[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LULU MILLER: Okay, ready?

LATIF NASSER: Yeah.

LULU: Hey, I'm Lulu Miller

LATIF: I'm Latif Nasser.

LULU: This is Radiolab. And this week we are bringing you four stories, four celebrations if you will, about the overlooked, the ignored.

LATIF: The unsung places in our world, from the cells inside our bodies to the treetops above us to the distance between all things, we are going to look at the overlooked. Overlooked they will not be any longer.

LULU: [laughs] And we look. And to start us off on this journey, we are gonna start small. I mean, microscopically small, with a story that Jad hosted a few moons back. And we should say that this story does contain some language that is not suitable for littles, so be forewarned. And now onto Jad.

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Radiolab. This week we want to share a story that really caught our attention. It's a story told by this guy.

BRANDON OGBUNU: My name is Brandon Ogbunu. I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Brown University.

JAD: It's a story he told on stage for the podcast Story Collider, which is a live storytelling show. Huge thanks to them for letting us borrow this. It's a story that, you know, touches on all the things that we're all thinking about right now. Takes it into some new territory. Brandon started the story when he told it on stage with an incident that happened to him in college when he was living in DC.

[applause]

BRANDON OGBUNU: Rule number one: When you see the lights at your back or in your eyes and they're unmistakable, stop moving. Raise your hands slowly from their side, five fingers extended so that they know that there's nothing in your hands. Stop. Wait for instructions. You see, you have to think about the police report. You don't want it to say that he lunged or he reached for something that looked like a weapon, or the mysterious, "He made a menacing gesture." "No, officer. I'm not carrying any weapons." That's rule number two: Use "Officer" early and often. Why? You have to let them know that you know the power dynamic. After all, they got the badge and the gun. You? You were just born with the wrong set of physical traits.

BRANDON OGBUNU: Officer number one stood with the gun loaded, pointed towards me, ready to go, ready to be a hero. Officer number two approached. "Are you carrying any drugs, sir?" Sir? I guess I respect that. "No, officer." After a thorough search—and I mean thorough—the interest turns to the contents of my backpack, a black JanSport that had some bad graffiti on the small pocket. I was a senior at Howard University, a chemistry and mathematics major at the time, and like most people at that stage my backpack told a lot about me. There was some moldy potato chips in a bag, some sketch pads and some notepads, copy of Source Magazine and a couple mixtapes. I mean real mixtapes, not the stuff that you guys talk about.

[laughter]

BRANDON OGBUNU: And much, much more. Officer number two had to sift through the contents, and I heard all the ruffling. Eventually, officer two emerged with an object of interest and slammed it on the hood of the car and under the flashlight it went. Lehninger, Nelson and Cox: Principles of Biochemistry, Second Edition. Officer two was persistent however, and raised the book and shook it out, trying to find the contraband. And officer two was successful. Down went several notecards that were placed in the chapter on Michaelis–Menten kinetics. Officer number two was persistent still and ruffled through the contents of the bag and emerged with another—another item, little bit smaller. Slammed it on the hood of the car. A draft of my senior thesis, highly annotated, with the title The Liberation of RNA. Now in this thesis I argue ...

JAD: The story that you tell begins with the sort of oh-so-familiar pulled over by cops.

BRANDON OGBUNU: Right.

JAD: When was that, by the way?

BRANDON OGBUNU: Late fall of 2001.

JAD: Huh.

JAD: Producer Soren Wheeler and I ended up calling up Brandon, asking him a few questions about the story.

BRANDON OGBUNU: I mean, just to add a little bit of context this is around the time of the Amadou Diallo case.

JAD: Oh, wow.

BRANDON OGBUNU: In New York. It's like a couple years after that, probably. Interaction with law enforcement has been a part of my life since really, you know, right after early adolescence.

JAD: So the Liberation of RNA, this thesis that they find in your bag, what—what kind of work were you doing at that point?

BRANDON OGBUNU: So I was a chemistry major in math. I studied math a lot. So I was math and chemistry, and I had joined Susan Gottesman's lab …

JAD: More on her in a second.

BRANDON OGBUNU: … in college. She had made this discovery of the RNA molecules that kind of regulated genes, and my work was focused on one of those small RNA molecules, these autonomously functioning RNA molecules that were responsible for switching genes on and off. And that was a pretty new discovery. RNA, we thought RNA was just this informational intermediate between DNA and protein, but I think in the '90s we learned that RNA actually does things in a cell. It can actually function like an enzyme. It's doing things in the cell. And now this is kind of common knowledge, but back then that was a pretty new discovery. This stuff is really active and is an important part of the way life functions across the biosphere.

JAD: So when you say liberate RNA, you mean let's give RNA its due.

BRANDON OGBUNU: That's right.

JAD: That it's not—that it needs to be elevated.

BRANDON OGBUNU: Yes. Yes.

BRANDON OGBUNU: We had historically put RNA in a box, but RNA was bigger than that.

JAD: And so you describe in your story that RNA was in a box. I wonder, did you see RNA as a kind of—what's the—what's the not dumb way to ask this? As a, like, analogue to your own life?

BRANDON OGBUNU: Oh, totally. Oh, totally.

JAD: Really?

BRANDON OGBUNU: Well, I mean I think—I think I absolutely used my science as—you know, I do my science biographically. I—I—in all of my science even now, I find a personal connection to the essence of the question, which is why I was writing a thesis called The Liberation of RNA. And as—when I wrote about the liberation of RNA, there was nothing explicitly political in that. It was about RNA.

JAD: Right.

BRANDON OGBUNU: It was totally a biochemistry thesis. But nonetheless, I definitely saw that thread that, you know, Susan Gottesman kind of and colleagues had discovered this set of molecules that were—that were kind of—that kind of had expanded our appreciation of what was possible. And I kind of felt that was a little bit of a metaphor for my whole life at that point.

JAD: And did you feel like, I mean because you identified with RNA and, you know, the orthodoxy is DNA is everything, you are your genes, did you then have a adversarial relationship to DNA? Or is that ...

BRANDON OGBUNU: No. I didn't have an adver—I didn't have an adversarial relationship with DNA. I still love DNA, and I think DNA's, you know, one of the most—one of the most—I got no beef with DNA. DNA—but I think ...

SOREN WHEELER: It's a great molecule.

BRANDON OGBUNU: Yeah, it's a great molecule. A lot of my best friends are DNA. But—but I do—from early, and at that point I was politically aware and scientifically aware. I was aware of things, like for example, like scientific racism. That was definitely something I was aware of. And I was definitely aware of the ways that DNA was weaponized in scientific racism. Even at that stage.

JAD: Yeah. Yeah. All right. So maybe we should circle back to Susan Gottesman, whose lab you're working in at that point.

BRANDON OGBUNU: I conducted this research in the laboratory of Susan Gottesman at the National Institutes of Health. To this day one of my truest scientific heroes. Both maybe the nicest and the smartest person I've ever had the pleasure of meeting let alone working with. She might have stood 5'3", but she towered over the field. Her work used bacterial genetics to understand the kind of basic questions in bacterial physiology. And recently, she had discovered several small RNAs in bacterial and in E. coli, and I focused a lot of my work in my lab on that. I owed a lot to Dr. Gottesman. She saw talent in me before I did. She believed in me and gave me an opportunity, and a lot of the greatness of Dr. Gottesman came out in my failures. I was coming from chemistry where, like, yeah, you might have an explosion, but there was no contamination, you know? Right? And so I—I had fairly, fairly heavy hands in the laboratory, and she would say things like, "You being smart is not going to make a correct bacterial growth curve, Brandon." Or even better, "Yeah, I think you'll be a good theoretician one day."

[laughter]

BRANDON OGBUNU: But I owed everything to Dr. Gottesman. I was young and naive at the time, but I understood that I was working for somebody very special, and I was honored to be connected to her. 15 or so years later ...

JAD: So you jump forward 15 years. Can you just, before we get to that next scene, connect the dots? Who—who were you in the interim?

BRANDON OGBUNU: So after leaving Susan's lab, I actually did a Fulbright in Kenya where I studied malaria.

JAD: Oh.

SOREN: Wow.

BRANDON OGBUNU: You know, I come back, I enter medical school at Yale.

JAD: Wow.

BRANDON OGBUNU: Then I switched into a PhD program, where I did my PhD in virus evolution at Yale, and I haven't looked back. So I'm a—at this point I'm a professor.

BRANDON OGBUNU: I'm sitting on a sectional couch in front of a 60-inch HDTV 4K. That I own. It's January, 2019. I got olive tapenade hummus, cauliflower chips, and a local root beer. And I'm tuned in to watch a movie: PBS American Masters: Decoding Watson. This documentary was about James Watson. Now James Watson's been an asshole for decades, right? Hold on. Hold on.

[cheers]

JAD: We should probably say that James Watson is part of the duo that discovered the double helix structure of DNA. He has made racist comments at several points during his career and gotten in trouble for it.

BRANDON OGBUNU: And presumably I was tuning in because, you know, this is a good series, The Decoding—the Masters, American Masters have been good. And you can learn—there's always something interesting to learn about people. But really, I confess that I was tuning in kind of like most people tune in when they're watching boxing. You can say, "Well, I want to see a match of styles," but you want to see a knockout, right? You—you want to see something kind of dramatic happen. And James Watson delivered.

BRANDON OGBUNU: Doubling down on his 2007 comments where he said, "Though I hoped people are equal, people who have to deal with Black employees don't believe this to be true." He had further things to say about Black people and white people, differences he attributed to genetics. My visible demeanor oscillated between kind of horrified shuddering and kind of uncomfortable laughter. But inside I was hurting.

BRANDON OGBUNU: So I had been keeping up with James Watson through the years, just because I had read all the stuff, I had read his biography. I knew a lot about him. I think what was jarring about that experience for me was everything else I had read that he said. So I had actually never seen him say any of these troubling things before. I was—it really made my skin crawl.

JAD: Hmm.

BRANDON OGBUNU: And it be—and it became personal in an odd way when I heard him say it.

BRANDON OGBUNU: Interestingly enough however, those comments were not the most notable part of that documentary film. What I noticed was several notable female, women scientists were in the film and had passed through his lab at various points and were talking. Famous people. And I was like, "Wow, this is very interesting given Watson's similarly problematic past when it comes to gender." So I said, "That doesn't quite fit my narrative of him. That's pretty interesting." And to his credit, none of the women scientists said that working for him that the environment was particularly toxic. They kind of had interesting things to say about his personality, but I found that to be very, very interesting. So then the question emerged in my head. "I wonder how many other famous women scientists worked for James Watson?" I took my inquiry to Google.

BRANDON OGBUNU: James Watson, academic family tree. Now, you know, there are—right, there are websites dedicated to being able to track genealogy academically the same way you do with your family. And there's a site AcademicFamilyTree.org, I believe. I click on it. At the top of the page, one of those classical James Watson photos with the insufferable smile and the bad hairline, right? My eyes went down the page and it said, "Children." And the first name in the children's section, Susan Gottesman, research assistant. Now my response was in my mother tongue, a highly technical language. "Get the [bleep] out of here!" Wait. Can't be true, all right? But it was true. There was no section that read "Grandchildren," because if there was—and there was no section because his grandchildren likely number in the thousands at this point. But if there was, one of them would have been an evolutionary systems biologist at Brown University who likes long walks in the park and open world video games, whose mother experienced the Jim Crow South and whose great-grandmother was born a slave.

JAD: When you—when you saw that you were only one person away from him, what did you—how did that compute?

BRANDON OGBUNU: Well, a couple things. He—he said these racist things. I bet he didn't think, you know, kids from public housing were gonna end up being his—you know, being in his pedigree.

JAD: Yes. Yes.

BRANDON OGBUNU: And who have the views that I have, and who promote the things that I promote in science and who say the things that I say and hold my views. Here I am eating my olive tapenade hummus on my comfortable couch watching my nice television, and I'm James Watson's grandson and he can't do nothing about it.

JAD: [laughs]

BRANDON OGBUNU: And I got my whole—and I got a whole career in front of me where I'm gonna make a—I'm gonna embarrass those kind of ideas. And so it—it caused a lot of reflection.

BRANDON OGBUNU: But what are academic connections anyway, really? Like, I don't know him, I hope I never know him. The connection is kind of nebulous and tenuous in these types of ways that kind of don't matter, right? But the connection between me and James Watson is about more than the profession. And the connection between all of us and James Watson is about more than science. James Watson was officers number one and number two. James Watson is why you feel unwelcome in your job. James Watson makes you feel like an impostor. And more broadly, James Watson tells people they're illegal. James Watson separates families. James Watson puts children in cages. James Watson, my academic grandfather.

BRANDON OGBUNU: The contents of my backpack was spread all over the police car at this point, the hood of the police car at this point. All of a sudden number one and number two looked at each other. What it looked like, "What the hell do we do now?" Eventually, officer number one said, "You can get your things and go." Now this was supposed to be humiliating. Here I am minding my business, and I have to stop and put all my things back into the bag. But sometimes resistance is best dealt quietly. And so I figured out a way to make this work for me. I took my sweet ass time putting my materials back into that bag. One by one. And with it I was saying two things. A) Them hands y'all got on them guns could help me put these things back in this bag; and B) The things I'm putting in this bag, the ideas they contain, some mine, some from others, are valuable. I have people in the world who love me. I have dreams of one day being a great professor. And I had to be at work in the morning in the Gottesman lab. As I was completing the process of putting the things in my bag, I looked at the last item, that thesis, The Liberation of RNA, and I put it in the bag and zipped it. I didn't miss the opportunity for one last slam dunk. I turned my head to the officers, said, "Have a good night." I slung the JanSport around my shoulders. I eased into a deep New York strut on the road to a career in science, a very rugged fitness landscape full of peaks and valleys, successes and failures, friends and enemies, Susan Gottesmans and James Watsons. Thank you.

[applause]

JAD: Have you ever talked to Susan Gottesman about this and said, "Hey, I saw on this website and what was that—" like, had you ever break—broached it with her?

BRANDON OGBUNU: So unfortunately, I haven't. But I think—I think you might be interested to hear why.

JAD: Sure.

BRANDON OGBUNU: In some ways. In some ways, that would be making an assumption that he's, like, significant to her.

JAD: Mm.

BRANDON OGBUNU: Right?

JAD: Mm-hmm.

BRANDON OGBUNU: Like, she's built this life and career that I mean, I don't know him personally, but I've read a lot of his work. I mean, she's smarter than he is, right? I mean no—I think that—I'm confident saying that. You know, in terms of obviously the size of his discoveries are gigantic and enormous, but you know what I'm saying? But the—you know, the work, the cleverness and the way she's understand—understands nature in which she's done in all these multiple ways, I think is more impressive. In some ways I'm kind of like ...

SOREN: As if, like, maybe the fact that ...

BRANDON OGBUNU: ... it's condescending in some ways.

SOREN: Yeah, like if—almost like the fact that she worked for or with him.

BRANDON OGBUNU: I mean, it matters in some way.

SOREN: Right. That was, like, the most—like, an impressive thing about her.

BRANDON OGBUNU: Important thing of her career. It's just not—it's just not at all. And that's why she didn't—part of me was like, "Oh, I wonder why she didn't mention it?" She didn't mention it because it didn't matter to her.

JAD: I'm tempted to make a connection between that decision not to talk to her about him, and you slowly putting the papers back in your bag.

BRANDON OGBUNU: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Do you see a connection there?

BRANDON OGBUNU: I mean, I think—I think—I think, you know, it's not—that's not a connection that I actively made at the time, but I think it—it's a theme with how resistance works. And when you are dealing with something uncomfortable with life, and this is—this transcends the Black experience, this—when you're dealing with something uncomfortable in life that you can't do anything about, and you can't do anything about who your family is, academic or other, and in this situation, I can't do anything about the fact that I'd been—right—I'd been stopped and I'm dealing with this racial profiling incident, you look for little ways, and I think you're right. I think in not having a coffee conversation about him in a weird way, like, I honored her more. Sometimes the most revolutionary thing or the most subversive thing you can do, is just focus on the right things in life.

JAD: Yeah.

BRANDON OGBUNU: That's sometimes really, really it. And I think this goes back to something that Toni Morr—Toni Morrison, one of her many myriad of incredible quotes talked about the function of racism is to distract, right? That's really what it does. I mean, it just—it just kind of like it takes your eye off of—it makes you do things that you shouldn't be, you know, doing. You—you want to prove people wrong. You want to prove you have a language, you want to prove that you're smart, and you do—and—right—it's so—it's such—it's so chillingly, you know, true that sometimes the most powerful thing you can just do is be like, you know, be aware of what the situation is, but not give it that power over you and the things that matter most.

JAD: Huge, huge thanks to Brandon Ogbunu for sharing his story with us and with Story Collider. His story was recorded last June as part of a Story Collider show at the 2019 Evolution Meeting in Providence, Rhode Island. Story Collider is a non-profit group that puts on live storytelling events and also puts out a podcast. Thank you to Story Collider's Erin Barker and Liz Neeley for letting us play Brandon's story. You can find out more about Story Collider at storycollider.org, and you can subscribe to their podcast through Apple or wherever you get your podcasts from.

LATIF: After the break, we go even deeper, to another place inside you.

LATIF: Okay. Hey, I'm Latif Nasser.

LULU: I'm Lulu Miller. This is Radiolab. And for our second stop on our journey through unsung places ...

LATIF: Another place inside of us, from zooming out from our cells, going kind of floating up to our brain or thereabouts with a story from the very brainy Molly Webster.

MOLLY WEBSTER: Yeah?

MATT KIELTY: Oh yeah. 

MARK KRASNOW: Oh no.

MOLLY: [Laughs]

MARK KRASNOW: Is that good?

MOLLY: Yeah. 

MOLLY: Alright so I ended up talking to this guy.

MARK KRASNOW: Mark Krasnow, Professor of Biochemistry at Stanford University.

MOLLY: Okay, perfect.

MOLLY: So, Mark is a lung researcher.

MARK KRASNOW: It's my favorite topic. It's my favorite topic, obviously.

MOLLY: [Laugh]

MOLLY: And we're going to pick up with him in, like, the '00's.

MARK KRASNOW: Kind of a natural extension.

MOLLY: So he actually has this question of just like, well what is actually controlling the rhythm of the lungs?

MARK KRASNOW: Exactly.

MOLLY: Like what makes you breathe?

MARK KRASNOW: Exactly. Yeah.

MOLLY: So he starts doing some research, and he finds this paper that says if you go to the base of your brain ...

MARK KRASNOW: In what's called the brain stem.

MOLLY: It's kind of the space that goes up between that groove ...

MATT: Oh, that divot?

MOLLY: That you have at the back of your skull.

ANNIE MCEWEN: Oh yeah.

MATT: Yeah.

MARK KRASNOW: Yeah. Yeah, it's right buried deep below that.

ANNIE: I feel it right now.

MOLLY: And it's right there that Mark learned that there is this little clump of neurons.

MARK KRASNOW: That are actually initiating… 

[inhales]

MARK KRASNOW: Each breath.

[Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.]

MOLLY: With every single pulse, they send a signal down the spinal cord.

MARK KRASNOW: To your diaphragm and the tiny muscles between your ribs.

MOLLY: Telling them to expand. And they send another signal, telling them to contract. And this is just what these neurons do.

MARK KRASNOW: They are the pacemaker neurons.

[Exhale]

MATT: Huh.

MOLLY: So there are 86 billion neurons in your brain and it's just this clump of 8,000 that do this very vital thing.

ANNIE: That seems very small.

MOLLY: It does seem very small, does it not?

ANNIE: Yes! [laughs]

MARK KRASNOW: And so…

MOLLY: So, Mark came across this paper, actually by this guy named Jack.

MARK KRASNOW: I consider Jack the father of the field.

MOLLY: Just a really quick Jack Feldman shout out.

MATT: Wonderful.

MOLLY: But when Mark came across Jack's research ...

MARK KRASNOW: We found out about ...

MOLLY: He just had this really simple question.

MARK KRASNOW: Which was, hey, are all of these neurons, are they all the same as one another? Or are they different from one another? And so, we started interrogating these neurons.

MOLLY: And so, he and some colleagues, what they did was they started looking at this group of neurons ...

MARK KRASNOW: In a mouse brain.

MOLLY: Under a microscope.

MARK KRASNOW: And ...

MOLLY: What had seemed to be a uniformed mass of beating.

MARK KRASNOW: It turns out these neurons weren't all alike. There are over 50 different types.

MOLLY: Really?

MARK KRASNOW: Of the pacemaker neuron.

ANNIE: Huh.

MARK KRASNOW: Why are they different and what do they do that's special?

MOLLY: So to start, in mice, Mark decides to focus on this specific group.

MARK KRASNOW: These 200 neurons from the breathing pacemakers.

MOLLY: And basically, with some molecules and a syringe ...

MARK KRASNOW: We can very precisely remove just those neurons.

MOLLY: And so Mark's team goes in, they shut down the 200 neurons. Mouse is happy, mouse is alive. And basically, what happens is mouse stops sighing.

MATT: What?

MARK KRASNOW: Which was like, whah.

MOLLY: So, I didn't know this but mice sigh.

ANNIE: Aww!

MATT: Huh.

ANNIE: That's so cute!

MOLLY: And so that's just saying like, oh these 200 neurons control sigh.

MARK KRASNOW: And they are the only neurons, apparently, in the brain that have this specific function.

MATT: Weird.

MOLLY: Yes. And that's not all. In another experiment they knocked out, again, like 150 neurons and the rate of exhalation changes. So, like, you know you can go [inhale] and you go [exhale]. And you can say I want to exhale for four seconds?

MATT: Mm-hmm.

MOLLY: Or your body just does it naturally at some rhythm? They found that when they took out this one group of neurons, the rate of exhalation got much longer.

MATT: Huh.

ANNIE: Huh.

MOLLY: And so, they're like, oh, interesting. So, they're starting to put together this little visual map of what all of these different neurons do. They almost have a function, right?

MARK KRASNOW: Yeah, so this was ...

MOLLY: And so they, you know, they go to another group of neurons.

MARK KRASNOW: You know, roughly 150 neurons.

MOLLY: Knock them out, but this time ...

MARK KRASNOW: Very, very disappointing.

MOLLY: ... nothing happens. So like, that's weird. Did really nothing change, you know? And they realize a few days later that something did change.

MARK KRASNOW: That hey, these mice look chillaxed.

MOLLY: [laughs]

MARK KRASNOW: They are very calm.

MOLLY: They're just kind of licking their fur and hanging out in place.

MARK KRASNOW: Chill. Mellow.

MOLLY: It's like what are—what are these neurons?

ANNIE: Give me those.

MOLLY: And they start looking at what the neurons are connected to. You know how neurons can have those long tentacle projections? And those let them communicate with other neurons?

MATT: Uh-huh.

MOLLY: And realizes that where they actually go is directly to the fight or flight center of the brain.

MATT: Wow.

ANNIE: Oh. Wow. Cool.

MOLLY: And so the story they put together is that this group of neurons, what it's probably doing is sending updates about the status of the breath pacemaker to the fight or flight regions, saying like, "We're working, everything is okay over here." And they're sending these little signals, giving it updates and if something's wrong, they can send a thing straight into fight or flight and be like "Mayday, mayday. Breath is—breath is a mess."

MATT: Would it be the other way of like, you see something really scary, fight or flight then sends a signal to the breathe—the breath pacemaker, being like, "Pick up the pace?"

MOLLY: So Mark walked me through this very cool thing.

MARK KRASNOW: So there are two great pacemakers in our body. One that many people know about is the pacemaker of the heart which, you know, beats every second. And it's—it's located right in the organ that it controls. It's right there in the heart.

MOLLY: So there's actually pacemaker cells in your heart that do the rhythm of the beating.

MATT: Oh really?

MOLLY: They're directly on the organ that they make beat.

MATT: That's crazy!

MARK KRASNOW: But with breath, the other great pacemaker, it's located far from the organ that it controls. It's located in the brain.

MOLLY: And once you put breath into the brain, you allow evolution to put more on the breath than just the mechanical function.

ANNIE: Hmm.

MOLLY: Like, it starts getting integrated into the emotional centers of the brain and the anxiety centers of the brain.

MATT: Whoa.

MARK KRASNOW: And those parts of the brain can impact and regulate breath. A sigh. And there's you know, laugh, you know or a cry, or even speech. You know, all of those, those are actually breathing.

MOLLY: So yes, Matt, to answer your question. You see something scary, a signal gets sent from the fight or flight to the breath pacemaker saying, "Pick up the pace," you know? But what Mark's research shows is it's going both ways. There's crosstalk, there's deep integration happening.

MARK KRASNOW: And the other key aspect of the breathing pacemaker compared to the cardiac pacemaker is you can consciously control the breathing pacemaker.

MOLLY: That's the intr—yeah.

MARK KRASNOW: You can hold your breath, at least for a certain period of time, and you can change the output of the breathing pace. So you can override and alter the breathing pacemaker.

MOLLY: Is that why if I take, like, a [inhale] [exhale]—like a big deep breath, I can actually calm myself down?

MARK KRASNOW: Yeah, but that is the way that you're getting control of this communication between the breathing pacemaker and the fight or flight neurons.

MATT: Huh.

MOLLY: And so in talking to Mark, I feel like in a way he almost gave me, like,  a scalpel to get inside my own brain and control it.

ANNIE: Ah.

MOLLY: Like, if I actually change my breathing, it will change this breath pacemaker region and it will send an "I'm chill” signal to the fight or flight directly and it will calm down.

ANNIE: Hmm. Wow.

MOLLY: And so like last night when I couldn't—when I kept waking up, like, when I was sleeping, I was like okay, I'm just gonna breathe slowly and then I'm just like, "Hi neurons!"

ANNIE: [laughs]

MOLLY: Like, "I'm breathing slowly now so you can send a signal to fight or flight that I'm okay." And like I can conduct this whole system. Like, I can work the system.

LULU: After the break, we're traveling up into the sky to a very special overlooked place.

ANNIE MCEWEN: It was three feet. Yeah.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Because they were wondering when they were going to go to the moon. They wondered how much dust would be on the surface of the moon. And they were worried—I once wrote letters back and forth to Neil Armstrong. So ...

ANNIE: What?

ROBERT: And one of the things that he told me was like, they really weren't at all sure how much dust there was on the moon, and whether it was, you know, variable. So you'd be sitting there ...

LULU MILLER: I'm Lulu.

LATIF NASSER: I'm Latif. This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: ... this area, and it would take your weight, and then you'd walk three steps forward and go "Boop," and you'd be up to your knees in it.

LULU: And this, of course, is none other than Krully, the Krul. Robert Krulwich.

ANNIE: Really?

ROBERT: So I said to him, I said, "I don't know why you didn't walk around more! I mean, you'd like—you went to another celestial body. The first ...

LATIF: Producer Annie McEwen called him up a few weeks back to talk—not about the moon, actually, they talked instead about a new kind of world that was discovered right here in the forests of planet Earth.

ROBERT: Um, okay. We're ready. [laughs] At long last ready to begin.

ANNIE: Okay. So one of the first things I ever did when I got to Radiolab was work on a show of yours called "Tree To Shining Tree."

ROBERT: I don't remember how long ago we did that. That was, like, three years ago or something? Four?

ANNIE: It was 2016. Isn't that wild?

ROBERT: Oh, wow! Wow!

ANNIE: I know!

ANNIE: And for those of you who haven't heard the episode, you should go listen. It's amazing. But just a tiny recap here: it was all about the network that exists under the forest floor.

ROBERT: It's this whole other world right beneath my feet!

ANNIE: This network is this deeply complex, interwoven mat of tree roots and these mushroom threads, these fungi connecting all of these trees together and helping them share resources.

ROBERT: About the forest that exists underneath the forest.

ANNIE: Here from that episode is ecologist Suzanne Simard.

SUZANNE SIMARD: What we found was that the trees that were the biggest and the oldest were the most highly connected. And so we—you know, we identified these as kind of like hubs in the network. It's just this incredible communications network that, you know, people had no idea about in the past because we couldn't—didn't know how to look.

ANNIE: Anyway, we learn about all of this magical stuff that is happening right beneath our feet in the forest.

ROBERT: Yeah.

ANNIE: But for this episode, I wanted to call you because I recently learned about this new layer to the story.

ROBERT: Okay.

ANNIE: So in "Tree To Shining Tree," we looked down under the ground.

ROBERT: Right.

ANNIE: Well, how about—okay, how about instead of looking down, we peer into a type of down that is in the up?

ROBERT: Oh, okay.

ANNIE: And to take us there ...

NALINI NADKARNI: Alrighty.

ANNIE: ... forest royalty.

ANNIE: I've read that you are known as the "Queen of the Canopy." Is that true?

NALINI NADKARNI: Yes. That's correct.

ANNIE: Is that ...

NALINI NADKARNI: That's true.

ANNIE: Where did that come from?

NALINI NADKARNI: I have no idea where that came from. I've also been called "The Mother of the Forest Canopy."

ANNIE: Oh my goodness!

NALINI NADKARNI: And now that I'm 67 years old, I think it's gonna be sort of the "Dowager Queen" or the "Grandmother of the Forest Canopy." [laughs]

ANNIE: I think you should be the empress! What about "The Empress?"

ANNIE: This is ecologist Nalini Nadkarni who, like a lot of kids, spent a large part of her childhood up in trees.

NALINI NADKARNI: You know, you grab a branch, you put your leg over it and suddenly you're up in the treetops. And for me it was, like, kind of my place. I had this sort of chaotic, large family. You know, I'd come from school with chores and homework, but the treetops of these eight maple trees that lined my parents' driveway were kind of my refuge.

ANNIE: She'd spend whole afternoons up there just sitting and wondering.

NALINI NADKARNI: And look at the leaves, and I'd go like, "Why does this branch have much yellower leaves than that branch which has orangey leaves?"

ANNIE: Yes, that's a good question!

NALINI NADKARNI: And it's like, well what is going on? What is this, branch independence? Or, you know, I'd watch squirrels jumping from one tree to another, and just think, "God, you know, where do they go? And what if I attached a spool of thread to the back of one of them and I could trace where they go?" So—but it was a place for my imagination to sort of run wild.

ANNIE: Nalini grew up and followed that imagination to study ecology in grad school.

NALINI NADKARNI: This was back in, like, the early 1980s. And I was just starting out, and I came to my graduate committee and said, "I know what I want to do with the rest of my career! I want to study the forest canopy." And they said, "Well, that's kind of like Tarzan and Jane stuff. You know, with so many questions to ask and answer on the forest floor, why do you have to go into the canopy?"

ANNIE: At that time, canopies were just basically not studied. They were hard to get up into, and there didn't seem to be a lot of point. The scientific thinking was there's just not a lot going on up there.

NALINI NADKARNI: But there was something about the canopy that I kind of just had this intuition that it's not enough to just stand on the ground and look up.

ANNIE: And so with some modified mountain climbing equipment, she began to climb these giant old-growth trees in the Olympic Rainforest of western Washington.

NALINI NADKARNI: Which is what's called a temperate rainforest.

ROBERT: Are these the places where in the morning the fog from the Pacific Ocean comes rolling in?

ANNIE: Yeah.

ROBERT: And the tree just gets an every morning bath of just pure moisture?

ANNIE: Yeah the tree just goes [slurps].

ROBERT: Yeah.

ANNIE: So Nalini climbs up into the canopy of this giant big-leaf maple tree.

NALINI NADKARNI: And I throw my leg over a branch and I'm sitting up there, and I'm anchored with my rope, and I'm looking around. I just see this enormous, three-dimensional panoply of moving leaves and moving twigs.

ANNIE: The branch she's sitting on as well as all the branches surrounding her are covered in this super-thick layer of ...

NALINI NADKARNI: ... this amazing growth of mosses and lichens and ferns.

ANNIE: Kind of like the tree is wearing this very unruly green shag carpet.

NALINI NADKARNI: You get this sense of being in a place that looks very simple from the forest floor, but is actually this kaleidoscope of life.

ANNIE: Her job up there was to take samples of the moss that was growing on these branches.

NALINI NADKARNI: I had to cut off chunks of it.

ANNIE: So using some clippers, she begins to cut down into that moss on the branch she's sitting on.

NALINI NADKARNI: And as I peeled back those mats of mosses ...

ANNIE: Beneath, instead of just bare branch ...

NALINI NADKARNI: I saw that there was all this soil up there.

ANNIE: This branch has a foot of soil piled up on it.

ROBERT: Oh, wow!

ANNIE: Soil that formed over many, many years of mosses and leaves dying and decomposing right there on the branch.

NALINI NADKARNI: It's so weird because you're sitting up there in the canopy, like, a hundred feet above the ground, and then you're digging your fingers into this soil that could be the soil that's, you know, in your backyard garden, for goodness sake!

ANNIE: You could imagine getting your gardening gloves out and planting rows of tulips a hundred feet in the air.

NALINI NADKARNI: There were, like, invertebrates in it, there were earthworms in it.

ANNIE: Tree worms?

NALINI NADKARNI: Yes!

ANNIE: That is so weird!

NALINI NADKARNI: I know! I know!

ANNIE: Even the stars of the old episode, the fungi, were there.

ROBERT: Really? So the mushrooms have climbed up the tree as well to sort of do their thing?

ANNIE: Yes. They're sharing resources, they're helping the tiny plants up there communicate with one another.

NALINI NADKARNI: The same as on the forest floor.

ANNIE: It's almost like she's stumbled into a perfect miniature of the forest floor she had just climbed up away from. And straddling a branch way up high in the air, she's like "Huh!"

NALINI NADKARNI: "Well, that's cool!"

ANNIE: This was in the '80s, and since then there have been so many more "Well, that's cools" because more and more scientists have been accessing this new world using cranes and ropes or building platforms, or my favorite way up into a tree is this French guy, Francis Hallé, who pioneered the use of the dirigible to access the canopy.

ROBERT: Oh, wow!

ANNIE: There's incredible pictures of ...

ROBERT: So it's a balloon trip that he takes? Leaning out of a balloon?

ANNIE: It's a balloon that floats—yeah, that floats over the tops of this green ocean, just kissing the tops of the trees.

ROBERT: Oh, wow.

ANNIE: And the scientists can just gently lean and trim this and that. Anyway, so one way or another, all over the world scientists began getting themselves up into trees and documenting what they saw there. And some of the coolest discoveries were found on the West Coast in the old-growth redwood forests. And oh my gosh, these giants were found to be holding these pockets of soil up to three feet deep. And growing in this soil were flowers, berry bushes, mosses, lichens. They found salamanders living hundreds of feet in the air who spend their entire lives never touching the ground.

ROBERT: [laughs] I'm waiting for you to say, "A small deer," or something like that. Or something very weird.

ANNIE: [laughs] I mean, I don't have a small deer for you, but I do have something that I find totally bizarre, which is that up in redwoods, scientists have found these tiny aquatic creatures.

ROBERT: An aquatic creature?

ANNIE: It's aquatic, yeah. It's like this shrimp-like ...

ROBERT: They found a fish? [laughs]

ANNIE: Pretty much. It's like a shrimp-like thing. A species of something called the copepod.

ROBERT: Oh!

ANNIE: Copepods, which is actually this whole subclass of creatures. They're the most abundant animal in the ocean, and a huge part of the diet of baleen whales.

ROBERT: [laughs]

ANNIE: This thing is, like, swimming around in these mossy mats, and no one knows how it got there. Anyway, these tree canopies that, up until the mid-'80s, everyone thought were just pretty much empty, not only are they not empty, they actually hold about 50 percent of all terrestrial life on the planet. A lot of that is ...

ROBERT: Did you say 50 percent? 50 percent?

ANNIE: Fifty. 5-0. Yeah.

ROBERT: Wow, that's a weird—you're saying 50 percent is up in the air somewhere?

ANNIE: Yeah, up in the air, up in trees.

ROBERT: Whoa!

ANNIE: Which, you know, sounds kind of unbelievable, but when you think of places like the Amazon, all those bugs, birds, plants, animals, it adds up. And most of this life has made a home in these canopy soils.

KORENA MAFUNE: What? Soil in the tree branches? I was like ...

ANNIE: And when ecologist Korena Mafune learned about these canopy soils ...

KORENA MAFUNE: I fell in love. I was like, "Okay, there's, like, a forest in a forest on a forest. I need to research this."

ANNIE: And she told me that thinking about these canopy soils, like these tiny, perfect replicas of the forest floor below wasn't quite right. Because these canopy soils, they have something that the forest wants.

ROBERT: Huh. Well, what would that be?

ANNIE: Well, Back when she was a grad student in the Washington Olympic Peninsula, Korena collected soil samples from the forest floor throughout the year. And she noticed that ...

KORENA MAFUNE: In the spring growing season, there aren't as many nutrients available.

ANNIE: Specifically, there was a lack of phosphorus and nitrogen—two important things that every plant in the springtime wants to help them, you know, put forth new leaves, to help them grow.

ROBERT: And those are rare. Plants love that.

ANNIE: Right.

ROBERT: Yeah.

ANNIE: And in contrast to the last episode where we talked about trees cooperating with each other ...

ROBERT: All these trees, all these trees that were of totally different species were sharing their food underground. Like, if you put ...

ANNIE: Korena told me that in that same sharing forest when resources are scarce ...

KORENA MAFUNE: There's a ton of competition on the forest floor. Trees have roots grafted together, there's mycorrhizal networks they're spanning across. There's this big battle to, you know, uptake nutrients. But ...

ANNIE: Korena had also taken samples of the canopy soils, and she saw that during these times of scarcity below ...

KORENA MAFUNE: These canopy soils had so much more nitrogen and phosphorus available for plant uptake compared to their forest floor counterparts.

ANNIE: Meaning that this soil for a plant was creme de la creme.

KORENA MAFUNE: It's just amazing.

ANNIE: Downstairs, there's shortage. Upstairs, there's abundance. When it's crumbs down below, up in the sky held aloft above the plebeian masses is like a Thanksgiving dinner.

ROBERT: [laughs]

ANNIE: And when Korena learned this, she thought, "I don't know."

KORENA MAFUNE: What do these canopy soils mean? Because they're not just hanging out there. They're not just there for no reason, right?

ANNIE: She's right. They're not. These sky gardens, they get even better.

ROBERT: Better at what?

ANNIE: Hmm?

ROBERT: Better at what?

ANNIE: Well, let's just say they're not alone up there.

ROBERT: Well, what's—what's about to happen?

ANNIE: So to understand this wizardry, we have to go back to Nalini.

NALINI NADKARNI: Fine with me.

ANNIE: And this amazing discovery that she made.

NALINI NADKARNI: Okay. So I remember sitting on this tree.

ANNIE: She's back up in a tree in the Washington rainforest, digging around in this canopy soil.

NALINI NADKARNI: And I began seeing these root systems that were running up and down the branches of these trees.

ANNIE: They didn't look like they belonged to moss or ferns or any other plant she could see up there.

NALINI NADKARNI: And there were fine roots all the way up to—some of them were the diameter of my wrist. I mean, these were gigantic roots.

ANNIE: Wow! What?

NALINI NADKARNI: And I thought, "Well, that's weird. What are these roots doing here?"

ANNIE: Huh.

NALINI NADKARNI: So I began just tracing the roots that I was finding.

ANNIE: Like, you took hold of one root in your hand and sort of like, went backwards?

NALINI NADKARNI: Yes, exactly.

ANNIE: Like a string?

NALINI NADKARNI: Exactly like following a string. Exactly.

ANNIE: She gently excavates this root, scooting along the branch as she uncovers it.

NALINI NADKARNI: I was tied in so I could sort of swing around and move from one branch to another. I had my water bottle with me, so then whenever it became difficult to sort of unstick the root, I could just throw a little water on it, keep going. Keep following it. It was like—I don't know, it was like being a detective.

ANNIE: Well, what did you think it was gonna lead to?

NALINI NADKARNI: I had no idea. I thought, "Well, maybe there's some sort of vascular plant that I'm not aware of that's here. But I don't think so."

ANNIE: Wow!

NALINI NADKARNI: So then ...

ANNIE: She follows the root all the way back to its beginning.

NALINI NADKARNI: And oh my gosh! Its origin was a dead-end in the tree itself.

ROBERT: What? What?

ANNIE: The big tree, the one Nalini is sitting in, is growing roots from its branch ...

NALINI NADKARNI: And snaking underneath these mats of soil, of canopy soil.

ROBERT: Let me think about this. Somehow it realizes that it can find soil high up somewhere, like—and so it just takes its roots, and its roots travel up and go whoop to the left and say, "Let's root not only where we normally root down there, but let's root up here."

ANNIE: Yes.

ROBERT: Whoa! So things that you thought were below can move above, way above. High above you.

NALINI NADKARNI: Yes. It was a real revelation.

ANNIE: And Korena thinks that if during a drought or during spring growing season when resources on the forest floor are scarce, that these big trees ...

KORENA MAFUNE: That's when they can tap into their canopy soils.

NALINI NADKARNI: Like, they're like, "Hey! There's a bunch of really great stuff here to suck on, so why don't you put out a root out here?" And that's exactly what these trees do.

KORENA MAFUNE: I kind of always compare it to like a secret cabinet that has all the good snacks in it. It's like if you were teaching a preschool, it's like, well, all of the schoolchildren are fighting over the snacks and fighting over these resources, you just go into your, you know, canopy soil closet and you got your good snacks up there.

ROBERT: Because we're looking for those special minerals like the phosphorus and stuff, and that's where we can find it.

ANNIE: Right. And it's finding it in its hat.

ROBERT: Yeah, finding it in its hat. [laughs] That's a nice way of putting it, yes.

ANNIE: Yeah.

ROBERT: That's a lovely way of putting it. The expression, "I'm gonna eat my hat" has now got a whole new meaning.

ANNIE: Oh yes! Robert! I love that. [laughs]

ROBERT: Yeah.

ANNIE: One thing that both Korena and Nalini told me is that this is a new field.

KORENA MAFUNE: There is just so many things to be found high above the forest floor.

ANNIE: Like for instance, Korena told me sometimes there are actual trees growing up there.

KORENA MAFUNE: That I've seen, like, a five-foot spruce growing out of canopy soil.

ANNIE: Wow.

KORENA MAFUNE: And you'll see a lot of, like, baby maples growing up in the old maples, so it's like, you know, like a little nursery.

ROBERT: Wait a second. You mean, there's a tree growing on the tree?

ANNIE: That's right.

ROBERT: On the branch.

ANNIE: In the soil on the branch.

ROBERT: Oh!

ANNIE: And who knows? Maybe as more people study the canopy, we'll find little trees on those trees. And maybe there will be little trees on those trees on those trees.

ROBERT: Yeah. It's fractal. Like, littler plants off them.

ANNIE: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: And then on them is the moss, which is little plants on top of little plants. So there's—like, there's little layers and layers and layers of life, and the more you go up, the more the layers you will find. That's sorta cool.

LULU: Thank you Annie McEwen for reporting and producing that gorgeous episode and leaving us with that image of not turtles all the way down, but trees all the way up.

LULU: And now for our final stop on this journey, probably the most expansive place of all. In fact, it's a place that's so expansive, it blurs the line between space and time.

LATIF: This is from reporting we did many, many years ago for our show "Colors." Our producer Lynn Levy, as well as Jad, sat down with a brilliant writer, Rebecca Solnit, to talk about the color blue.

LYNN: Hello, Rebecca, can you hear me?

REBECCA SOLNIT: Hi.

LYNN: Hi, this is Lynn. How are you doing?

REBECCA SOLNIT: I can. I'm doing well.

LYNN: I read your book, as I mentioned, A Field Guide to Getting Lost and kind of fell in love with it and gave it to Jad also. And we were both really sort of excited by this exploration that you do of the color blue, and this, like, sort of special relationship that you seem to have with it.

REBECCA SOLNIT: Yeah, it was fun figuring out, okay, what is blue about? It's about this distantness and the sky and flying. And just for me, part of the melancholy pleasure of blue is this dreamy. It really is the color of distance, the color of things that are far away. And one of the times I remember feeling it really strongly, I was hiking on the mountain closest to San Francisco, Mount Tamalpais. And from the mountain, San Francisco looked like this beautiful, dreamy blue city. Everything was blue. I really wanted to go to that blue city, but of course, I'd just left it. And when I left it, eggs yellow, wood was brown, grass was green, lipstick was red. And you get lots of emails every day.

LYNN: And while you're answering them, you think about how nice it would be to go hiking on the beautiful blue mountain in the distance.

REBECCA SOLNIT: Yeah. You know, my life does get really busy. And maybe the state of being busy is feeling like nothing is far away. You're just so busy dog paddling to stay afloat in this moment, you can't really contemplate the horizon.

LYNN: That's why we need the blue.

REBECCA SOLNIT: It's an invitation. An invitation maybe to be calm, to be contemplative. Maybe it's the color of thought. I think distance has been adult taste in a lot of ways, and that kids are like medieval paintings. It's all about the foreground. They live in the moment and what they can engage with in a really active way. You know, we're the ones who are gazing off in the landscape, talking about how beautiful it is, and they're not.

REBECCA SOLNIT: And then I think one of the really interesting things about old age and memory loss is that often you lose the most recent memory first. And the distant past might be more real than the immediate past. My mother has Alzheimer's and she became even more preoccupied with her childhood and her mother and things that had happened 60, 70, 75 years ago. And so the very old often are the opposite of children in that they remember what happened a really long time ago, but they don't remember yesterday or 10 minutes ago.

JAD: Yeah.

REBECCA SOLNIT: And so human nature is such that kids are all foreground and no distance. And the old live in that distance. They live in distant memory and the past and. And not in the here and now so much.

JAD: That's interesting. Something just ...

REBECCA SOLNIT: And there also—oh, go ahead.

JAD: I'm sorry to interrupt. Something just clicked for me when you were talking.

REBECCA SOLNIT: Okay. That was enough.

JAD: [laughs] I think—I mean, it seems like what we're really talking about actually isn't geographic distance but, like, time really, you know? Because the blue of distance is some kind of—it's a temporal distance as well. It's the time from here to there.

REBECCA SOLNIT: In a sense, there's lots of ways in which time and space correlate, but I'm not quite sure off the top of my head, even on pre-recorded radio, quite how to solve that equation.

JAD: This is wonderful. Thank you so much for taking the time.

REBECCA SOLNIT: Great, thank you. And then we fade into the distance. [laughs]

LULU: That was reporter/producer Lynn Levy with Rebecca Solnit. Thanks so much to both of them. Rebecca has many books out there, all of which are so worth a read. Please check them out and thank you as always for listening.

 

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