- [Anne] Life is the sum total of the time we have between birth and death. You can measure it in years or in the number of breaths you'll take, but if I ask you, what is this thing, this gift you've been given? What is life? Even science can't quite answer. Billions of years after the first organisms emerged, fundamental aspects of life remain mysterious, but that hasn't stopped us tinkering with it using stem cells to breed chimeras like humanoid monkeys or grow brains in vats or cure cancer. I'm Anne Strainchamps. And today, on "To The Best Of Our Knowledge," new technologies of life are inevitable. To handle them, what we really need is a new story of life.
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- [Anne] It's "To The Best Of Our Knowledge." I'm Anne Strainchamps.
- [Steve] And I'm Steve Paulson. Today, we're headed back to the Island of Knowledge.
- [Anne] Which, to be clear, is not an actual island. It's a small think tank in the hills of Tuscany.
- [Steve] Where three times a year, small groups of people, mostly scientists, some philosophers, and maybe an artist or two, come together to talk about how some of the reigning models in science are just wrong.
- [Anne] This time around, it's early spring. The orchards are green, the almond trees are blooming, bees are buzzing. And the question on the agenda, what is life?
- [Steve] Well, what don't we understand about life?
- [Marcelo] Oh my goodness, we don't understand so much about life.
- [Anne] This is our host, Marcelo Gleiser. He's a physicist and astrobiologist at Dartmouth College and co-founder of "The Island of Knowledge."
- [Marcelo] Yeah, we know what life does really well, but we don't know what life is. We don't know how life originated in this planet. How could a soup of chemicals become a sentient being with a will to survive? I mean, there are stars, there are galaxies, there are rocks, but a living blob of stuff, how did chemistry become that? And here, I may disagree with some of my colleagues, you know, we say, "Oh, life is ubiquitous in the universe." I'm like, "Really? Show it." And I'm working on this. I'm working on the possibility of life in other worlds, but always with the thinking that where we're gonna show is that life is really rare. And so, to me, one of the reasons why I think asking what is life is important is because it will show how precious life is.
- [Steve] It sounds like partly your project here is kind of a reaction against what I would call the techno utopians out there. You know, the Elon Musk of the world who think that, "You know, actually some future version of machines will create a better world."
- [Marcelo] We are at the juncture point where we are mechanizing life. We are hybridizing with machines, creating AI, bioengineering, all sorts of strange creatures. Well, you know, this is a very old story, right? I mean, you can think of Frankenstein. I mean, it's always about us becoming like Gods, turning science into a godlike thing that can actually invent what we don't know, how it emerged, right? Life. And I guess because I'm getting older, I start to think more and more about the meaning of all this. What are we doing here as humans, you know, and why are we here?
- [Anne] Where I am right now is taking a break from indoor discussion, walking into the woods to hear a new story about how we all got here, how life and this planet evolved.
- [Steve] This is not the usual narrative we hear about evolution. Think of Darwin's Tree of Life, you know, from fish to reptiles, to mammals, and eventually to us. But maybe that's just a small part of the story about the origin of life.
- [Anne] At what point did you notice there was lots of limestone?
- [Bob] Well, first of all, I always noticed topography where-
- [Steve] Bob Hazen is a renowned geologist known for his pioneering work in the evolution of minerals. More recently, he's been working on a radically new, more expansive understanding of how life evolved, which begins not with cells, but with rocks.
- [Bob] Now, we're approaching a gentle cliff face. But what drew me to this place was this beautiful coating of moss, because the exposed wall of the quarry, this very rough, jagged limestone, it's a limestone that's made of ancient, microscopic sea animals that, layers upon layers, were deposited. You can imagine this was underwater, this was offshore.
- [Anne] Can you actually see the remains of the little creatures?
- [Bob] If you look closely, what you'll see is a bumpy surface.
- Okay.
- And the bumps of these little tiny shells called foraminifera. They're tiny, just, you know, a 100th of an inch across. So, these limestones are, if you can imagine a living reef. There're fish swimming around, there were other organisms, and then there've been in the last a hundred million years. I think these rocks are of Cretaceous age, so that's back there were dinosaurs roaming around it. So it's so cool, and-
- [Anne] To be a geologist always seems to me like to walk and wonder, I think.
- [Bob] I can't believe I get paid for this stuff. Yes, it's so-
- I keep looking at this web of life. And the thing is that it's not just all green and biological. It's stone life along with plant life.
- [Bob] And they're inescapable, 'cause life and rocks co-evolved. Many of theories of the origin of life depend very intimately on the availability of minerals. Many of those minerals come from deep in Earth. The microbes got their energy from the rocks. And that was true for billions of years before photosynthesis became the main source of energy.
- [Anne] But, you know, that makes it sound like this is one living being, one living system. It's one life, not green life growing on something completely inanimate.
- [Bob] So, you have layers of existence, layers of life. That's why our planet is so special. If you look at our solar system, people say, "Well, why is Earth special?" You know, we have Mercury and we have Venus, and we have Mars and Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus and Neptune. They're all unique worlds. But Earth is the only one of those that has this incredibly dynamic interaction between water and rock, the deep interior and the surface constantly moving matter, constantly exchanging matter. And in the process, driving the essential elements for life. Life wouldn't be possible without this dynamic planet.
- [Anne] So, we're at this gathering of scientists talking about life, and I think a lot of folks listening would think, "Well, you're gonna talk about evolution then, but rocks don't evolve. Minerals don't evolve." But I'm guessing as a mineralogist you would say, "Ah-ah, yes, they do."
- [Bob] Well, that of course is what I was taught in school. And my colleagues would've argued, yes, mineralogy, evolution, those are two words that don't agree. But in a very deep and profound way, the rocks and the minerals, they do evolve. Earth, as a dynamic planet, in the earliest part of our history, had only a few hundred different kinds of minerals, and they were minerals that were formed through the actions of volcanoes and the process of turning molten magma into solid rock. And that process led to a generations of minerals, but then those minerals were subjected to water and air. They weathered, they eroded, they changed, they reacted chemically. And so you held a whole new generation of minerals since that gets you several hundred more. And then some of those surface rocks were taken deep down into Earth, remelted again, and brought to the surface. And that led to another whole range of new kinds of minerals. And so, if you think about the history of Earth, you can think of it, you start with a few hundred minerals, and then you have a thousand minerals, and then you have 2000 minerals, and then 3000 minerals, and then life comes along. And the astonishing thing is that life changes the near surface environment so dramatically that that causes those preexisting minerals to change even more, and-
- [Anne] But is that evolution, like Darwinian evolution? I thought that had-
- It's not-
- To be driven genetically.
- It's not Darwinian, but it's an increase in the diversity of minerals, and also complexity increase number of different ways of making minerals. And so, in a very real sense, this is an evolutionary process. We are blinded by the richness of Darwinian evolution in life, and that is obviously the most dramatic, most important case that we can see, but we see evolution in so many other systems. In stars, atoms evolved.
- Really?
- [Bob] The earliest stars only had hydrogen and helium after the Big Bang. But then the hydrogen and helium, through processes called nuclear fusion, generated things like oxygen and magnesium and silicon and calcium and iron. These are elements that make the minerals we see on Earth. And then those stars collapse, they explode, they seed the universe with new elements. The next generation of stars after that made a whole new range of elements, and the next generation of stars after that. So, the periodic table is not just something that came suddenly at the Big Bang. It's-
- More like the Moses tablets.
- [Bob] Yeah, it does. It took tens or hundreds of millions of years to generate the periodic table from the very beginning, and that's another evolutionary process. And we see this again and again and again, right up to modern society. Our languages evolve, our material culture evolves, our music evolves, our computer codes evolve. Now we have AI, and we see AI evolving.
- But so, so that starts to feel like you're just using the word evolve as a synonym for change-
- Ah.
- But evolution suggests that there are rules that are gonna be the same-
- Yes.
- No matter whether you're talking about, music or language or minerals or plants.
- [Bob] So, this leads to my colleagues and I coming up with rather audacious and potentially wrong, but also there goes a rock that we see the changing landscape, besides as we stand on this steep slope.
- We're contributing to the evolution.
- Yeah. We think of it this way. There are incredible numbers, 10 to the hundredth different possible combination of atoms for minerals. And yet only about six or 7,000 mineral species are known. That means it's incredibly rare to find an arrangement of atoms that actually persist long enough for us to collect it and put it in a museum collection and give it a name.
- [Anne] So, if you had to guess, would you guess that there have been many trial combinations, baby forms of temporary minerals that didn't make it through the selection process?
- Definitely. That's exactly what Earth does. Earth mixes and matches atoms constantly, and so some minerals are formed, but most possible combinations are rejected, and that's selection. Darwin talked about selection, so biology, once again, is the most obvious example of this. But in stars, certain arrangements of protons and neutrons were selected to make the chemical elements. And it's true of, you know, I think about the evolution of Broadway musicals and what drives evolution is the selection by people who buy tickets. And the musicals where nobody buys tickets, they go extinct. And the musicals that small fraction of musicals that are wonderful. It's always a small percentage of all possible configurations that work. So, this goes on and on in many, many different areas of science. So, we see, when we look at this quarry, we look at these rocks, we see evolution everywhere,
- [Anne] Which is a stance of such wonder, awe, and gratitude, I think, that we and these trees and these rocks made it through that whole process.
- [Bob] And remember, yeah, we have been selected too. We've been selected, and it's a very rare thing in nature. Most configurations are rejected.
- [Anne] So, the concept that you and your colleagues came up with, it's a new law of nature.
- [Bob] And here's what's the audacious part. There have been a series of laws of nature, the laws of motion that Isaac Newton proposed in his law of gravity. There's laws that describe electricity and magnetism. There are laws that describe how energy is used. I've taught that for decades. It's a complete set of what happens to us. And I kept realizing, and my colleagues agreed that, "No, there's something else going on here." Because it's the only arrow of time embedded in those laws. The only thing that describes a direction in time where things change is called the second law of thermodynamics. And the second law is the law that says the entropy, the disorder of the universe, is increasing. It will continue to increase.
- [Anne] Things falling apart.
- Oh.
- Destruction and yeah.
- Oh, it's illness. It's the fact that we go old-
- Death.
- [Bob] We lose our memory, our bodies start to deteriorate. We die, we decay. This is the fate of all of us. We cannot escape the second law. It's built into our lives, it's a drumbeat. I think there's so much poignancy for human beings. And yet, my colleagues and I look around at nature and we see the wonders, variations, and the blossoming of trees and the singing of birds. And we see the birth of our children. We see them grow. We see them learn. And how can this be entropy? How can this be an increase in disorder?
- [Anne] It doesn't explain creativity. The creative life force of the universe.
- [Bob] I say this is a conclusion we've come to, that there's something else. It's another arrow of time. It's a second arrow. And time in second arrow is, we think, tied to an increase in information. 'Cause every time you select a configuration that works, you're adding information to the system, but it's a very specific kind of information. It's information that was introduced about 20 years ago by a very smart guy, Jack Shostak. He won the Nobel Prize for other work, but he describes something called functional information. So, these are two different arrows. One's the increasing disorder, which we all experience all the time. The other's the increasing order.
- [Anne] It's very hard for me not to ascribe moral value. To think, aha, right, entropy is the force of death and decay and functional information. The second arrow of time is the force of life and creation.
- [Bob] Ah. And isn't it interesting that for time immemorial, humans have recognized this dichotomy, this tension. And we've called it good and evil, life and death. We have all these pairs of words, but science only has entropy.
- [Anne] And yet our gut sense is that it's a continuum.
- It has to be not just disorder, but also order. But there's not yet a coherent scientific explanation, description and explanation, of how systems can become more ordered. How we can be standing here, where the bird's singing and the sun shining and all this variety of life around us. And this is a subjective thing, but a very real sense, more interesting than it was a billion years ago. A billion years ago, we would come to a landscape and there'd be no life, no soil. There'd be no trees. There'd be no nothing. It would just be a barren landscape. And now we come here and they're just teaming with life. And it's that increase in functional information at which we just see and we feel. And I'll tell you, there's something that's very profound about this to me in a more personal level, which surprised me, 'cause science is supposed to be somewhat cold and impartial, but I realize that I have no choice in the second law. No choice whatsoever.
- [Anne] Right.
- [Bob] I am going to grow older and become weaker. I'm going to die, I'm going to decay. But on the other hand, this idea of increasing functional information gives us tremendous agency. It gives us choices. We can imagine some paths in our lives leading to destruction, bad choices, things that make life worse for other people. We can say insulting things, we can be mean to the point of deciding on terrorist acts and destruction. You can speed up the second law, but you can also make a choice to create, to love, to smile, to care for people.
- [Anne] Do you think science could ever get to the point of being able to say a smile and a thank you increases functional information in a way that "screw you" doesn't?
- [Bob] You know, I'd love to think that that was true. One of the things about the fundamental laws is, they don't just explain if they are true. If there's something about them that has validity, then they will also quantify and potentially predict. And if that's true, if we can start applying it to other domains, then the ability to make things better for people, it's possible. So, these are possibilities. We don't know yet. These are early days. But it's-
- It's so exciting. I just have to say, it is just so generative, so filled with hope.
- [Bob] It is, to me, the most humbling and hope-inspiring thing I've done in science, so.
- [Anne] Thank you so much.
- [Bob] Yeah.
- [Steve] Bob Hazen is a mineralogist at George Mason University and a senior staff scientist at the Carnegie Institute's Earth and Planets Laboratory. He's also had a 40-year career as a professional trumpet player.
- [Anne] You know, something that struck me about that conversation, what a difference it made to be talking about the science of life while standing outdoors, where we could touch the limestone and moss and smell the woods.
- [Steve] And that's something every scientist in this group talked about, wanting to change, not just what we learn about life science, but how.
- [Speaker] I would like to see every textbook of any aspect of biology, beginning with a re-enchantment of life, beginning with organisms, with ecosystems, to remind the student this is ultimately what we're trying to understand.
- [Speaker] If we're gonna enchant school children, I don't think it's gonna happen with a textbook first. I think you have to bring them outside to look at the flowers and then you bring in the textbooks, right? Because purpose and motivation and agency, at least in humans, is largely driven by what brings us pleasure, by what lights us up and makes us say, "Oh my God!"
- [Speaker] Recent surveys, both in the UK and in the US, kids spend around about half an hour outside every day.
- Yeah.
- Oh.
- [Speaker] In the UK, the survey that was done found that children in modern childhoods spend less time outside than prison inmates do.
- [Speaker] Wow.
- [Anne] Coming up, what science lost when it moved indoors? It's "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX.
- [Steve] Hey, it's Steve Paulson and I wanna invite you to listen to "Luminous," our podcast about the science and philosophy of psychedelics. I've been covering this field for years, and it's remarkable what's happening now on everything from new treatments for depression and addiction to mind-bending trips where people say they've encountered the divine. I have really deep conversations with my guests, and you'll find them all on our website at ttbook.org/luminous. And hope you're subscribing to the "Luminous" podcast feed. I think you'll like it.
- [Speaker] So, is lunch ready?
- [Speaker] Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have super-
- [Anne] It's lunchtime at the Island of Knowledge, the Think Tank New Sienna, where a small group of scientists, philosophers, and artists is meeting. I'm Anne Strainchamps.
- [Steve] And I'm Steve Paulson. We're circling around a really big question, what is life? Turns out the science of life is being rewritten in the 21st century. In fact, a lot of the biology I learned in school is now outdated or just plain wrong.
- [Anne] Take the idea that life is pretty much controlled by genes, that the genetic code is like the master recipe for life.
- [Steve] That's not how science writer Phil Ball describes it. Phil is a former editor of the journal Nature, so he's been tracking this new biology of life. So, I need to hear what you sound like.
- Here.
- It's okay. So, we have had just had the most amazing risotto.
- Yes, we have, isn't it?
- And it was... I have no idea what was in it to turn it that color, but whatever it was, it was very-
- [Steve] We snuck off from lunch to squeeze in an interview.
- [Steve] So, you've written about how you were just finishing up publishing a book about how life works, and then you had the rather shocking discovery that you had cancer and, I guess, some of those issues that you were writing about at home at that point. Can you tell me about that experience?
- [Phill] Well, it felt kind of ironic that I just finished this book about how life works and then found out that mine wasn't working quite as well as it should.
- [Steve] This was prostate cancer?
- [Phill] It was, yes, yeah. And it made me think a little harder about the issues that I raised in the book, what they implied for our individual existence. What are we really. Because, you know, once you start to look into that question deeply, and certainly at the cellular and the molecular level, it can look so incredibly complex, that it's a wonder that it works at all and that it works for as long as it does. But also, you have to start thinking, "Well, there must be some overarching process that is keeping this together, because there's just too much going on. There's a pattern that's being imprinted on matter, and that is us. We are a little local pattern.
- [Steve] So, I wanna come back to sort of this larger vision, the new biology essentially, that you've written about. But to return to the cancer for a moment, my image of cancer is, the cells are running amuck or it's sort of this chaotic system. They're just, like, suddenly spreading all over everywhere. Is that actually how cancer works?
- It's not quite. That's the way it's popularly thought about. It's not totally chaotic. In a way, we think of cancer cells as they're sort of rogue individuals that have just said, "You know, nevermind all the rest of the body, I'm just going to replicate." Well, it's not quite like that because cells aren't quite like that. Tumors look more like a kind of organ of the body than they do just like, you know, an undifferentiated mass of cells. It's almost as though the cancer cells are trying to form something. They have a developmental program. And so to my mind, it reinforces the view that our cells, in fact, all cells, have a kind of agency. They have goals, they have plans, if you like. And in particular, one of the things that, I mean, this was before I knew I had cancer. One of the approaches, one of the new approaches that I'd come across for dealing with cancer is to actually not just... I mean, at the moment, we just tried to kill off the cells.
- Right, yeah.
- [Phill] Either we hit them with chemotherapy or, as it happened to me, we cut them out.
- Oh, you actually had it removed.
- I did, yes.
- You had the tumor removed.
- I did, I was fortunate enough that it was caught at a stage where I could have a prostatectomy. That's not an easy process, but hopefully, and in my case seemingly, removes the cancer. But, you know, it's a very crude way of going about it.
- Oh, yeah. So you have no prostate.
- You just catch it out. Yes, that's right.
- Okay.
- Yes. But instead of treating cancers this way by basically trying to kill the cells or just removing them, one new option is to think about whether we can turn those cancer cells back into healthy cells. That cells are much more malleable and labile than we think they are, and this is what development is. Cells of a certain type, they start off as a certain type, and they progress through different stages, different cell types, until they reach our material tissues. And it's been discovered in the past, really in the past 20 years, that that process is reversible. We can turn cells back to an earlier state.
- [Steve] That's astonishing.
- [Phill] It really is. And the way I think about cancer now is, if we understand that process well enough, there's a possibility that we can actually persuade, if you like, persuade the cancer cells to go back to a healthy state. And there's work going on to look for agents, drugs really, that will induce this process. So, in principle, that will be a much milder way of treating cancer.
- [Steve] So you're describing a new revolutionary way of understanding how the body works, how the science of biology actually happens. And I wanna pull back for a moment and put this in some context. So, what, 70 years ago, Watson and Crick uncovered the double helix structure of DNA. It was sort of thought, "Oh, they had discovered the secret of life there." Jump ahead 50 years, we have The Human Genome Project. Big announcement, the whole human genome had been mapped. We had discovered the code of life. But none of that was true, right?
- [Phill] I don't think it was true. It was certainly the way that it was sold. In fact, James Watson himself had a role in promoting this idea that DNA was the secret of life in the sense that once we had read all of these chemical building blocks, 3 billion of them that make up our DNA, we would have the answer. But I think that we have become more and more aware that DNA is not simply like a computer program or an algorithm that just has to be read out to create the body.
- [Steve] And it's also not true that the more genes you have, the more complex the species is. Don't bananas actually have more genes than the human gene?
- Yeah. Bananas plants have almost twice as many genes as we do. So, where does all this complexity that we have come from? And the answer is that the complexity of an organism isn't about how many genes you have or which genes you have, it's about what you do with them.
- [Steve] So, we're talking about kind of the frontiers of biology, and I'm gonna sort of take our conversation in a slightly different direction. So, I saw a talk that you gave yesterday and you flashed a slide of what are called brain organoids. Is that right?
- Yes, well, in a way, it's even more fantastical than that. I thought it might be useful in view of what was said yesterday to sort of kick off with this image of neurons growing in a dish. For me, they're rather special neurons because they're my neurons. So, what are my neurons doing in the Petri dish? Well, they were taken from a piece of skin tissue that was taken by biopsy from my arm and turned into induced pluripotent stem cell, something that we've known how to do since 2006, 2007. So, it didn't take much. Just a little nudge. Got them doing this.
- [Attendee] Like a little brain .
- Yeah, these are called brain organoids. These, again, are my cells. They formed this little brain-like structure in a dish. Some of these look really quite spooky. You can even see brain stems starting to sprout as if this clump of cells is looking for the rest of the body. I mean, I had no idea how I would feel. And I'm still kind of questioning it, you know, what does it mean? Is it a bit of me that's in that freezer? I kind of think, you know, that it is, but it brings home the fact that, as I say, every bit of us could become, in principle, another organism.
- [Steve] You do wonder, is there some sentience there? I mean, it it has the makings of a little brain, is what you're saying.
- [Phill] Yeah, it does. And this is a question... I mean, it used to be a classic problem in philosophy, to talk about a brain in a vat, and whether a brain in a vat outside of a body could have experience. And now here we are, kind of confronted with that. Not not exactly that situation in the laboratory, but something that is starting to resemble it. We do know the neurons are signaling to each other. We can see the little pulses of calcium ions that they release just as normal neurons do, and so we do have to ask the question, you know, is there a stage? And presumably, there would be a stage at which some kind of sentience becomes possible.
- [Steve] Now, these are living beings, right? These brain organoids that in this gel. I mean, this is alive.
- [Phill] It's absolutely alive because they're made of cells. I mean, you can grow any tissue type this way. You can grow little gut organoids, you can grow lung organoids. Or if you combine the right types of very early reprogrammed tissue, just sort of stick them together, they organize themselves into the pattern that they need to become an embryo. And you can grow them to the stage where you can see the beginnings of a beating heart. You can see the beginnings of a brain forming. And we simply don't know how far they would continue to grow in this direction.
- Well, so let me play out the, I wanna say the science fiction scenario, but I don't think it's just science fiction. I mean, people are gonna do this at some point, maybe not in the countries that make it illegal, but somewhere. I mean, someone's gonna implant some of these organoids in human beings to see what happens and what are the possible scenarios here.
- [Phill] Well, if we think about brain organoids, in fact, this has already been done. They've been connected to a machine interface in a way that allowed this organoid to play a computer game, to play the computer game "Pong." And it was able to learn pretty well how to play.
- [Steve] Wait, a brain organoid could play "Pong?"
- It learned how to do that, yeah. With some training, it learned how to do that.
- But how do you train an organoid?
- [Phill] Well, it's a little bit like training our AI systems, but then if we're talking, you know, you mentioned the possibility of implanting one of these whole embryo models made from these induced stem cells, we really don't know how far they could develop. But it doesn't seem that there's obviously any principle that would prevent them from developing all the way.
- [Steve] I mean, basically, we're talking about creating new life.
- [Phill] Yeah, it not only seems possible, but experiments like this, they're being done in other animals, and there are clearly ethical concerns with that as well. But in terms of humans, I think there's pretty much consensus. There is no way you should ever do this kind of experiment. But as you say, that doesn't mean it's not going to be done.
- [Steve] Well, it also raises the question of whether you can somehow combine, I don't know, the organoids of a monkey and the organoids of a human and create a new species.
- [Phill] You can do that at the level of the embryo, and that too has been done. So, this is a different kind of experiment where you make, they're called chimeric embryos. And, you know, that's a reference to the chimera, the mythical creature that was a mixture of different animals. So, you can combine human stem cells and monkey stem cells. And whereas a human and a monkey can't mate and reproduce, their cells can get on with each other. Their cells can find ways of living together in an embryo. Again, I don't see any prospect that anyone is going to legally be able to implant a human monkey chimeric embryo into either a monkey or a human womb and see what happens.
- [Steve] So, I wanna return to the science fiction scenarios here, or maybe not science fiction. It's sort of, to me, fascinating to speculate on whether you could somehow, coming back to this question of the machine organic interface, whether you could somehow connect these organoids, whatever you wanna call them, onto a networked silicon system, essentially to give the machine a body. Obviously two entirely different substrates, I mean different kinds of matter, but is that a feasible scenario? And then of course it raises all kinds of questions, 'cause, you know, one of the huge questions about AI is, does artificial intelligence have any experience of the world? Is there any consciousness there? I mean, if this is possible, it would suggest that that is one future scenario.
- [Phill] Well, there's already work being done, and has been done for some time now, to try to integrate neural circuits made of living neurons, you know, our nerve cells with silicon technology. But beyond that, there are efforts also to create so-called organs on a chip. You can start to wire these things up. You have a little heart organoid, a little lung organoid. You can join them together using this microfluidic technology. And suddenly, you have a kind of schematic two-dimensional or even three-dimensional being because you have all the organs. You could imagine a kind of, you know, schematic human on a chip. What is that? What sort of entity is that?
- [Steve] Is it a living being? Does it have a self? Does it have rights-
- Exactly.
- At that point?
- Yeah. Well, exactly. And these are questions that need to be resolved. And, you know, that haven't been. I mean, does it have a self? Well you can just keep adding to it. You could presumably, you know, have one brain organoid communicating to another. It's that two brains. Is that like merged brain? What is that? These technologies are really probing at and challenging our whole notion of what the human is. And there are, of course, there are people debating the ethics because, you know, as you say, what is this? What sort of entity is it? Is it a kind of being? Is it an autonomous being? Does it have a self? We're absolutely at a stage now where we simply don't know quite how to think about these questions, let alone how to answer them.
- [Steve] Well, that's a perfect place to leave it. Thank you.
- [Phill] You're welcome. Thank you.
- That's fascinating.
- [Anne] That's Phil Ball, a former editor of the science journal, Nature, an author of the book "How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology." Next, a naturalist responds to that specter of brains in vats and lab-grown life with a call for more wonder. It's "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. And now, a story of death and life.
- [Melanie] The fire is a holy shade of white, white enough to melt iron and turn sand into glass, enough to boil the waters of our bodies and ash our bones.
- [Anne] Writer and naturalist, Melanie Challenger.
- [Melanie] It is August and a fire is raging in a remote part of the Sequoia National Park in California. By the time this fire is done, more than 150,000 acres of forest will burn. Some human folly likely started this one, a flicked cigarette butt or the rusty wheel of a battered truck flinting on hot stone. However it started, tiny particulates dance in the air, the final legacy of trees that saw the days of Jesus's crucifixion. But this fire is unlike those that have come before. It has burned too deep, too long, and too hot. In places, even some of the tallest trees have been felled by the flames. Still, it is not all devastation. On the northern slope of the mountain, a giant sequoia, perhaps around 800 years old, has been flashed by a low-lying fire. Not enough heat to kill, but to spark life. Giant sequoias, like other trees that have adapted to fire-prone conditions, hoard their seeds inside the cones in their canopy. When the flashpoint comes and fire reaches, the cones dry out in the hot air, turning from green to tan, opening like secrets. The seeds spill free. And then wind, that gift of wildfires, gives the seeds their wings, and they flurry down to Earth as if panted out on the last breath. Imagine now that one of those seeds catches a little updraft coming to land on ground that has been newly cleared and enriched by fire. This seed has grown and matured through the activities of the parent tree. Fertilization of the female plant took place as sperm from the male pollen entered through a weak spot on the seed's coat called a micropyle. Now, there is a tiny embryo inside the seed, ready to begin its life. Yet, loosed from its parent, it's almost helpless. It can't direct its fall. It can't begin to grow without some outside influence. It is the vessel of fate. I say almost helpless because there is one thing this seed can do despite its vulnerabilities. It can keep itself going for years until the time is right. Millions of seeds sleep like this for years, even decades, tucked in the dark of cones like fairytale miniatures. Yet, the seed isn't passive. There is activity within, even if only the merest flicker. So now, my question to you, is the dormant seed alive or not?
- [Anne] That's Melanie Challenger reading a bit of work in progress. And that question, is the seed alive or not? That took our conversation in a whole new direction, away from theories and laboratories, and back into the natural world, back into the body. Melanie's had an interesting career. She's a poet who writes librettos for operas, a naturalist who spent a lot of time in the field, and a national geographic explorer who's intimately familiar with both death and birth. You've worked in many and lived in many different places, many different landscapes with many different kinds of creatures. If we were just gonna run through a few, you've mentioned being in the Falklands with emperor penguins. Where else?
- [Melanie] Probably my first important encounter was being in the Gulf of Corcovado with a team who were trying to map a nursery for blue whales.
- [Anne] In order to protect it.
- [Melanie] In order to protect it, exactly. We were there to try and gather genetic data and prove that this was a special and important place for a population of blue whales. So, we would go out across the water, and they move so fast. And I remember one had sort of disappeared from views suddenly, 'cause they dive, and you have to be careful not to disturb them. And this whale came up right next to the boat, so huge that you can't see them in one look. You need three, four, five looks to capture each kind of segment of their vast body. And she came up and she breathed right in my face. Like. Right in my face. This, like, fishy breath. So visceral and real. You know, for me, we've talked a lot about it this week, but that was a sacred moment. It was a commitment to who she was and what it means. And really, everything that I've done has unfolded from that.
- [Anne] From the very beginning for you, studying life began with birth.
- [Melanie] Well, I suppose if I move forward only a few years actually, and I was pregnant with my first child myself. And then we have a kind of 10-year gap for me as a thinker and a writer, because when my wee boy, Gabriel, came into the world, I could do nothing but be with him. I was just that kind of mom. You can't plan for that. So, really, the world then became seeing everything through his lifecycle. So we then started at the rock pool level because, you know, they're so close to the ground at that stage, but it becomes through a child's enchantment. And they are free from any of the prejudices and assumptions that we have. They encounter all organisms as the individuals that they are. They assume intelligence. You know, you have to beat that out of children.
- [Anne] We do encode that in children's books. All the characters are animals and they all have names, individual names,
- [Melanie] And there's a madness there, isn't there? So, we have this young mind that accepts that what they are seeing in front of them, these purposeful, meaningful, emotional lives. For instance, I'll give you an example again. When we're in Cromarty in the north of Scotland, Gabriel and I spent a lot of time in forests, and I've dwelled in forests quite a lot. And when you live in forests, there is signs of agency everywhere. So, as an example, you get to learn where the deer paths are. And if you trust that these animals are intelligent, they're purposive, if they know what they're doing, you know that if you follow a deer path, it will lead you through the best route through the forest, because they pick the best route through. I remember one time with Gabriel, we were walking in Cromarty, we were following this deer path, and we came to this wallow. There were two of the deer just locked in a kind of embrace in the sunlight with these looks of absolute ecstasy on their faces. They looked our way, you know. It could even have been mother and child, right? You know, looking back at this little boy, and mom just crouched in the shadows, peering at them, eyeball, eyeball. And then they just thought, "Nah, having a nice time." And the heads popped back down again. And Gabriel and I retreated. But, you know, if you do not have those encounters with life and take them seriously in the way that a child's, you know, mind does, and you get wrapped up in these kind of new narratives we've told ourselves that we shouldn't trust the agency of life, that we shouldn't trust that they're really intelligent, that they're not really feeling anything, or that their feelings are somehow less important than ours, you live your life in this strange distortion.
- [Anne] We've talked a lot here about how interwoven all the different levels of life are, and I was remembering something you said about having once become a mother, you are forever physically connected to your child. You carry some of your child's own cells within you. Really?
- [Melanie] Yeah, so, that was something that I felt first before I sort of knew, if you like. Anyone who has carried a child understands that you are two people with two heartbeats and two brains, you know, more if you have twins and so forth. But it's almost impossible to explain that to men what that is. You know, it's an extraordinary state to find yourself in. And it is one from which you cannot then return to the individual that you were before. And one of the things that then happens, you know, when you have proximity to your child and you're caring for them is that you really can feel that psychical connection also. You can sense the illness that's coming before it comes. It's not a rational part of you. It's just a deeply embodied connection to your child. And you also realize that they are always with you wherever you go. You're unable to be alone in the same way ever again. But then, you know, because obviously of the work that I do, I came across the science of microchimerism, which is that when you are growing another child with a different genome inside you, you know, a different being, there has to be a communication between the fetal body and the maternal body to make sure that you don't reject them as foreign to you. And so, there's a migration of cells, there's a crosstalk of the cells. And what's so beautiful though, and so such an enigma within science is that these cells, they migrate around your body, they embed yourself in your body. And they've been found, you know, up to 27 years in the brain, in the liver, in the lungs, in different tissues, and parts of your body remain these little ghosts of your child.
- [Anne] So, there are cells of my, I have two children, of my two children are in my body? Oh my God, that explains so much. Doesn't it?
- [Melanie] I mean it's a fascinating question as to why they stay for so long in the way that they do. I think there are lessons in these discoveries.
- [Anne] And I'm thinking about the parenting literature and the stuff that our culture tells us, which is often, "No, you should not be sleeping with your child. You should put your child down to sleep at a certain time and they should sleep through the night. It doesn't matter if they cry or if you want to go to them." We've had so, you know... Or before Dr. Spock, my husband's mother's generation was told not to hold their children too much, their babies too much. So, we have centuries of parenting advice that goes directly against what our bodies and psyches are telling us. And then that's just emblematic of an entire world we've grown up in and which the dictates of the culture override what our own biology is telling us.
- [Melanie] There's so much in that that we could unpack, but it all turns on the body. And I think it's something very important here is the fear of the body that has run through history. So, there are many other reasons that are at work in the kind of parenting shifts that you've talked about, but part of it also comes from the fact that on one level, we can find the body frightening, so it's the body that gets diseased, it's the body that ages, it's the body that will die, and it's the body that's like other the beasts, right? So it's the body that's animal-like. And we can't trust those instincts. We can't trust the body or believe in the body in that kind of way. We have to elevate some non-embodied part of us. So, the idea of the mind as this kind of special part of us, or our rationality or our moral thought or whatever it might be, has priority over the body. And that has helped us to also prioritize men over female bodies, 'cause the body is so deeply animal with women that we've tended to sort of both sideline the body and denigrate the body at the same time.
- [Anne] "I think, therefore I am."
- [Melanie] Absolutely, I mean, it's an ancient tradition, but that impulse towards what we might call dualism, the kind of split between the body and the mind is really, really old, and it serves us at some level. But to bring it back to life, that is not how life works. Life is profoundly embodied. Life only makes sense when you pay attention to the body. If anything, the body is who you are. Not your thoughts. Yes, your history matters. Yes, your sense of self matters, but it is all in the body. I often tell this anecdote because it's exactly the same. If you're a horse or you're a tiger or you're, you know, any primate, and certainly any mammal works this way. So, from the top of your sort of head running right the way down your spine, you have these special kind of neurons that if you stroke, so it mimics the licking that mammals did from tip to tail. Now, your child falls over in the school playground and they're distressed and they're embarrassed, and there's lots of things going on. They'll have a massive spike in stress hormones, which isn't great for your health. They'll run over to you for reassurance, and you're too busy 'cause you're looking on your phone. And what you're gonna do is instinctively pat them on the back or stroke them on their head. And without thinking about it, your body is doing something that's been learned through generations of your fellow mammals. You mimic the licking that happened to bond together the mother and the child, and you reassure them through proximity of your bodies. And what happens is that their stress levels drop back down again. And the more you do that, the more your child has the resilience because they learn for that stress level to fall down faster than it would do otherwise. If you don't meet that need, they're much more likely to be someone who, when something bad happens, that stress level will stay for a long time afterwards. We know this now, we know it's critical to touch and respond to our children, and that is learned through the body.
- [Anne] That is absolutely fascinating and yeah, emblematic of an entire approach one could take to the study of life, to the study of biology, which, you know, hence your books. It's just very exciting. Thank you so much for talking.
- [Steve] Melanie Challenger is a writer and National Geographic explorer. Her books include "How to be Animal: What it Means to be Human."
- [Anne] This was the second meeting at the Island of Knowledge, where scientists, philosophers, and writers gather in the old chapel under the olive trees. We'll be back with a third episode in the coming months.
- [Steve] We wanna thank everyone at the What is Life Symposium, Marcelo and Carrie Gleiser, Bill Egginton, Bob Hazen, Melanie Challenger.
- [Anne] Paul Vanouse, Phil Ball, Roberta Raffaeta, and Andreas Weber.
- [Steve] "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" is produced by Angelo Bautista, Shannon Henry Kleiber, and Charles Monroe-Kane.
- [Anne] Our technical director and sound designer is Tom Blaine. Additional music for today's show came from the Free Music Archive. Thanks to musical artists 1000 Handz, atoll, Kirk Osamayo, and Pavel Peschak.
