What We Risk Losing Without Federally-Funded Scientific Research

[MUSIC - Marden Hill: Hijack]

Hudson Freeze: [singing] Is the dawning of the Age of Aquaticus, Age of Aquaticus.

Brian Lehrer: Wait, isn't it supposed to be Age of Aquarius? Well, our friends at Radiolab recently aired an episode called The Age of Aquaticus in which they tell the story of a relatively overlooked scientific discovery that paved the way for huge advancements in biotechnology. Radiolab host Latif Nasser joins us now to talk about Thermus aquaticus and how small but significant discoveries like it in the modern day are being threatened by the political winds of today. Hey, Latif, welcome back to the show.

Latif Nasser: Thanks for having me as always, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: What is Thermus Aquaticus, and who was that we heard in the intro singing about it?

Latif Nasser: The guy who was singing about it is a scientist I've grown very fond of and he has a great name. His name is Hudson Freeze. He goes by Mr. Freeze or Dr. Freeze. He's heard all the jokes. Anyway, starting when he was an undergrad in the 1960s, he was part of the team that discovered this bacterium, Thermus aquaticus. Thermus aquaticus, it's also called Taq for short. It's not just any bacterium, it's an extremophile bacterium, which means that it loves extreme environments, in this case, heat. This bacterium loves to live where it's really hot, like almost boiling water hot.

Brian Lehrer: Hot water worms.

Latif Nasser: Yeah, basically. They're not really worms. We call them worms in the episode, but they're bacteria. Yeah.

Brian Lehrer: All right, so Hudson Freeze discovers Thermus Aquaticus. What did this discovery say about the world we live in? And how did the world both within the scientific community as well as the general public react to or were changed by his findings?

Latif Nasser: Basically, what happened was he discovered this with his college professor at the University of Indiana. At the time, there was this idea that life had a temperature limit, like nothing could possibly live above 73 degrees Celsius or 163 degrees Fahrenheit. His college professor, this guy, Thomas Brock, he was on vacation driving through Yellowstone National Park in a VW minibus. He looked at the hot springs and he's like, "I think something lives in there even though it's hotter than that."

They go trawling for life in this hot spring and they find this thing, Thermus aquaticus, and that already was an incredible discovery because it was like, "Oh, wow. Life is able to not just survive, but thrive in a whole zone we thought was off limits." Now, that would eventually lead us to believe what we do now is generally the consensus I think, that life on earth maybe started in these super hot deep sea hydrothermal vents. Not only is this possible, this might be all of our ancestral birthplace in a way. But when they came out with this discovery in the late '60s, it didn't make a huge splash. It was just like they published a paper in a journal and they put a sample of this bacterium in this germ library basically. Other than that, according to Hudson Freeze, it was not that big a deal at the time.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, you are saying, I'm making sure I'm hearing this right, that this super hot water loving bacterium was discovered by somebody named Freeze?

Latif Nasser: Yeah, I know, right, I know. Just imagine, to do so, he was standing over this hot spring in Yellowstone trawling, and if he fell in, he may not even have survived. Yeah, but his name is Freeze and he did this amazing hot spring research, which is a delicious irony.

Brian Lehrer: You have one more clip from the Radiolab episode to share with us. Before we play it, set it up. I think you know which 30 seconds we pulled here about maybe the implications of this and what the term we'll hear in this, PCR stands for.

Latif Nasser: Basically, what happens is that's the first half of the story we tell and then there's the second half of the story we tell is about a completely different-- it's a seemingly totally different story, which is this biotech startup in San Francisco in the late '70s. They're trying to figure out how to read DNA, which is an extremely, at the time is extremely labor intensive, extremely difficult. This one sort of obnoxious but brilliant employee at this company called Cetus, he has this idea to make basically a DNA Xerox machine, which would make DNA way easier to read.

He keeps trying it, keeps trying it, but something about it is that just the way the chemical process is, is that it gets very hot. You need it to get really hot to be able to replicate these DNA strands to be able to read them better. The enzyme equivalent of printer ink in this Xerox machine, it just basically falls apart when the temperature gets too hot. Then through a long roundabout way, they are like, "Wait a second, there's this bacterium that we could use that is fine in the heat."

They basically plug it in and it makes this DNA Xerox machine work like a dream, which is the final puzzle piece in this process called PCR, polymerase chain reaction, but it's basically a DNA Xerox machine that unlocked DNA to be read in a cost effective, time efficient way.

Brian Lehrer: We'll hear Hudson Freeze in this clip, we'll hear Latif in this clip, and we'll hear Bill Clinton in this clip. 30 seconds, here we go.

Speaker 3: This process has been hailed as one of the monumental scientific techniques of the 20th century. Why?

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

Bill Clinton: We're here to celebrate the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome.

Latif Nasser: They finally decode the human genome and all the knowledge that comes with it. From there on out-

Hudson Freeze: -I would say every biotechnology company in the world-

Latif Nasser: -every lab, anywhere that's studying DNA-

Hudson Freeze: -has to use PCR.

Brian Lehrer: Hudson Freeze, the last voice there. You heard Latif, you heard the Radiolab String Quartet or whoever that was. I really like that music. Now I want to bring this to the politics of today. Under Donald Trump, DOGE has cut a lot of research funding, citing experiments on things like chimps throwing feces and the impact of cocaine on honeybees as examples of wasteful spending. Do you think Hudson Freeze would have discovered Thermus aquaticus and its implications for DNA mapping if DOGE was in action then, or is that too hypothetical a question?

Latif Nasser: No, I think it would for sure be on the chopping block, and that's the reason we told the story, but I'm not the only one. A couple of weeks ago, Hudson Freeze himself, he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times, which he ended by saying, this is the quote that he ends with, "Thanks to the decades of support from the NIH, I was able to do work that helped a lot of folks and made a difference in the world. Now such discoveries and follow ups will be rare and maybe extinct."

Brian Lehrer: I mentioned some of the research that's been mocked by the political right, but what are some significant examples of projects that have lost funding if you've been looking at this on Radiolab? Obviously, you're a science show, but the breadth of Radiolab has been stunning over the years with spin offs like the one about the Supreme Court, More Perfect, and so you intersect with other realms of life besides pure science. Have you been looking at the implications of these cuts?

Latif Nasser: Yeah. It's hard to say. The budget just passed in the House this morning, so I haven't looked at it closely yet, but there are so many of these projects that you're seeing that you're just hearing about entire grants getting cut, scientists getting cut, whole projects being scrapped. One project that pops to mind for me is last year I went and toured the construction of this new space telescope at NASA. They've been working on it for 15 years. It cost them $3.4 billion to build. They are 90% done. My eyes were popping out of my head looking at this thing. It's so incredible what they made, and now it may not get launched. It may just sit there, and you're like, "What was the point of any of that?"

That's exciting for maybe people who love space or people who love these pictures that are coming from the Webb telescope. This would have been even so much more of that. But it's not just that. You also hear stories about, there are these hundreds of clinical trials for conditions like pediatric cancer, or diabetes, or things like that, that are just being stopped midway, which it just feels like the meanest and most dangerous way to do that, to basically tell patients, "Sorry, you're cut off from this medicine you're partway through the course of and we're not going to monitor or treat you for any possible side effects that arise." It's really across the board, these science cuts are really, really devastating to so many people on so many levels.

Brian Lehrer: Our friends at Radiolab have produced an episode called The Age of Aquaticus that we've been talking about with Radiolab co-host Latif Nasser. Latif, keep it up. Thanks a lot. Amazing as usual.

Latif Nasser: Thank you, Brian. You too. I feel the same way about you.

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