a few stands of shrub.

BOB BERNER: I was driving home.

LULU: That's Bob Berner. Best name ever for a firefighter.

BOB BERNER: I could see the Forest Service starting to do a burn. And I thought this is not a good time. It was windy, they didn't have the manpower. And I said, "We'll probably be getting called out here shortly."

DICK LORD: Basically, we did not realize that the weather was gonna change as rapidly as it did.

RITA HALBEISEN: The wind came up suddenly—something nobody could predict. And it took the fire across the road into a stand of mature jack pine and took off.

DICK LORD: There were flames probably 100 to 150 feet in the air.

BOB BERNER: The sound is like a roaring train.

LULU: The forest guys jump into their bulldozers trying to plow trenches alongside the fire.

DICK LORD: To pinch it off.

BOB BERNER: And I mean, you could feel the heat.

DICK LORD: It was way out of our control.

BOB BERNER: Hitting the tops of the trees, rolling.

DICK LORD: I knew at the rate it was traveling that it was going to be a major catastrophe.

LULU: Within six hours it had burned over 20,000 acres. It's one of the fastest moving fires ever documented.

BOB: Yeah, it went through here. Far as you can see, was all black.

LULU: These are two guys ...

BOB: I'm Bob.

MIKE: I'm Mike.

LULU: ... who own houses in the area that got burnt.

BOB: I remember the guy down there in the corner, garage was all burned up, black, charred.

LULU: Their houses were okay, but 41 houses were destroyed.

MIKE: All the way up to the lake.

LULU: Just completely.

MIKE: Yeah.

BOB: Nothing green. Nothing.

MIKE: Like something out of a moonscape.

BOB: As far as you could see, everything gone.

RITA HALBEISEN: And the worst part about it for all of us ...

LULU: That's Rita Halbeisen again.

RITA HALBEISEN: ... was that it killed one of the Forest Service employees, a very young wildlife technician who was very well loved by his coworkers.

LULU: A guy named Jim Swiderski.

DICK LORD: You know, Jim was a good friend as well as an employee.

LULU: Dick Lord, again, Jim's boss. He told me that Jim had been a postman for a few years, but just loved birds so much that he took a huge pay cut to come and help protect the warbler.

DICK LORD: Basically what happened was the fire overran him.

RITA HALBEISEN: Oh, the press was having a heyday, just tearing into the Forest Service for what had happened.

DICK LORD: The townspeople were very angry at the forest service.

RITA HALBEISEN: How could you do this?

LULU: Rita says they were told not to wear their Forest Service uniforms in town.

RITA HALBEISEN: Gosh, it was so terrible.

LULU: And the forest itself?

RITA HALBEISEN: You know, there was nothing there.

LULU: It was completely silent. But a year later, a little bit of green started to poke up. And the next year a little bit more. And ...

RITA HALBEISEN: Eight to ten years after that Mack Lake burn, it just seemed like everywhere you turned around, you'd stop for a listen, and there were five or six birds. A tremendous number of warblers. That was the answer to the mystery.

LULU: The fire.

CHRIS MENSING: You know, if you look at a population graph ...

LULU: That's Chris Mensing again.

CHRIS MENSING: After that Mack Lake burn, the population went like that.

LULU: He points his hand straight up.

CHRIS MENSING: So it's pretty dramatic.

LULU: And today, the numbers are up to almost 4,000 birds.

WOMAN: Ah, there he is! Yeah!

LULU: And growing.

WOMAN: He's singing like crazy.

LULU: Now that the birds are back, but a man is gone, when you walk around this town, a question lingers in the air ...

ED FAWCETT: Is the life of a fireman worth the life of a bird?

RITA COLEMAN: Oh, take a look. Take a look!

ED FAWCETT: Is it?

JIM COLEMAN: That's incredible.

WOMAN: Got him. I got him.

ED FAWCETT: No, in my opinion it isn't.

LULU: This is Ed Fawcett.

ED FAWCETT: I wouldn't trade your life for a bird.

LULU: I'm sitting with him and his wife, Mary Jane.

MARY JANE FAWCETT: Amen.

LULU: Amen.

LULU: In a diner. And no matter where you go in this town ...

MAN: Ah, what's the government doing?

LULU: ... people don't tend to be huge fans of the warbler.

MAN: It's just a small bird.

WOMAN: And I've been up here since '68. I've never seen one.

LULU: Did you ever see one?

MAN: No.

WOMAN: Never have I seen one.

MAN: I've never seen one.

MAN: No.

LULU: And back to Ed.

ED FAWCETT: I just gotta say to you, what would you think about it if your father or brother were killed for a bird? It'd be pretty hard to accept, wouldn't it?

LULU: But if you zoom out, one human life versus the end of a species.

ED FAWCETT: You know how many warblers there are in the United States? There's something like 37 species of warblers.

LULU: The real number is actually closer to 60.

JAD: Whoa!

ED FAWCETT: That's kind of ridiculous.

LULU: And that's not all ...

CHRIS MENSING: They ask you when are you done? And we really say, "Never."

LULU: Chris explained to me that they have to keep killing the cowbirds, and they have to keep doing burns—smaller burns, but every single year.

CHRIS MENSING: If we let things be, the bird would be extinct.

LULU: Wow.

CHRIS MENSING: That's the hard thing about this job is knowing that we're never done.

LULU: How many people are working? How much ...

CHRIS MENSING: You're probably looking at hundreds of people. Well over a million dollars a year spent.

LULU: And all this began to really sink in on one of my last mornings out there.

LULU: All right, it is five in the morning.

LULU: It was the annual Kirtland's warbler census.

MAN: Good morning.

LULU: Where birders from all over the world show up to help count how many warblers there are out there.

JAD: Is it like "There's a warbler?" Step step step step. "There's a warbler!"

LULU: Yeah, that's actually exactly how it works. I was paired up with this guy, Dave Mendes.

DAVE MENDES: We're gonna kind of walk through the middle of these transects. We're gonna come up ...

LULU: He's kind of a dude dude. He's an older guy, got a beard.

DAVE MENDES: I work for an electrical contractor.

LULU: Told me he's got a man room.

DAVE MENDES: My man room. You know, most guys got sports, but I've got Kirtland's warbler pictures up on the wall.

JAD: Nice.

LULU: So I went into it thinking, like, this will be really cool. We'll march along, we'll count them. I looked at the map. It was a mile, maybe, of a walk. We'll be done in 20 minutes. Well okay, maybe not. We're walking through the forest, an hour, tops.

DAVE MENDES: [laughs] And?

LULU: Hey, Dave!

LULU: We set off. Dense, brambly forest. Still dark.

LULU: Is that one?

DAVE MENDES: That was a hermit thrush.

LULU: Okay.

LULU: Let me just play you a quick little time lapse.

DAVE MENDES: Twenty to seven right now. The sun's just coming up, and it's getting a little muggy out here. That was a Kirtland's.

LULU: Oh, yeah?

DAVE MENDES: Yeah. We can't count him, though. He's not in our section.

DAVE MENDES: 7:07. I heard one way back that way.

LULU: Yeah?

DAVE MENDES: Yeah. There he is again. But I'm not gonna mark him in because I don't know exactly where he's at.

DAVE MENDES: 7:33. There he goes.

LULU: Yeah?

DAVE MENDES: Yep, right there.

LULU: Did you count him now?

DAVE MENDES: No, no, no.

LULU: Not yet?

DAVE MENDES: No. We want to be a lot more accurate. We want to triangulate them.

DAVE MENDES: 9:56, and all's well in the warbler woods.

LULU: A couple of ants are biting me, yeah.

DAVE MENDES: They hurt, don't they?

LULU: They do a little bit, yeah. Get out of there!

DAVE MENDES: 10:45 am. I know that there's a bird out there.

DAVE MENDES: I can still hear that bird way back there.

LULU: So we end up staying out there for seven and a half hours.

LULU: We just marked one, right?

DAVE MENDES: Yep. I've only marked one.

LULU: And I don't mean to sound like I'm making fun of Dave. I mean, he's doing his job well, but at some point, in between the fire ants and taking four hours to confirm this one bird ...

DAVE MENDES: He's gonna be right off over here.

LULU: I just started thinking about all the effort it takes.

DAVE MENDES: Two rows of trees over from us and we can't see them.

LULU: I just suddenly thought ...

LULU: [bleep]! It's this fussy, fragile little bird and it hasn't evolved. Who cares?

DAVE MENDES: Yeah.

LULU: I mean, this is not worth it.

LULU: And so I started asking people who protect the bird ...

LULU: Why do it with so much money, and it's all for a bird. And I could see it maybe if it was for some—but it's just one warbler of 18 million different kinds of warblers. Like, why do it?

CHRIS MENSING: Well, we do it because we should. You know, we're stewards of the land.

LULU: That's Chris Mensing again, cowbird killer.

CHRIS MENSING: It's for future generations.

LULU: And ...

DICK LORD: Well ...

LULU: Here's the firestarter, Dick Lord.

DICK LORD: You know, the Kirtland's warbler was listed under the Endangered Species Act, and we had a charge under the law to do what we could to recover its existence. And that's the only thing that I can say that, you know, we had to do what the law required us.

LULU: So we should do it. And the law tells us we have to do it. Unconvincing. And that question ...

ED FAWCETT: Is the life of a fireman worth the life of a bird?

LULU: ... and that guy Ed at the diner, it just stuck in my mind. And I realized I couldn't leave this town until I talk to the people who lost the most.

LULU: Can I just get you to introduce yourselves?

ROBERT SWIDERSKI: Whole name?

LULU: Yeah, sure.

ROBERT SWIDERSKI: Robert Swiderski, age 54.

KATHLEEN SWIDERSKI: Kathleen Swiderski.

FLORENCE SWIDERSKI: Florence Schwiderski.

ROBERT SWIDERSKI: The mother.

FLORENCE SWIDERSKI: I'm the mother.

JAD: Of the guy who died?

LULU: Yeah.

FLORENCE SWIDERSKI: I guess that's it.

CALVIN DEBREE: Want iced tea or water or anything?

LULU: We're all sitting around the kitchen table.

CALVIN DEBREE: There's a lot of hot dogs and beer over there.

LULU: Jim's brother-in-law is there too.

CALVIN DEBREE: So I'm Calvin. Calvin DeBree.

LULU: And I asked them to tell me about Jim.

ROBERT SWIDERSKI: Quite a guy. Soft spoken.

CALVIN DEBREE: Smart.

ROBERT SWIDERSKI: He was quite a character.

KATHLEEN SWIDERSKI: Yep.

LULU: They told me at first they were furious.

KATHLEEN SWIDERSKI: They should have never, ever sent him in there.

LULU: Angry at the forest service, angry about this bird.

ROBERT SWIDERSKI: Very angry.

LULU: Now, three decades later ...

ROBERT SWIDERSKI: I say you keep that little bird going.

CALVIN DEBREE: Exactly.

JAD: Really?

LULU: Jim's younger brother Robert said that the thing he wanted the most is for the Kirtland's warbler to become the ...

ROBERT SWIDERSKI: State bird. That would be the ultimate.

JAD: Huh!

ROBERT SWIDERSKI: That would be the biggest accomplishment ever, would be that being a state bird.

LULU: Wow. I guess in some ways, I'm surprised. I didn't mean to come here with expectations, but in some ways I thought if it was my family, that I would hate that bird, that I would just hate that bird.

KATHLEEN SWIDERSKI: No, it's not the bird. I mean, that bird didn't do anything to any of us. You know, if we can keep it going, I mean, that's what he set out to do. Let's keep it going.

LULU: They think about Jim's death like the death of a soldier.

CALVIN DEBREE: Where would you be sitting right now if we wouldn't have lost all those soldiers in World War I, World War II?

LULU: That he died protecting us.

CALVIN DEBREE: You know?

ROBERT SWIDERSKI: It's only one species. Well then it's gonna be another species and another species and another species. Next thing you know, you walk out in the morning and it'll be quiet. Thank God for Teddy Roosevelt and the boys that made our national parks. Imagine if we didn't have those? It costs money. It's painful, blah, blah, blah. You gotta have the guts to do that. And Jim was really that kind of guy.

JAD: Well, that is convincing.

LULU: Yeah. But ...

LULU: I mean, do you agree, Florence?

LULU: And I asked the mom.

FLORENCE SWIDERSKI: What can I say? The birds are coming back, but the life is gone. So why bring it up again? It's done. You can't bring it back, so you have to live with it. But there's always a hole in your heart, something that none of us will ever forget forever. And don't ask me any more questions, please.

LULU: And then ...

CALVIN DEBREE: There she goes again.

FLORENCE SWIDERSKI: Oh!

LULU: ... the power went out.

FLORENCE SWIDERSKI: Give me a break!

ROBERT SWIDERSKI: We'll go home and get the generator.

CALVIN DEBREE: I think we're done. Pretty dark.

JAD: Lulu Miller. If you want more information on warblers or anything, or if you want to subscribe to our podcast, go to Radiolab.org.

[LISTENER: Hey, Radiolab. This is Gretchen Corsnell, and I'm sitting in Oakland, California, looking out over beautiful Lake Merritt. 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: Hey, I'm Jad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert.

JAD: And the topic remains ...

ROBERT: Oops.

JAD: Final oops coming up. It's a double oops, I would say.

ROBERT: We start with an oops that leads to another oops that then self-negates.

JAD: It comes to us from a fellow who within the confines of this show, we will call "Oopsie" Wheeler.

SOREN: Maybe we could just start with both of you kind of introducing yourself and saying who you are and what you do. I mean, just something basic.

ANDREA STIERLE: Hi, I'm Andrea Stierle.

DONALD STIERLE: Oh, me? I'm Donald Stierle.

SOREN: This is Don and Andrea Stierle. They're chemists. They're actually a research team.

DONALD STIERLE: Here at University of Montana.

SOREN: And they met back in the '70s.

ANDREA STIERLE: Back in 1979.

SOREN: At the University of California in San Diego.

ANDREA STIERLE: We met and almost fell in love at first sight. We dated for a week, he proposed, I accepted.

DONALD STIERLE: [laughs]

SOREN: They got married.

ANDREA STIERLE: Uh-huh.

SOREN: And not long after, Don got offered a job, so they left their home in sunny California.

ANDREA STIERLE: Mind you, we lived about half a mile from the ocean.

SOREN: Nonetheless, they packed up a truck.

DONALD STIERLE: With all of our stuff.

SOREN: Including ...

ANDREA STIERLE: About 200 plants.

SOREN: And they moved to ...

DONALD STIERLE: Butte, Montana.

SOREN: Which is a different thing altogether.

DONALD STIERLE: An old mining town that barely had a tree in the city limits. I don't know if you want to know Andrea's first impression to Butte or not. [laughs]

SOREN: Sure!

ANDREA STIERLE: I actually burst into tears, and then started laughing. I think we call that hysteria. [laughs]

BARRETT GOLDING: We had a beautiful scan up on the hill over here when this wasn't operating.

SOREN: So I actually grew up in the town over from Butte in Montana. It's a town that you were afraid to go to when you're a kid, filled with abandoned buildings, depressed. And actually, if you walked through town right there, right next to the middle of town ...

BARRETT GOLDING: I don't remember exactly where it was. I remember being here in the late '70s.

SOREN: ... is this enormous, open wound on the hill like ...

BARRETT GOLDING: Oh, wow!

SOREN: ... this deep pit.

BARRETT GOLDING: Wow, this is where the pit is.

SOREN: The Berkeley pit. And the guy saying "wow" is Barrett Golding. I couldn't get back to Butte myself, so I asked Barrett to go over there and visit with a couple of engineers.

BARRETT GOLDING: So tell me who you are. Go ahead.

JOE GRIFFIN: Okay. Well, I'm Joe Griffin, Montana Department of Environmental Quality.

NICK TUCCI: And I'm Nick Tucci. I'm with the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology.

SOREN: And the three of them are standing at the edge of the pit, which is kind of hard to imagine, especially the size of this thing, but when you're at the edge of the pit, and you look down in, what you actually see is ...

BARRETT GOLDING: How can you convey what we're seeing?

SOREN: ...this enormous lake. Kind of.

NICK TUCCI: Well, it's 40 billion gallons of water, which is a lot of water. It's one of the larger lakes in the United States.

JAD: Just carved into this hill?

SOREN: Yeah. The main difference though, between this lake and one that you might decide to take an afternoon dip in is that this lake is a bizarre ...

NICK TUCCI: The color of the water is red.

JAD: Eww.

BARRETT GOLDING: This kind of sickly red.

SOREN: And also ...

BARRETT GOLDING: Greens and gray and black.

SOREN: It's technicolor. It shimmers in this way that words can't describe[00:50:00.18]. And when you're standing there, you can't help but wonder.

BARRETT GOLDING: The question I really have, and I'll rephrase it after I ask it because it's not quite—is like, what the [bleep] happened here?

ANDREA STIERLE: I don't think that's gonna air. [laughs]

BARRETT GOLDING: I mean, what happened?

JOE GRIFFIN: Well, it's just, you know, the price of copper.

SOREN: In the 1920s, when we were stringing up telephone wires and electrical wires and going through world wars, a third of the copper in the US came out of this hill.

JOE GRIFFIN: You know, the long and the short of it is you wouldn't be standing here broadcasting this or recording this without copper in your wire right there.

SOREN: And in its heyday, you know, before the pit was even around, Butte was this mining boomtown. But by the 1940s, the price of copper had dropped, the company that owned all the mines in Butte wasn't doing so well, and so they figured it'd be cheaper and easier to just blow the top off the hill. But things just kept getting worse, And by 1982, right around the time when Don and Andrea were coming to town ...

ANDREA STIERLE: ... have taken over the mountains.

SOREN: ...the mines completely shut down.

ANDREA STIERLE: When they shut the pit in early 1980s ...

SOREN: But here's the thing: while they were actually mining, they'd keep all the groundwater pumped out of there so that it's dry and they can work. And when they shut the mines down, they shut off the pumps.

ANDREA STIERLE: The company turned off the pumps, I think it was Earth Day 1982.

SOREN: Yeah, on Earth Day.

ANDREA STIERLE: After that, the pit started filling up with groundwater. And it took a good 10 years to actually see a kind of a rust-colored puddle in the bottom of the pit itself.

SOREN: But it was a puddle that was growing and growing and growing. Now here's the thing about that water: the rock around the pit is filled with pyrite, and when the water hits the pyrite and the air, the three react to create sulfuric acid.

JAD: Uh-oh.

EDWIN DOBB: In turn ...

SOREN: That's Edwin Dobb.

EDWIN DOBB: Freelance writer. Have been for about 20 years.

SOREN: Who actually grew up in Butte.

EDWIN DOBB: The sulfuric acid hastens the removal of the metals from the ore itself, like gold and silver and copper.

ANDREA STIERLE: Copper, cadmium, zinc, iron sulfate, arsenic.

SOREN: And what you end up with this is toxic, acidic disaster.

ANDREA STIERLE: And it's still rising.

SOREN: In fact, you know, since we started working on this piece, Jad, it's risen, like, about a foot.

EDWIN DOBB: There was an incident, infamous incident in the mid-1990s.

SOREN: Anybody who grew up anywhere near Butte knows this story.

EDWIN DOBB: One stormy night, some 340 snow geese landed.

JOE GRIFFIN: They landed on the water.

EDWIN DOBB: Looking for shelter.

JOE GRIFFIN: And they, of course, drink some of it.

SOREN: The next day, there were 342 goose carcasses floating on the water.

EDWIN DOBB: They were all dead. And the autopsy showed lesions in the esophagus throughout the digestive system.

JAD: It sounds like the water ate their insides.

SOREN: Yeah.

SOREN: Were you struck at all upon arriving there? Did you actually kind of go visit the mine, the old mine site?

ANDREA STIERLE: No. Avoided it like the plague. We were two staunch environmentalists, and the idea of living in a mining town was so completely foreign.

SOREN: And when they first showed up in Butte, Don and Andrea, they were kind of struggling to fit in at the university, because they're trying to study this little microorganism.

ANDREA STIERLE: A sponge in Bermuda.

SOREN: But they're in Butte.

ANDREA STIERLE: Landlocked Butte, Montana.

SOREN: To make matters worse, when they took off for a year on sabbatical ...

ANDREA STIERLE: Our college accidentally unplugged our refrigerator, destroying all of our samples.

SOREN: Oh my God!

ANDREA STIERLE: Desperation.

DONALD STIERLE: Definitely.

ANDREA STIERLE: We had no funding. We decided we just needed to start over.

SOREN: But one day ...

ANDREA STIERLE: A scientist named Bill Chattam ...

SOREN: Came into their lab ...

ANDREA STIERLE: With a piece of wood. And on this wood, there was some green slimy stuff.

SOREN: And he said, "You won't believe this, but I found this stick with the slime on it in the pit."

ANDREA STIERLE: Floating about a foot below the surface of the water.

SOREN: Now here's the thing: I mean, that lake, this is like—this is the most deadly place you can imagine. I mean, nothing grows here. Nothing should grow here.

JAD: Nothing.

SOREN: Absolutely not.

JAD: Not even anything but nothing.

SOREN: Yes.

JAD: What's less than nothing? Maybe absolute nothing.

SOREN: Like, negative numbers of ...

JAD: Of nothingness.

SOREN: It's more than nothing. It's an active getting rid of thing.

JAD: It's a negating nothingness.

SOREN: You know how there's love and hate? This is not a lack of love. This is hate.

JAD: [laughs] Okay.

SOREN: But they got together with some colleagues. They looked at the slime, and they realized against all odds, the stuff was alive.

ANDREA STIERLE: Life in acid mine waste.

SOREN: Life that no one had ever studied before.

ANDREA STIERLE: It really is what started everything we've been doing now, gosh, for the last 15 years.

SOREN: And so far ...

DONALD STIERLE: We've had virtually hundreds of compounds, organisms that were growing.

SOREN: Organisms that make molecules that can fight viruses.

DONALD STIERLE: Several turned out to be good in our anti-cancer screens.

JAD: They fight cancer? Really?

SOREN: Yeah.

ANDREA STIERLE: So we have Berkelic acid and Berkeleyamides and the Berkeleyacetals.

SOREN: They've now published tons of papers. I mean, their work has just taken off.

DONALD STIERLE: So it's been pretty exciting research.

SOREN: But then they told me this story that totally took them by surprise. It was about a year after they'd first started looking at the pit water.

ANDREA STIERLE: We found this sort of a sticky, opaque, thick, gooey, black organism.

SOREN: Then they noticed that weirdly, if you put this little guy into a thing of the water from the pit ...

ANDREA STIERLE: It actually absorbs the metals in pit water.

JAD: What does that mean? Like, they're taking the metals out of the water?

SOREN: They become a little metal sponge, yeah.

JAD: So they're cleaning the water is what you're saying?

SOREN: Yeah. And there's lots of people that work with microorganisms to try to clean up metal-laden water, but usually these things take in maybe like, I don't know 10, 15 percent of the metals.

JAD: Mm-hmm?

SOREN: This little guy?

ANDREA STIERLE: Will actually absorb between 85 and 95 percent.

JAD: Whoa!

SOREN: They got really curious about it, and they started trying to figure out where it had ever been seen before.

ANDREA STIERLE: We had it identified.

SOREN: And they eventually discovered ...

ANDREA STIERLE: That the only place this yeast had ever been found was ...

JAD: Where?

DONALD STIERLE: Well ...

ANDREA STIERLE: In the rectal swabs of geese.

JAD: [gasps] You mean like the snow geese that landed on the water?

SOREN: Yeah. The geese left a little—a little something behind.

JAD: Wow.

SOREN: A present.

JAD: Soren Wheeler. More information at Radiolab.org.

[DONALD STIERLE: My name is Don Stierle, and Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad, and Soren Wheeler.]

[ANDREA STIERLE: Our staff includes Ellen Horne, Lulu Miller, Michael Rayfield, Brenna Farrell, Pat Walters ...]

[DONALD STIERLE: And the one and only Tim Howard. With help from Sharon Shaddick, Raymond Tugicar, Nicole Curry and Sam Albright. Special thanks to Barrett Golding, Phil Hubor and the whole Hubor family. And Aaron Sands. There you go. I hope I haven't made too many mistakes.]

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