2021-12

Episode 96
We are beyond thrilled to welcome Dr Jennifer Wiseman to the podcast today. We talk about her faith journey as well as her work in astronomy as she helps us to understand why the James Webb Space Telescope (launching this week), is going to take the Hubble to the next level. Her enthusiasm and wonder is contagious, so I hope you're ready to be inspired! 
 
Dr Jennifer Wiseman is the Director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) program of Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion (DoSER). She is also an astrophysicist, studying the formation of stars and planetary systems using radio, optical, and infrared telescopes. She studied physics for her bachelor’s degree at MIT, discovering comet Wiseman-Skiff in 1987. After earning her Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University in 1995, she continued her research as a Jansky Fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and as a Hubble Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University. She also has an interest in national science policy and has served as an American Physical Society Congressional Science Fellow. She has worked with several major observatories and is currently a senior astrophysicist at the Goddard Space Flight Center.  She is also a public speaker and author, and enjoys giving talks on the inspiration of astronomy and scientific discovery to schools, youth and church groups, and civic organizations. She is a Fellow of the American Scientific Affiliation and a former Councilor of the American Astronomical Society.
 
https://sciencereligiondialogue.org/
https://hubblesite.org/
https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/
https://roman.gsfc.nasa.gov/ 
 
 
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produced by Zack Jacksonmusic by Zack Jackson and Barton Willis 
 
Transcript 
This transcript was automatically generated by www.otter.ai, and as such contains errors (especially when multiple people are talking). As the AI learns our voices, the transcripts will improve. We hope it is helpful even with the errors.
Zack Jackson 00:05
You are listening to the down the wormhole podcast exploring the strange and fascinating relationship between science and religion.
 
Ian Binns 00:13
Our guest today is the director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science program of dialogue on science, ethics and religion, also known as dozer. She is also an astrophysicist studying the formation of stars and planetary systems using radio, optical and infrared telescopes. She studied physics for her bachelor's degree at MIT discovering comet Wiseman Skiff in 1987. After earning her PhD in astronomy from Harvard University in 1995, she continued her research as the Jansky fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, and as a Hubble Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University. She also has an interest in national science policy and has served as an American Physical Society congressional science fellow. She has worked with several major observatories, and is currently a senior astrophysicist at the Goddard Space Flight Center. She's also a public speaker and author and enjoys giving talks and inspiration of astronomy and scientific discovery to schools, youth and church groups, and civic organizations. She's a fellow of the American scientific affiliation, and a former Counselor of the American Astronomical Society. We're very excited to welcome Dr. Jennifer Wiseman to the show today.
 
Jennifer Wiseman 01:22
Thank you, it's my pleasure to join you.
 
Ian Binns 01:25
So, um, Jennifer, again, thank you for agreeing to come and talk, we just, you know, we've met you and I met several years ago, I know that you and Zach know each other as well. And so we kind of wanted to start off with what got you into astronomy. And then how did that grow to include your science and religion work as well,
 
Jennifer Wiseman 01:47
I grew up out in a rural area in Arkansas, on a family farm. And so I was just surrounded by nature growing up, we lived in a pretty area that had nearby lakes and rivers. So I enjoyed everything about the natural world, I thought we had animals of our own livestock and pets, but also lots of wildlife that I enjoyed seeing. And then I also enjoy just wandering around meadows and the streams and, you know, swimming, and kayaking, and all those kinds of things. And that made me appreciate the natural world, we also had dark night skies when I was growing up. So we could go out at night and see stars from horizon to horizon. And that is such a rare treat these days, most people live in cities or suburbs and have stray light from parking lots and stores and streets that create a glow in the sky and really drown out a lot of the beauty of seeing stars, unfortunately. But I was able to see the night sky, we would go on evening walks my parents and dogs and and I would enjoy these these regular walks. And I would imagine what it was like to, to go up where the stars are. And I would I was curious. So I think that started me out just being naturally curious about nature. And then science was a kind of a natural affinity then because science is basically the formal study of how nature works. And I had good teachers in my public schools who encouraged me in all kinds of subjects, science, mathematics, but also humanities and music. But all of that together, I think was the foundation and then Pair that with as I was growing up, there was a lot of flurry of interest about space exploration, the Voyager spacecraft, were just sending the first images back to earth, of moons around planets in our solar system, close up views we've never had before. I just thought this was fascinating. And you know, a lot of science fiction like Star Wars movies and things were starting to come out in the late 70s and 80s. And I was caught up in that too. So there was a lot of social interest in space, as well as my own natural affinity for nature. And all of that together, I think set the foundation for my interest in doing something related to the space program, but I didn't have a clue as to how to get involved in it. But thankfully, I had teachers and encouraging family and church that just encouraged me to go on and try anything I wanted. So I went on to study science.
 
Zack Jackson 04:42
That's beautiful.
 
Ian Binns 04:43
Yeah, there's a lot to take away from that. One of the things I love the most is you referred to Star Wars and Star Wars fans. Thank you for that.
 
Zack Jackson 04:53
genre that we've we've spent quite some time on this podcast talking about the value of science fiction and how it implants This sorts of love of cosmos in love of the world into people into children's minds. And so they grow up to great things. Yeah, that's so sorry. Go ahead. Sorry, I'm walking all over you. So I'm, I hear you say that there was a lot of support from family from, from friends and teachers and even church. Did you get any of that? That sort of feeling that science and and God are at odds that so many young Christians did as they're growing up? Did you taste any of that? Or was it all supportive?
 
Jennifer Wiseman 05:36
I never had any sense that there should be some kind of conflict between science and faith. In fact, quite the opposite. I grew up again, in a in a place where nature just surrounded us, it was a rural area where people had farms or they enjoy recreation on the lakes and rivers, and it was pretty and so we just naturally correlated the beauty of the natural world with our faith and our love for God, because we understood that God is the Creator, and God is responsible for the creation and called it good. So I think at a very basic level there, there really wasn't any sense of conflict, quite the opposite that science was the study of God's handiwork. And we should be grateful for that. Now, when it came to the particulars, like how do you interpret the opening verses of the biblical book of Genesis, that seems to stipulate that all of creation came into being in a few literal days and those kinds of things? You know, I think we, we probably took that rather literally in church and so forth. We didn't have any reason not to. But I think I was also given a sense of humility that our pastors and things would would tell us that God doesn't give us all the details in in Scripture that, that He's given us just enough for what we need to know to have a relationship with God, but but he's also given us mines and other tools and giving us more knowledge as time goes on. And so I think, even though I was probably schooled in a more literalistic view of Scripture growing up, I was also given a sense of humility, that there might be more to it than just what is more two more information that that God will give us than just what's written in Scripture. So I think that enabled me as I began to learn more about the scientific picture of the vast size and age of the universe and the development of life, I was able to correlate that with a humble view of scripture that God didn't give us all these details in Scripture, but delights in us using scientific knowledge to learn some of these rich details, and wow, are they Rich, I mean, the universe is not small. It's enormous, beyond our wildest imaginations, both in space and time. And I think that's something that fascinates me the most about astronomy is that it is a time machine, we can use telescopes to see out and that is equivalent to seeing back in time has taken time for the light to get to us from either planets in our solar system, or other stars or distant galaxies. And we can see how the universe has changed over time by looking back in time to distant objects in space. So I think what I did pick up growing up in terms of attention is more of a philosophical tension. I remember watching my favorite program on television, which was the cosmos program, which was a wonderful exploration of the universe. And I really admire Carl Sagan to this day, I'm so grateful for how he opened my eyes to the mysteries of the solar system and the universe beyond and introduced me to these images coming from the Voyager probes of the outer solar system, things like that. But every once in a while he and some other well, spoken scientist would interject some philosophical opinions and things that were kind of denigrating toward religion or religious faith and I picked that up even as a teenager and as a child. I couldn't quite articulate it, but I even then could sense that while I loved the Science, I didn't like some of the content Have dismissive comments I was hearing about religious faith and I, you know, I just kind of put tuck that away, in my mind kind of puzzling. Why does there have to be some kind of, of denigration of faith when you're talking about the majesties of science and, and then, of course, as I became an adult and a scientist, I realized that there is, of course, a strong difference between what the science is telling us about the natural world and how it works. And human philosophical interpretation of which there can be different opinions. And and trying to separate, you know, what is the science telling us from? What are the different human interpretations of what the natural world is telling us about human purpose and meaning, and even our beliefs and God and purpose. And I'm able to do that much better as a as an adult scientist, and to see where that wind falls, then I think a lot of folks in the public may be prepared for when they hear a scientist kind of crossing the line between talking about just the science and expressing personal philosophical views.
 
Zack Jackson 11:12
But I think you do so with the same sort of humility, like it spills over from, from your study of astronomy into your, into your religion and philosophy, that, like you study the stars, and you see the unbelievable fakeness. And you just can't help but let that spill over into everything that well, why would I know everything about philosophy? Why would I know everything about God, that's absurd. I don't even know everything about our solar system. There's like a certain humility, I think that comes from, from when you're really into, into that kind of science that I appreciate, I think, I think astronomy makes me a better Christian, or at least a more of a mystical one. Anyway,
 
Jennifer Wiseman 11:57
I think what astronomy does for me is not you know, sort of prove God or something like that, I think it's very hard to take something from the natural world and use it to prove or disprove something that isn't confined to just the natural, observable world. But what it does do, being a person of faith as I am in enrich that faith, I mean, I believe in God as the Creator and Sustainer of the universe. And when I learn more about what that universe is like, that means that my reverence for God is much deeper. I mean, it's almost scary when you think about the ages of time we're talking about in terms of our own universe, and there may be other universes too, that we don't even know anything about. And yet we read in Scripture, that the same God who's responsible for this 13 point a billion years of the universe, and its content, and its evolution, is also concerned with the lives of us and of the sparrow, you know, of the, of the individual, what we would call insignificant wife in terms of time and space, and yet God chooses to call us significant because of God's own choosing and love. And so it's that kind of, you know, the infinitely large almost, and the infinitely small, almost, that God encompasses that's very hard for me to comprehend. But it does deepen my, my reverent fear and my appreciation for the kind of God that that we read about in Scripture, and that we experience as people of faith.
 
Zack Jackson 13:54
So you are the director of the American, the American Association for the Advancement of Science program of dialogue on science, ethics and religion, which is a huge mouthful. Which is triple A S. dozer, you know, for those who like acronyms, which is an organization that I think every single one of our listeners, like if you if you subscribe to this podcast, and this is an organization that you would be interested in learning more about, but I would wager to guess that a lot of them have never heard of it. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do and what the organization does and what kind of resources are available, how they can connect?
 
Jennifer Wiseman 14:40
Sure. Okay, so so the the world's largest scientific society is the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And that organization does exactly what it sounds like it triple as advances science for the good of people around the world. So AAA is publishes a journal scientific journal called science that many have heard of, or even written scientific articles for. AAA is also advocates the good use of science in society. So, AAA is has public education programs and programs helping legislators to see how science is beneficial to people in all walks of life, triple as sponsors some programs to advocate science for advancing human rights, and to work with different components of society to make sure science is being used to the benefit of all people. One of those programs is this dialogue program called the dialogue on science, ethics and religion, or doser. It's the you can find out about it by the website as.org/doser DDoS, er doser was thought of back in the 1990s, when scientists realized that to really be effective and communicating with people, we needed to understand how important religion and faith is in people's lives. And if we're really going to interface with different communities, especially in the US, we need to recognize that people's faith identity is a very important part of their worldview. Most people identify with a religion or a religious tradition, as an important aspect of their identity, and how they get a lot of their sense of values and worldview, including how they see the world and hear and articulate science and its use in their lives and work in ministries and so forth. So if scientists are not understanding of the importance of religion and faith in the lives of most people, and if they're not able to articulate science in a way that brings people on board and listen to the values of people from faith communities, then scientists are really missing a huge chance of understanding the value of science and how it can be incorporated into the lives of our culture. So the doser program was invented back in the 1990s, to start building those relationships between scientists and religious communities. These are religious communities of all faiths, and scientists of any faith or no faith, but building a dialogue about how science is important in the lives of our people in our culture. Today, the dozer program is very active, we have several projects, one of them, I think you guys are particularly knowledgeable, that is our science for seminaries project, where we work with seminaries from across the country, and even beyond the US that are interested in, in incorporating good science into the training of future pastors and congregational leaders, because science is a part of everyone's life today. So if a church wants to serve the world in the most effective way, they need to know to how to incorporate science into their ministries, if they want to be relevant to our culture, especially for young people, they need to understand the role of science. It's not just the old arguments about science and creation and evolution. A lot of people when they think about science and religion, they immediately wonder if there's some kind of an argument about how old the the world is. And you know, there are still some very interesting questions, of course, about How did life come into being and so forth. But most faith communities now are really much more excited about talking about many other aspects of science as well like space exploration. Could there be life beyond Earth or, or more practical things? How do we incorporate good science into ministries to the poor or helping people around the world have better food better, cleaner water? How do we get the best science incorporated into the best health care practices? I mean, this is of course come to the forefront during this pandemic with COVID-19 and trying to understand the science of vaccinations and the social reality of distributing vaccine and getting people to understand and trust the science enough to become protected as best we can against the terrible disease. So all these aspects Our I think invigorating a dialogue between faith communities and scientists in our dozer program really seeks to bring scientists and faith communities into better relationship and contact. And of course, these are overlapping communities. I mean, a lot of scientists themselves are people of faith from various faith traditions. But even scientists who are not or not, for the most part, are not hostile to faith communities, they just need a better architecture for building dialogue and relationship. In fact, most scientists already of course, are interfacing with people of faith, whether they know it or not the students in their classrooms, people in their lab and so forth. And so we also hold workshops for scientists, at scientific society meetings, and at research universities to help scientists better understand the important role that faith plays in the lives of many, probably most people in the US if you look at the polls, and how to make sure that they are incorporating a respect for that faith component of people's lives when they're talking about science in their classrooms, and, and in their interface with people in their public spheres of influence. Not just to help welcome people into science, but also to help people see how science is relevant to the values they already have.
 
Ian Binns 21:26
So I'm curious if we can shift a little bit a UML mentioned in your bio, that you've did have done some work with Hubble, the Hubble Space Telescope, and you know, we, this is going to be versus being released, hopefully, in the same day that the new The Next Generation Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope will be launched. And so can you talk to us a little bit about your work with the Hubble Space Telescope, and then maybe the distinction between Hubble that a lot of people know about and the new one, the James Webb Space Telescope and what your hopes are for that.
 
Jennifer Wiseman 22:02
I've had the privilege of working with many different types of telescopes throughout my astronomical career. My own research is based on the use of radio telescopes, which are these big dish shaped telescopes. My doctoral research used an array of them out in New Mexico called the Very Large Array or the VLA. In fact, you can drive out there and see the Very Large Array, southwest of Albuquerque. And with these kinds of telescopes, I've been able to study how stars form in interstellar clouds, you can peer in through the dust and see some of these regions where infant stars are forming. I've also used and worked with the Hubble Space Telescope, which is a platform that's now become very famous Hubble is a is a satellite orbiting the Earth. It's not very far above the earth just a little over 300 miles above the surface of the Earth, but it's up there to get it above the clouds. So you can get a much clearer image of objects in deep space, whether you're observing planets or stars or distant galaxies and Hubble has been operating for almost 32 years now, thanks to repeated visits from astronauts that have kept the observatory functioning by replacing cameras from time to time and repairing electronics. So so the the observatories in very good shape. We're recording this discussion right now in mid December looking forward to next week what we're anticipating as it's the launch of another very large space telescope called the James Webb Space Telescope, named after a NASA administrator who was a science supporter back in the Apollo years. This telescope will be every bit as good as Hubble in terms of getting beautiful images of space. But it will also be different from Hubble because it will be very sensitive to infrared wavelengths of light, the Hubble telescope sees visible light like our eyes can see. And even energetic light that's bluer than blue ultraviolet light, which is emitted from energetic processes in galaxies and in regions where stars are forming. Hubble can even see a little bit into the infrared part of the spectrum of light, so that's a little redder than red, which helps us to see somewhat into these interstellar clouds I mentioned where stars are still forming and planets are forming and to see very distant galaxies because as we look out into distance space, light from very distant galaxies has taken millions, sometimes billions of years to come. To us, and as it's traveling through expanding space, that light loses some of its energy, it gets shifted into what we call the reddened part of the spectrum, we get red shifted. Because it's stretched the wavelength of light, we can think of it as being stretched as they pass through expanding space to get to our telescope. And so some of those galaxies even though the light started its trip as blue eight from stars and ends up being infrared light when we receive it here, Hubble can see some of those very distant galaxies, which we're seeing as they were very far back in time when they were just infant galaxies. But some of those galaxies that light is redshift, and even beyond what Hubble can see in this new Webb Space Telescope will see infrared light much farther into the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum than Hubble can see. So the Webb telescope will be able to see galaxies even earlier in the history of our universe, when they were just starting to form. And that will complement the kinds of galaxies and the kinds of information that Hubble sees for us. So, you know, we talked about the universe being about 13 point 8 billion years old, which we can glean from various different types of information about the universe. We're now seeing galaxies as they were forming for Well, within that first point, eight of the 13 point 8 billion year history of the universe, we're really seeing the universe at when it was basically in its childhood, and the Webb telescope will show us proto galaxies, the very first generations of stars and gas kind of coalescing as gravity holds it together in the very first few 100,200,000,000 years of the universe after its beginning, so we're excited about that closer to home, the Webb telescope will also see into that deeper into that infrared part of the spectrum that allows us to see deeper into these nurseries of interstellar gas in our own galaxy, where stars are forming and planets are forming and disks around those stars. And to gather the Hubble Telescope, which we anticipate will keep working for quite a few more years, and the Webb telescope will provide complimentary information. For example, when we look at star forming regions, the Hubble Telescope will tell us something about emission in visible light and ultraviolet light. Webb Telescope will give us the infrared part that gives us a lot more information about what those baby stars are like as they form. And even more exciting, we're now we're now discovering that there are planets around other stars we call those exoplanets because they're outside our solar system. We can study something about their atmospheres and in their composition of those atmospheres. Hubble tells us something about the atoms and molecules that emit their light and visible wavelengths and in ultraviolet wavelengths. The Webb telescope gives us information from molecules in these exoplanet atmospheres that emit in infrared wavelengths. So then we can get a whole spectrum of information, we can know whether some of these exoplanets have water vapor, whether they have oxygen, have other kinds of things that we really want to know about exoplanets, and what they're like. So, complimentary science is the name of the game as we look forward to the James Webb Space Telescope, and we think about how it will work in complement to the Hubble Space Telescope in the coming years.
 
Zack Jackson 28:56
I bet you blew my mind in about seven different times in the past couple of years. So I'm not entirely sure where to go with the fact that you can point to telescope towards an exoplanet and look at the way that light passes through the tiny sliver of an atmosphere and be able to then tell what that atmosphere is made out of. That blows my mind.
 
Jennifer Wiseman 29:32
Well, the Hubble Space Telescope was actually the pioneer of this method of studying exoplanets. To study exoplanets, you have to be kind of like a detective because you have to use indirect methods to detect them in the first place, and even to study much about them. I mean, we would all like to simply point a camera at another planet, outside our solar system and take a nice picture But these things are really small. They are tiny objects orbiting bright things we call stars, and they get lost in the glare of the star. So astronomers have to use indirect methods to detect them to detect exoplanets. The first ones were detected not by seeing the planet, but by seeing how the star it was orbiting would wobble in its orbit. And that's because there's a gravitational mutual tug between a planet and its parent star. So even if you can't see the planet, you can see the star wobbling a little bit in its position as the planet orbits around, and they're both actually orbiting what's called the center of mass between the two. So the first exoplanets were detected by noticing stars periodically wobbling in their position, and determining from that what mass of planet, we would need to create that much of a wobble. And then the idea of transiting exoplanets was explored. That is certain planets happened to orbit their parent star in a plane that's along our line of sight as we're looking toward that star. And that means every time the planet passes in front of its parent star, it blocks out a little bit of that star light from our view. So even if we can't see the planet, we can see the starlight dimming just a little bit periodically as the planet orbits in front of it. Those transit observations were used by the Kepler space telescope, to discover hundreds of new exoplanet candidates. In fact, we have 1000s of them of systems simply by looking at the parent star and seeing them dim periodically and then doing follow up observations with other telescopes to really confirm whether or not what's causing that is, is an exoplanet. They have Hubble Telescope has taken this one step farther, which is using transits to, to study the composition of the atmospheres of some of these exoplanets. So when a planet passes in front of its parent star, not only does it block out some of the starlight, but some of the starlight passes through that outer rim of the planet's atmosphere along the outer limb on its way to as it passes through. And that atmosphere, what depending on what's in the planet's atmosphere will absorb some of that light. If there are molecules and atoms in the atmosphere, it will absorb light at very certain colors or frequencies. So a spectroscopy just can take that light and spread it out into its constituent colors, kind of like using a prism. And you can see the very particular color band where light is missing because atoms or molecules in that exoplanet atmosphere have absorbed it. And so we have, we have instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope, that are what we call spectrograph. They don't take the pretty pictures, they simply take the light and spread it out into its constituent frequencies or colors, like a prism and see where there are very particular color bands missing. And that pattern tells us what's been munched out, and that tells us what kinds of atoms or molecules are in the exoplanet atmosphere. So Hubble was the first observatory to be used to determine the composition of an exoplanet atmosphere. And now this has grown into a huge astronomical industry, if you will, of using telescopes, Hubble and other telescopes to do spectroscopic analysis of the atmospheres of exoplanets to learn something about their composition. And here, we're excited about this new webb space telescope that's going to do that as well. But in the far infrared in the sorry, in the mid infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, where we can do we can determine even more molecules and kinds of diagnostics that tell us more about what's in these exoplanet atmospheres. We want to know whether planets outside of our solar system are similar or different to planets inside our solar system. And of course, we'd like to know if any of them are habitable for life. We don't yet have the technology sadly to visit planets that are outside our solar system and take samples of their atmospheres or their their dirt if they have dirt or things like that, but we can observe them remotely and so that is what we're trying to perfect are these techniques of taking remote information Like the spectrum of light from an exoplanet atmosphere, and determining from that, what's in that atmosphere. And then from there we can discern whether or not there might be habitability for life. Like we know we need water for life as we know it. So could there be water on one of these exoplanets, or even signs of biological activity, we know that if we looked at Planet Earth from a distance, we would see oxygen in the atmosphere. And that's evidence of, of the work of plant life on our Earth's surface, generating oxygen, this kind of, of process photosynthesis tells us that there's an ongoing biological community, if you will, on planet Earth, otherwise, all the oxygen in the atmosphere would disappear through reactions, but the fact that we have continuing refreshed oxygen tells us that there's biological activity on our planet. If we saw oxygen, as well as other indicators in the atmospheres of other planets, that would be a clue that there might be biological activity there. So we're taking steps the Webb telescope will give us more information than Hubble and then future telescopes beyond Webb will be able to discern whether there are earth like planets with truly Earth light compositions in their atmospheres in in star systems around our galactic neighborhood. So the web is the next step in a whole series of future telescopes that astronomers are planning.
 
Ian Binns 36:39
That's exciting. Yeah. And I, and doing a little bit of research on James Webb and comparing it to the Hubble and and, you know, I've always been a huge fan of the Hubble Space Telescope and you know, have little models of it. Growing up when you know, I'm a huge LEGO fan, when Lego released the new space shuttle model. In the spring, the one that had Hubble with it was really exotic, so I could kind of build the space shuttle and Hubble. And so but doing those comparisons, I then saw just now the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, that's in production, I guess, right? And,
 
Jennifer Wiseman 37:22
yes, so So the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope is named after you guessed it, Nancy Grace Roman, who was just a phenomenal pioneer in the history of NASA's foray into space astronomy, she was the first chief astronomer at NASA headquarters. And back in the 1970s, she was the one who advocated the idea of NASA building a space telescope. Now scientists had been talking about this for even decades about what you could do if you could put a telescope in space, but to actually get it implemented, required someone with a NASA headquarters to champion this idea. And she did, she got it started with a NASA Headquarters back in the 1970s. And that ended up being the Hubble Space Telescope. So she's sometimes referred to as the mother of Hubble. She passed away just recently, but she remained an active interested scientist for all of her life. So this telescope now that's being developed is named in her honor the the Roman space telescope, and it will again complement these other space telescopes, it will complement the Webb Space Telescope, which will launch sooner. And the Hubble Space Telescope, which is already operating, the Roman telescope will be an infrared telescope, you know, like the Webb telescope is, is an infrared Space Telescope. But the difference is that Roman is going to have a much wider field of view, that means it will see a much wider swath of the sky than either Hubble, or the Webb telescope can do. If, if Hubble wants to survey a wide, wider region of the sky, it has to do hundreds of little postage stamp observations and stitch it all together. And we've done that and we've done for example, a Hubble observation of a big part of the disk of the Andromeda Galaxy, which is our nearest big spiral galaxy, and we learned a lot by stitching together little postage stamp observation after observation. This is a project led by Professor Julianne del Canton and her team called the fat program which which is is spelled ph 80. But it's it's Hubble Andromeda Treasury program to look at stars in this nearby galaxy. But it's taken a long time. The Roman telescope can do this wide swath of the sky with just, you know, one exposure because it can see such a wider swath of the sky. And the other thing, the other kind of science that it's really being designed to do is to study the distribution of galaxies. Hubble's really good at looking at an individual galaxy and telling us a lot of information. But if you want to know how hundreds or 1000s of galaxies are distributed around the sky, it takes a long time, my favorite image from Hubble is called the Ultra Deep Field. I don't know if you've seen it. But it was a product of just pointing Hubble in one direction, the sky and collecting faint light over many days. And the product is this collection of little blotches of light that you might think are stars, but each one of them is actually another galaxy like like like or unlike the Milky Way each one that can contain billions of stars. And so if you imagine that extrapolated over the entire sky, you get a sense of how rich our universe is. But as wonderful as that deep field is, and you can see 1000s of galaxies, you can't get a sense of how galaxies are really distributed across wider swaths of the sky because it is a small field of view. The Roman telescope, which should be launched later, this decade, will have a wide field of view that can see how the patterns of galaxies have taken shape. Throughout cosmic history. We know that galaxies are distributed in more of a honeycomb fashion, there are regions where there aren't many galaxies, we call them, voids, voids. And then there are regions where there are kind of quite a few galaxies collected together. We know now that throughout the billions of years of cosmic history, there's been kind of a tug of war between gravity, which is trying to pull things together. And that's creating galaxies and even clusters of galaxies that are held together by their mutual gravitational pool. And something that's pushing things apart, we now know that the universe is not only expanding, but that expansion is getting faster. So something is, is kind of pushing out. And we're calling that dark energy, because we don't really know what it is, it may be some repulsive aspect of gravity. Over time, this tug of war between dark energy pushing things apart, and the matter pulling things together, through what we would call traditional gravitational pull has resulted in the distribution of galaxies that we now have today, we would like to understand that better. And the Roman Space Telescope is going to help us see how galaxies have been distributed across space throughout cosmic time. And then the Webb telescope, and the Hubble telescope can help us hone in on very specific galaxies and small clusters to give us more detail. So again, we use different observatories in complement, because they each have their own kind of unique scientific niche of what they can tell us. And together, we get a much better bigger picture of what's going on in the universe. And we also use telescopes on the ground that are getting more and more sophisticated in what they can do to complement telescopes in space. So all of these facilities work in complement.
 
Ian Binns 43:51
So I'm curious, Jennifer, you know, with Hubble, and you're especially bringing up the Ultra Deep Field. And before that there was so the Hubble Deep Field, and then the hobo Ultra Deep Field, right. And they were both just unbelievable. To look at. I remember when they both came out. And I cannot remember the years, obviously, but I do remember, I think the Hubble are the first one I was able to use and I was a high school science teacher. But it was just unbelievable to look at these things. Will there be with the James Webb Space Telescope? For example? Will we is there will there be an effort to kind of point it in the same direction? You know, the Hubble has been pointing out and look at either the same areas that Hubble's looked at to see what else we could get from that location. And then also to Will there be something kind of like the Hubble Ultra Deep Field with the James Webb, like, is there going to be do you know, or is that just anything is possible?
 
Jennifer Wiseman 44:52
Oh, absolutely. I mean, one of the main drivers for the the James Webb Space Telescope was this desire to look at the Deep feels like Hubble has done. But to be able to see galaxies that are even more distant than what Hubble can pick up the these distant galaxies, of course, we're not seeing them as they actually are right this minute, we're seeing them as they were when the light began its track from those galaxies across space, to our telescope. And for some of these galaxies in these deep fields, those galaxies are billions of what we call light years away a light year is a unit of distance is the distance that light travels in a year. So when we see a galaxy that's billions of light years away, we're seeing it as it was billions of years back in time. And as that light has traveled across space to get to our telescope, it's traveled through space that is actually expanding, that creates what we call a red shifting effect, the light that we receive is redder than it was when it started, it's its journey. And sometimes that red shifting goes all the way into the infrared part of the spectrum, even beyond what Hubble can pick up. So for these most distant galaxies, we anticipate that a lot of them are shining most of their light in, in a wavelength that's become shifted into the infrared part of the spectrum that only the Webb telescope will pick up, it will pick up galaxies and see them that that the Hubble Deep fields haven't seen so we anticipate seeing even more galaxies with the Webb telescope than Hubble has seen. And yet Hubble can see galaxies in ways that the web won't be able to see Hubble can see the ultraviolet light from the more nearby galaxies. And we can then put a picture together as how as to how galaxies have changed. Over time, by comparing those early infant galaxies at the Webb telescope, we'll pick up with the galaxies that Hubble can see brightly in ultraviolet light that won't be as bright in the infrared light that Webb can see. And then all those intermediate galaxies that we pick up, the infrared light from the Webb telescope and the visible and ultraviolet light from Hubble, and we can put all that information together to make deep feels like we've never had before. So yes, we're going to see the same deals that Hubble has seen, Webb will look at and pick up more galaxies, and then other deep fields Webb will look at. And we will we're already doing preparatory science with Hubble knowing that we want to use Webb for the things that Webb uniquely can do, and can use it in complement with what Hubble can already do. So we're already doing what we call preparatory observations. With Hubble, that makes sure that we understand everything we can about these different fields of galaxies with Hubble, so that we know just the kinds of things we want to learn with JT VST. And we use that telescope as efficiently as we can, once it gets going. You know, the Webb telescope is anticipated as we record this to be launching in late December. But it'll take several months for it to get out where it will be perched a million miles more and more from Earth. That's a lot farther away than Hubble is, but it's being put that far away from Earth to keep it very cool. So that it can pick up the faintest infrared light from these distant galaxies, and from these closer to home star forming regions. So we won't be getting science images from the web for quite a few months, as it makes this trek out into a much more distant part of space than the Hubble telescope. So we're gonna have to be patient. But I'm looking forward to those first science images coming in, in the in the middle part of 2022. If all goes well,
 
Zack Jackson 48:57
so when we do start to get those images, wow, if they're in the infrared, what will they look like to us humans? Will they have to be artificially colored? Or?
 
Jennifer Wiseman 49:09
Yes, so so the the Webb telescope will see red light that we can see. But then beyond read into the infrared that we cannot see. And the Hubble itself also sees Light We Cannot See. So Hubble picks up visible light that we can see. But Hubble's picks up ultraviolet light that we can't see and also near infrared light that we cannot see. So already with Hubble images, we have to give them colors that our eyes can see so that we can have a picture to look at. So for Hubble images, if you read carefully, it will tell you whether what you're seeing is visible light or if it's for example, near infrared light, it will be given a red hue so that you can see that part of the spectrum showing up In in the eyes, your colors your eyes can see, we usually label the things on Hubble images. So you know exactly what the color coding is. The Webb telescope images will be likewise sort of translated into colors that we can see in pictures and photographs so that the part of the infrared spectrum that is closer to visible light will be colored, a little less red, maybe even blue. And the part of the infrared spectrum that the web will pick up that's deeper into the infrared part of the spectrum will be colored, very red. And so you'll you'll see probably a, a, a legend that, you know, next to these James Webb images that tell you the range of colors that it's actually picking up and what that has been translated to in the colors that have been put into the image, it's, it's not just any color goes these, usually what happens is you try to make the color range that's on the image as close to the span of color as the actual information is, but just transferred over into a band that our eyes can see. So yes, you have to do something, or else you couldn't see it, with our eyes looking at a picture, because we can't see infrared light. And the same is already true with Hubble images that go beyond just the visible light of the spectrum.
 
Ian Binns 51:35
I'm just in awe. It's just, I've always loved astronomy, and you know, it's something that I've always just been passionate about. What is it that you're most excited about? And I'm sorry, I just you know, in listening to you talk about it, you may have talked some already. But with this, the Webb Space Telescope, the Nancy Grace, Roman, and telescope and all these different ones that are coming, what is it that you're most excited about with these things?
 
Jennifer Wiseman 52:06
I think I'm most excited about what you might call two extremes of the spacial scale of the Universe. With these new telescopes, like the the Webb Space Telescope, and then later the Roman Space Telescope. I'm excited about getting even a better understanding of how the universe we live in has become hospitable over billions of years for life, we can actually, you know, look at the earliest galaxies and compare them to galaxies, like our own Milky Way and intermediate time galaxies as well. And we can see how they've changed over these billions of years of time, we can't follow an individual galaxy as it changed. But we can look at the whole population at these different epochs of time. And we can tell that galaxies have merged together and become bigger over time we think our own Milky Way is the project product of mergers. And we can tell that stars have come and gone in these galaxies, massive stars don't live that long. And so they they produce heavier elements that we need four planets in life. As they shine, they, they they go through a process, a process called Fusion that creates heavier elements. And then when the massive stars become unstable, and run out of fuel, they explode and disperse that material into these interstellar clouds where the next generations of stars form. So we know there's been several generations of stars building upon prior generations. And all that process does is to create heavier elements that enable things like planets to form around star. So in our own galaxy, when stars are still forming, we see them forming with discs of dusty debris and planets forming around them. We know that that's only possible because of previous generations of stars in the galaxy that have created heavier elements. So as as we look at this process of the whole universe, the whole cosmos becoming more hospitable to life over eons of time, and that fascinates me and I'm excited with these new telescopes to get a greater sense of how that process has worked. And that personally feeds my, my faith, my sense of offer, how our universe has been endowed with what we need for for life and eventually the ability to have these kinds of conversations to exist and to think about our purpose and our existence and to contemplate on greater meaning. So that excites me and then much closer to home. I really am excited about observations within our solar system, I like the idea that we, with these new telescopes can also study details about planets and moons in our own solar system. And also that we're sending probes, you know, the the kind of space exploration that got me excited in astronomy in the first place. Where are these probes that humans have constructed and sent out to send back images of other planets and their moons in our solar system, I still think that's the the one of the greatest things humans have done and can do, if we put our heads together and do constructive international cooperations. And so I'm excited about probes that will go to places like Europa in our own solar system, in the coming years, that's an ice covered moon that we know has water ocean underneath, I'd like to know what what that water is like, you know, and there are missions that are already sampling the region around Jupiter, and have probed the environment of Saturn. These are things that excite me. And so I'm looking forward also to probe and telescope studies of our own solar system in the coming years. That's our own backyard. And we can learn a lot about even our own planet, by studying our sister planets in our own solar system. So those are the things I'm most excited about.
 
Zack Jackson 56:29
Do you think we're going to find life on Venus?
 
Jennifer Wiseman 56:33
Venus is harsh. Venus is is hot, and you know, really inhospitable to life as we know it. Now you can say, well, what if there's life, that's not as we know it? But, you know, we've all watched a lot of science fiction. But the trouble is, we have to know how to identify life, what is life? And so we have to start with what we know, which is life, even in the most extreme conditions on planet Earth. And, you know, what, what are they? The conditions, even the most extreme ones that in which life can thrive? There's a whole field called astrobiology right? Now, that's, that's a new field. But it's a very vibrant field where scientists are trying to understand what are the even the extreme conditions in which life can exist in our own planet Earth? And then, how would that translate to environments in space, either in interstellar space or on other planets or other star systems? And then how would we identify it as life? You know, that's really the tough question, especially if you can't go someplace physically, you can only observe remotely, how would you know that? That's that there's life there? That's a hard question in the field of astrobiology is trying to address all those questions. One of the things I like about astronomy right now is it's very interdisciplinary. It's not that you know, astronomy is separate from geology, which is separate from physics, which is separate from chemistry. No, all these things are being used together now, including biology to try to understand environments of other star systems and planets. And you know, how these conditions of stellar radiation and geology and atmospheres and chemistry work together and how that might affect even biology. So everything is very interdisciplinary now. And I just encourage people to get excited about space exploration, even if that's not your professional feel, there's so much you can learn and enjoy, even if it's not your occupation. By paying attention online, what's going on Hubble Space Telescope images are all freely available online, you can go to the website nasa.gov/hubble. And learn about it are also the galleries at Hubble site.org. And see any of these amazing images I've been talking about. The other telescopes that are large and space are on the ground also have magnificent websites with images. So you can learn a lot just by paying attention online. And I hope everybody also encourages young people to go into science fields or to realize that science is relevant to all walks of life, not just if you're thinking about becoming professional involved in space, but if you're thinking about just about anything, science is relevant to what you do. Science is relevant to our food to communications, to our health, to our exploration of oceans, and mountains, even on this planet, so I hope everybody takes a sense of time to just look around the natural world right around you. be appreciative of the wildlife and the trees and the natural world in a pretty Science as a way of studying that natural world but but keep a sense of wonder and awe. That's how I would encourage everyone to walk away from a program like this.
 
Zack Jackson 1:00:11
Well, thank you so much for that. Yeah. And
 
Ian Binns 1:00:13
I'll give a great ending.
 
Zack Jackson 1:00:14
I'll give a plug for we did an episode on on astrobiology back in January that you all should check out if you haven't had a chance to read Adams book. What is it living with tiny aliens? The image of God and the Anthropocene? Right, am I getting that subtitle? Right? He's not here. He's one of our CO hosts. He's not with us today to plug his own book. But thank you so much for the the wonder the all the inspirations hope. There's a lot to get excited about. Yeah, thank you.
 
Jennifer Wiseman 1:00:45
My pleasure. I'm glad you're interested in and I'm sure there'll be many more conversations to come have

Episode 95
As much of the US is caught in the grips of yet another wave of COVID-19 infections from the Delta variant, a new, sinister sounding mutation has been making news. The Omicron Variant. What is it? Why is it noteworthy? How is it different from Delta? The answers may surprise you. Frequent guest and expert on the evolution and spread of pathogens, Dr Daniel Janies answers your questions about this new variant as we discuss unknown viral lineages, where this all is going, and what role white tailed deer may have in the future of this pandemic. 
 
Dr Daniel Janies is an American scientist who has made significant contributions in the field of evolutionary biology and on the development of tools for the study of evolution and spread of pathogens. He is The Carol Grotnes Belk Distinguished Professor of Bioinformatics and Genomics at University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is involved with research for the United States Department of Defense, and has advised multiple instances of the government on methods for disease surveillance.
Colby T Ford, Denis Jacob Machado, Daniel A JaniesPredictions of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Variant (B.1.1.529) Spike Protein Receptor-Binding Domain Structure and Neutralizing Antibody Interactions
 
Jacob Machado, D., White, R., Kofsky, J., & Janies, D. (2021). Fundamentals of genomic epidemiology, lessons learned from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, and new directions. Antimicrobial Stewardship & Healthcare Epidemiology, 1(1), E60. doi:10.1017/ash.2021.222
 
 
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Support this podcast on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/DowntheWormholepodcast
 
More information at https://www.downthewormhole.com/
 
produced by Zack Jacksonmusic by Zack Jackson and Barton Willis 
 
Transcript 
This transcript was automatically generated by www.otter.ai, and as such contains errors (especially when multiple people are talking). As the AI learns our voices, the transcripts will improve. We hope it is helpful even with the errors. 
 
 
Ian Binns 00:06
So, today we are welcoming back up a frequent guest, our resident expert, all things COVID. He is the University North Carolina or is that UNC Charlotte with me, and he's the Carolina greatness, Belk Distinguished Professor of bioinformatics and genomics. And we are really excited to welcome back to the show, Dr. Daniel Janis. So thank you for joining us again, Dan, we're excited to have you as we are continuing to navigate all of this changing world of COVID. Yeah, thanks for having me. You know, we reached out to you right away of just, Hey, there's this new variant out there. And so we wanted to kind of pick your brain a little bit of what is the Omicron variant? I know, there's been other variants that have emerged, some that emerged that there was nothing about it and others like delta, but what is it about this one that raised concerns that you know, who classified it as something special, I can't remember their categorization but something a variant of concern? So what does that was that mean? Can you what can you tell us?
 
Dan Janies 01:06
What's interesting about Omicron is it contains 60 mutations with respect to Wuhan virus that emerged late 2019, in Delta contains 46. And what was interesting about Alpha through delta is that you could see them in in a lineage and, you know, nested set of mutations, building, and each one was, you know, incrementally more efficient than the other. What's different about Omicron is, we don't know where it came from. And it's not really in those lineages. And of those 60 mutations. 37 of them are in the spike protein, which is the protein that the virus uses to interact with human cells. So there's a lot of open questions with respect to those, especially those 37 mutations in the spike protein.
 
Ian Binns 02:04
So like, what, what kinds of questions I mean, what is it that when you saw this and your team and other teams around the world, I mean, what what kinds of things just popped in your head right away of what what you needed to study or questions you want to answer?
 
Dan Janies 02:17
The main thing is like, what did those mutations do to the conformation of the virus with respect to the antibodies that your body produces, after vaccination and or after infection, and in our early computational predictions, we predict that the antibodies produced by vaccination will be much less efficient in their ability to neutralize Omicron. need
 
Ian Binns 02:51
exactly what we want to hear.
 
Dan Janies 02:52
We've already seen this, you know, with with Delta, hence the, you know, the breakthrough in factions. And we, it's so it's, it's, it's more of the same, I mean, we expect more breakthrough infection. We don't know that much about transmissibility yet. What's interesting about Omicron is one of the key mutations that allowed delta to be so much more transmissible in outcompete previous variants is also in our con, but it's in a little bit different. It's in the same position, but a little bit different amino acid change. So the remains to be seen what that means, early data very early data out of South Africa, where this has been going on since mid November shows that Omicron is starting to outcompete Delta, but it's so early that epidemiological data will take some time to know to come in and numbers.
 
Zack Jackson 03:52
Is there any indication yet of how virulent it is? how dangerous it is?
 
Dan Janies 03:59
That the South African doctors are saying it's in the vaccinated, you know, they are seeing breakthrough infections, but they're mild cases, just like, you know, Delta, you know, sort of summer cold, so to speak, and hospitalizations, that data even lags, you know, even more, but hopple hospitalizations are not yet up for the unvaccinated. It couldn't be much more severe. We just, we just don't know.
 
Zack Jackson 04:24
Do you see that as the the eventual trajectory of COVID in general, is it going to go the way of becoming more transmissible but less deadly, so it just kind of settles in our population? Some
 
Dan Janies 04:36
people think that's the case. It's hard to predict how many more variants there are, since this one was not incremental, so to speak on the others in terms of its evolution, there might be a lot more space, you know, available for code to vary in that the problem is is that we have the tools now you know, least in the in the developed world. Anybody who wants to vaccination can, or two or three can get one. And B, we're not accepting it. So that leaves a pocket of people that delta, or Omicron, in this case, can use to infect and replicate itself and produce new variants. So that's a situation we really found ourselves in.
 
Ian Binns 05:20
If I, if I may, I'm just curious. I was something I heard the other day on, on someone else was speaking about this. And so I'm curious. The first SARS that was detected, you know, it spread but not wildly around the world like this. Right. And I know we talked in our original episode, we had you on the distinctions here between SARS cov. One SARS, cov. Two. But one of the things I think that the person said, and I can I can't remember the name right now, but what he said was, is that when a virus is more deadly, what that may be one reason why it doesn't spread so much is because orphan acts very quickly and kills a host quickly that doesn't have the opportunity to spread, like one that is not as deadly. Does that make sense?
 
Dan Janies 06:09
Yeah, yeah. So you're talking about SARS. cov. Oh, some people say SARS cov. One to distinguish it from SARS cov. Two, which we're experiencing now, there was only about 800 cases. And you know, it was much more deadly, but spread less efficiently leaving SARS cov. Two, and that's one of the things one of the Harbinger's of Delta's that it is out competing other viruses, because when it infects you, it's replicating itself so much faster, and it's getting out faster. And it's not causing symptoms as it's getting out of people as people are shedding it. And so people are even walking around more than spreading it more often. It's making so many more copies of it than its predecessors to.
 
Ian Binns 06:55
Okay, and so that's, that's what makes this one, just SARS, cov. Two in general, from the very beginning, there's one of the reasons why it spreads so quickly is because we don't know we have it in that, right. I mean, if we go back to
 
Dan Janies 07:08
ever ever more with very nervous. I mean, that's that was good. And
 
Ian Binns 07:11
now that's even more
 
Dan Janies 07:12
that was how Delta became so successful is was spreading, what SARS cov, two was spreading naysmith eyston, dramatically, Delta ramped it up.
 
Ian Binns 07:24
So another question we have for you, is, you know, if if Omicron does indeed show to be a model, milder variant of the virus, you know, with less risk, someone was curious, or, you know, we reached out to listeners, and what they were curious about is that, if that is the case, does it make sense for it to spread throughout the world largely unchecked, like just, this is kind of the whole some, you know, as you said, that there are is a pocket of the population, especially in the US, and the developed in the the world where we have easy access to vaccines, where people do not want to get it for whatever reason, the vaccination. And so is it someone have said, Oh, we should just let it go unchecked? And so I'm just curious, is there
 
Dan Janies 08:08
Yeah, that was tried in Sweden early on. And conditions are somewhat different there. They have a lot of people who live in their own house by themselves and things like that. But it was a regretted decision, because it was terrible for the for the elderly, you know, you can have most of the population get a cold, but the people that are vulnerable elderly, the immunocompromised people with other underlying conditions, your you're subjecting them to, you know, to a deadly disease in their case. So that was so those of
 
Ian Binns 08:44
us who can get vaccinated, it's good to do that. So that we slow the potential risk to others who are unable to get vaccinated. That's the whole point of vaccines in anyway. Right, is there are those who are unable to get vaccinated for whatever reason you're medically in any kind of vaccine. And so they rely on those of us who can't get vaccinated to do it so that they can.
 
Dan Janies 09:04
Yeah, I think it's an interesting choice in medicine, and that you're not only protecting yourself, but you're protecting those around you. And that, that's probably why No, the arguments hard to swallow for a lot of people.
 
Ian Binns 09:18
Right, right. Yeah.
 
Zack Jackson 09:20
I mean, if, if it came naturally, to care about your neighbor, then every religion in the world wouldn't have to make it their number one rule. It was just, they would just do it. But it turns out, it's really hard to convince people to think about other people's well being. Yeah, so it seems like we are, it seems like we're getting more variants like like we're just, we just work it up through Delta. I know out here, they're they're still talking about this delta wave. We've just hit the highest number in our in our county in the delta wave. And now we're talking about another variant. Is there an accelerating impact in this? And is that going to mean? Are we going to see more more quickly? Or is this going to make it harder to end this waking nightmare?
 
Dan Janies 10:15
We just don't know. And the big surprise of Aamir Khan was, it is so different looking. Most of its mutations are not shared by delta. And so, nor any other Coronavirus such that it really made us wonder several things about where it came from. And it's such a surprise, I can't answer your question. You know, maybe a month ago, I would have said something, you know, about the pace of variance. But this really throws a monkey wrench and all that.
 
Zack Jackson 10:55
Can you can you talk a little bit more about about that. Like how do we get something that is so far out in left field that doesn't that like a long lost cousin that we didn't get? So
 
Dan Janies 11:06
there is somebody SARS cov two, okay, so it's not short on the virus. There are several speculations. And I'll just preface this by saying there's, there's no data for any of these that I've seen, I'd like to see some data, but much like alpha, which was first called the UK variant. The speculation there was that immune compromised person had been affected with SARS cov two, and the infection sustained itself in their body and was not fought against by their body. And therefore SARS cov to cut can vary within the person. I heard the metaphor the other day, that situations like an evolutionary gym, where in which stars go v2 can try out, get stronger and try out new tricks. So and then it emerged from this hypothetical person. And then there was not much speculation after that for for alpha, and we saw the other variants becoming just, you know, incrementally better alpha, beta, gamma, delta. The interesting thing about Omicron is that it is not connected to any of these lineages evolutionarily deep, you know, very deep in the early emergence of SARS, cov do we can tell it SARS, cov, two and there that brought up other speculations that SARS cov to from people went into an animal animal population, use them as this, you know, metaphorical evolutionary gym and then reemerged into people. And this is not far fetched SARS, cov, two in the Netherlands, for example. And then Denmark, infected from humans, firing minx using the fair trade, and came back out into infect people. We know in the American Midwest, the stars, Kobe to somehow in whitetail deer. They're not farm, they're wild. But they're friendly, and then accustomed to people, especially in the American suburbs. So that is, still remains to be seen any connections there any evolutionary connections, and the third, which I think is more of a, you could say it's a third problem, or kind of an overarching problem, which there's some debate in the surveillance community is that we thought we were doing a great job, you know, sequencing the heck out of SARS, cov. Two cases, but maybe we're just not doing a very good job. And this thing was under the radar. It was first identified in Botswana in a aids lab, but then identified in mass in South Africa. But then, once people had the sequence to Qian and the Netherlands, they found a bunch of cases and travelers returning to Northern Europe, from South Africa. But then they went back into their on yet to be sequence samples. And they found they had early November, mid November cases. So as we go back, we might find more about this. And we just wrote a paper should be out soon, where we'll review that. There are many cases in many countries in the world where even though we're doing a tremendous job and sequencing cases, you can do a back of the envelope calculation that shows we're not doing enough to catch every variant. And so I think this latter scenario of just under surveying, it would be just a Herculean task to survey everything, but under surveying is going to produce these things and that could account For the animal reemergence case and can account for the, the immunocompromised case. So under surveying is a, I think a blanket explanation.
 
Zack Jackson 15:10
Yeah, I've heard that that was white tailed deer have it in such large numbers in the places for their testing, it was like 75%, or something I read, and that it doesn't, it doesn't kill them. And so it's like, it's like a little, a little playground for them. And if it comes back, and I when I saw that article pop up, that was the first time in the past few years, I felt legitimately hopeless, was on well, it doesn't matter how much we vaccinate if the white tailed deer population, which is all over my garden is is going to be carriers, then what hope do we have?
 
Ian Binns 15:49
Do you want to address that question, Dan? Or do we just I mean,
 
Zack Jackson 15:54
if there's no hope to be had,
 
Dan Janies 15:58
it's speculation when it was discovered in whitetail deer, and nobody was talking about Omicron. So I don't know if there's a real connection there. There's a there's a danger there always.
 
Ian Binns 16:08
So someone you know, another question that emerged for us was, you know, how does SARS cov to compare to other viruses in terms of how fast it mutates? And I'm sorry, I was looking off. So if this is related to what Zack already asked me, Is there a there's not a set speed or just happen?
 
Dan Janies 16:24
Yeah, it's it's, it's relatively slow. And the odd thing is SARS didn't SARS. cov two didn't really mutate until mid 2020. I thought sequencing would be quite boring. And then one mutation occurred. And people who pointed that out got quite famous. Because that mutation became fixed. And on subsequent SARS cov. Two cases, in then, we started to realize that mutations were building up. And this whole concept of variants really took off late 2020, early 2021. And then we realized, especially in the UK, that the variants were more efficient in their replication, and thus their transmission. And then it got really interesting to start sequencing variants, but it wasn't a fast process by any means us about comparing to influenza, which is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, but influenza does not only in its own right, evolve faster, but it's a different genome structure. SARS, cov. Two is just one very long genome. Whereas influenza has eight chromosome like segments to its genome. So those segments, when a person or an animal's co infected with two different lineages, they can reassort it's called, or its kin to shuffling a deck of cards and dealing out different poker hands. So it has not only the mutational avenue to change, but the reassortment Avenue and the we don't see that in SARS, cov. Two now, even though it's theoretically possible could recombine with, but it's not as able to be as it's not segmented, like informed roles.
 
Ian Binns 18:08
So with the mRNA technology that we have, with at least two of the vaccines that are approved in the US, at least, what can be done with those that technology, the mRNA vaccines to be able to handle this variant or future variants, especially ones that could potentially be much worse?
 
Dan Janies 18:28
Yeah. Well, the mRNA vaccines are, they can be just, you know, in essence reprinted and the main makers would like to argue that they can just reprint it and reformulate it and have it ready. I think Maderna said by March. So matter of months, the regulators probably want to some in would be wise to do you know, clinical trials before it's used. So, you know, it's really the vaccine productions, you know, almost immediate, but, you know, I think there's going to be a regulatory period as well, they did start to make reformulations of the mRNA vaccines for alpha and delta. But it turned out the vaccines that they that we had, you know, were already approved, or EUA, at least mergency youth authorization. were effective enough. And so the question is, where do you take on a whole new regulatory pathway versus you have something that's still really good? I mean, we're going to talk about going down in efficiency, I think, and in vaccine efficient efficacy, and for me in terms of Omicron and delta, but they're still wildly good. I mean, a flu vaccine some years is only 30% or 50% effective and, you know, nobody, nobody writes home about that. And so if we go from 96%, effective to 75%, effective for SARS, cov, two vaccines, even those directives against wild type Wuhan virus when applied to Delta, or Omicron, we're still, you know, in the black, so to speak, we're still doing pretty good, you know?
 
Ian Binns 20:09
Right. But they would have to if if something happened, and you know, a variant emerged, and, you know, the current vaccines we have, are not working very well, we need to make something needs to change. Obviously, they would need to go back through that clinical trials process.
 
Dan Janies 20:28
Again, right, just I believe so I believe they should. Yeah. Okay. I mean, there might be regulatory regimes around the world where they don't but
 
Ian Binns 20:35
okay. But it's still significantly faster than what anything we've had prior to these mRNA vaccines, like the process is still faster because of the technology that's available to us now,
 
Zack Jackson 20:46
is that at all possible to anticipate future mutations and create future proofed vaccines?
 
Dan Janies 20:54
Yeah, I've been thinking about that a lot. I think we're doing great as it is, but I think we could look at the number of possibilities for making a stable, you know, Spike protein and calculate those structures. And, and sort of anticipate the function of them, I think the latter part is the foreign part is easy, we can calculate out our structures, the understanding what they mean is a little harder than the understanding what they mean, you know, biochemically is a little harder, and then the understanding what they mean, epidemiologically is even harder. So, you know, we see this 30% reduction of 36 upwards of 36% reduction of efficiency against current antibodies by Omicron. But we don't know what that means yet, you know, in the real world, so. So, I mean, we could we could make computers run really hard, but it'd be hard to hard to translate that to the real world. That's a great idea, though. I think it's something we should strive for.
 
Zack Jackson 21:54
Now. I mean, that seems like it would be easier if the viruses were progressing incrementally, like you said, but with something like Omicron, that pops up out of the blue.
 
Dan Janies 22:04
Yeah, yeah. There are many ways to skin the cat when there might be a very large number of many ways to make an efficient to make an efficient SARS cov. To that, and we have not until Omicron thought that way. Now, we're, you know, when thinking that way for the last two weeks,
 
Zack Jackson 22:20
how do you? How are there multiple ways to skin cats? Isn't it
 
Ian Binns 22:26
wondering where that was? Come? Yeah, pull it off.
 
Dan Janies 22:30
I like the idea here.
 
Zack Jackson 22:34
Kendra's not here to defend cat giant,
 
Dan Janies 22:38
often the metaphor of a landscape is used. And so you have a hilly, imagine a landscape with many hills and the hills are optimal viruses, right. And it's, it's sometimes thought it's hard to go from one hill to another, you can kind of like go up the hill a little bit, you can go alpha, up to delta up the hill. And then when you're on the top, you're kind of stuck in one evolutionary space. But you got Omar Khan on this other hill over here. And so it's hard to imagine being less efficient to get more efficient. But what happens, I think, is that there's a set of contingencies, certain mutations happen that allow others to happen, and therefore evolutionary evolutionarily SARS, cov, two starts climbing a new Hill, so to speak. And there may be many hills of deficiency out there of evolutionary peaks. Okay,
 
Ian Binns 23:30
can we go back to the white that the deer situation? I mean, when we when you learn that emerged, or that it was detected in the deer population? What does that mean? Like for the human population and stuff? I mean, we talked about not really going away. So since it's not, doesn't appear to be deadly to that population. But is it easy for it to jump back to us from them? Or do we know?
 
Dan Janies 23:54
We don't know. And it's largely dismissed. I mean, the whole notion of zoonosis I think, in general is very important. We don't like to think of reverse zoonosis because we're clean and animals are dirty, but we're just another kind of animal, right? So we just see, we sometimes give bacteria and viruses to animals, and they're not being treated, but by and large, right, so the virus can live amongst them and evolve with them. And yeah, this is true influenza fun, fundamentally comes from birds. We know all these coronaviruses are many, you know, many of them, clinically important ones we're familiar with come from bats. And that's the idea of a reservoir that the virus is in the wild and ever so often infects people and then we pay attention to it.
 
Zack Jackson 24:40
That that will always stick with me from our first episode that you said the reason why these seem to come from bats, this goes back to have such great immune systems and nothing kills them. And they fly around viruses bounce around. Yeah, and fly around. What have you been thinking about in terms of this? This virus What's interesting to you?
 
Dan Janies 25:01
I really would like to know where it comes from. I mean, and I really think it's probably under sequencing and how much I'm wondering how much money and effort we're going to spend to deeply survey viruses. I'm not against it, but and we, you know, we can do it. It's just a matter of political Well, yeah, I'm wondering where the political will is gonna take us and a lot of these things, you know, the President's already said, we're not doing lockdowns. I thought that was the state's decision now. But I think this might be Yeah, might be a point where we're going to just decide to live with the pandemic. Unfortunately,
 
Zack Jackson 25:38
it does seem that way. It does seem like I looked at cases the other day was like, wow, this is nearly the highest single day that we've ever had. And it looks like it did three years ago when I walk into Target. Yeah. And see, I was just talking with a member of my church who is forget her official title, I'm sorry, Amanda. But she's a big wig in the emergency department of the local hospital and asked her how things are going. And she said, it's, it's heartbreaking, Nick, they're, they've lost like 60% of their staff, and the outside world is acting as if nothing is happening inside. And so all these health care professionals are like, they're completely burnt out. And they've lost their faith in humanity. And they're just, they're done. And it seems like Alright, so this is the new normal, we're just going to normalize dying. And
 
Dan Janies 26:37
yeah, so we can't, we can't live with very Chris, we, you know, we can't make doctors and nurses very fast. That's a lot of training. And it takes the right kind of person. And so maybe that's the response to this, we're just going to live with it. Because we know, we have to have doctors, nurses, and everybody who makes hospitals wrong. So imagine all the ancillary effects. People are not getting their cancer screens not getting their teeth fixed or not getting their surgeries, if the hospitals full well, healthcare effects are going to be tremendous. We have a study here on campus of the adherence to prep treatment for HIV. And we've seen that gone down in in the COVID period as well.
 
Ian Binns 27:29
I remember when delta started taking off, you know, we used to live in Louisiana, and there was a hospital system down there in Baton Rouge that talked about that the chief medical officer actually said that because the numbers were so out of control there, that they talked about, that we something along the lines of that they were no longer an efficient system or something along those lines. Because their numbers, they were so overwhelmed. That it they were trying to make it clear to people who are unwilling to get vaccinated prior to the emergence of delta, that the even things his car accidents and stuff like that, that they would not be able to be seen, because they were just that overwhelmed. And trying to send the message home to those who were adamantly opposed to vaccinations that the only reason why this is happening because you're not getting vaccinated. Right. And so that's what they were trying to bring home.
 
Dan Janies 28:25
Yeah, pre COVID. There was already a crisis in rural America, small hospitals were closing in, in, in towns that were not being near big cities. Right. So don't, don't get drawn to me don't get hurt in the country, that's for sure.
 
Ian Binns 28:42
Yeah. Which was this I remember when that happened with the when delta emerged, and it really took off, and I was here. And then I just kept looking at, you know, my wife and just kind of saying that this is the US like, you don't think of stuff like that. That's not supposed to happen the United States of America, right. And but as you just said, pretty COVID rural hospitals were shutting down and medical care and stuff. But everyone always talks about, you know, we're the greatest and we have all the best medical care and blah, blah, blah, but then we're turning people away, like doctors, which I'm aware that that's not the case. But you know, it just was it was tough to hear, again, to be reminded of the fact that this is not over.
 
Zack Jackson 29:24
Wealthy people and propagandists say that we have the best health care system in the world. But right. I think most folks would disagree with that. Yeah.
 
Ian Binns 29:34
But it's just an interesting perspective being shared. And to hear again, you know, chief medical officer saying, we don't have the ability to care for you right now. Yeah, it was very eye opening.
 
Zack Jackson 29:46
So if you want to give your give your local healthcare provider, a merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa, whatever they celebrate by getting vaccinated. Yeah.
 
Ian Binns 29:59
When I remember Dan You and I were part of a panel. And it's still funny to think of this. I think it was like February of 2020. Near the end of February and as before things really took off. Yeah. So we know lock downs were in place yet and compared to now very few cases were in the US that we knew of at the time. And we kind of talked about in that panel about, you know, and, and people were asking about, you know, if this gets out of control here in the US, what about lockdowns, all that kind of stuff? We just kind of kept talking about the acceptable level of loss. Like, you know, and then I remember you pulled up a slide talking about the number of flu deaths every year. Yeah. That we were having time. And so we just, that was considered an acceptable level of loss by society, not, you know, into an individual person, obviously. But it sounds like that may be where some are trying to go. Like, you see some just saying, I'm done. I'm not, ma'am. This is over for me.
 
Dan Janies 30:56
Yeah, I don't think it by design. And I don't think those that's why I showed those slides. And, you know, I don't think people really consider fluid deadly disease, but it is if you're, if the wrong underlying conditions, you know, so now we've got another one that, you know, before we especially before we had the tools, there is some right side, we do have tools now for we've had, you know, influenza vaccines and antivirals now we're getting to the stage where we have, you know, better vaccines than we did for influenza for, you know, for SARS, cov. Two, and there are some new antivirals. I think that will probably be some bright side and the gloomy picture we've been painting that even unvaccinated people can take a regime of these antivirals and less than their illness. Okay, I'm sorry, infection.
 
Zack Jackson 31:49
Yeah. So thank you so much.
 
Ian Binns 31:53
Yeah. Thanks. Is there anything else you want to share with us? Based on what you guys you and your teams have been studying the past couple weeks? Um,
 
Dan Janies 32:01
yeah, I'll send you the I'll send you the paper. One is we we, we predicted the, you know, even though we surveillance looks Herculean right. Now that it's not, we wrote that. And, you know, we predicted time will tell the clinic, but we predict now that vaccines will be less efficient against Aamir Khan than the previous version. So we'll see.
 
Ian Binns 32:28
Okay. And we can link to that in the show notes. Yeah, be great. All right. Well, thanks, Dan. I appreciate you.
 
Dan Janies 32:35
Thanks. Thanks for talking again.

Episode 93
In part 5 of our mental health miniseries, we're talking about what makes us who we are. If our brain is the center of our personalities and identities, what happens when our brains get broken? Rachael tells us the curious story of Phineas Gage as well as her own experience with traumatic brain injury. Along the way, we will talk about split brains, manipulative microbiomes, and hungry ghosts. 
 
Support this podcast on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/DowntheWormholepodcast
 
More information at https://www.downthewormhole.com/
 
produced by Zack Jacksonmusic by Zack Jackson and Barton Willis 
 
Transcript 
This transcript was automatically generated by www.otter.ai, and as such contains errors (especially when multiple people are talking). As the AI learns our voices, the transcripts will improve. We hope it is helpful even with the errors.
 
 
Zack Jackson  00:05
You are listening to the down the wormhole podcast exploring the strange and fascinating relationship between science and religion. This week our hosts are
 
Ian Binns  00:14
Ian Binns Associate Professor of elementary science education at UNC Charlotte, in my favorite brain character is crying from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
 
Zack Jackson  00:27
Zack Jackson UCC pastor in Reading Pennsylvania and my favorite cartoon brain character is the brain from Arthur
 
Kendra Holt-Moore  00:36
Kendra Holt-Moore, assistant professor of religion at Bethany College in Lindsborg Kansas. And my favorite brain is the brain in those comics, I think they're like from PhD comics or something, but it's like a brain and a heart that are always talking. And the hearts like, I'm gonna go catch a butterfly and the brains like no, we need to work.
 
Rachael Jackson  01:06
Rachael Jackson, Rabbi at Agoudas, Israel, congregation Hendersonville, North Carolina, and my favorite cartoon brain, brain from pink in the brain, especially their line. What are we going to do tonight? The same thing we do every night Pinky try to take over the world. I use that when anyone in my family asks, What are we going to do? Because it turns out, they never actually take over the world. And this is for all y'all that watch this TV show in the 1990s kids WV in
 
Zack Jackson  01:44
the late 1900s.
 
Rachael Jackson  01:48
So if you have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure you can find it somewhere. But I haven't looked yet. So pinky in the brain is awesome, because they're going to take over the world. But they never end up taking over the world. Because, well, the laboratory mice. So why are we asking this question? Why did we want to talk about our favorite brain characters. And that's because today I want to start us by talking about our actual brains. As much as we might enjoy the comics are cartoons of brains and the way that we anthropomorphize and frankly, anthropomorphize them, they are just a part of our bodies, like every other part of our bodies, except not at all, like every other part of our bodies, because they can troll the rest of our bodies. And we might have this inclination to think that our brains have, again, like the rest of our bodies, oh, well, if something happens to it, you know, me, you put it in a cast, right, you break out, you break a bone, you set it, you get a scrape, or cut, you sew it up. But what happens when your brain matter gets damaged, it also can bruise, it also can shrink and get cuts, it also has the ability to suffer physical damage. And one of the biggest things that happens when that when the brain itself is damaged, is that our personalities can change. Our emotions can change, which is why I really love what Kendra brought in as her example, that it's the heart and the brain, these comics, that for so long in our American culture, the emotions are kept in the heart. And the rational thought is kept in the brain. But we really know that that's not at all true. The heart has no emotions, the heart pumps blood and receives blood and recycles blood like it's that's all it does. Not that that's an all like
 
Zack Jackson  04:11
if there's any hearts out there, listen kind of sorry.
 
Rachael Jackson  04:15
I apologize if I hurt your feelings heart. But hearts don't have feelings. Right? Our feelings are all in our brains. Our personalities are all in our brains. And we forget that. And I want to bring in one of the most famous medical stories, people that they really started to understand this. So this was 19th century or so mid 19th century, and prior to this point, they had no idea where our personalities really came from and how they were formed. There's a whole lot of well, the shape of your skull dictates How Your personality is? Well, that's weird. Case. In case that needs to be said. I mean, it's almost it's almost as backwards as The Little Mermaid cartoon, right? The show or the movie, excuse me, The Little Mermaid. And the seagull goes up to the prince. And they say, Is he alive? And what does he do? The Seagull puts the ear to the man's foot. Oh, yeah, he's right. It's like, what that's really, that's not how your body works. And we know that and we can laugh at that. Because that's how absurd it is. Well, a couple 100 years ago, they didn't know how our personalities worked at all. So by saying, Well, it's the shape of your head that dictates your personality. Okay? Why not? We have these ideas that maybe again, prior to this, and to this day, maybe it's when you were born, that dictates your personality, right? We all it for a lot of people. It's it's mostly used as a funny thing, and less deeply integrated into who they are like, what's your sign? Right? Well, I'm a Pisces, oh, well, if you're a Pisces, and these planets were rising, that means your personality is xy and z. And for some, there's a lot of truth in that. And for others, it's just a way of connecting and be like, Oh, that's when my birthday is to how fun that we still don't know exactly how our personality works unless you're in that field. So going back to the mid 19th century, there is a person who's named is Phineas Gage Pei, or, excuse me, pah is how you start his name, Phineas Gage. And he is, well, the typical youth of the 19th century blue collar worker. And he's working hard, working hard. And he finally says, I'm going to get a good job. And he gets a good job building the railroad. right way back when when we needed railroads to move us from one side to another part of the country. And so here he is a strapping man because frankly, in order to you know, lay railroad ties and put this stuff in, you have to be physically fit. And people around him, his friends and letters and stuff, his own notes, said, you know, had some fun, kind, reverence, upstanding, you know, still rapidly Strapping Young Lad. And so he gets promoted through the railroad. And now he's the manager, and he's, you know, like 2324 years old, and he's the manager of this railroad. And what they did back then is you don't just lay the railroad ties and, and hammer them in, you actually have to make space for the railroad, right, the ground has to be flat, the ground has to be ready. And if you're going over a mountain pass, or or a molehill or something, like you have to actually make the ground ready. And the way they did that is with explosives. So what they do is they basically dig a hole, and they put some gunpowder or TNT or something like that inside the hole, you know, a couple of meter or so down. And they pack it in. And they use a tamping iron to tap it in, right, basically, and this thing is usually four inches in diameter, and about a meter or three feet long, right? This is this is a big thing. This is not a small, small stick. So as the manager Phineas Gage is tamping this stuff in and because he was so well liked, he's talking his other people. His mouth is open, and it precisely at that moment with his mouth open, it goes off it this explosive explodes, and it's such a forceful explosion. And his mouth is open that the tamping iron goes through his mouth exits his skull and lands several dozen feet away Thank you, Zach. Yes,
 
Ian Binns  09:41
that's yeah, so I'm sorry. I just I know you're talking sorry. You're good. Yeah, that was the part that I kept trying to figure out so it did exit his called they did not have to take it out.
 
09:52
No, no, it exit it like okay, it was
 
Ian Binns  09:56
Did it get stuck in there and then yeah, okay.
 
Rachael Jackson  09:59
No, no which is great. Yeah, but it didn't get stuck in there. Yeah, and so we're gonna, of course, put pictures and Wikipedia pages and medical journals, we're gonna put stuff like that in our show notes. Tangential aside, parenthetical aside, if I can remember to send them to Zach, so hopefully there'll be there. Anyway, so it exits his skull, and pupa. And he's still alive, and he's still breathing. And he's still walking. And people are like, Oh, my God, what do we do? Literally, this guy's head, like, his skull blew off?
 
Zack Jackson  10:40
What do we do?
 
Rachael Jackson  10:42
And so they take him to to his doctor, right? This is your just, it's just your run of the mill PCP. I don't know about you guys. But I don't think my PCP could handle this. So he goes to his PCP and the guy goes, okay, okay. Let's keep him alive. So we keep them alive. And they recognize, well, there is no skull fragment, so they can't capture the bone, they can't put the bone back, and his brain starts to swell. And it bleeds and so that's their number one, that's their number one focus is to stop the bleeding. Right? Because if you just bleed to death, well, there's nothing else to do. So if you're really interested in the medical part of this, again, I'll link I'll link the journal article that talks about it. So on and on, he recovers it takes about six weeks for like for him to recover to the point where he can be awake, right? So this is a long recovery in being awake. Right? It's it's very much a traumatic injury. But it happened in his brain. And he wakes up, and he really starts physically getting better, right? His his blood supply has returned back to normal. He's able to sit and eat and converse. And what people notice is that he's mean, and he's vulgar. And he says irreverent things all the time. And they have no idea what happened. So Phineas Gage, changed. And the doctor noticed this, too. And one of the lines from the doctor's report says, He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at time and the grossest profanity, which was not his previous custom, manifesting but little deference for his fellows. This doesn't sound like the same person. And so they're really trying to figure out what happens. And so Phineas Gage to end his story that is, Phineas Gage lives for another decade, decade and a half. And at one point, he goes to Chile as a long haul, or long distance stagecoach. And the long distance stagecoach, according to their job description required the driver to be reliable, resourceful, and possess great endurance. And above all, they had to have the kind of personality that enabled them to get on well with their passengers. Fascinating, also, not a job Island. No 19th century drive in the hills long distance of Chile. Hmm. So this was a job that he took. And then he started to feel ill and he went back to live with his mom who was at that point living in San Francisco, and he started to have major seizures. And he died before he was about 40. So sort of ends his life. His life story that is, but I bring this bring this stage coach piece, because that doesn't quite match what his doctor wrote that he was irreverent and spewing profanities. And remember, this is at a time in our American puritanical society that was like, oh, no, we can't say profanities. That's only for the bad people. We've changed our culture since then.
 
Zack Jackson  14:23
Yeah. That least Whoa. This is Kellyanne.
 
Ian Binns  14:31
You can bleep that out. Right? Don't Don't take it out, believe it, because I think it's perfect timing. Sounds good. Thank you.
 
Rachael Jackson  14:40
So here we have a person who has changed. And the best understanding at that point was that his brain injury caused him to be a different person. And we now recognize that our medical science that that is completely true. that our personalities reside in the mush that is contained in our skulls. And if something happens to that mush, it's very soft material, if something happens to it, it can affect who we are. And that can be quite disturbing. And like as not even for a person going through it, but can you imagine, I can just say to you, right, I can say to Kendra, Kendra, you don't, you're not who you think you are. And that at any moment, if I cut off a slide of your slice of your brain, you're going to be a different person. And that kind of shakes our foundation of one of the things that we believe in our life to be in to be permanent, right, so much of our life is filled with impermanence, that we think well, at least who I am, unless I willingly change it unless I have the control to change who I am. And that control is part of my personality. Then it then I am who I am. And, and it goes, this is showing that it's not. And that can be disconcerting, especially when there are so very many medical diseases and challenges that affect the brain throughout life. One of the most common ones that we see in our society is dementia. Not just Alzheimer's, but dementia as a whole category of different of different illnesses that affect the brain. And I highly suggest if there's anyone in your family, if there's anyone that you work with, if these are patients that you care for, if you somehow engage with anyone that is in the population of those who have dementia, there's this book called the gems and the gems and dementia, a guidebook for care partners. And what it does is it walks a person through stages of dementia, and rest six stages of dementia. And it helps them recognize helps us recognize what a person might be going through, I'm not going to read you all six of them. But the titles are sapphire, diamond, emerald, Amber, Ruby, and ending with pearl. And what happens is in each of these different places, so let me let me read one of these to you. And this is the diamond, this is the second stage. And it sort of says cognitive characteristics. A person gets rigid, but does the best and does best with established routines and rituals can really do well at times, they can shine. And so it seems planned or on purpose. They can be hurtful or say mean things without seeming to notice or care. They talk and worry a lot about cost money and expenses. Different people will see them differently. Like we do diamonds and different facets, they can't seem to get it at times or won't let it go. Some family members are not sure if it's dementia versus just being mean stubborn, and forgetful. Dementia is really a brain disease. It's something that physically affects the physical mush of the brain. Now, I'm not a neuroscientist, I'm not a neuro surgeon. I'm not, I don't even play one on TV. So I cannot explain what's happening in those. But I trust those that do know what they're talking about. So I'm going to pause here and see if there's questions or reactions to the story and what I've just shared and then I'll move us into a slightly different direction.
 
Ian Binns  19:23
So I've always found that, you know, prior to you sharing the link for that story, Phineas Gage you know, I've read it somewhere else before and was just so fascinated by it for multiple reasons. Obviously, the fact that he survived for so light, right? I mean, it's like, holy, sorry, there we go again. Good things not 1850s Right. So but uh, the other thing too is, you know, how much that accident advanced doctors at the time advanced their own understandings of the brain and led to like the development of different types of medical fields and scientific fields because of that accident. Okay, I just find that so fascinating. And, yeah, again, it's just it's, it's just insane to me that he survived that, and then what they're able to do with it?
 
Rachael Jackson  20:22
No, thank you for that. I mean, and I love that you said that it that they learned from that this story. It happened in the 19th century is still in modern day textbooks and modern day classes. So my dad went to medical school starting in what year was that? 1998. And he learned a Phineas Gage in medical school. Right. I mean, there's, there's a reason that this person is so well known because of how he changed the understanding of what our brains are and what our personalities are. I hope I didn't cut you off there. Yeah.
 
Ian Binns  21:02
No, not at all. It's again, it's just, it's really interesting. You know, that again, he survived what, how at advanced the medical community in the medical field. And then yesterday, when in preparing for today's recording, looking at some of the notes and things like that, that were written by the doctors, you know, that we have those those notes in their description of what was going on in the brain. You know, what they were able to witness of, like, some of these descriptions, or was it of like, you know, parts of brain matter coming out of the top of his head and stuff. I'm sitting there like, oh, my gosh, like Jess, who? That was, I was cringing while Reading it. It just like that just now I see why not doctor? medical doctor. Dr. Binns? That's right, that's right. Yeah,
 
Kendra Holt-Moore  22:02
the thing that this story of Phineas Gage, and just the conversation about, like brain injury and personality, it reminds me of something that I learned, I think I learned about this when I was maybe at the end of my master's degree, or like, early PhD student and I went to some conference, but I, it was like, a conversation about the microbiome. And it was one of the first times or maybe the first time that I had heard someone talk about how there are neurons in our stomachs. And so it just is always really interesting, when, like, we talk about, like this topic of, it's really like a question about, you know, Who Who are we and, you know, how much do we are we sort of prone to just like, the impermanence of whatever happens to our bodies changes our experience of the world, but we like, have this idea of self, that, at least in like, a lot of cultures is, you know, in the brain, and for other people, it's maybe more in the heart, but there's also the gut, or like that, that, you know, we talk about, like our gut telling us what to do, or, you know, the, that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when something is, you know, happening that you are unsure about, like, it's just, it's this other part of our physical experience that, you know, is also an option for how we like identify, like, the core of our self. And that's really interesting. And also just interesting to, like, bring in, I think, the, like medical, there's, I mean, I'm not a biologist, but I love like listening to and talking about the microbiome and that, like, just our relationship to our bodies, is not just a relationship to a body, its relationship to like, these, like millions of teeny tiny little things like micro organisms that help make up our body. And it's, you know, there's a plurality built into ourselves that we're not always like, aware of, but like, what does that mean in terms of selfhood, and personhood and personality and the way that we relate to people and love people and, you know, show respect and all these other like bigger questions about personhood, and they just become more interesting questions when you consider, like, the complexity of like the body itself, whether we're talking about the brain or, you know, those neurons in our guts, our gut brain, it's all just really cool. You know,
 
Zack Jackson  24:57
that's why it's so hard to give up junk food. is when you have eaten a lot of junk food you have selectively bred in microbiome that that thrives off of that junk food. And that mic, those little microbes, then release chemicals into your blood, which tells your brain to get more of that junk food. And so your microbiome wants a certain kind of food, which you have selectively bred by your choices, and then your cravings, that you think this is my favorite food, because I love it. But it's really your favorite food, because all of the microorganisms that live in your belly love it, and you're just its host. And it's, it's telling you, they're telling you what you think that you actually like, but it's really just them.
 
Rachael Jackson  25:42
But you're the ones that did selectively put them there, maybe they're the brains, you have the ability to change, or maybe they were always there. Right. And so maybe some people don't have
 
Zack Jackson  25:52
much of your microbiome, from their mother, during the birthing process, when you are a blank slate, and those microbes can get in there and set up shop. And then yeah, you can you can take swabs of people, and you can tell who their mother is by the specific fingerprint of the microbiome we got. Yeah, it's crazy to think that we are, in many ways, like a mech suit for a whole host of, of microbes, more so than we are an independent person that just so happens to have a bunch of microbes that eat our food. Now, we are a universe in and of ourselves. I like that.
 
Rachael Jackson  26:34
We tend to be so narcissistic into thinking that we are who we are. And we have complete control over this body that we inhabit. When the reality is far more complex than that. Right? Like you were just saying, right? How much control do we have over these things in our gut, especially when they're really imprinted? Like fingerprints, right? When they're imprinted in such a way that we can identify family lineage, right, which you have very little control over who your parents are. In fact, you have zero control over who your parents are. But we but we have this, this deep need to know that. And one of the hard parts is if we have that need for ourselves, do we not also have this need for other people in our lives? When we meet with a person, we go, Oh, I really like this person, we can be friends. And then you become friends. And then that person changes. Are you still friends with them? Does it matter how or why they changed if it was by choice or by happenstance? So I want to share a slightly personal story with us. In I'm actually forgetting what year this was. It must have been 2008. to that. Yeah, I think it was 2008 Is that the election was 2008. And Obama took office in January of oh nine. So this happened Christmas Day. 2008. So I'm 27. I'm 27 years old. And I just go up on a ski hill. I've skied before, but it's not a hobby, right? It's just something like, Oh, I've done it once or twice. I know, you know, I know that. If you want to slow down, you make a wedge. And if you want to speed up, you put your feet together and you know, go side to side. Cute little things like that. I wasn't being ridiculous. I was just staying on the green slopes. I was I was with my best friend at the time, who later became my husband. And I go on my second green run and I'm with his mom, and all the guys are off doing like black diamonds and something like Oh my God, I don't even know how people can do that. And my second run, it's Christmas time, and I fall. And I don't just like oops, hee hee hee. I fell on my tokus wasn't that funny? I'm a little embarrassed. i fall i garage sale, I fall down the mountain and the everything's on the yard, right? That sort of concept of the garage sale, like everything in my pockets. Like everything is off. Now, I knew I was going to do a green. So I didn't wear a helmet. Was that smart? I don't know. Maybe? I don't know. They didn't. This was again 2008. This was up in Colorado. They didn't necessarily offer how much to people that are just having this cute little fun time on a green slope. I don't know what to tell the person you just really have to ask a person that knows how to ski from now on like it's my suggestion that you wear a helmet because why not? You wear a helmet when you ride a bike and you go just As fast on skis as you do a bike, so that's my suggestion. I was not wearing one and I didn't even occur to me that I should have been wearing when one of my skis did not pop off like they are supposed to. And it just like twisted my leg as it was, as I was literally falling down the mountain. And so it stayed on and I had this massively strained and sprained ankle, so I couldn't walk. But as I'm falling, and I, I have this very distinct moment, where here a crack, like an actual crack, and then I, I'm laying there, and it's a beautiful day, so I'm laying in the snow looking at this blue sky, bright light. And, and I run my tongue around my teeth, because I thought the crack was my teeth breaking. And I was really scared that I was like, Oh, my God, teeth are so expensive, kid you not. That's what my thought was. Yeah, I was like, I broke my teeth and teeth are expensive. didn't occur to me, that I broke my brain didn't occur to me that I broke my neck did not occur to me. And then I was stupid. Because I was not thinking, like, I literally wasn't thinking and I was stupid. And I said, Sure, I can go on another run. And I somehow work through the pain of my ankle, went down the mountain, got back up on the chairlift started down again. And then I went, I'm getting dizzy, I think I need to lay down. And I just lay down in the snow. And my eyes were doing this weird thing. And it's like I couldn't see and they were just going so fast. This is a stress story. Imagine living it
 
Kendra Holt-Moore  31:58
gone, don't worry. Yeah, that's what's helping you live.
 
Ian Binns  32:04
So I live
 
Kendra Holt-Moore  32:06
spoiler alert, I
 
Rachael Jackson  32:06
don't die. And then then they call the rescue, right? They call the rescue the ski squad or whatever they're called. Because I still am in the middle of the mountain and I have to get down. And they take me to like a little cab out and they have a heart or something. And they brace my neck and they put me on a stretcher, so they can take me down. And I'm only told this I don't remember this. At this point, I have completely lost the ability of consciousness. I am a conscious, but I don't actually know that I'm conscious at this point. And so these guys are strapping me into the board. And I asked one of them for a kiss. Is everything okay? I was like, Well, you could you could kiss me. Like, okay, oh, glad to know that I said that. I've never been that forward in my life. So interesting that I would have chosen that ailment. Yeah. And then I'm taken down the ski, I'm taken down the ski hill, and they do a quick X ray and they go, Yeah, you're broken, like we can't fix you. And so they have to send me to a large hospital, which is about an hour away. And so they take me to the large hospital. And they see that I've broken part of my CFR and I have a severe concussion and they keep me in the hospital for about a week. And then I go home, and I can't walk because of my leg, my ankle. And I can't turn my head because of my my neck issue. And far more distressing, was I can't think I couldn't think. And one of the exercises that I was told to do that an occupational therapist or I was someone like that I had so many different therapists, physical, occupational and speech. And I can't remember exactly who told me this. But my task was to make a grilled cheese sandwich. Mind you, I am 27 almost 28 years old. I am a chemist. I know I've lived alone like a grilled cheese sandwich. Are you kidding me? Turns out, I couldn't. I couldn't make a grilled cheese sandwich. I didn't know the order to put Oh right. You got to butter the bread. And you have to put the butter side down and you have to get out the right pan and then you put the cheese on and you have to flip it and I didn't know how to make a grilled cheese sandwich. And I sat my pantry and cried. There was one time when I didn't have a walk in pantry. I just had like a large like it was a bifold door that then had three shelves on either side so you could walk I guess it's a walk But like you couldn't turn around, really. And I walked in, and I couldn't find my way out.
 
35:06
I didn't know how to get out of my battery that literally, like, that made no sense.
 
Rachael Jackson  35:13
And I lost the ability to really understand math, I lost the ability to know how to play the piano. I learned Hebrew the year before, couldn't recognize a single letter after this. And to this day, language is still extremely hard for me. Now, people that know me now would have no idea that I had this. People that knew me then would go, Wow, you're really different. I have high I have extremely heightened anxiety that I never had before. Like ever. I was not an anxious person, I was a stubborn, I was shy, I was lots of other things. But I wasn't anxious. And now I have, I have quite a diagnosed generalized anxiety disorder. And so this, this Phineas Gage story really resonates with me. And I think one of the things that we as people who are with others, and this for me is where I bring in the religious piece to so many of us have religious communities, that when we're in them, we may not know why a person has changed. And it's our obligation. And I mean that word intentionally, to care for them. We don't have to be their best friends, we don't have to, to be there those ways. And if someone is abusing you, verbally abusing you, you don't have to stay in that situation. Right? Because people can get very mean, I definitely had a mean streak. While my brain was trying to figure itself out. One of my therapists called it, I had to defrag my brain. And I love that like computers. So I just defrag my brain. And then I got much better and so took about a year before before I became who I am now, but who I am now is different than who I was. So I just want to add that to our to our story. And I'm not a unique case, and I am 100% Lucky. Right? It is a it's a scary situation. And frankly, I still went to rabbinical school after that fact. So I my traumatic brain injury had a had a happy ending. Very much so. But not everyone's does. And so I think if we share our compassion and recognize this idea of myths, LM Elohim that we're all made in the image of God. And I don't believe in a God that is static. I believe in a God that is dynamic. So too, are we dynamic. So questions, reactions, etc.
 
Kendra Holt-Moore  38:14
I think my reaction is just a fish. Again, agape facial expression. And glad that you're with us, Rachel, that's crazy, too.
 
Zack Jackson  38:31
It reminds me of the split brain surgeries. Have you heard of these? Yes, yeah, we don't do these anymore. And so there's, there's only a small amount of research done into it. We're basically for a period of time. Some doctors were treating people with recurring seizures that were just really bad. They were treating them by severing through the corpus callosum, which is the connecting point between the two hemispheres of the brain. And it seemed to really work. Now that's, that's significant brain damage, is what that is, but it stopped the seizures and increased the quality of life. And then what they found the some of the people who had this done, started to act very strangely, in that the two halves of their bodies were not acting together anymore. Yeah. And so there were stories of like, a guy would reach into his into his closet to pick something out and his other hand would pick something else out. There was one, one guy where like, one hand was, would like hit him, while the other one had to like restrain it. There was, I think, my favorite case and this is so they're starting to see that the it seemed almost like for some people. There were two different personalities in their brain now that we're at work. Before they were working together, now they were working separately trying to control the body at the same time. But the left hemisphere of the brain is where most of your language centers are localized. And so the right hemisphere of your brain is effectively mute, and is unable to speak, but is able to have different thoughts. And but it can't speak anymore. And so there was one person who they refer to as P S. And they were able to using scrabble tiles, and moving them around with each different hand, and like blocking, putting something in between their eyes so that they can't see what the other hand is doing. And only one eye can see one and one can see the other real, confusing, convoluted thing. They asked this person who are you, and both hands spelled out, Paul. And then they asked him, What is your desired occupation and the left hand, which, which would be controlled by the right part of the brain, the more artistic impulsive side or whatever, spelled out racecar driver. And the other hand, which was controlled by the more rational one spelled out draughtsmen, which is a much more down to earth sort of occupation, right. And it was like, there were two different ambitions, two different brains, there was one that was more rational and down to earth, and there was one that was more impulsive and excited, and their ability to communicate with each other was severed, but in some ways, it gave the right brain some more freedom to interact, because now it wasn't, it could communicate now, without being overpowered by the left side of the brain. And, again, we don't do this anymore. So we only have this like, select number of patients. But it seems like maybe we are not the unified to being that we imagine ourselves to be. That even within our own brain, there is a multitude of consciousnesses that are in concert that are that are, you know, creating a sort of Mosaic personality. But that are not the same. And I think about, about in, like Rome, in Romans, the book of Romans, Paul says, I always I seem to always do what I don't want to do, and the things that I want to do, for some reason I can't do. And I am always at war with myself. And I think we can all kind of relate to this feeling of like, I have these higher ideals. And for some reason, I cannot do them. And I always seem to revert down to this other thing that I don't want to do. And like how would that conversation about our personality, our spirituality, our higher ideals or morality change, if we imagined ourselves not as, like one person being, you know, impacted from without, as much as it is multiple persons, within ourselves a multitude of people who are working in concert together to make what we feel is the best decision for our collective selves. If we start to see ourselves as a universe instead of as an individual, like, what, what kind of a difference would that make for how much grace we're willing to give ourselves or complexity we're willing to offer to others?
 
Rachael Jackson  43:28
That's beautiful. I just finished Reading. So I'm sort of listening to what you're saying there, Zach. I just finished Reading a book called When Breath Becomes Air Are any of you familiar with Yes? So it's Paul calling our colony the colony Yeah, certainly colony, the colony, k a la a nit Hi, When Breath Becomes Air. It is a hard read. It came out just about six years ago, January of 16. A by an autobiography of a neuro surgeon who develops metastatic lung cancer, I'm not spoiling anything. He tells you that in the first chapter one of his lines that has stuck with me the whole book is like if you if you highlight in your books, and you're like oh, I just want to highlight really powerful and important passages your highlighting this whole book was he was doing a brain surgery on a person that's awake, right and that's necessary so that you know what's happening. Is that amazing that we have all these surgeries, right? We have all of these surgeries are like put me deep asleep. And these ones, they want to make sure you're awake, because they're going into your brain and they'll change and one time he's telling the story where he He's doing something, he puts some sort of thin electrode in. And the person says, I'm sad. I'm so sad. And then Paul takes it out politics electrode out, and the person goes, Oh, that's better. And so he does it again, because this is right around the area of a tumor or something like he needs to be in this area for reason. He wasn't just being like, Hey, what's this do to be in this area,
 
Ian Binns  45:28
we should be interested. Right, just like poking it with a stick, and
 
Rachael Jackson  45:33
he goes, and then the patient again goes, everything is just so sad. And then he pulls back a millimeter, a millimeter, I sick. I'm no longer sad, right? That's how fragile and that's, that's where we give people so much grace, a millimeter, right? Tiny little percentage, no room for air. So if you get jostled, perhaps that millimeter got shaken up. And that's why you're really sad today. And the world feels like it's really sad today. That we have this ability to give people grace. And I think that's one of the best things that we can give them, compassion or humbleness, right, that we can not even understand where they're coming from, but just understand that, that they're going through something, whatever it might be, and then we can be there for them. I don't have a I don't have a nice little bow.
 
Kendra Holt-Moore  46:38
That story that that book though is like, it is amazing. I around the room Reading it crying by myself. Basically,
 
Rachael Jackson  46:50
I just bought it. Yeah, if you need a cry, like almost as a cry if you need to think about death. And think about what is your purpose in life? What is the value of living and what is not to be scared about death? I'm it's just, it's an incredible book. Absolutely incredible. And then his wife wrote sort of an afterword a couple of chapters to sort of sum up like from her perspective and to finish it because he wasn't able to finish it because he died. Again, not a spoiler.
 
Ian Binns  47:23
Yeah. Well, like the book cover said that like when I was boiling Okay.
 
Rachael Jackson  47:35
Unlike my story, he doesn't he does not live.
 
Zack Jackson  47:40
We are remarkably fragile creatures.
 
Rachael Jackson  47:43
remark. Yep. So we've talked a lot about life and where that can take us and the fragility of it. So I think that that's wonderful and a good a good place to pause our conversation and if anyone has stories that they want to share with us, please feel free to do so. But I think we are at the moment where we can have our down the wormhole minute and today or this week is Kendra
 
Kendra Holt-Moore  48:20
so I haven't decided what I want the theme music to be for the segment yet, but I might workshop a couple ideas. Right now. I want it to be something like Welcome to the segment on residents of hell. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, like some electric guitar.
 
Zack Jackson  48:44
It will be so much better if instead of electric guitar you just did it with your mouth
 
Kendra Holt-Moore  48:57
yeah, that's, that's kind of where I am right now. But I also want to figure out a way to blend the drone earner and earner of electric guitar with like, needy, needy like ukulele sounds. I just think those things together can really express you know, the sentiment of hell. So Well, we'll see. Yeah, so welcome to the first segment of residence, pal. I just wanted to do that again. And so today, the first Resident of hell that we're going to talk about are the hungry ghosts. And if you've never heard of the hungry ghosts, hungry ghosts, come out of the Buddhist tradition, and are particularly popular in Chinese Buddhism and are present in a few other East Asian countries where Buddhism is popular, but I think Chinese Buddhism is kind Have the main Buddhist tradition that people kind of associate with hungry ghosts and to kind of paint a picture of what a hungry ghost looks like. Because they have a very distinct presentation, they are these beings with large distended bellies, that they're always hungry. Hence, you know, it's kind of implied in the name. But they have distended bellies that are, you know, always ravenous with hunger, but they have, like long, very skinny, skinny throats. And whenever hungry, goes, try to eat food, the food, basically like turns to fire in their mouths and in their throat. So it's very painful, to try to eat food to, you know, satisfy the hunger in their large, empty stomachs. And their throats are also so skinny and small that like they can't really eat that much. And so it's they, the Hungry Ghosts, like the image of a hungry ghost is kind of like this embodiment of desire and greed. And there are a lot of different ways that you might become a hungry ghost. So that's the other thing to kind of point out is that hungry ghosts is like a possible reincarnation for, for a human, depending on your karma. So in Buddhism, there's another image that I can try to kind of paint for you, that's the Buddhist wheel of life. And there are upper realms that are more the heavenly realms, and there are lower realms, more the hellish realms, there is a distinct hell realm. And hungry ghosts actually have their own realm and they're on the visual of the Buddhist wheel of life, hungry ghosts are adjacent to the hell realm. So they're one of the lower realms and like, you don't want to be reincarnated into the Hungry Ghost Realm. But you might be reincarnated as a hungry ghost if you lived a life that was just full of greed and desire and over attachment to worldly things. Because, you know, if you're unfamiliar with Buddhism, then it's worth mentioning that in Buddhism, attachment is like a big no, no, like, you want to try to live a life in which you are not attached to, to worldly things, and you recognize that everything changes and it is marked by impermanence. And when you become attached to anything that leads to suffering. And so you're trying to kind of alleviate suffering by these practices of non attachment. So hungry ghosts are kind of a like if you become a hungry ghost, then you didn't do a very good job of being unattached. And every year during the ghost Festival, which happens in the seventh month of the lunar calendar this year, it happened like mid August, people the the lower realm the hellish realms kind of open up and hungry ghosts can roam, roam the earth here with humans and people are able to feed the hungry ghosts during the ghost festival to kind of alleviate their suffering. And so people will burn money and food like paper money and paper, food and paper kind of like luxury items to you know, appease the suffering of these beings as they wander the earth on a during the time of the ghost festival. So that is the Hungry Ghost
 
53:59
when I'm just hungry
 
Zack Jackson  54:05
I can relate. Hungry Hungry Ghosts
 
Kendra Holt-Moore  54:08
are done or not. You have just listened to the first residents of hill. Thanks for joining me didi.