Mar 25, 2021
Transcript
[RADIOLAB INTRO]
JONIECE ABBOTT-PRATT: Helium. Revolt. There is no shelium. Yes, he is pronoun and element, top right king, the most noble gas. But if there was shelium, how fine, wise, light she might be.
JAD ABUMRAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab, and today? Elements.
ROBERT: Yeah.
SAM BRESLIN WRIGHT: I carried your oxygen, and you walked beside me through the lobby, commenting on the décor when you needed to stop for breath. Your hand ran light and steady, by the ocean of breath, twice I remember. I carried your oxygen. It was heavy, a bleak alloy. Steel.
JAD: This hour is a collaboration with poets like the ones you heard, and will hear more of.
ROBERT: Musicians.
JAD: Reporters.
ROBERT: And of course the periodic table of elements.
JAD: Speaking of which, our producer Soren Wheeler, whose sodium-sparked brain conceived of this entire show, he will lead us off.
SOREN WHEELER: So this one starts with a story I heard from Jamie Lowe. She's a writer in Brooklyn, and at the heart of this story is this particular 24-hour period in Jamie's life that she is uneasy about.
SOREN: Let's just set it up for one second, so what are we about to watch?
JAMIE LOWE: I'm not actually exactly sure where it starts, but we're about to watch, I think, the night before Valentine's Day, 2001.
SOREN: I eventually convinced her to sit down with producer Latif Nasser and sort of just walk us through the tape.
LATIF NASSER: Go for it, you're in control there with the space bar.
JAMIE LOWE: All right.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, student: Yeah, I'm on?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Loew: You're on.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, student: Hi.]
JAMIE LOWE: These are the kids in the corner.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, student: Hey you should marry Jamie. Are you going to marry Jamie, Mike?]
SOREN: The video starts, it's nighttime. Jamie and her friend Mike, he's the one filming, they're outside his apartment in Brooklyn, and the camera is pointed at a bunch of high school students who were just walking by.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: So what's the deal? Tell me. So you want to be an actress, right?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, student: Yeah.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Tell him what you need to tell him.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, student: I love acting and Shakespeare. ]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Good for you.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: Hell yeah. Really?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, student: Yeah.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: That's so cool.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Romeo ...]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, student: Thy name is my enemy, thou art thyself though not a Montague. What's Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any other part belonging to a man.]
JAMIE LOWE: Somehow I'm, like, egging them on to recite it.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, student: Retain that dear perfection which he owes without that title. Romeo doff thy name, and for thy name, which is no part of thee, take all myself.]
JAMIE LOWE: This is the part that you can kind of—see I'm screaming.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: You ladies are all right. So wait ...]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: I notice you were saying ...]
SOREN: The camera eventually turns to Jamie. She's sitting on the stoop, huge curly hair, wide eyes, and she starts to sing the kids a song.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: It goes, [singing], "You don't call me yesterday, because I can't see you.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, student: All right.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Even if I …]
JAMIE LOWE: I was pretty convinced that I was, like, a great singer and rapper.
MIKE RYAN: She likes the sound of her own voice.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, student: Yeah you're good.]
SOREN: Wait, do you sing a lot in ...
JAMIE LOWE: No, never.
SOREN: Never?
JAMIE LOWE: I am not a singer.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Wow, I just started singing like, I don't know, what was it, like three weeks ago?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, student: Was that the one around the corner?]
MIKE RYAN: It was fun to watch people react to her. She made people really happy wherever she went.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Do you guys live here?]
MIKE RYAN: We went to flea markets and she would talk to people, and she would pull this spark out of them. It just felt like New York loved her.
SOREN: That's Mike Ryan, the guy holding the camera. He'd only met Jamie just three weeks earlier, not long after he moved to New York, and they pretty much instantly became friends.
MIKE RYAN: She was so positive. As I recall, she's talking to some little kids on a stoop. But
then that next four or five hours was pretty defining.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: I don't know if I can remember it, though.]
MIKE RYAN: Okay cut to ...
JAMIE LOWE: Mike's apartment, I think.
MIKE RYAN: You're just walking around.
JAMIE LOWE: In a bra and open dress, sparkly red bra and plastic bag.
MIKE RYAN: Plastic bag on the ...
JAMIE LOWE: On the stomach? Belly dancing? You might have to shield your eyes, Latif.
LATIF: [laughs]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Okay, here we go.]
SOREN: Fast forward about four hours.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: That's Mike, he's sleeping.]
JAMIE LOWE: Oh boy.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: [Inaudible].]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Good morning. It's Valentine's Day, 2001.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: Good morning.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: That's kumquats and avocados. The kumquats were picked with my grandpa from their kumquat tree about three or four days ago.]
JAMIE LOWE: That's true.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: There's three breakfast bars.]
LATIF: What is all that stuff on the cutting board?]
JAMIE LOWE: They're cut-up power bars.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: A bow from the present I gave you, that's hiding a cup of wine that we're gonna drink for Valentine's.]
JAMIE LOWE: And a cup of wine, of course, at 7:40 in the morning.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: So do you need a nap or anything at noon? Or do you just keep pumping?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: If I'm tired I'll sleep. Oh, here's a dollar!]
JAMIE LOWE: Oh, poor Mike.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: So Jamie ...]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Yeah?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: What's gonna happen today?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Today I'm gonna contact MTV to debate Gore, Bush, Nader, for Iraq.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: And Fidel Castro.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Yeah, him too. He's an amazing man.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: Debate Fidel though, seriously.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Okay.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: It has to be about ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: It can be about anything.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: Right.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Anything goes. Do you want to taste this one?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: Yeah.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Peanut butter and chocolate.]
LATIF: Were you meaning that literally? That you were gonna go on MTV and debate Gore v. Bush, and then ...
JAMIE LOWE: I was. That is exactly what I had in mind for the day.
MIKE RYAN: I thought it was make-believe. It seemed harmless. It just didn't occur to me that what I was seeing was somebody who had deviated substantially from who they wanted to be.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: We have to change the world. Jesus Christ, Mike.]
SOREN: Eventually Mike got up, had to go to work. Jamie took off for a while, and then later that day she showed up at his office. And at first everything seemed sort of fine.
MIKE RYAN: But within 20 minutes she said, "Hey, tell you what, can we go to the roof really fast?"
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: What?]
MIKE RYAN: And that immediately got me uncomfortable.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Can't tell you yet.]
JAMIE LOWE: So okay, overpants, floral wraparound skirt. We are now going to the roof.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Are you ready to be blown off your feet?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: No, I'm not.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Okay.]
JAMIE LOWE: You can hear he's done. Like, the day has been insane. This is at the end of that day. Snowy 7th Avenue rooftop.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: What is this?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Any finger.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: What is that?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: It's a piece of yarn.]
LATIF: What is it?
JAMIE LOWE: A piece of yarn.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Mr. Mike Patrick Ryan, will you come tonight to a party?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: I can't. I have to work.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Okay. At 5:20, on top of the world, at the World Trade Center, where I want to marry you.]
JAMIE LOWE: Yeah.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: If you want to.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: Tonight?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Yeah. It's all set up.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Jamie ...]
JAMIE LOWE: That's the end. At that point he was like, "Done. We're done."
LATIF: Wow!
JAMIE LOWE: Yeah. I mean, yeah.
MIKE RYAN: That's when it hit me that there was no way that any of this reflects what she would actually want. I don't know if 'delusional' is a kind word here, and if it's not I apologize, but if she is delusional enough to think that we should get married, is she delusional enough to think she can fly? Will she be distraught when I say, "No?" And will she—would she jump? And so I lowered the camera, and I said, "I'm afraid of heights and I want to go downstairs immediately." And I felt, for the first time, just fear. And I called her—I believe I called her mother first, Leanne, and I just said, "My name is Mike. I'm a friend of Jamie's, and I think she may be going through something, and I don't know what I'm dealing with. I'm in over my head, here."
LEANNE LANTOS: When Mike called I just got on a red eye that night.
SOREN: That's Leanne Lantos, Jamie's mom.
LEANNE LANTOS: It was my job to get her to go back to her therapist so that we could get some medication in her.
SOREN: For Leanne, this episode was not entirely a surprise. It had happened once before when Jamie was in high school.
LEANNE LANTOS: At that time, she was not sleeping at night.
MARK D'ANTONIO: Spinning around the room, talking non-stop about how she had to save Central America from disaster.
SOREN: During that first episode, Jamie ended up at a place called the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA, and she ended up being treated by this guy, Dr. Mark D'Antonio. He's a psychiatrist.
MARK D'ANTONIO: She was in a very acute, manic psychotic state.
JAMIE LOWE: I remember being sort of tackled by nurses to actually take my meds because I refused to.
LEANNE LANTOS: We didn't know if we would ever see our Jamie again. You know, that was the scariest part.
JAMIE LOWE: Everyone around me, I think, was really, really worried that I wouldn't come back.
SOREN: But she did come back, and it's what brought her back that is actually the reason I got so interested in this story. So, shortly after she was admitted Dr. D'Antonio told Jamie's parents ...
MARK D'ANTONIO: We know what this is and we know how to treat it.
LEANNE LANTOS: And he said she's a classic case of bipolar.
MARK D'ANTONIO: There was no question.
LEANNE LANTOS: And the drug of choice is lithium.
MARK D'ANTONIO: Is lithium.
SOREN: Which is not even a drug, but just this salt.
LEANNE LANTOS: And he explained to us, you know, that she would need to ...
MARK D'ANTONIO: Take three tablets of lithium. Three tablets of this salt.
SOREN: And it could bring her back.
MARK D'ANTONIO: When it works, it's just remarkable.
SOREN: Do you have memories of, like, what it was like to come back like that? What you were thinking, or what it felt like?
JAMIE LOWE: It's really hard to describe. It's a little bit of, like, a slow realization of, like, "Oh, that was a weird thing that I did a week ago." Like, "Why did I do that?"
LEANNE LANTOS: The first time she was actually lucid, and coming back to herself again ...
SOREN: Mm-hmm.
LEANNE LANTOS: ... the first words out of her mouth were, "Mom, it's not me," and I just—that just killed me.
SOREN: Within a few weeks it was like the incident never happened.
JAMIE LOWE: It's so bizarre. I mean, I felt like here was this thing that's a salt that I get to just take three of a day and that was it.
MARK D'ANTONIO: Totally normal, no side effects, no issues.
SOREN: She went off to college.
JAMIE LOWE: And just, like, flourished, and it was great.
SOREN: Things were good for a long time.
MARK D'ANTONIO: Then after about six years she said, "You know, I've been on this pill for six years. I've had no problems. I'd like to go off it."
LEANNE LANTOS: "Why don't we try to go off gradually?"
MARK D'ANTONIO: Then about a month after she was totally off lithium she was whack.
SOREN: In Mike's apartment, up all night.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: You were so tired just a minute ago.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: That's because you told me I had to leave, but now I'm still here aren't I?]
MARK D'ANTONIO: A totally manic episode all over again.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jamie Lowe: Because I am whatever you say I am.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Ryan: Oh God. That's it.]
SOREN: One of the things that kind of makes lithium, that effect that lithium has, so spooky—and you hear this from a lot of people that have taken lithium to treat bipolar—is that lithium itself is so simple.
BEN LILLIE: Lithium is an element, right? It's a single atom.
SOREN: This is Ben Lillie. He's a writer, runs the Story Collider podcast. He's had some personal experience with psychiatric drugs, and he's written about lithium.
BEN LILLIE: That, to me, was fascinating, that a single atom can change what we think of of who we are. I mean it's not even—not just an atom, it's atom number three. It's the third element in the table.
SOREN: Hmm.
BEN LILLIE: It's one of the simplest atoms, right? So it's just three protons, four neutrons, three electrons.
SOREN: That's a pretty simple bit of matter. I mean, it doesn't get much ...
BEN LILLIE: It really is. This had never struck me when I was on Lexapro or Wellbutrin, which is the other one they put me on. You know, if you look at them, they look like what you expect a pharmaceutical drug to look like. There's a ring of carbon atoms, and some other things stuck on it, and they look like these big complex molecules. And you're like, "Oh yeah, I'm complex. My brain's complex. It takes this complicated thing to change it." And then you're confronted with just this atom. It was found by accident that it works. It's not complicated to make. It's just a salt that you distill out, and yet it has this profound effect. The other thing I know about lithium that is profoundly weird is that you're not just saying, "My mind, my personality, is being changed by an atom." It's being changed by an atom that was created directly in the Big Bang itself. So you have this atom formed in the Big Bang, goes through whatever it does, winding path, to come onto the Earth. Gets dug up, turned into a pill, given to someone, and that changes their affect in the world. And that, to me, is just—it's this profound reminder that the forces that shape everything in the universe are the same as the forces that are shaping who we are and what we do, and what our identity is.
SOREN: It's possible that these forces shape not just the people with bipolar disorder, but all of us. I ended up talking to a clinical psychiatrist, Anna Felz, who told me about these studies.
ANNA FELZ: Huge epidemiologic studies. The biggest one, I think, was in Japan. One was in Austria, one was in Greece, a famous one in Texas, in which they looked at communities that had different levels of lithium.
SOREN: Lithium in the water supply, and we're talking about tiny, tiny amounts.
ANNA FELZ: Micrograms, those are a thousandth of the amount in a milligram.
SOREN: If you think of like a pill of lithium, well we're talking about amounts like ten- thousandths of a pill. Like, that's the amount that we're dealing with here. And these studies found, by and large, in towns that had a tiny bit more lithium in the water, suicide rates were lower, in some cases as much as 30 percent.
ROBERT: Wow!
ANNA FELZ: I should say the Texas study, which is astonishing, also shows that the towns that have the highest lithium level have lower felonies, thefts, rapes. And these are reputable, published studies.
SOREN: Now these studies are, you know, only showing us correlations, but there does at least seem to be some kind of connection and ...
JAD: I mean, if there is a connection, what the hell is it doing?
ROBERT: Do they know why it works in the brain? Like, do they know what it does?
SOREN: Well, essentially ...
MARK D'ANTONIO: No.
SOREN: ... it's still kind of a mystery. But here's Mark D'Antonio's theory. He says we know that bipolar disorder involves a defect in a certain part of the brain.
MARK D'ANTONIO: It's an area of the brain that has to do with controlling mood. So believe it or not, there's neurons in the brain that keep your mood even.
SOREN: These neurons, they do their job by sort of passing electricity back and forth, and that electricity is carried by sodium ions. So the whole system is pretty much based on sodium.
MARK D'ANTONIO: Lithium is very similar to sodium.
SOREN: So if you have lithium in the brain, the neurons will use that to communicate. They'll send lithium ions back and forth. And here's what's interesting: lithium works just like sodium.
MARK D'ANTONIO: But not as well. Lithium is similar enough in properties that it can be an imposter, but whatever it does it just doesn't work as well.
SOREN: That's the key, he says.
MARK D'ANTONIO: So then this area of the brain, the defective area of the brain that makes these moods flip on and off so intensely doesn't work as well, and that stops the bipolar episode.
JAD: That's so interesting that maybe its sluggishness is what makes it good.
MARK D'ANTONIO: Yep, yep.
SOREN: Although he says that same trick where it can be a sort of sodium imposter but slower, that can also cause issues.
MARK D'ANTONIO: Slight tremors in your hand. You can have nausea. They can affect the kidneys. The balance of sodium in your body is regulated partially through the kidneys, and somehow lithium replacing it can be toxic to the kidneys.
SOREN: Which actually brings us back to Jamie.
JAMIE LOWE: Yeah, so before I went ...
SOREN: After that episode in New York with Mike and the video, she went back on lithium, and again she was fine. In fact, for the last 16 years she's been completely normal. But then a couple months ago ...
JAMIE LOWE: I went to a new primary physician, mostly because I'm lazy and I didn't want to go to the Upper West Side to see my other doctor, and this doctor basically took my blood pressure and was like, "You're gonna die. You need to go to the ER."
SOREN: Turns out her kidneys were failing, and so she suddenly had to make this choice.
JAMIE LOWE: That I could sort of just stay on lithium and, you know, go to dialysis and get a transplant, or that I had to switch. And that now would be when I would switch. That I had enough function left that I could.
SOREN: You are in the middle of that decision now, you feel like? Or do you feel like it's decided?
JAMIE LOWE: I think I'm gonna switch. I think I made that decision. It's just that every psychiatrist in New York leaves for August, because I don't know why, but they all disappear for August, all of August. And mine said, "You should probably wait to switch until I come back." But I feel like I have a good group of people around me. I have a solid job. It's terrifying to court mania, but I also feel like there are a lot of effective drugs, and that one of them is gonna work. It won't be as cool as lithium, though. Depakote sounds like—oh God. It's like, "Wah-wah, you're on Depakote."
SOREN: As she was in the middle of that decision, Jamie did one last thing. She actually took a trip to Bolivia, which is where much of the world's lithium comes from. There's this place you can go and literally see these massive salt flats which are just covered in mounds of lithium.
JAMIE LOWE: I just wanted to see them. I wanted to experience them. I wanted to be near them, so I went. It just looks like a hallucination. It looks like somebody could not have conceived of this landscape. You know, you have red lakes, and you have flocks of flamingos and this, like, long salty expanse that goes on forever. Like, it's just huge, it's enormous.
SOREN: Do you go up to a pile and put your hand on it or ...
JAMIE LOWE: Yeah, you can. You stand on it, and you jump off the pile. And I was making kind of lithium angels. And it was awesome. I know I have to go off of it, but I really am—I mean, gratitude is, like, not even the word. I feel like this thing allows me to be me. It doesn't define me, but it allows for, you know, functionality, and that sounds kind of wonky but it's like every day I get to work and it's because of that—like, everything. You know, I'm just—I'm grateful to it for its service. I feel like it's done—it's done a lot for me. It worked so hard to get to me too, from the Big Bang to now.
JAD: Producer Soren Wheeler. Now Soren is made of elements, though not of lithium, which we should say only some of which was made in the Big Bang. Some of it was also made in a supernova, and we'll have one of those coming up. Special thanks to Ben Lillie, Ann Harrington, Kay Redfield Jamison, Steve Lowe, and of course Jamie Lowe. Jamie is working on a book about her experiences with bipolar. It will be called Grand Delusions.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Jamie's Song" – Sylvan Esso: [musical intro].]
JAD: This is a song from the band Sylvan Esso. We played them the last story in progress, and they wrote a song about it.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Jamie's Song" – Sylvan Esso: [singing]. It's not me you're talking to, gently dancing in my room. Through the light beam ark, I'm all stops and starts, I'm all space and stars. I'm a brilliant machine, composed of softer things: compression ache, scale bends and sways, another nova on the way. Though the constant is constant, I'm breaking up. The choices I make will all fade to dust. While the metal is shifting I'm waking up. I remember, I remember what I thought I was. It's not me you're watching move, slam dancing around my room, faster, faster till I bloom. Keep on blooming, keep on blooming, dragging me down though I keep moving. Keep on blooming, keep on blooming, dragging me down though I keep moving. Though the constant is constant I'm breaking up. As I glow I'm so tired, that I'm too big to stop. While the metal is shifting, I'm breaking up. I remember, I remember what I thought I was. Though the constant is constant, I'm breaking up. As I grow I'm so tired, but I'm too big to stop. While the metal is shifting, I'm waking up. I remember, I remember what I thought I was.]
JAD: That was Sylvan Esso with "Jamie's Song."
RANDY FAROGAWA: You want to talk bang? Hydrogen was there at zero hundred hours in the coke-colored velodrome of dark matter, gases checking gases ad infinitum. Chartreuse flair, then a deafening birth. Ions of cosmos cartwheeling pink, red, yellow, green, purple, blue, black in the sphere of night. First I was a star, then a stain of water, then a kindergartner.
ROBERT: These poems, by the way, come from two events that we held in New York City. We went to Emotive Fruition, which is a wonderful organization run by Thomas Dooley, who is himself a poet. He summoned poets from all around the metropolitan area, and for two nights they came to the Bell House in Brooklyn, Botanic Lab in Manhattan.
JAD: And so far we have heard "Hydrogen," by Sarah Salas, read by Randy Farogawa.
ROBERT: "Helium" by Christine Quintana, read by Joniece Abbott-Pratt.
JAD: And "I Carried Your Oxygen," a poem by David McLoghlin read by Sam Bresslin-Wright.
ROBERT: So next up ...
DEREK MULLER: I'm going to give you three claps. I don't know if you need that, but just in case you need to ...
ROBERT: Okay.
DEREK MULLER: ... sync it there you go.
ROBERT: Like a TV guy.
JAD: Okay, so a while back we ended up talking to a guy named Derek Muller who makes a YouTube channel ...
DEREK MULLER: Called Veritasium.
JAD: Super-popular channel about science and engineering. And we called him because he's making a documentary about uranium. We got to talking about what happens when you take two protons or neutrons and you just—whack!—put them together.
DEREK MULLER: Yeah, it's absolutely nuts.
JAD: And that led to this really interesting conversation about the beginning of all elements.
DEREK MULLER: I mean, I feel like a little bit of back story is worth saying here. One really important thing to know is that combining nuclei gives you energy.
JAD: He says when you slam two particles together they get squished, and in the squishing they lose a little mass.
DEREK MULLER: That mass gets emitted as energy. This is E=mc2. That's what's happening in the sun right now. So the sun is taking protons, individual protons, and smashing them together, combining them, and that gives you energy, the energy of the sun. Their lost mass is the sunlight that we bask in. It was mass.
JAD: I have never thought of light as former mass.
DEREK MULLER: Yeah.
JAD: That's what a star does, he says. It smashes little atoms like hydrogen together to make bigger atoms like helium, and then bigger atoms like carbon, and then even bigger atoms like oxygen, and every little collision it's doing generates some energy which keeps the star going.
DEREK MULLER: Stars live by this process of sticking nuclei together, going from smaller nuclei, making bigger nuclei. The heavier the star, the more of this smashing and bashing they can do in their core, and the bigger and bigger nuclei they can form.
JAD: But there are limits. Six billion years ago there was a star, a giant star, way bigger than our sun, and it was just doing its thing, taking atoms ...
DEREK MULLER: And smashing them together, combining them.
JAD: You know, just taking hydrogen atoms and making helium. Taking helium atoms and ...
DEREK MULLER: Making carbon, making oxygen.
JAD: And as it's smashing all of these nuclei together it's releasing energy and getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger.
DEREK MULLER: But then there comes a point where sticking nuclei together no longer gives you energy.
JAD: And that point is element number 26.
DEREK MULLER: Iron. Once you've formed iron, if you're a star, that's the end of life as you know it.
JAD: Because iron is incredibly stable.
DEREK MULLER: One of the most stable nuclei in the universe.
JAD: Its protons are tightly packed in there, and so you can't force any more energy out of them.
DEREK MULLER: Which means you have a core which is no longer gonna give you energy.
ROBERT: You can't cook up anything higher than the iron.
DEREK MULLER: That's it.
JAD: But what happens to the star? Does it just become a big hunk?
DEREK MULLER: What happens is everything starts to collapse.
JAD: Gravity takes over.
DEREK MULLER: That's the thing. A star maintains its size by the fact that there's all this energy going out.
JAD: So this dead iron core starts pulling everything back in.
DEREK MULLER: And at this point, all of that stuff which is headed inwards ...
JAD: Aluminum, oxygen, carbon, magnesium, silicon ...
DEREK MULLER: ... starts rubbing against each other, and it starts getting real hot and real dense. And all of the sudden you get—poof!—the supernova.
ROBERT: That was the most pathetic supernova explosion I've ever heard.
DEREK MULLER: It wasn't—can you put in a sound effect to make it sound better?
ROBERT: Yes, we have to put it in.
JAD: That is actually our specialty.
JAD: So even though we know there are no sounds in space, for the purposes of your enjoyment we present to you the supernova.
DEREK MULLER: So here's the beauty of it. Here's the beauty of the supernova. In the ridiculous excesses of energy that are there in the supernova, right, in that ridiculously huge explosion, the biggest in the universe, there is so much energy there that actually what happens is you form these nuclei which would not form under any other conditions.
JAD: You know, iron hits carbon to form germanium. Silicon hits oxygen to form titanium. You start to get all of these bigger elements.
DEREK MULLER: Including, like, gold, including the gold in your wedding ring. They need that extreme ridiculous excess of energy to form.
JAD: And then it's done.
DEREK MULLER: And what are you left with? You're left with a giant field of debris. There's carbon, there's oxygen, there's iron, there's silicon, there's hydrogen, there's helium, and it starts to clump together due to gravity. And the center of that, which clumps together, is our sun, is mostly hydrogen and helium, and it's, like, 99 percent of all the mass in our solar system. And then the other chunks, other bits and pieces, start to clump together as well. And they have a bit more angular momentum so they're spinning around the outside, and those are your planetesimals, your early planets, and ...
JAD: And that is eventually how you get the Earth, and all of us.
JAD: This is where we come—so you're saying this is the birth of everything past iron?
DEREK MULLER: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
JAD: I feel like an idiot but I think I get it for the very first time. So post-supernova, like in the milliseconds post-supernova, you have lots—you have the whole periodic table hurtling through space.
DEREK MULLER: Yeah, you do. You really do.
ROBERT: You can find Derek Muller most days on his YouTube channel, Veritasium. His documentary Uranium: Twisting the Dragon's Tail will soon appear on PBS.
JAD: It has already, in fact, appeared.
ROBERT: It has even already appeared on PBS, and for some crazy reason it passed me by.
JAD: Coming up, a story that will make you wish the Cold War wasn't over.
ROBERT: Not me. Not me. I'm happy it's over.
[LISTENER: This is Hester Fuller calling from the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Radiolab is supported in part 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: Science reporting on Radiolab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science.]
JAD: Next up, producer Molly Webster and carbon.
MOLLY WEBSTER: All right.
JAD: Okay, you just want to launch in?
MOLLY: Yeah. So science and ...
ROBERT: Yay!
MOLLY: Yeah. This is my new thing with my sisters. I just always go, "#Science," because they get really sick of me trying to teach the kids science-y lessons. "Just #Science it." Okay, so one of the biggest mysteries in biology is how old am I?
JAD: That—that doesn't seem like a mystery.
MOLLY: Well, I mean, like, obviously I'm Molly Webster who's 32 years old, who has lived, you know, through 32 birthdays, I guess.
JAD: Yeah.
MOLLY: But this is a question of, like, we know that some cells in our body regenerate, and so it's like, how old are those cells? Like, how old is my heart right now?
ROBERT: Hmm.
MOLLY: Or how old is my eyeball, or how old is my nose?
JAD: Spleen.
MOLLY: The northwest corner of my kidney.
ROBERT: Is this like, if I'm three years old and now I'm 33 years old, do the cells in the 33-year old—are they the same as—are any of them the same as the one when I was three? Is that the question?
MOLLY: Yeah, that's one of the questions. Are any of them the same? If they're not the same then how often do they change?
ROBERT: Hmm.
MOLLY: Because if you understand that then you might be able to, like, solve injuries, help people heal faster, or fix diseases where cells are, you know, messed up like psoriasis or anemia, or ALS, or something like that. But also, it just seems so cool to be able to be like, "Oh, that chunk of my heart is from 1997."
ROBERT: Yes.
JAD: That's super cool.
MOLLY: Or, like, that other chunk of my heart is from 1983.
JAD: Yes.
ROBERT: Oh, I would love to know that. At the party of Robert, I would want to meet the original Robert cell. So if there's anybody who's been here since 1947 I'd love to just say hello, and if you just joined me in 2015, well that's nice.
MOLLY: Right. It would be super cool.
ROBERT: Yeah.
MOLLY: So one of the questions they've had for a long time is, "Is there a way that we can try to date cells?" And so they're like, "Well, we can't really send anything into the body because that can be toxic." So the answer for a long time had been no. And then, 2002-ish, this little idea pops up, and it's something called the bomb pulse.
ROBERT: B-O-M-B? Bomb?
MOLLY: B-O-M-B, and then pulse, P-U-L-S-E.
JAD: Bomb pulse?
MOLLY: Yeah. To explain ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Five, four, three, two, one. There it goes.]
MOLLY: In the 1940s and '50s, we all know this, we ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Christmas color, there is the ground wave. It is over folks.]
MOLLY: We tested a lot of atomic bombs.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: It worked! It worked! There's a huge fireball.]
MOLLY: The first test was in 1945. Trinity test, New Mexico. A few weeks later ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Harry Truman: The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.]
MOLLY: Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Harry Truman: We shall continue to use it ...]
MOLLY: So then as World War II comes to an end, the rest of the world just tries to catch up to the US.
[NEWS CLIP: The Reds are to explode a huge bomb of 50 megatons.]
MOLLY: The Russians. Then after the Russians ...
[NEWS CLIP: Britain fires its first H-bomb.]
MOLLY: ... the British, the French. The whole Cold War basically just continues to unspool. All in all, over 400 atomic tests went off above ground between 1945 and 1963.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Just imagine: if only one atom bomb were to be dropped on an American city, thousands of persons would be killed instantly.]
JAD: That was a sucky time.
MOLLY: Well, #Science.
ROBERT: [laughs]
MOLLY: Here's one good thing. Potentially one good thing popped out, and that is an answer to the question of how old are we?
JAD: That somehow came out of the bomb tests?
MOLLY: Yeah.
JAD: How?
MOLLY: Let me explain.
JAD: Do it.
MOLLY: So with every one of those detonations, when an atomic bomb goes off it would shoot a whole bunch of stuff up into the atmosphere, all of these, like, radioactive elements like cesium and plutonium and all these things. But also, that explosion shoots up a bunch of neutrons and the neutron will crash into the nitrogen that's floating in our atmosphere and create C-14, which is a very special type of carbon. It has two extra particles in it. Now as all that bad radioactive stuff starts falling out of the atmosphere back to the ground, C-14 doesn't fall out of the sky. It just sort of floats there. And what happened is over time the wind currents carried C-14 from these test sites and just spread it all over the planet. And this C-14, which is just totally like normal carbon, not harmful, it just bonds with oxygen and it gets sucked up into plants. And then animals eat the plants, and then we eat the animals, or we eat the plants, and then suddenly the C-14 is in us.
JAD: Hmm.
MOLLY: So we all have a little bit of the atomic age in us.
JAD: Wait, but I wasn't even born in 1963, so why would it be in me?
MOLLY: That is the cool thing, because it hangs out in the air for a long time. So it's actually still up there.
JAD: Hmm.
ROBERT: But why does this have anything to do with dating anything?
MOLLY: Yeah, so I'm about to tell you that.
MOLLY: Hey, you there?
BRUCE BUCHHOLZ: Hi, yes I am.
JONAS FRISÉN: Yeah, yeah.
MOLLY: Perfect.
BRUCE BUCHHOLZ: I'm Bruce Buchholz. I am a senior scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab.
JONAS FRISÉN: Jonas Frisén, professor of stem cell research at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm.
MOLLY: So in the early 2000s, Jonas is staring down this question of, like, how do I date cells, and at a certain point he gets together with Bruce because he comes up with this idea which is just, "Oh, maybe we just look up."
BRUCE BUCHHOLZ: So there are some groups in Europe. There's one in particular that's been measuring the atmosphere every two weeks since the late 1950s.
MOLLY: Oh my gosh!
BRUCE BUCHHOLZ: Which is—it's an incredible data record.
MOLLY: Bruce says what these scientists have done is they've taken all of these measurements and they put them into one chart, so you can see the amount of C-14 in the atmosphere over time.
BRUCE BUCHHOLZ: So we have this, basically a—basically a calendar. I could send you a picture so you can see what the graph looks like.
MOLLY: Yeah, I'd love to see a picture.
MOLLY: What you see on that graph is this, according to Jonas ...
JONAS FRISÉN: Up to 1955, it's a pretty flat line, with very little variation, but then suddenly in 1955 ...
MOLLY: With all the bomb tests ...
JONAS FRISÉN: ... there's a very sharp increase.
BRUCE BUCHHOLZ: A lot of carbon-14, very dramatic increase. That's why they called it a pulse.
MOLLY: And that increase goes all the way up to 1963 when ...
[NEWS CLIP: The Kremlin, fortress of communist doctrine, is the setting of an historic event.]
MOLLY: ... when the US, the UK and the Soviet Union agree to stop exploding atomic bombs above ground.
[NEWS CLIP: The signing of an atom test ban.]
JONAS FRISÉN: After that, there's a gradual decline.
MOLLY: And, you know, they're just measuring it all the way down so they can just say, "Oh, like, here's where it was in 1980, here's where it was in 1990, 2000, 2010." This right here is the coolest part, because the amount of C-14 in the atmosphere at any given moment is directly reflected in our cells, right? So if there's, like, that much C-14 in the atmosphere in September 1972, then that is going to be mirrored in cells that were born in September of 1972. So it is like this totally perfect birthday calendar.
BRUCE BUCHHOLZ: We can see approximately how long. Have they been there for 10 years, or 20 years, or 30 years?
MOLLY: It's like once this idea got out, scientists all over the world were like ...
BRUCE BUCHHOLZ: Oh yeah!
[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Tic, Tic, Tic" - Doris Day: [singing] Oh give me your attention, there's been a new invention.]
BRUCE BUCHHOLZ: It didn't take long to see that this might be something cool to do.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Tic, Tic, Tic" - Doris Day: [singing] It came about because they made a big atomic bomb.]
MOLLY: So just to give you a quick sense of some of the work that came out of this, I spoke to one scientist.
KIRSTY SPALDING: I'm Kirsty Spalding, and I work at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm.
MOLLY: She was working with Jonas, and they figured out how to use C-14 in brains.
KIRSTY SPALDING: I mean, first of all, the basic question was, can adult humans make new neurons?
MOLLY: She says that for like 100 years ...
KIRSTY SPALDING: The dogma had always been that the neurons we're born with are the ones we die with.
MOLLY: The problem was she had no way to investigate this. She couldn't use it in humans—even if they were dead humans—until she figured out a technique where she could, like, extract brain cells and see how much C-14 was in there.
KIRSTY SPALDING: Yeah, exactly.
MOLLY: And it turns out the next best thing to a human is a horse.
KIRSTY SPALDING: Because horses can live for quite some years.
MOLLY: Decades.
KIRSTY SPALDING: So every second Tuesday I would go out to the local abattoir ...
MOLLY: The local slaughterhouse.
KIRSTY SPALDING: ... an hour away. I mean, I was a vegetarian surrounded by carcasses, and they would bring the horse's head out to me, and I had to figure out how to get the brain out of its head.
MOLLY: Wait, what? So you actually had to, like, cut open the skull and get to the brain yourself?
KIRSTY SPALDING: I mean, the second time I went I took my boyfriend with me, because I was like, "I can't do this, physically." They actually had a circular saw and I actually discovered that the skull—the bone across the top—the nose of the horses is quite thin. So that was a much easier access point. This is a really gross discussion. [laughs]
MOLLY: Did you ever see your research going that way?
KIRSTY SPALDING: No, absolutely not. Not at all.
MOLLY: But what she saw when she finally moved her research from horse heads to humans was turnover.
KIRSTY SPALDING: We found quite robust levels of new neurons in adulthood.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Tic, Tic, Tic" - Doris Day: [singing] I tic, tic, tic. Why do I tic, tic?]
MOLLY: Once Jonas's team showed that this worked, scientists got excited, and people started to date things, and not just cells. So can I tell you the ages?
ROBERT: Sure.
MOLLY: Okay. The baseline ages we knew before C-14 was that skin was like 14 days old.
ROBERT: 14? Oh that's only 14 days old?
MOLLY: 14 days. Yeah, so like two weeks.
ROBERT: Wow.
MOLLY: The surface level of your gut, like the skin on your gut I guess, was five days.
ROBERT: Five days?
MOLLY: So that's even shorter than skin. That's like the surface of the ...
ROBERT: Wow, so ...
MOLLY: ... intestine.
ROBERT: Oh the surface of the intestine?
MOLLY: Yeah.
ROBERT: The lining?
MOLLY: The lining that's like ...
ROBERT: Well that's—because that's everything scraping—all that food going down. So no, that doesn't surprise me.
MOLLY: And then, with C-14, the deeper muscle-y part of the intestine, the average is 15.1 years.
ROBERT: 15.1 years. Oh, big difference between skin ...
MOLLY: Wait, 15.9—15.9 years old.
ROBERT: Okay, 15.9 years, hmm.
MOLLY: Fat cells was another one that they did: 10 years old.
ROBERT: 10 years old.
MOLLY: Yeah.
ROBERT: Interesting.
JAD: Why would a fat cell need to last that long?
MOLLY: 10 years?
JAD: Jesus.
ROBERT: Because it's perverse.
MOLLY: Just to torture you.
ROBERT: Because fat cells—yes!
JAD: Why would it last that long?
ROBERT: Because fat cells are mean cells.
JAD: But honestly, do they have any idea?
MOLLY: They don't know.
JAD: Huh. Do they know what would be one of the oldest part of us?
MOLLY: Your cortex, which is, like, the part of your brain that does abstract thinking, or your voluntary movements. That's as old as you are.
ROBERT: Really? Huh.
MOLLY: So if you want to know one of the oldest parts of you, the oldest cell is probably in your ...
ROBERT: Super-thinky part of your brain.
MOLLY: It'll be, like, your cortical neuron.
ROBERT: Well that fits if I think of myself as the stories I tell myself. Like, when you get Alzheimer's and you lose your stories, you lose your mind, like people say.
MOLLY: But the interesting thing, though, is the hippocampus is where you keep all your memories, and they saw that your hippocampus does make a bunch of new neurons.
JONAS FRISÉN: Yeah, so in the hippocampus ...
MOLLY: That's Jonas Frisén again.
JONAS FRISÉN: ... an adult gets approximately 1,400 new hippocampal neurons per day.
ROBERT: Really?
MOLLY: Yeah, and then each of those neurons will live, like, 20, maybe 30, years.
JAD: So does that mean that the part of Robert's brain where he keeps the stories he tells himself, that part is being made new every 20 or 30 years?
MOLLY: Yeah.
JAD: That's a strange thing that, like, your oldest stories could be stored in baby little neurons.
ROBERT: That is weird.
JAD: Yeah.
ROBERT: I remember going to Kyoto, and it's, like, the oldest most beautiful temple in Kyoto, it has exactly the form that it had hundreds of years ago. But when you walk in, the walls and the floors and the roofing, they've been restored. They've been restored actually over and over again, because in Japan what they call old is the form, it's the shape of the building. You go to Athens though, and you go up to the Acropolis and you stand in the Parthenon, there you're standing in the very temple that Pericles stood in. It's the same place exactly, same materials. So, like, in Greece they believe that the original stuff is what you preserve, and in Japan they don't. They think it's just the form. And I was thinking of this thing you're doing is sort of a little bit like that. I was thinking I'm much more Greek than I am Japanese, because I want to know what my original cells are, where they are in me.
MOLLY: Yeah.
JAD: But my question is actually more basic. It's like, why does part of me get to be reborn and the other parts of me don't? Like why not all of me get to be reborn?
MOLLY: Because if all of you is being reborn you would just crumble into dust.
JAD: No, but I mean, why does only certain parts get to regenerate?
MOLLY: It's interesting because they don't know. They said the next—they said basically this question of how old is a cell, they said no one was asking. Everyone wondered this, but no one was asking this question because they never had the tools to ask it. So now they're just starting to ask those questions, but there's a problem. This bomb pulse that we've been dependent on in the last decade to start answering all these questions is going away.
JAD: Really?
MOLLY: Every day a little more of that C-14 gets sucked out of the air.
ROBERT: So how much time do we have left before ...
MOLLY: 15 years. It's gone by 2030, give or take.
KIRSTY SPALDING: Yeah, so we need to get questions answered now because we really are working against the clock for many things we want to look at.
MOLLY: I talked to this Alzheimer's researcher who is trying to figure out, like, the chronology of the disease, like when certain pathologies form in the brain. He was kind of just like, "I just wish I had a little more time." And when I think about this—like, I was thinking about this on the subway this morning. Like, I was looking around and I was thinking—you know I'm on the L-train, it's a bunch of, like, 30-year old kids or something. And I was like, these—they're all reading or something and drinking their expensive lattes. I'm like, "These people are so far away from thinking about the Cold War or atomic bombs or anything like that, and they're all walking around with, like, this secret signal from the atomic period inside of them." And then that little signal is, like, binging out knowledge about their shoulder and their elbow and their liver, and the west side of the liver, and the east side of their liver, and like different parts of their heart, and the fact that it's now going away, and how, like, someone born in 2042 is just going to be really boring, and there's going to be no—they're not gonna have any insights into who they are.
ROBERT: Yeah, but ...
MOLLY: It sort of makes me inclined to very peacefully want to explode another atomic bomb.
ROBERT: What? No. No, no, and no.
MOLLY: Why?
ROBERT: You forget all of the poisons that it—that is not a benign event that's sort of an experimental picker-upper. That is extra—extra stuff in the air.
MOLLY: Don't kill my dream, Robert.
ROBERT: I have to kill your dream because it's a dumb, dumb dream.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, "The Atomic Telephone" - Spirit of Memphis Quartet: [singing] Lord, give us a brand new power Lord, to use for the good of all mankind. Some people going to use it to destroy everything. God didn't mean it like that. He wants us to use it for the good of all mankind. God has talked to Jesus on the atomic telephone. Oh well, then no man knows its power. Only God alone. Oh well then, it can't cure the sick or destroy the evil. With one sweep of power, known by God alone.]
JAD: Producer Molly Webster.
ROBERT: And special thanks to Henrik Druid and Mark Lovell.
SAM BRESLIN-WRIGHT: Happy Valentine's Day, magnesium. I'd go blind watching you burn, magnesium. Iodine is cute, the way it sublimates. And yes, I'll put lithium in water to watch it scoot about but my heart belongs to you, magnesium. The hot, white flame, the abandoned, the slowness of you becoming your own fuse. Mercury is beautiful, yes, but it's you magnesium. The way you burn for me, the way you leave nothing of yourself behind.
JONIECE ABBOTT-PRATT: We are flying over Greenland. Your elbow is too close to mine on the airplane armrest. Down there they are excavating uranium from beneath the Arctic ice and selling indiscriminately. Though from here I can only see the white of ice sheets and glacier-topped mountains. This is an island of fishing rigs and colorful houses, cod and catfish stew, and tomato cream. Once, I thought every isotope in me is radioactive. I make the people who love me sick. This is a teenage way of thinking, but you have uncovered a glowing spark in the pristine, frozen places within me.
JAD: That was "Uranium" from poet Emily Hockaday, read by Joniece Abbot-Pratt, and before that "Happy Valentine's Day, Magnesium" by Jason Schneiderman performed by Sam Breslin Wright.
ROBERT: Everybody has a middle name in this thing.
JAD: Yeah they do.
ROBERT: Sam Breslin Wright. Yeah, okay.
JAD: Coming up ...
ROBERT: We're gonna get into an elevator, push the button, and go down. I mean all the way down. I'm Robert Louis Krulwich.
JAD: Jad Nicholas Abumrad.
ROBERT: Yeah.
JAD: We'll continue in a moment.
[LISTENER: Hi, this is Pilar Castro from Bogota, Colombia. Radiolab is supported in part 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. Muchos gracias, Radiolab.]
JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I am Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab, and today—[bleep] it! Elements, we're doing it. We're doing it.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, "The Elements" – Tom Lehrer: [singing] There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium, and nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium, and iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium, europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium, and lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium, and gold, protactinium and indium and gallium, and iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.]
ROBERT: Satirist Tom Lehrer.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, "The Elements" – Tom Lehrer: [singing] There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium, and boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium. There's strontium and silicon and silver and samarium, and bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium and barium.]
JAD: Okay, so we have this periodic table of elements, which is a list of the simplest bits of matter that we know of. And so theoretically everything that we see, everything that we are is made of the stuff that is in that table. That's sort of the beauty of the periodic table is that it describes everything, right?
ROBERT: Well, about 45 years ago a scientist named Vera Rubin was studying the motion of the galaxies. You know how the galaxies just spin in that beautiful way around, like in spirals. Her calculations did not explain why the galaxies were holding together, and she figured, "You know, there's gotta be some stuff that I can't see around the galaxies that explain why they move the way they do." What is that stuff? Whatever it is, it's not interacting with the matter of our world hardly at all. Otherwise we'd see it.
RICK GAITSKELL: That's indeed why we call it dark. Dark matter is the dominant matter component in the universe.
ROBERT: That's experimental physicist Rick Gaitskell.
RICK GAITSKELL: The stuff you and I are made of, these conventional protons, is the flotsam and jetsam of the matter world. It's cast on a sea of dark matter. We're talking about, in terms of the total composition of the universe—you and I, the stuff we're made of—is four-and-a-half percent.
ROBERT: The other 95.5 percent is this stuff: the dark matter, the dark energy, which theoretically is all around us.
RICK GAITSKELL: If you clap your hands you will have a dark matter particle in your hand. The problem, or the challenge, is that it is so weakly interacting that it will pass straight through you, and in fact will pass straight through the Earth, and will have very little probability of interacting.
JAD: But what if you could get one of these little bastards to interact? Then, I mean forget the periodic table, then you would meet the most fundamental element of them all.
ANDY MILLS: City of Lead, historic home town.
JAD: We're gonna tell you about an experiment now, this bizarre experiment, and we sent our producers Andy Mills, and Damiano Marchetti to check it out.
DAMIANO MARCHETTI: Right here, essentially.
ANDY MILLS: You think it's this close?
JAD: It is happening in South Dakota, in the Black Hills, in this little town called Lead.
ANDY: I have not seen this many trees in so long.
JAD: Incredibly beautiful, picturesque little town, but right near the town as you crest over this hill ...
ANDY: That's it?
DAMIANO: Oh, that's a deep cut!
JAD: ... you'll see this mountain that looks like it's just been torn open.
DAMIANO: No.
ANDY: We pulled over and we walked over to the edge of this thing, and it was like
peering down into an ancient volcano.
ANDY: That's not what I thought it would look like.
DAMIANO: They just carved out that hill.
DAMIANO: In this town, there is one of the deepest man-made holes on the planet.
ANDY: That's where the experiment is, and it's there because way down deep in that hole ...
KENT MEYERS: It's demonstrably the quietest place in the universe.
ANDY: That is Kent Meyers, he's a writer.
DAMIANO: The quietest thing will make sense in a second.
ANDY: He wrote an article in Harper's Magazine recently that is all about this experiment and this hole.
KENT MEYERS: I was interested in the idea of these frontiers, that the ...
ROBERT: "Fraunteer?" Where are you from? "Fraunteer."
KENT MEYERS: I'm from Minnesota.
ROBERT: Oh, there you go.
KENT MEYERS: People tell me I sound like I'm from the movie Fargo.
ROBERT: Well, let me join them.
KENT MEYERS: [laughs]
ANDY: Anyway, Kent says that this story, it starts off way back in the old west.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: A hearty frontier, wild, rugged.]
DAMIANO: 1874, General Custer and crew.
KENT MYERS: Custer comes out looking for this gold, and finds it.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Gold on the mountains, in the rivers, and in the dark depths, far below the surface of the Earth.]
KENT MEYERS: Then just like that, 10,000 people within two years are just invading, illegally invading the Black Hills which were the great Sioux reservation.
ANDY: By 1901, the miners blast 1,500 feet down. By 1927, 3,500 feet down. By 1975 ...
KENT MEYERS: It's 8,000 feet deep.
ANDY: To put that into perspective ...
RICK GAITSKELL: That's a sort of mile and a half.
ROBERT: Did you say a mile and a half? Is that ...
RICK GAITSKELL: Yeah, they literally moved mountains.
KENT MYERS: Oh, it's immense.
ANDY: Imagine six Empire State Buildings going straight down.
ROBERT: And gold is that valuable that you could put that kind of effort and energy, and ...
KENT MEYERS: Isn't that astonishing?
ROBERT: Yeah.
KENT MEYERS: But what happened is that eventually the price of gold dropped to the point
where the size of mine ...
ANDY: Was just unsustainable.
KENT MEYERS: When you're mining 8.000 feet down, you know, for every foot you go down your price increases, your costs increase. You've got to haul it further, you've got to air-condition the mine.
ANDY: You've got to pump out the ground water.
KENT MEYERS: You have to run electrical lines down there.
ANDY: And so in 2001, after 126 years of being in operation, the mine shut down.
ANDY: Did it create a ghost town? I mean, did ...
KENT MEYERS: Well, this was the fear. This was the fear that we were just gonna have—the whole economy of this part of the country was gonna fall apart, but as this was happening ...
RICK GAITSKELL: We saw an opportunity there.
KENT MEYERS: ... these physicists realized that this was a golden opportunity.
ROBERT: Wait, wait, wait. Before we—I don't—how—do experimental physicists—do they love holes? I mean, is that just an old tradition?
KENT MEYERS: Yeah, they're just in love with holes. They're just like dwarves. [laughs]
ANDY: No, no, no. This is where we get to that idea of quiet. This experiment, it needs a kind of quiet that you cannot find on the surface of the Earth.
RICK GAITSKELL: When you and I are sitting on the surface of the Earth we're not acutely aware of it, but we are being hit by cosmic rays at a rate that, I think, really rather amazes people. If you simply hold your hand out, three or four times a second a cosmic ray is going through your hand. And it's going right through it, and that's every second. So your body is literally bathed in thousands of these every second.
KENT MEYERS: We are just being bombarded with a din.
ANDY: Rick Gaitskell talks about it like being in the middle of a stadium during the Super Bowl.
RICK GAITSKELL: This is as though everybody in this arena is clapping.
ANDY: Now just imagine that in the middle of all this chaos there is one person leaning over to their friend and whispering a secret into their ear.
KENT MEYERS: Dark matter is like the whisper.
RICK GAITSKELL: It'll be lost in the noise.
KENT MEYERS: We have to cut out all this noise in order to even come close to hearing it.
RICK GAITSKELL: And it turns out putting a mile of rock between you and the clappers is taking you a lot of the way there.
ANDY: Yeah, that's a great sound.
ANDY: So Rick took us into this mine through these massive iron doors, down these long, underground tunnels, into a room where we met this guy.
ANDY: What's your name and who are you?
MIKE SUNEESE: Mike Suneese. Grew up in Lead, South Dakota. I'm the fourth generation that's been hanging around the homestake mine.
ANDY: Mike worked at the mine, so did his dad.
MIKE SUNEESE: Both my grandfathers are homestake veterans.
ANDY: Most kids that Mike went to school with, and his dad went to school with, they worked at the mines.
MIKE SUNEESE: And my grandmother's father, on my dad's side, was also a miner.
ANDY: But now ...
DAMIANO: Now he works in a room where he basically equips scientists with all their safety gear and stuff.
MIKE SUNEESE: Got to have your belt on.
ANDY: He gave us these boots and a respirator.
MIKE SUNEESE: You catch on fire, you want to be able to breathe, right?
DAMIANO: That's what you want to hear in the morning.
ANDY: Yeah.
ANDY: And eventually ...
DAMIANO: We climb into this old steel service elevator.
MIKE SUNEESE: A little further. South cage, this is 41.
VOICE ON RADIO: South cage, 41.
MIKE SUNEESE: Lower south cage.
ANDY: And then we just start rocketing downward.
DAMIANO: We're going so fast.
RICK GAITSKELL: The speed of which we're moving is sort of equivalent to the speed of which an airplane—often when it's descending.
DAMIANO: At 1,000 feet our ears pop. At 2,000 feet this sort of wet, muddy smell sort of wafts up.
ANDY: And as we're dropping, all that noise is getting slowly filtered out.
RICK GAITSKELL: We're able to literally use the rock to absorb these cosmic ray particles.
ANDY: After about 10 minutes the elevator stops.
DAMIANO: Whoa!
MIKE SUNEESE: Okay guys, watch your step here.
ANDY: Thank you guys.
DAMIANO: Thank you.
DAMIANO: And we step out, 4,850 feet down.
ANDY: This is a [bleep] cave, man!
ANDY: It looks like a cave. It's got a dome-like ceiling and walls that are just carved rock.
JAD: So what is that sound?
DAMIANO: It's water.
ANDY: That's the sound of rain coming through a whole lot of rock. To be clear, it's not raining outside. It's not raining up in the world. It's just ground water.
DAMIANO: According to Kent, it's costing over a million dollars a year.
KENT MEYERS: Just to run the pumps to drain that water. So that gives you some ...
JAD: A million dollars a year?
KENT MEYERS: Yeah.
DAMIANO: But Rick says down here ...
ANDY: This is the least amount of radiation that we will ever experience in our lives.
RICK GAITSKELL: It is quite dramatic. It's about three million less cosmic rays. So when you
hold your hand out, less than one every few months.
DAMIANO: January.
RICK GAITSKELL: Coming through your hand now.
DAMIANO: March.
RICK GAITSKELL: But that isn't the end of the story.
MIKE SUNEESE: So we're gonna step inside here. The very first step, we actually have a nice ...
ANDY: It turns out that even if you cut out all of the rays coming from the outside, there are still rays coming off of us.
RICK GAITSKELL: You and I, we carry a certain amount of uranium and thorium, these radioactive elements, in us.
ROBIN BARLIN: Okay, so what we're gonna do is you're going to take your coveralls off.
DAMIANO: A woman named Robin Barlin made us change clothes.
ROBIN BARLIN: So can you take that machine out?
ANDY: Yeah.
ROBIN BARLIN: Okay.
DAMIANO: Scrubbed our stuff.
ROBIN BARLIN: Oh, the microphone. I'm gonna wipe this. Is that okay?
DAMIANO: Yeah.
DAMIANO: And then Rick takes us into the lab where the experiment happens. It's this all-white room with this huge tank in the middle.
RICK GAITSKELL: The tank contains 70,000 gallons of high purity water, and we're directly inside it, and we can, without fear of disrupting the experiment one can ...
ANDY: The experiment actually happens inside this tank.
RICK GAITSKELL: One can bang the outside of the steel container.
ANDY: The whole idea is that this water will actually filter out even more radiation.
RICK GAITSKELL: That makes it very quiet.
DAMIANO: But still, it's not quiet enough.
ANDY: And so inside that tank of water, they put an even smaller tank of the element xenon.
RICK GAITSKELL: About a third of a ton of liquid xenon.
ROBERT: Where do we find xenon on the periodic table? What is this?
RICK GAITSKELL: Xenon is number 54.
ROBERT: 54.
RICK GAITSKELL: It's over on the right hand side so that we have this imperially-named set of elements we call the noble elements.
ROBERT: You mean they're just too good for everybody else? They interact hardly at all.
RICK GAITSKELL: That's right. You really struggle to make xenon interact with any other atoms.
ANDY: Which is just another way of saying that inside of this tank of xenon, which is inside of this tank of water, which is down in one of the biggest holes ever dug by man, it is really, really, really, really, really quiet.
KENT MEYERS: It's demonstrably the quietest place in the universe. I mean you can't—you don't know that it is because there could be somewhere some quieter place, but as far as we know the center of this lux detector is the quietest place that we human beings know of.
JAD: And what's supposed to happen inside this super-quiet xenon space?
KENT MEYERS: So the idea that you have here is that this cloud of xenon, it's just waiting. And the thought is that when a dark matter particle that's, like, zooming around all the time, when that zooms through this xenon because it is so quiet in there, because there is nothing else happening in there, that dark matter particle, even though it's not supposed to interact with anything from our world, that particle, if it disturbs, if it nudges, in any way, any of the atoms of the xenon, we'll notice it.
DAMIANO: And that tiny little disturbance, whenever it happens, Kent says you can think of that moment as the universe whispering to us.
KENT MEYERS: The whisper—in human nature, the whisper is the point when we really—when we really want to speak intently to a single person, we whisper. You know, we whisper at funerals. We whisper in the presence of awesome things in nature. You know, it's that reduced use of the voice that drops down, and drops down to—only goes into the ear it's intended for. It's Isaiah's call, you know? He's lying on his mat and he hears the whisper because he knows that's for me alone, that call is for me alone. And that's that sense that this experiment gives to me, is that here the universe has been shouting and shouting and shouting at us and we've gathered all this scientific knowledge out of the shock, out of the clapping, out of the cheers. And now where we're at in the 21st century is we're going down to what's it saying in the whisper? And those whispers go clear back to conception. They go clear back to birth. If we understand these whispers, we're very close to understanding gestation. And I got carried away there, but ...
ANDY: Oh, we love it.
KENT MEYERS: But you really—yeah.
JAD: Okay, and did you get to hear the whispers, see the disturbance, whatever it is? Did you meet the dark matter?
DAMIANO: Well, how can I give this to you lightly?
RICK GAITSKELL: Okay, so this is confession time. I've—I've been looking for dark matter for 27 years, and so far we have yet to see a convincing set of interactions that are associated with this dark matter and that's ...
JAD: Nothing at all?
DAMIANO: Yeah, nothing. But Rick hasn't given up hope. I mean, he sort of never gives up hope. I mean, he says maybe we just need to build a bigger, more sensitive detector.
RICK GAITSKELL: That's, of course, exactly what we're doing.
DAMIANO: Instead of their current one, which has a third of a ton of xenon ...
RICK GAITSKELL: We are now designing and building a detector that's going to be 10 tons, you see.
ANDY: He says, even there, who knows?
RICK GAITSKELL: The uncertainty we have to deal with is at least a factor of 10 million.
MIKE SUNEESE: 9,000 RPM, 10,020. 25 ...
DAMIANO: And the other pretty disappointing thing is that when you're in this room, like in the room with the lux detector that's supposed to be the quietest place in the universe, it's loud. It's crazy loud!
ANDY: There are sounds that I can only describe as robots dying. Like, listen to this.
JAD: Was there any moment that was quiet? Like quiet-y-quiet, like deep quiet, feely quiet?
DAMIANO: Well, sort of. After we went to the lux, we had some time to kill, and they took us into the raw part of the mine where they used to mine for gold, and they just sort of walked us through these old tunnels.
ANDY: Are you scared?
DAMIANO: A little bit, yeah.
DAMIANO: And you're walking through the black, and all you hear is, like, the sound of our feet crunching. The wind is being sucked down. It's kind of rushing through the tunnel so you hear—and it's the silence. It's not like the silence of, like, "Oh, this street is really quiet outside of my bedroom." It's got like an energy to it. It's got like this—it's kind of like when you're running, and when you stop running and the absence of your exertion sort of fills you.
ROBERT: Yeah.
DAMIANO: It's like that moment where the absence of the noise sort of becomes palpable. That's, for me, the moment. Not standing in the laboratory. For me, that moment was the moment where I'm like, now I am standing at the center of the xenon. I don't think I ever, ever, have felt that before.
JAD: Producers Damiano Marchetti and Andy Mills.
ROBERT: We have had Damiano with us for almost a year, and it's been a total pleasure. He is moving on, but we wish him—what would you like to wish him?
JAD: I wish him quiet, but the good kind of quiet. You know, the kind that has energy.
ROBERT: Oh, that's nice.
JAD: You know, the whomp, whomp, whomp kind. That kind.
ROBERT: Yeah.
JAD: Thank you, Damiano. Huge thanks to Thomas Dooley. We had original music this hour from Oneohtrix Point Never, Sylvan Esso, Kevin Drum, Ken Camden, and Vijay Iyer.
ROBERT: Thanks also to Matt Kapust and to Connie Walter, and to the folks at Sanford Underground Research Facility for letting us visit them and stay, and stay, and ask so many questions and finally leave.
JAD: Yeah. Which is what we're about to do. I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: Thanks for listening.
[ANSWERING MACHINE: Message two, new.]
[JAMIE LOWE: This is Jamie Lowe.]
[KENT MYERS: This is Kent Meyers.]
DEREK MULLER: Hey, this is Derek Muller calling to read the credits, and I just wanted to do this because I think all of these peoples' names are awesome. I mean, tell me you don't agree.]
[KENT MEYERS: Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad.]
[DEREK MULLER: Our staff includes Brenna Farrell, Ellen Horne ...]
[KENT MEYERS: ... David Gebel ...]
[JAMIE LOWE: ... Dylan Keefe ...]
[DEREK MULLER: ... Matt Kielty ...]
[JAMIE LOWE: ... Andy Mills ...]
[KENT MEYERS: ... Latif Nasser ...]
[JAMIE LOWE: ... Kelsey Padgett ...]
[DEREK MULLER: ... Arianne Wack ...]
[JAMIE LOWE: ... Molly Webster ...]
[KENT MEYERS: ... Soren Wheeler and Jamie York.]
[DEREK MULLER: Who are these people? It sounds like a crime-fighting team. You know, when you've got the Kelsey Padgett and the Soren Wheeler?]
[JAMIE LOWE: With help from Simon Adler, Kathy Tu, Molly McBride-Jacobson, and Alexandra Leigh Young.]
[KENT MYERS: Our fact checkers are Eva Dasher and Michelle Harris.]
[DEREK MULLER: I mean, tell me those aren't cool names. Eva Dasher? I just love these names. Anyway, thank you so much for having me on the show, and I don't know if you guys have time for a plug, but if you haven't checked out Veritasium, you might just want to go check that out—"the element of truth." All right, bye.]
[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]
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