Latif Nasser

I know, I was going to say, do economists have some kind of wonky name for this?

Jeff, it is yours. Yours is the name.

Swerve.

And why that? Because remember, do you remember Thomas Malthus? Yeah. And if I remember, his whole thing was like, you tell me what his whole thing was like.

Except, she goes on to say, for us.

Okay.

Right. Right? What is like the green revolution or whatever, right? Is that right? The fertilizer revolution.

Please. I love the guano story. We can do it quickly. I know the guano story, but I love the guano story. And I want to hear you tell the guano story.

Yeah.

Guano. Guano. Which is basically just bird poop.

So what she did is she took the average gross domestic product worldwide, and that's a rough measure of economic growth, and that had been growing recently around 3%, which for economists is like a happy little growth number.

Nitrogen.

Right, right, right.

And that is on the order of like alchemy discovery. Like that is like this thing that is super abundant in the air all around us. It is literally the majority of the air. But it was unusable, and then there was a hack where we then figured out how to make it usable. That seems like—that's like a miraculous technological breakthrough.

I like it. I like it. And the swerve—so the swerve is like—it's like when you say swerve, I'm picturing like it's like— A car about to collide into a cliff and then right at the last second, whoop, swerves out of the way.

And Malthus is driving the car thinking that, of course, we're going to hit the cliff. Really, it's like the passenger who then just like yanks the steering wheel. It's like, nope, not going to happen. Right at the last second, we figured it out.

I find this somewhat of a relief. It is sort of encouraging, but it also seems like there's so much drama here. Yeah. Yeah. there might be a time where we can't swerve in time. Like what happens if and when we can't swerve in time? And also I would argue sometimes the swerves Sometimes we swerve right into another cliff.

So, for example, the example you talked about, from charcoal to coal, which is great for the trees, except after a while, it's also bad for the trees, right? It's like global rising temperatures lead to wildfires, lead to trees not able to grow where they once were able to grow. It's true.

more time fair right we've bought ourselves more time but then we just always use that time to step on the gas to the next thing right and then maybe when we do swerve then we swerve into something worse something that causes you know war or exploitation or or or just messes up the planet in a way that you that is unswerve backable from i mean yes that is all totally right uh it is a mess

But Sandra took that 3%. And with some quick math, she started to just play it out year after year. And in her lecture, she's showing this chart where you can see this curve just shooting up.

Actually, first, we're going to swerve to break, but only for a minute. Then we'll swerve back and step on the gas directly towards a currently oncoming cliff.

Oh, we're in the middle of the Malthusian oil.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and even before that, like I think in the 70s and stuff, like it's like we keep having this conversation over and over again, peak oil, peak oil, peak oil.

Well, you just said it in 52 years or whatever. Like, you just said it.

But is that a swerve? Like, I mean, if we're—now we just found another way to get more fossil fuels. Like, is that even really a—that feels like we swerved and swerved right back in the same direction.

And she was basically like, look at all that growth. That's eating up Earth's resources.

But in a way, running out of oil isn't even necessarily the problem here. The problem is the thing it's doing for everything else.

It's a much harder sell, though. It's a much harder sell to tell people we have too much of this thing that's going to hurt you as opposed to we have not enough of this thing. So take care of it.

I love it. I love it. Keep doing it.

Necessity is the mother of invention kind of thing.

Desperation is the inventor's best friend.

Yeah, exactly. Or, also...

And so even though Earth should be good for 100 million years, we're going to just eat the planet up. We're going to devour the physical, material level of this planet. We're going to eat it up in more like a couple thousand years.

Yeah, but it just feels like a trap. And an especially capitalist kind of a trap where the only thing that will inspire us to innovate or to swerve, to use your word, is the immediate danger of the cliff. Like, I mean, we're talking about resources and economics, GDP, and blah, blah, blah. But really, this is all like a head game. It's like all like people's minds work in this very specific way.

And long-term thinking is so hard for us. Yeah. And it's like we've got this system that leans into a thing that is already a problem with us and the way we think. It's like we're just going to use it as long as it's there. And when it starts to almost not be there, we'll figure out something else.

But, like, we're all so smart enough to... Can't we figure out a system where we don't have to just drive into the cliff and swerve at the last minute every time? You know? Yeah. If this was your... And there was, I mean, this is such a weird analogy.

There's only one car and you, whoever is in the driver's seat, really it's all of us, but whoever's in the driver's seat keeps driving pedal to the metal, accelerating faster and faster at cliffs.

You would take their keys away. You'd be like, sorry, this, you are not fit to drive. It's scary. Yeah. I don't know. Why do we keep doing that then? Like, do you think growth is inevitable? Do you think growth is good? What do you... After all this, what is your take on growth in particular?

And when I heard that, that was breathtaking and horrifying. And honestly, I haven't been able to stop thinking about that number, 3%. It sounds like a specific thing, but also it's kind of abstract and mathy, and I wanted help. I wanted help to parse this out. Like, how bad is that really? How bad could that possibly be?

Impossible seeming.

That's funny. That was probably the population of the entire Earth in Malcolm's time. Right?

Yeah, I agree with that. Like, we all have needs and there are increasingly more of us. But I do think that taking, like, I still am sort of struck by the Sandy Faber's, like, stone cold, like, zoom out. Mm-hmm. There's nothing that's wrong about that logic either. She just has seemingly a different priority than most economists, which is like she's thinking at a different scale. Yeah.

So I should tell you, we actually ended up talking to Sandy Faber.

And telling her about your Malthusian swerve idea.

And the thing that she was most concerned about was that energy is just so wrapped up in all these different parts of our lives, basically everything we do. And it has these huge effects on the environment. She says we're actually dealing with a bunch of different cliffs and a bunch of different kinds of cliffs all at the same time.

Basically, we're facing a crisis of crises.

Thank you. Thank you.

And so I turned to someone whose job it is to literally make sense of this exact kind of thing. Hello.

Hi, I'm doing well. How are you? And we had what I felt like was a kind of a roller coaster of a conversation. So I'm just going to play it for you right now.

Terrific show.

I need you. I need you to help me. It's more than scratch and itch. I need you to help me.

That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, well, she won the National Medal of Science, not the Nobel.

Okay. Yeah, sure. Fair.

Yes, yes, yes. Oh, my gosh. I'm so excited.

My favorite kind of math. My favorite kind of math. It's so hand-wavy.

Yeah, that's a big one.

Very big deal.

Using copper and needing copper the same way that we are. Yeah, yeah, sure. T minus 70.

No copper for anybody.

Okay. Okay. So then what, but then, so that's, this seems to point exactly to Sandy Faber's point, right?

Oh, that's the end of it? I thought you were going to be like, but there's a giant, there's a copper thing that we're going to, no, there's no but, that's it. It's just like, yeah, she's right about copper.

Yeah, okay, okay, okay, okay, wait, you want to go through more of them before we get to the but? Is that the idea?

Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, next one, okay, next one.

Okay, yeah.

Oh, my God.

Okay, that sounds like a lot. I don't even know.

Totally. Totally.

Okay. But it does seem like the whole point of sand is that it's like teeny tiny. It would take a lot of energy to turn that rock into sand.

Wait, so a quintillion based on the growth rate and the uses now. I would imagine this one is going to be, this one is not on Sandra Faber's side. I'm going to guess this one is like way, way, way far from now. Like this is going to be like a million years or something.

That seems so short again. It does, doesn't it? That is way shorter for the whole crust.

Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasser. What got me thinking about economic growth was not all the stuff that's in the news, the tariffs, the fear of the recession, all that stuff that everybody's talking about. What started it was a lecture I heard a little while back by, of all people, an astrophysicist.

Oh, my God. That's not... Like, it's long, but it's not that long. Like, that's like... That is nuts.

This is just making me more and more existentially worried. Okay, but keep going.

Okay.

Okay, great. Good one. Good one. And lithium, you imagine there are like those giant deserts filled with those like sand flats or whatever, right?

In Bolivia.

Yeah. Okay. So this one will be again... Like I think this one... I feel like there's going to be a curveball in here where you're like, no, no, no, we haven't had enough for millions of years.

Right. That's kind of... Okay, so that's like in phones, electric cars, da-da-da-da-da.

What, like 5% or 10%?

Which is good, which is good, which means like more electric cars, more da-da-da-da, right? More recyclable batteries and stuff. That's great. Yeah.

That sounds... A lot less than the sand. Like, this doesn't sound—this is going to get worrying. Okay, keep going.

Yeah, sure.

I feel like you're going to say, like, I feel like you're going to say, like, so soon. Tomorrow.

Okay, 100 years again. Which is not bad. No, it is bad. It's bad, Jeff. It's bad. We need that. Like, we're going to need that later for even better stuff.

Okay, keep going.

Really scary one.

But hopefully we're weaning off of this one. So maybe this one is a different.

Like it's going in the opposite direction. Hopefully.

I don't think you have had a single piece of good news here. Just wait for it. Okay. All right.

Yeah, when you say it like that, it sounds quite alarming.

But we do want to use less of it anyway. Right, yeah. I'm ambivalent about this. We're trying to. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

No way. Yes. That is nothing.

Wow. Maybe. Maybe. I was worried about when Sandra Faber said we had thousands of years and you're like, you're taking me even an order of magnitude less in that.

Her name is Sandra Faber. She goes by Sandy. Brilliant scientist. She co-authored the Standard Model for Thinking About How Galaxies Form. She won a National Medal of Science back in 2011. And she started the lecture by saying, we have a pretty happy little planet to live on.

Okay.

I was just imagining the bellows. I was just imagining the bellows. Yes. Okay, cool. Okay. So that's the key innovation here.

Which is charcoal is made out of wood. Is that right? No.

So they're like slurping down forests, basically. Yes.

Yeah.

Because we have one tree left and everyone's about to cut it down. We got to save the trees. The tree.

Wow.

Okay.

Not available in all states. Hey, it's Latif here with a quick note. Today, we have the second installment in the series where we just sort of let ourselves fall into a conversation between our own senior correspondent, Molly Webster, and a scientist who's working on the front edge of something, if not exactly news, something deeply and delightfully new. So here we go. Wait, you're listening?

Okay. All right.

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Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasser. So recently, you may have seen just a rash of headlines about people using artificial intelligence for their mental health. There are all these therapist bots and just even people using regular chatbots to help them find solutions to their problem, to calm them down, to just looking for somebody even just to listen. And... I don't know.

I'm not sure what to think of any of it for a lot of different reasons, but partially because the AI doesn't know anything. It's just taking an unimaginable amount of our words, scrambling them up and generating something relevant and helpful and maybe even intelligent seeming, but it doesn't actually know what any of those words mean.

That's right after this break.

Ultimately, all it's doing is parroting our language back at us. And yet, I know a lot of people find it very helpful to talk to. All of that got me to thinking about a very different story that we made here at the show years ago. A story where, similarly, a person who needs help is helped by something. And it's unclear if that something really knows how it's helping or whether it's helping.

Just before the break, Jim and his parrot Sadie were developing this relationship where she would help him calm down when he was about to lose control.

Okay. Lulu. Latif. Radiolab. Hotworms. And the place where the hotworms went next, which nobody could have ever predicted, only really happened because of a drug-induced biological fever dream. What? And that's the story I'm going to tell you now. Okay. So maybe no surprise, we're going to leave Indiana and jump instead to Berkeley, California.

We're still in the late 1960s. Only now I want to tell you about a guy called Cary Mullis.

He's a PhD student in biochemistry at UC Berkeley. But instead of being a lab, he seems to prefer experimenting in biochemistry by synthesizing his own LSD.

He's literally famous on campus for doing this. Anyway, so he gets his degree, gets a job in a bio lab, but then he just hates like how many mice they kill all the time. And then he gets a job in a cafe. He's like, he's like this floating guy. Yeah. Until one day he's working in the coffee shop and a customer is like, Aren't you that guy who used to make your own LSD? And they get to talking.

And eventually, this guy offers Carrie a job.

At this biotech startup called Cetus.

Now, just to give you a sense, at this point, we're in the late 70s. Today, science is on the threshold of a new era. And the thing that scientists everywhere, especially the scientists at Cetus, are obsessed with is DNA.

They have this hunch that decoding DNA is going to unlock lots of secrets about the human body.

And Cetus, the company where Carey Mullis got his job, they want to be on the cutting edge of this. And so they have teams of scientists trying to figure out how to read DNA. Okay. And their main problem at the time is that reading DNA is extremely, extremely hard.

The whole process of trying to read or even just find and isolate, like, microscopically tiny little molecules of DNA, it was so inefficient that it was just not, it was non-starter. It was not feasible at all. So scientists at CETIS were scratching their heads trying to find a better way to do this.

Now, Cary Mullis, he was not doing any of that. He was stuck doing very slow, very repetitive, boring lab work. But one day, he's out on a drive after work. I was driving along one night. Kerry Mullis actually died back in 2019, but while he was live, he did a bunch of interviews where he talks about this moment.

Driving through the mountains on these windy, steep roads. It's super dark. It was really late at night. And in his mind, he's turning over the problems of reading DNA. The way he described it, he's like trying to read a piece of DNA at that time, was like trying to find a license plate on the interstate

In the middle of the night.

From the moon. Okay. And then you still have to read it. So just impossible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And all of his colleagues are focused on basically devising a more powerful, more precise telescope to spot the DNA. And he's thinking, like... How do you fix this thing? I mean, what do you do? And all of a sudden... He sees DNA everywhere.

Blue and pink strands of DNA just floating in front of him as he was driving, like through the windshield.

As he said it, they injected themselves somewhere between the mountain road and my eyes. He hadn't done any LSD that night, allegedly, but he says that he had done it so many times that he could almost get his mind there without having to take it. I mean, who knows? But like, it's almost like he's imagining himself riding a piece of DNA. And then he has this thought.

that just snaps them right out of it. Everyone's working on a better and better telescope from the moon, right? Mm-hmm, right. What if instead you futz with the license plate? Like, what if you can make copies of the license plate?

A billion of them. It's as if the whole planet Earth now is covered in the license plate that you wanted to see. And all of a sudden, it's going to be way easier... To find it. Yeah, and therefore to read it.

I think that's fine. I think that's fine. Like the only thing you need to know is he has this vision for a machine that's like kind of a DNA Xerox machine.

And he's like, he's like, this is it. Like he talks about he had like deoxyribonuclear bombs going off in his head as he's driving. Like Eureka. Eureka. Yeah. Okay. He literally stops the car and writes it. He like looks in the glove compartment. He like finds an old receipt and he's like writing things down on the back of it. Oh my gosh. Okay.

So he takes his idea into work, and everyone thinks it's really stupid.

I think it's because it's such a simple idea. They're like, of course it's not going to work. But also, Carrie, he sucks. Oh. Basically, he sucks. He takes things very personally, gets into fights with colleagues at work all the time, literally a fist fight at one point. Allegedly, one day he brings a gun to work to threaten somebody. Oh, whoa.

Hud says he actually did a science project while he was there.

Yeah, Cary, right. But the thing is, Cary's sort of already working out in his head how this DNA Xerox machine theoretically would work. So you have a piece of DNA. Imagine like a long zipper. Because remember, DNA is, it's made up of matching base pairs. C's go with G's, A go with T's, right? And they're all zipped together.

Now, in order to copy it, first you have to unzip it. Unzip it. So now you have two halves of it, right?

Then basically you find new base pairs to match up with each side of the zipper. Oh, yeah, right. For every G, you find a C. For every A, you find a T. You can kind of perfectly recreate the other half. Right. And then it's like you can zip it up with a new zipper, right? Right, right. Okay, then do it again. Unzip, and then copy both. Okay. And then you keep doing that over and over.

About what it would take for a microbe to survive on Mars. And he says he just fell in love with the university, with the science he was learning there.

Zip, unzip, zip, unzip. You do that 30 times, you have a billion zippers. Whereas you just started with one. Clever. By this point, he managed to convince his boss, who has assigned people by force to work with him, and they keep trying it and trying it. They're working on it for months, and they keep failing.

One of the problems is to unzip it, for whatever chemical reason, the temperature needs to be really high. Okay. And then to re-zip it, the temperature needs to be lowered by a lot. Huh. And he notices this one part of the DNA zipper, like the slider, the thing that zips the DNA teeth together, is this enzyme called a polymerase. And he notices that any time he raises the temperature too high...

the polymerase falls apart without getting too in the weeds here. The polymerase is a protein. And typically, if proteins get too hot, they just sort of disintegrate. And so Cary and his team were like, oh, if only there was a polymerase somewhere that could live at this high temperature. So then someone from their team went to this library, this microbe library. Okay. And what did they find?

The hot worms. Thermos aquaticus.

Yeah. And as Hudson Freeze explained to us, Thermos Aquaticus has its own polymerase.

And again, because every part of TAC is evolved to take the heat, this polymerase, when you heat it up... It can survive without falling apart. So Kerry and his team are basically like, oh, this is exactly the thing we were looking for. Yeah. And they plug it into their machine and it basically works like a dream. as if it was made to do that. Oh, my God.

Like, all of a sudden, they can add the Taq polymerase, run this reaction to replicate the DNA over and over. And before you know it, they have a billion copies of the gene snippet they're looking for.

Whoa. And so the process that they invent, it's called... Polymerase chain reaction, or PCR. PCR. PCR.

And it completely changed everything.

Because PCR made it so much easier and faster to read DNA. Suddenly, scientists everywhere start using it.

They finally decode the human genome and all the knowledge that comes with it.

To put that a different way, every major scientific breakthrough that involves DNA in any way in the last several decades, it's all run on PCR. To detect genetic markers... Like diagnosing genetic diseases... Diseases including cystic fibrosis...

And sickle cell disease. Determining ancestry. Like, think of like 23andMe, Ancestry.com. All of that. The whole industry.

We have... Forensic DNA testing to identify the suspect's DNA. The whole world of forensics, solving crimes with DNA evidence, or... Recent DNA evidence exonerated him. Proving people innocent. Even identifying bodies for things like reuniting loved ones after wars or natural disasters.

Also another thing, this whole renaissance and learning about human origins.

None of this stuff would have been possible without PCR.

Crazy, right?

Okay, and here's my favorite example.

The PCR test is the very same PCR that we used during the pandemic to test for COVID.

The most reliable test. PCR was the sort of gold standard of a test.

Multiplying COVID RNA so it was detectable.

Yeah, and it's hard to know how many more people would have died without them.

Now, obviously, the development of PCR was not just Carey. It was this huge team effort. But in 1993... Dr. Carey Mullis, I now ask you to receive the Nobel Prize from the hands of His Majesty the King. Carey Mullis wins the Nobel Prize.

And, you know, I did ask Hudson Freeze, like, are you, like, bitter that you didn't win the Nobel Prize?

Right.

Yeah. Like, I had a hand in this, like, amazing world-changing technology.

This, by the way, is Radiolab producer Maria Paz Gutierrez.

Yeah. Yeah, you're the scout. You're the talent scout who saw Michael Jordan. Yeah. Today, actually, Hudson Freeze works in an institute where they work on, like, rare genetic diseases, including and especially in children. Like, they use PCR all the time at his institute to help, you know, to help, like, to literally save lives, you know, make people's lives more livable.

I find this like just a beautiful, beautiful story about what is life capable of? Like what can life even do? And in the end, like it really became this life-changing, life-saving discovery.

So at the time, the scientific consensus was that nothing could live above 73 degrees Celsius, 163 degrees Fahrenheit. It was seen as kind of an upper limit on life.

Yeah, like, just idle curiosity paying off way more and in ways that nobody could ever expect. Yeah. All of that came out of one $80,000 grant from the U.S. government. That's why Hudson Freeze and Thomas Brock, they won the Golden Goose Award in 2013.

Well, I mean, when you put it next to what is going on in the news right now, which are all of these cuts, it feels like a tale of a thing that we are in danger of losing. Yeah.

Yeah, but Thomas Brock had recently vacationed in Yellowstone and he had seen these hot springs where boiling hot water comes up from the interior of the earth. And he knew that if you go to these hot springs, you see around the edges where the water cools down, there's stuff alive there.

Carl says a lot of the cuts to scientists and basic research are coming in the form of broad cuts at government agencies.

It's just going to sit there and do nothing. Yeah.

Like algae, bacteria, little spider mites, stuff like that. Okay. And he thought maybe this could be a place where he could find some little microbe that is defying that limit of life.

I mean, is there some chance that businesses, like the private sector in general, would come in and fund all of this, like pick it up, pick it back up?

Okay, Lulu, so I know we're in shambles here.

But I kind of saved, there's one extra detail from the Hudson Freeze tax story, knowing that we would need a pick-me-up at the end here. Okay. Because it's like one of my favorite little details about this story. Please. Well, okay.

In the late 1980s, a Berkeley paleobiologist... started using PCR to find DNA in ancient weevils. Okay. And the ancient weevils were found in amber. Okay. And it counts very little bit, but the story goes that the novelist Michael Crichton heard about that.

And he's like, hey, Hud, would you like to go to Yellowstone?

And he was like, huh, that's a great premise.

So he wrote Jurassic Park, which is amazing because when we interviewed Hudson Freeze, his takeaway from his research was like, Life finds a way. And you're like, yeah, that's from a movie that was inspired by the thing you discovered.

Yeah. Okay. Okay, so that's our episode for today. Big thank you, of course, to Hudson Freeze and our little friend Thermus Aquaticus. We didn't say this earlier, but his professor and co-author, Thomas Brock, died in 2021. And the song that Hudson Freeze sang at Thomas Brock's funeral?

Thank you as well to Joanne Padron Carney. Also to her team, Aaron Heath, Valeria Sabate, Gwendolyn Bogard, Meredith Asbury, and Megan Cantwell at AAAS for being a tremendous help to this episode and for administering the Golden Goose Award. Thank you as well to Gregor Kavlik.

and Derek Muller and the rest of the Veritasium team, who I actually collaborated with to do a YouTube video about this topic. They even go into how post-Nobel, Carey Mullis went totally off the deep end and lost all his scientific credibility. Check out that on YouTube.

Catch you next week.

And also for a, you know, small town kid from Indiana, like this seemed like a great adventure.

Through the farmlands of Wisconsin, into the plains of the Dakotas. 20-some hours altogether. And he was like this doe-eyed kid just looking out the window. A lot of the Midwest is pretty flat. But then as he crossed into Montana... And I looked, looked out there.

Hey, how you doing?

Well, you're in luck because we're actually headed somewhere hot. Okay. Extremely hot. Can't wait. And our guide there, ironically enough. Hi. Hey.

They drive into the park and then hike several miles up to these very remote hot springs. Have you ever seen those pictures of like, or have you ever visited?

Should I send you a picture here? You want to see it?

Okay.

Oh, it's just beautiful. And there was one hot spring in particular that Brock and his team got interested in. Mushroom Spring. Mushroom Spring. At the center is a pool of water. It's about 30 feet across. Water at the center can reach 70 degrees Celsius, 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Steam coming off every direction. Surrounded by light gray rock and dead trees.

And so they'd walk right up to the edge of this pool, trying to get as close as they could.

Trawling, basically. Trawling for life. And the water is so hot that if they happen to fall into the spring... Oh, adios. Yeah. Luckily, no scientists were harmed in the doing of this research. But they got their samples. They took them back with them to their little shack lab.

And what they do is they would add these radioactive chemicals that would react with stuff in the sample, whatever proteins or sugars or whatever. And that would be a sign of something living in there. And we actually proved that the material was actually alive.

Is a scientist maimed.

But what they still didn't know was if the living things in there had come from the center of the springs or, you know, if it had fallen from the outside or what exactly it was. So they took these samples back to Indiana University and it was HUD's job to see if the samples they got could really grow and thrive in super hot temperatures. Yeah, yeah.

So now HUD's got all these samples and they're sitting in these hot water baths on all these burners so that each one is set to a different temperature. So it's starting a little cool, getting hotter, eventually going past that supposed limit that is too hot for anything to be alive.

But he has to keep refilling these hot water baths.

Because the water keeps burning up. Because the water keeps boiling up.

So anyway... Day after day, he's tending to these little vials, always checking on them.

So he's waiting, he's waiting. The liquid is clear. Day one, he's waiting. Day two, he's waiting. He's waiting a couple days.

So he takes a look under a microscope, and what he sees are these little worms, kind of like cut-up spaghetti. Just floating around in there. And they're moving? And they're moving. Yeah, they're alive.

Anyway. So the story that I brought Hud here to tell actually happened at the beginning of his career 60 years ago or something. But I've been thinking about this story a lot in the last couple months. Because, I don't know, every time, you know, like just a new headline comes out, which is like funding cuts to the National Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health or NASA.

You know, according to the current thinking, like nothing should be able to live in here. But they were growing, they were reproducing, they were making more of them.

They're thriving.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But then Brock was like, Oh, no, no, no. We're not going to do that.

We are going to call it Thermus Aquaticus.

Thermus Aquaticus. TAC. TAC is short for Thermus Aquaticus.

Hot water. It literally just means hot water.

Well, so usually in hot water, the water molecules are just jostling around so much.

But TAC has evolved proteins and enzymes that are more tightly structured. That's right. They can survive without falling apart. Which, beyond being a cool trick, opens up a door that life can do a whole new thing. Like, there's a whole new superpower that we didn't even know about.

Life will be fine. We may not be fine, but life will be fine. Right.

So I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. Like, was this on the cover of Time magazine? Yeah.

And the rest of the world, the non-scientist world, was just like, well, who cares? And so they preserved a sample of TAC and they just put it in a kind of like a library of microbes. Yeah, yeah. It's a germ library. Beyond that, we didn't think about it. They moved on to other things. And then 50 or so years later, Hudson is sitting at his desk and he gets a call.

Oh, Golden Goose.

Thank you for joining us for the 11th annual Golden Goose Award ceremony. Right. OK, so you remember we did an episode about a couple of years back.

We even sent one of our producers, Maria Vaz Gutierrez, to cover it, like, in red carpet.

Right, right.

It was held in Washington, D.C. How? In a big, fancy building near the Capitol.

That's a good question. I am wearing a suit.

It's a statement. With this windowpane, hello. But anyway, basically, it was an award created back in the 80s, 1980s, when Congress was ridiculing a lot of the government funding of basic scientific research. And, you know, there were like headlines all the time about like, we're wasting money spending, you know, funding a study about snail sex or whatever, whatever it was.

And then the Golden Goose Award was sort of this tongue-in-cheek, nerdy response in the form of an award that goes to research that is funded by the government that sounds dumb or sounds useless, sounds absurd, but then turns out to completely change the world. Right. So now HUD is getting a call from them saying, tack. Deserves this award.

Yeah. I guess maybe for now it's enough to say that Hudson Freeze's story, it kind of feels to me like a parable for the moment we are in right now. Okay, so let's just start way at the beginning. How did you get involved in any of this?