Episode 14: Dominic D’Agostino discusses the physiological benefits of nutritional ketosis

Dominic D’Agostino looks like a bodybuilder. But that doesn’t mean that he eats a diet typical for that sport; on the contrary, the research scientist—and amateur athlete—can go an entire day without eating and says his performance—both in the lab and in the gym—improves because of it.

D’Agostino is perhaps rare in the world of science in that he practices what he preaches. As associate professor in the department of molecular pharmacology and physiology at the University of South Florida, and a visiting research scientist at IHMC, D’Agostino develops and tests metabolic therapies for a range of diseases and conditions for which the ketogenic diet is the cornerstone.

The low-carb, moderate-protein, high-fat ketogenic diet is what he also follows for health and greater mental clarity.

The ketogenic diet for decades has been used, albeit perhaps sparingly in the clinic, to treat epileptic seizures. D’Agostino is working on the development of exogenous ketones in the form of ketone esters for cancer and neurological disorders as well.

For more information on D’Agostino and his research, visit: http://health.usf.edu/medicine/mpp/faculty/24854/Dominic-DAgostino.aspx or http://www.ketonutrition.org.

His IHMC bio is at https://www.ihmc.us/groups/ddagostino/; and his IHMC talk “Metabolic Therapies: Therapeutic Implications and Practical Application”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gONeCxtyH18

D’Agostino is a long-time friend and colleague to STEM-Talk Host Dawn Kernagis, and the two engage in a rich, cutting-edge conversation with knowledgeable input from IHMC Director Ken Ford in this episode.

00:37: Dawn introduces D’Agostino, who goes by ‘Dom,’ and Ken Ford as co-host.

2:14: Ford reads an iTunes five-star review of STEM-Talk from “A Sweet 81,” which is entitled BAM: “Amazing podcast. It’s like candy for the brain. That is, if candy was good for your brain. So it’s like ketones for your brain.”

2:48: Dawn describes Dom’s research: He develops and tests metabolic therapies for CNS oxygen toxicity, epilepsy, neurodegenerative diseases, brain and metastatic cancer. Main research focus past five years: understanding why the ketogenic diet and ketone esters are anticonvulsant and protective to the brain.

4:15: Dom says his interest in science started in high school: He was a football player and wanted to improve his athletic performance. His honors biology teacher got on him to study hard. “I saw biology and science as a way to understand my own biology and physiology to maximize my performance.”

5:23: During his Ph.D. program in neuroscience and physiology at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, his mentor urged him to be an independent thinker. He describes being “thrown into the fire” when he was asked to apply basic science research to medical situations. He specifically looked at how the brain responded to hypoxia.

7:12: He did a post-doc with Jay Dean and also became a recreational diver. “Dean was the only person studying cellular and molecular mechanisms of extreme environments.”

8:36: Of Dean, he said, “The tools he created are filling gaps in the understanding of dive physiology.”

10:19: Nutritional ketosis is important for the metabolic management of diseases, especially seizures.

10:45: Nutritional ketosis works similarly to fasting: you liberate free fatty acids from the adipose tissue and break down stored glycogen levels in the liver. Once the glycogen levels reach a certain level, you start accelerating the oxidation of fatty acids in liver.

11:11: Dom explains how ketosis works: the heart (and muscles) prefers fatty acids over glucose, but they don’t readily cross the blood-brain barrier. So brain energy metabolism will transition from glucose to a fuel source called ketone bodies, which is a by-product of accelerated fat oxidation in the liver. These represent water soluble fat molecules that readily cross the BBB; they help preserve, maintain and enhance brain energy metabolism in the face of starvation.

11:54: The ketogenic diet has a macronutrient ratio that mimics the physiological state of fasting: high fat, moderate protein, and very low carbohydrate.

12:22: Nutritional ketosis has been used for over 90 years to manage drug-resistant epilepsy.

13:25: The ketogenic diet helps control seizures because it’s effective at achieving brain energy homeostasis.

14:28: The Office of Naval Research has played the key and primary role in sponsoring Dom’s research program to develop and test exogenous ketone esters for mitigation of CNS oxygen toxicity in Navy divers.

14:46: “Here was a substance that could potentially mitigate CNS oxygen toxicity; but also at the same time potentially enhance physical and cognitive performance.”

15:27: Of all the ketone esters that Dom and colleagues tested, the one that would elevate beta hydroxybutyrate and acetoacetate more or less in a one to one ratio was most efficacious in controlling seizures.

19:09: The ketone ester worked in every single experiment we did, which was remarkable.

20:20: Dom says they want to move into human studies of testing cognitive resilience under hypoxia using exogenous ketones.

21:00: Dom talks about the potential for ketones to protect against radiation in space as well as in cancer treatments. Adrienne Scheck at the Barrow Neurological Institute has done animal studies on glioblastoma showing that “If animals are in a state of nutritional ketosis, sensitizes tumors to radiation, and makes the radiation much more lethal because ketones have an anti-cancer effect.”

22:30: Basic science supports idea that nutritional ketosis could preserve cognitive and physical functions under conditions of hypoxia; and also preserve the cellular, tissue and physiology of people exposed to radiation. This is especially important for astronauts, who may suffer long-term from cancer.

23:16: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

23:40: Dawn mentions that Dom is taking a metabolism-centric approach to so many conditions, including seizures, cancer, traumatic brain injury, Alzheimer’s Disease, ALS, and muscle wasting. “How to have traction in so many diseases?”

24:37: Dom explains that cellular metabolism relates to so many different disorders.

27:32: A lot of people are turning their attention to cancer metabolism. Cancer growth is tightly linked to insulin, and the liver creates ketones in response to decreased insulin.

30:31: The ketogenic diet abolishes those spikes in glucose/insulin. “That’s a powerful part of efficacy as a metabolic therapy for cancer/managing seizures.”

31:00: Ketone bodies were once considered a bad thing. But in the past ten years ago, they have been appreciated an efficient metabolic substrate for cells; and in the last five years, a powerful signaling molecule that can influence inflammation and endogenous anti-oxidant in cell.

38:33: Anecdotally, patients with Parkinson’s Disease have improved in nutritional ketosis.

40:00: They are also encouraged by research on the effects of nutritional ketosis on brain injury and stroke.

40:50: Nutritional ketosis can, in some cases, mitigate the consequences of traumatic brain injury.

43:08: 80-90 percent of people with brain injury will have seizures. The VA system is looking into this. “Exogenous ketones would be the way to go. Something could be developed that could be taken to the field—either orally or via IV.”

47:45: Undoubtedly cancer is a genetic disease in that certain oncogenes are activated that can cause transformation of a healthy cell to a cancer cell. We believe that the initial insult associated with genomic instability results from a decrease in mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation. And the nucleus senses that.

48:18: Mitochondria are ultimate tumor suppressor; one way to keep them healthy is by feeding them fuels that are metabolized exclusively in mitochondria; ketones (and fatty acids) are metabolized in the mitochondria. We need to enhance our mitochondrial function and biogenesis. “The more we have, the greater bio-energetic potential the cell has for preservation under stress.”

49:20: We’re studying a bunch of disorders, including Angelman Syndrome, a rare disorder characterized by drug-resistant seizures and severely impaired motor function.

50:50: Nutritional ketosis (perhaps specifically the use of IV esters) could also avert the use of anti-seizure drugs that in children can cause developmental delays.

51:18: Brain cancer patients would be great candidates for nutritional ketosis for managing cancer.

53:34: He notes several challenges to getting ketone esters into widespread medical application: funding; IRB approval; patient recruitment. Many institutes will not run a diet trial for cancer. Metabolic-based therapies are not recognized at this time as an effective treatment for disease management. Medical school students are not taught nutrition.

56:10: Ford shares his own positive experience on the ketogenic diet, which he has been on off and on throughout his whole life and continuously for the last decade. He reports a range of physical and cognitive benefits; and is hopeful about the prophylactic potential for age-related diseases.

57:00: Dom shares his experience on the ketogenic diet, which he embraced in 2009. “I thought it was important for a strength athlete to eat six meals a day; on a carb-based diet I was hungry every few hours.” His hunger went down on the ketogenic diet.

58:30: He says making the transition from glucose to ketones was rough. He had glucose withdrawal symptoms in the brain. “I felt foggy initially; but then, there was clarity after two to three weeks. The more I followed the diet, the easier it got for me.” Specific benefits include cognitive resilience when fasting and improved sleep.

1:02:50: Fasting is the quickest way to activate AMPK; the ketogenic diet mimics caloric restriction that will activate AMPK (the suppression of insulin.) The drug metformin also activates AMPK.

1:07:38: They are also doing a lot of studies on the tissue-specific effects of metformin.

1:10:05: The ketogenic diet mimics metformin. One question is: If we use both, can we get a twofer?

1:13:09: Benefits from ketogenic diet are more beneficial (than metformin) for anti-aging. Using both may be synergistic.

1:14:12: They need to do clinical trials of metformin and ketogenic diet, in order to study the metabolic biomarkers.

1:14:35: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

1:16:37: Dom says the data on mTOR is fascinating; and in some ways confusing and conflicting to get through it all. Ketogenic diet can cause suppression of mTOR.

1:18:18: There are studies on how the ketogenic diet impacts the immune system. Adrienne Scheck published recently a paper on how the ketogenic diet could make the immune system hyper-vigilant in seeking out cancer cells.

1:19:00: The ketogenic diet activates AMPK and decreases mTOR.  Ford and D’Agostino discuss the subtle interplay between AMPK and mTOR and the possible trade-offs between health-span and longevity, especially in the context of sarcopenia.

1:19:25: The ketogenic diet, caloric restriction, intermittent fasting, and metformin converge on these pathways that are of intense interest to pharmaceutical companies.

1:20:00: Dom recommends a ketogenic diet to anyone who has had cancer and wants to prevent its recurrence. “The emerging animal data is enough” to convince him of its efficacy; he also would recommend metformin and intermittent fasting.

1:25:00: Branch chain amino acids that work through the activation of mTOR can preserve weight in animals with cancer cachexia. Could also be useful for sarcopenia.

1:26:52: Dom’s recommendation for muscle building/maintenance: “Lift heavy stuff and eat just enough to recover.”

1:27:55: Ford calls IGF-1 a “Goldilocks hormone: low and high levels both seem problematic.”

1:29:46: Dom says it’s important to make the distinction between circulating and local IGF-1. Strenuous, low-bearing exercises can increase local IGF-1, and the ketogenic diet sensitizes the body to local IGF-1.

1:32:22: Chronically elevated IGF-1 levels are not a good thing.

1:34:00: Ford recounts a significant decrease in his own circulating IGF-1 levels as a result of the ketogenic diet.

1:34:45: Ford notes that aging athletes avoid the ketogenic diet because they think it will lower IGF-1 and therefore lower their muscle protein synthesis. “But they are not making the distinction between local and circulating IGF-1; nor the distinction between a denser collection of receptors and more sensitive receptors.”

1:35:20: Athletes who do well on the ketogenic diet include those doing distance running, cycling, rowing; weight-class restricted sports.

1:36:00: The Elite Gymnast published a study of athletes on a modified Atkins diet and the ketogenic diet; those on the latter had maintenance of strength and more significant body alteration. “The use of the ketogenic diet for performance really shines in the context of trying to make weight for a certain event.” Or where the power to weight ratio is important, such as in wrestling or cycling.

1:37:37: Dom cites study of elite-level endurance athletes by Jeff Volek and Stephen Phinney.

1:39:00: Another study showed that testosterone was 25-30 percent higher in people on the ketogenic diet (vs the Western diet); they also gained muscle strength and size.

1:41:10: We typically become increasingly carb-intolerant with age.

1:42:45: Dom would most like to see FDA approval for exogenous ketones in epilepsy patients soon.

1:43:30: “Developing metabolic-based treatments (where nutritional ketosis is the cornerstone) for neurological diseases and cancer… is the thrust of what I want to accomplish as a scientist.”

1:44:40: Dom mentions a number of people in his lab who are doing excellent work, including his wife Csilla Ari, who spearheaded work on an ALS project and is studying the effects of nutritional ketosis in behavior disorders such as anxiety. Her work showed that animals in nutritional ketosis were easier to handle.

1:48:00: Dom says ketones might have application for treating PTSD in the military.

1:49:00: Dom and Csilla have a rescue dog from the Tampa Humane Society: “He’s our recovery. We go on nightly walks; we go to the beach a lot and bring our dog with us whenever we can.” They also love international travel and visited several countries in Southeast Asia on their recent honeymoon.

1:51:00: Dom explains his optimistic outlook and good nature: “To a large extent, it’s who you surround yourself with. If you’re grateful, it’s hard to be angry.”

1:52:30: His advice to young scientists: “You really have to follow what you’re passionate about. Identify people who are doing what you want to do. Contact those people; follow their paths. If you’re really passionate, and your research is meeting a need for someone, you’re going to be happy and fulfilled.”

1:54:35: Ford calls Dom’s research “important, innovative and impactful.”

1:54:55: Dawn and Ken sign off.

Episode 13: Kelvin Droegemeier talks about the past, present and future of weather prediction

When Kelvin Droegemeier watched the Wizard of Oz as a child, the tornado scenes scared him so much that he didn’t want to look. Today, the esteemed meteorologist watches storms for a living—with a particular interest in tornados.

From his upbringing in central Kansas—where he grew up marveling at weather and storms—to his undergraduate internship with the National Severe Storms Lab, Droegemeier was primed for a brilliant career in meteorology.

Droegemeier is currently the vice president for research at the University of Oklahoma, where he is also Regents Professor of meteorology; Weathernews Chair Emeritus; and Roger and Sherry Teigen Presidential Professor.

He is also the vice-chairman of the national science board at the National Science Foundation. In 1989, he co-founded CAPS, the Center for the Analysis and Prediction of Storms. This center pioneered storm scale numerical weather prediction with data simulation, which ushered in a whole new science of studying the weather.

Droegemeier talks with STEM-Talk Host Dawn Kernagis and co-host Tom Jones about the past, present and future of weather prediction, both in the U.S. and globally.

For more information on Droegemeier, check out his home page at the University of Oklahoma: http://kkd.ou.edu as well as his biography at the National Science Board: http://tinyurl.com/zwwvav9.

Here is also the report that came out of that, entitled “Hurricane Warning: The Critical Need for a National Hurricane Research Initiative: http://www.nsf.gov/nsb/publications/2007/hurricane/initiative.pdf

00:47: Ken Ford describes Droegemeier as a pioneer in understanding thunderstorm dynamics and predictability, computational fluid dynamics, aviation weather, modeling and predicting of extreme weather, among other areas.

1:13: Dawn says: “Kelvin has greatly shaped the scientific landscape in meteorology and storm prediction and tracking. His work has no doubt saved many lives.”

2:00: Ford was co-chairman on the National Science Board Task Force on Hurricanes, Science and Engineering in 2005-06. “Living in Pensacola and having just experienced Hurricane Ivan, and then Hurricane Katrina, I was highly motivated to work on this problem…. Around here we’ve come to fear hurricanes with Russian names like Ivan and Katrina.”

3:20: Ford reads iTunes review from “ARFO6C”: “Brilliant, just brilliant.”

4:37: “Growing up in central Kansas, I was exposed to interesting weather year-round. I remember as a child being fascinated by the power and the grandeur of the atmosphere, and how quickly the weather could change.”

7:00: Droegemeier is especially interested in spring storms and wind. “To me, the perfect day is 60 degrees, low clouds, winds at 40 mph…. [There is something] so wonderful and powerful about the wind.”.

11:06: As a child, Droegemeier was interested in science, but it wasn’t until his undergraduate work study job at the National Severe Storms Lab, where an advisor suggested graduate school, that his academic interest in weather was sparked.

12:35: He went to graduate school at the University of Illinois to work with a person who was a pioneer in using super computers to make 3D models of thunderstorms. They looked at storms’ rotation, or the pathways to understanding how tornados form.

13:50: He describes “seminal changes in the last 20-30 years in meteorology, driven by high-performance computing.”

15:04: Twenty years ago, the first national network of Doppler weather radar also emerged. This allowed sensing the directional movement of precipitation particles.

17:30: He says the data simulation models have “dramatically improved over the last two decades. We are able to predict up to 72 hours more precisely than what we were able to do twenty years ago [predicting] up to 36 hours.”

18:00: CAPS is one of the first 11 science/technology centers funded by the NSF. It was selected out of 323 applicants. The premise was the following question: ‘Could you use a computer model to predict thunderstorms in advance of their occurrence?’

21:45: Droegemeier talks about project Hub-CAPS, with American Airlines, to predict storms. They then created a private company to commercialize the forecasting technology to different types of industries worldwide, including communications and transportation. That company was called Weather Decision Technologies, Inc.

22:49: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

26:05: Climate models are much more driven by boundary conditions than initial conditions. Boundary conditions include vegetative cover, changes in biogeochemical cycles, the solar cycle, volcanic eruptions and things like that.

28:01: “Science never ends, and models are never perfect, but I think they’re getting better and better all the time,” Droegemeier says, in describing new climate models that include information about microbiomes and organisms in the ground and how these influence the carbon cycle.

28:33: “The amount of money we spend on research is a pittance compared to the massive economic loss we have from devastating storms.”

28:58: “Fifty percent of the population in the U.S. lives within fifty miles of the coastline.” One area in need of improvement is better building codes.

29:16: Cumulative disruptive events, not just big events, have a major impact/economic toll. They cause delays in construction projects, cancelled flights and energy plant closures.

30:05: Droegemeier emphasizes the importance of the human element in storm tracking and prediction. “The key thing is we are dealing with people who have to make decisions. It’s also a human behavioral problem.” The key to preventing death, he adds, is taking a more comprehensive view of the issues.

31:16: “When someone receives a warning, the first thing they do is seek confirmation: they call a neighbor, turn on the TV. They lose time.”

33:30: In 1956, 519 people died in tornados. In 2011, 550 people died. The population has increased, so this is a successful result, but to reduce the death toll even further, Droegemeier insists on the human element.

34:12: “Understanding how people receive, interpret and act on information. Those pieces are very important. I think once we crack the code on that, we’ll see the death toll go down.”

34:53: Droegemeier says “My mantra is zero deaths.” He compares his goals to reduce tornado deaths to the reduction of wind shear accidents in commercial aviation: There were a lot of deaths in the 1970s; but through training, and better technology, there has not been a crash since the mid-80s.

35:48: The big snow storms in Washington D.C. and New York City last January were well-forecasted. “People saw it coming from a long way away.”

37:20: Droegemeier talks about intense storms in Moore, Oklahoma, where he lives.

38:20: “During a tornado, the last place you want to be is in your car, which becomes like a missile.” Despite this, people will flee en masse in cars after hearing the media report tornado warnings.

39:50 Hyperbolic messaging inspires people to flee instead of stay put (which they often should do.)

40:10: “We have to become more sophisticated in our messaging. It’s not a one-size-fits-all audience.”

42:00: Social media is having a more prominent role in weather prediction/messaging. The challenge is that people are now bombarded with multiple sources of information. The National Weather Service is the single authoritative source. Television stations have their own radars, add their interpretations.

43:00: “How do people navigate this tremendous blast of information? Trust is extremely important; most people seek confirmation.”

43:43: Droegemeier says misinformation risks creating upheaval, but he has never (fortunately) seen that happen.

44:25: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

45:05: There are computing facilities in Maryland, and a back up facility in Florida; plus 168 Doppler radar networks (with dual polarization capability; they can detect/distinguish different types of precipitation.)

47:28: Cybersecurity is extremely important for National Weather Service.

48:00: Social scientists at Oklahoma University gather data from Facebook and other social media sources.

49:00: Droegemeier and Ford, when they were on the National Science Board, proposed a National Hurricane Research Initiative. This involved researching hurricanes in a new way; creating a virtual lab; modeling both human behavior and buildings’ reactions.

51:30: The proposal received some Congressional support for a couple of years, but no money was appropriated. That was ten years ago, and the ideas in the report haven’t gone away.

53:03: Hurricanes such as Ivan, Katrina and Rita still have lingering impacts, particularly the economics of closed businesses, lost insurance coverage, etc.

53:40: A lot of building codes just aren’t enforced. A lot of property loss could be prevented.

54:17: Ed Lorenz said that large scale events have greater predictability because the physics driving them is simpler; two dimensional. Forecasting individual clouds/cloud coverage is very difficult.

56:48: Two weeks is the theoretical limit of weather prediction, which we will never be able to surpass.

57:30: Droegemeier foresees the development of a global model for individual thunderstorms in the next 30-40 years.

58:30: Every part of the atmosphere talks to every other part of atmosphere.

58:50: There is a lot of storm energy in the space from the ground up to two or three miles high in the atmosphere, but we don’t have sensors sitting in this area. Drones show promise for getting information.

1:02:39: Droegemeier has personally been very close to tornados, but he has not yet been in a hurricane. He has experienced winds at 120 mph, and been in a situation where his car was totaled.

1:04:30: Studying weather can be comprehensive, involving even humanists: He knows a classics professor studying climate change in Ancient Greek culture/how that affected human health.

1:06:25: The Space program has been valuable in weather forecasting since the 1960s, with the use of satellites. Thunderstorms produce X-rays.

1:08:00: We still have students willing to chase storms and lightning.

1:08:15: Dawn thanks Kelvin for being on the show.

1:09:00: Dawn and Ken sign off.

Episode 12: Dale Bredesen discusses the metabolic factors underlying Alzheimer’s Disease

‘Would you rather remember: the latest episode of Friends, or how to speak?’ asks Dr. Dale Bredesen, a nationally-recognized expert on neurodegenerative diseases.

We don’t have to think about the answer to that question. In fact, we are biologically programmed to preserve speech and forget the television show. But physiological changes occur as we age, which begin to affect our ability to speak, walk, and remember names and faces.

The most extreme and recognizable form of this is Alzheimer’s Disease, which Dr. Bredesen states is the third leading cause of death in the United States. He has come up with a novel therapeutic approach that first investigates the underlying metabolic changes leading to the disease.

Bredesen’s approach, called MEND (metabolic enhancement for neurodegeneration) helped a 65-year-old woman recover her functional memory, after her first physician had written her off as bound to the same demise of her mother, who suffered and died from Alzheimer’s Disease.

Bredesen shares these and other insights in this episode of STEM-Talk, where he and host Dawn Kernagis engage in a rich and thought-provoking conversation about the future of treating neurodegenerative and other diseases.

Bredesen has been on the faculty at UCSF, UCSD. Currently, he divides his time between UCLA and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, of which he is founder and CEO: http://buckinstitute.org/bredesenLab

For a close-up look at Dr. Bredesen’s work, check out his papers in the Journal Aging: http://www.impactaging.com/papers/v6/n9/full/100690.html ; http://www.impactaging.com/papers/v7/n8/full/100801.html.

As well as is his paper on ApoE4 in the Journal Neuroscience: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26791201

00:55: Dawn introduces Dr. Bredesen as a nationally-recognized expert on neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease.

1:17: Ford explains that Bredesen’s research has found that AD stems from an imbalance in nerve cell signaling. In the normal brain, specific signals foster memory making, while balancing signals support memory breaking. In AD, the balance of these opposing signals is disturbed. Nerve connections are suppressed, and memories are lost.

1:47: Dawn adds that Bredesen’s findings, which support the view that AD is a metabolically driven, neurodegenerative process, are contrary to the popular belief that the disease is derived from an accumulation of plaques in the brain.

2:50: Ford reads Mark Riff’s 5-star iTunes review: “Fantastic line-up. And what a wealth of cutting edge information. Just having access to these incredible minds is unbelievable. Can’t wait to see what’s coming up.”

3:15: Dawn describes Bredesen’s background: college at Caltech, medical school at Duke University, Chief resident in neurology at UCSF, where he was also a post-doc in Nobel Laureate Stanley Prusiner’s laboratory.

4:02: Bredesen describes how he got into research, first as an undergrad at CalTech. He went to medical school to understand how diseases affect the brain, and specifically alter learning and memory.

4:47: “The whole molecular neuroscience revolution of the 1980s and 1990s has really offered us the novel tools to understand these diseases,” adding that until now, treating and reversing neurodegenerative diseases like Huntington’s and Lou Gehrig’s has been the greatest area of biomedical failure. “This is exciting time where we are starting to develop therapies.”

5:52: The development of large data sets and systems biology is having a major impact on illnesses. People would formerly spend their whole career on one mechanism, but now we’re realizing disease is multi-factorial.

7:05: AD is a network imbalance that is very analogous to osteoporosis. Signals contribute to osteoblastic activity, which is laying down the bones. Other signals contribute to osteoclastic activity, or taking up the bones. For most of our lives, these signals are “beautifully balanced,” which becomes imbalanced as we age. In AD, similarly, synaptoblastic activity is imbalanced with synaptoclastic activity, which destroys synapses.

9:53: Bredesen talks about the “dozens and dozens of signals that alter the synaptic balance” in AD, including: ApoE4, estradiol, Free T3, Free T4, testosterone, exercise, sleep, melatonin.

10:50: AD for most people is not a disease. It is a programmatic downsizing of the synaptic network. Much like apoptosis, or synaptosis. “Imagine you have a company of 10,000 employees that is essentially headed for the red. APP (beta-amyloid precursor protein) is essentially like your CFO who is looking at all inputs. The first thing you do is shut down hiring. First thing in AD is you do not store new memories.”

12:20: You’ve spent your whole life selecting out the most important knowledge, much as we are actively forgetting things all the time.

12:43: AD is three subtypes: two are programmatic downsizing and one is truly an illness.

13:13: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

16:02: ApoE has turned out to be extremely important, even evolutionarily. When as a species, we transitioned from simians to hominids 5-7 million years ago, an over-representation of inflammatory genes accompanied that change. That is what partly allowed for the transition: We went from being arboreal creatures to roaming the savannah, and fighting with each other/other animals. So we suddenly had to heal wounds and eat microbes in raw meat, which pro-inflammatory genes allowed us to do.

17:30: ApoE4 has conferred certain survival benefits; but it has also increased our risk for AD, cardiovascular disease and is under-represented in centenarians.

19:28: ApoE4 enhances NF-kB and reduces activation of SIRT1.

20:40: ApoE4 helps us during the first forty years of our lives, and if we are living in more challenging, third-world environments. However, later in life, it’s a negative. But it allows you to do well with little food. But bad with too much food.

26:00: With cancer you have tumor suppressor genes and oncogenes; if you have a mutation, you end up with a run-away full forward process of tumor cells.

28:00: Back in 1993, they discovered receptors that respond to withdrawal of trophic support.

30:30: Numerous receptors signal the presence or loss of trophic support.

31:30: APP is an integrating dependence receptor over many of these trophic influences.

32:54: “There is a trophic, anti-trophic balance that is out of balance in people with AD. We can alter this balance in people and make them much, much better.”

33:45: Bredesen describes a 65-year old woman who was having AD symptoms. She consulted Bredesen, who put her on MEND, and three months later, she was back to work, with her memory better than it had been in thirty years.

35:26: You don’t just try to tweak one input, but as many as you can.

36:08: With HIV, it took three drugs to change the landscape of HIV. AD is more complicated.

37:40: This approach works well in all stages, except late stages.

40:10: AD pathophysiology is related to metabolic changes. We start by evaluating the person’s metabolic profile, including: red blood cell magnesium; inorganic and organic mercury status; free and bound testosterone; iodine status. These are things that drive the imbalance.

43:03: People with AD express 10-25 abnormalities; asymptomatic people only express a few.

44:27: Unlike cancer drugs, which often come with side effects, the drugs they are using for these metabolic imbalances in AD first make people feel healthy. The cognitive function follows from the metabolic function.

45:20: AD has been called Type 3 Diabetes.

47:20: For thousands of years we’ve been dealing with small data sets. “But here [with the brain], we are dealing with a very complicated organism. Physicians have had to be intuitive, good guessers.”

48:03: “For 21^st century medicine …. The future is for larger and larger data sets, and less and less guesswork.”

49:13: Why did you get this/what’s driving it metabolically? This is a 21^st century approach to AD. With so many disparate risk factors, this is not a simple situation.

52:00: Contributing factors include insulin resistance; various inflammatory mediators like NF-kB; hormonal imbalance; exposure to toxins like mercury.

55:20: ApoE4 protects against the third group of AD, which is amyloid positive. It strikes younger people. Agraphia (inability to write) anomias (recall names of common objects)—associated with cortical presentations instead of hippocampal presentations.

58:45: Clinical trials deal with one variable. We have to look at multi-variable and personal trials.

1:02:30: The functional medicine movement looks at the biochemical parameters affecting the underlying problem.

1:04:45: In the early 1800s, a doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis was looking at why women were dying after childbirth, at least those whom medical students had delivered. The women using mid-wives did not die. He discovered that it was because medical students were working on cadavers and were transferring something to the women, so they developed hydrochloride approach to preventing this, and the mortality dropped to almost zero. The point is that small overlooked points in medicine can provide big change.

1:7:00: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

1:8:05: 75 million Americans are ApoE positive. We should have a national program to get your genome tested and see if you are ApoE positive. “If we initiated this globally, you could dramatically reduce global burden of dementia.”

1:12:42: Bredesen describes his first spark for studying the brain: I was a freshman at CalTech and read the Machinery of the Brain, and I was hooked.

1:14:00: I wanted to go to medical school and study the big picture of driving what’s happening when you get hit in the head, or Huntington’s disease.

1:14:53: There is a schism between 20^th century medicine, where you ask what the problem is; and 21^st century medicine, where you ask why the problem exists.

1:15:55: The metabolic approach will be the foundation upon which future drug development is based.

1:16:45: Bredesen describes his first aha moment: when he discovered that the receptor that was supposed to be involved in supporting neuronal growth instead induced death.

1:21:25: Bredesen says that over the years, he’s modified his diet, with the help of his wife, an integrative physician, to counter the high simple carb tendency in the American diet.

1:22:22: High stress and little sleep…unquestionably impact AD-related balance.

1:23:44: Dawn thanks Dale.

1:25:07: Dawn and Ken sign off.

Episode 11: Kirk Parsley discusses why good sleep is more important than nutrition and exercise

If we could only sell people on the importance of sleep as successfully as we sell them on the pleasures of sex, we’d have a much healthier—and happier bunch. This is one of sleep expert Kirk Parsley’s messages.

Parsley calls sleep “the greatest elixir,” and places its importance above that of both exercise and nutrition. Yet, this simple physiological need is hard to satisfy in a society that glorifies business and overworking—and loves its electronics, which don’t exactly prepare the body for sleep.

Parsley discusses these and other issues with STEM-Talk host Dawn Kernagis. He talks about how his background as a Navy SEAL led him to a career in medicine, focused on sleep. He also explains why sleep is important—and how you can get more of it.

Parsley served as the Naval Special Warfare’s expert on sleep medicine, and has been a member of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine since 2006. He is also the inventor of the Sleep Cocktail, a supplement designed for the sleep optimization of Navy SEALs: http://www.sleepcocktails.com

A much sought-after sleep expert, this podcast marks Parsley’s 100^th podcast interview. You can find more information on him at his web site: www.docparsley.com. You can find his TED talk at http://tinyurl.com/pw9h7qz

4:10: Dawn welcomes Kirk.

5:00: Kirk joined the Navy SEALs after high school and stayed for nearly seven years. “I quickly realized that was a young, single man’s job, and I was becoming neither.”

6:09: Kirk volunteered at the San Diego Sports Medicine Center to qualify for physical therapy school, but found the field too limited, so he shadowed doctors and decided to pursue medicine.

7:00: He attended the military’s medical school. “They were going to pay me to go to medical school instead of the other way around…”

9:58: The SEALs came to him for medical advice. “The most palatable way for me to talk about it in the military was through sleep. They didn’t really want me talking about testosterone. Adrenal fatigue is sort of a pseudo-scientific term. So inadvertently I became a sleep guy.”

10:40: “I don’t think there’s any area of your life that isn’t significantly impacted by sleep. Good quality sleep is probably the most important elixir there is.” He places it above both nutrition and exercise.

11:35: Sleep is a hard sell, with the advent of factory jobs and the idea that time is money.

13:55: “My message is the more you sleep, the more work you get done.”

14:58: “The big problem with sleep is …. Once you fall asleep until you wake up, you don’t really have any objective experience of that.”

15:50: Polysomnographs reveal that some people wake up 300 times a night, but say they slept fine.

16:13: You don’t need the same amount of sleep every day. Seven and a half hours is the average amount of sleep we aim for to enhance the immune system.

17:05: Kirk compares proper sleep to taking your daily vitamin. “You can’t really tell the true benefits of proper sleep until you’ve done it for a month or so.”

17:40: Wearable tech gadgets such as Fitbit and Jawbone measure how much you move during sleep and equate that with sleep quantity. “The truth is you could stare at your ceiling, never move, and never sleep, and it would say you got this awesome night of sleep.”

19:00: Some devices also measure heart rate variability; others, placed under your pillow or on your nightstand, record your respiratory rate. Some iPhone apps capture snoring.

19:40: Polysomnographs are the gold standard for determining how much somebody sleeps.

20:00: Everyone has a different sleep metric: mood, athletic performance, project completion rate/satisfaction.

21:12: Sleep deprivation leads to anxiety, which is already a big problem for entrepreneurs and other professionals.

21:20: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

22:55: Stage 1 sleep is the decision to get in bed and try to start falling asleep.

23:19: Stage 2 is “pre-sleep”: when you are not quite asleep, but somewhat aware of your environment.

24:10: Stage 3 and 4 sleep is deep sleep. Delta and Theta brainwaves occur. Predominantly the first four hours are deep sleep; the last four hours are REM (rapid eye movement).

24:53: What happens during deep sleep is the opposite of fight or flight. The immune system is at its highest function; you are secreting maximal growth hormones/testosterone. It is the only time the body is repairing itself.

26:00: Some medications and alcohol interfere with deep sleep.

26:55: During REM, you experience the most most vivid dreaming; emotional categorization.

27:20: People who sleep adequately say they dream a lot because they have gotten lots of REM.

28:00: If you wake up during deep sleep, you’re going to feel bad. The adrenals have to ramp up.

29:25: Kirk discusses iPhone apps that measure sleep cycles.

31:00: During sleep, neurotransmitter changes occur in the brain, and a cleansing of the glymphatic system.

32:32: When we are tense, there is a build-up of adenosine; that’s why when we’ve had a hard day, we feel like sleeping. Sleep pressure is driven by adenosine.

33:34: People with intense schedules fall asleep easily because of a lot of sleep pressure: a lot of adrenal hormones are circulating throughout body. As soon as they flush out all of the neurotoxins/adenosine, the adrenal function wakes them up. They often say, “I fall asleep in 30 seconds” as well as, “I sleep for two hours, and I’m wide awake.”

35:24: We are the only animal that sleep deprives ourselves on purpose. The only time other animals don’t sleep is if they are being stalked by a predator or the brain senses famine.

36:42: Chronic sleep deprivation compromises our pre-frontal cortex-executive functioning, which means: our ability to make decisions and solve problems; our reaction time and attention span.

38:00: When the body is sleep-deprived, it is less anabolic; is has to secrete stress hormones to get through the day; that’s why people use stimulants.

39:17: Sleep adaptation studies show that the average person living in the Western industrialized lifestyle settles down at needing 7.5 hours of sleep.

43:05: A genetic variant allows some people to sleep less and not suffer sleep deprivation as badly as the average person.

45:00: “If you were about to have surgery, and while you were reading consent forms, the surgeon has a shot of whiskey, no one would be comfortable with that. If that guys takes a shot every two hours, he’s performing like someone who has been up for 18 hours in a row; and we accept that all the time.”

45:44: We put pilots in air who have been sleep deprived for four nights—especially transcontinental pilots.

49:28: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

50:15: Sleep drugs go after the GABA analogues.

52:45: Sleep drugs on average shorten the time it takes to get to sleep by 15 minutes, and lengthen it by 30 minutes; but they fundamentally damage sleep architecture and damage REM sleep by 80 percent.

53:13: Over the counter drugs such as Benadryl block histamines.

53:34: Alcohol affects stages 3 and 4 sleep and REM.

54:32: Sleep drugs are helpful to get back on track if you are jet lagged or confronted with an emotional trauma. But 69 percent of people taking sleep drugs take them every night.

58:28: Kirk encourages engaging in sleep rituals with the same regularity as you might stick to a workout schedule.

1:00:24: Improve your sleep by decreasing stimulation to the brain an hour before bed by doing yoga, meditation, reading.

1:04:20: Melatonin is major hormone involved with sleep. Most people take way too much, decreasing their brain’s sensitivity to melatonin. From the time the sun goes down, your brain will only produce between 3 and 6 micrograms of melatonin.

1:08:18: Kirks discusses the link between sleep deprivation and depression.

1:09:00: Kirk discusses his sleep supplement. It can cross blood brain barrier. It’s low-dose, for sleep initiation. It’s meant to compensate for whatever is sub-optimal about sleep habits.

1:11:19: Mentions web site: www.docparsley.com where you can see other podcasts, read blogs, find more information. Web site is being re-launched: Will have new blog.

1:12:15: His sleep drug, sleep cocktail, will be renamed because a lot of people think it’s an alcoholic drink.

1:13:43: Dawn thanks Kirk.

1:14:09: STEM-Talk’s “double secret selection committee” may invite Kirk back for a second interview as there is much more to discuss.

1:14:23: Dawn and Ken mention that Dr. Parsley will be visiting IHMC and giving a public lecture in the Evening Lecture Series.

1:14:29: Dawn and Ken thank the audience for terrific support during the launch of STEM-Talk and mention that STEM-Talk was immediately featured in iTunes’ New and Noteworthy category and was actually in the top position at one point.  It has pretty consistently been #1 in both the Science & Medicine and Natural Sciences categories.

1:15:02: Dawn invites the audience to visit the the STEM-Talk webpage where one can find the show notes for this episode and all others.

1:15:10: Dawn and Ken sign off.

Episode 10: Barry Barish discusses gravitational waves, LIGO, and the scientists who made it happen

In many respects, Barry Barish is the quintessential scientist: soft-spoken and modest, he is also completely dedicated to the pursuit of pure science. Barish is currently the Linde professor of physics at Caltech. He’s a leading expert on gravitational waves, and his leadership and advocacy to the National Science Foundation about the need for LIGO (laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory) played a key role in convincing the NSF to fund it. Barish was the principal investigator of LIGO in 1994, before becoming its director in 1997.

The pay-off of Barish’s effort and the NSF decision was huge: Last February, Barish and other scientists announced to the world that they had detected gravitational waves four months before, marking the first ever direct detection since Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916. The proof came via a chirping sound—played below in this interview—which was the sound-wave translation of the merger of two black holes more than a billion light years away.

Barish talks to STEM-Talk host Dawn Kernagis and co-host and IHMC Director Ken Ford about the history of Einstein’s theory and the science that later ensued to set up this significant discovery. He also talks about the scientists who made it happen.

Barish gave an IHMC lecture in 2009 entitled “Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony: Sounds from the Distant Universe”

Here is a link to the LIGO press conference on the gravitational waves detection: https://cds.cern.ch/record/2131411

1:36: Audio of “the chirp” signaling the detection of a gravity wave emanating from two black holes merging one billion light years away.

2:57: Ford reads a five-star iTunes review from CCPABC: “Love the science-based discussions, which also includes the interviewers, who also know and understand science, a rarity amongst podcast hosts. Love the funny comments along the way. For example, “Stay curious my friends.” And “Walk into a Walmart to see epigenetics at work.” Outlines (show notes) are also helpful for those of us who want to listen to specific sections again for better understanding.”

3:37: Dawn recaps Barish’s career, calling him a “leading light in several areas of physics.”

4:04: In October 2002, Barish was nominated by President George W. Bush to serve on the National Science Board of the NSF. Ford was also on the board. “We immediately connected and worked on the NSB for six years,” Ford said.

5:15: Barish discusses his upbringing and initial interest in science. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, to parents who had not gone to college, Barish said, “I was probably a scientist before I knew it.” The first science question he asked his father was why ice cubes float on water. His father’s answer didn’t satisfy him. “His answers never satisfied me, which I think is kind of the scientific mind.”

6:36: Ford, Kernagis and Barish recall one of their first scientific questions on why the sky is blue.

7:20: Barish grew up around Hollywood, California. “The furthest horizon I could see was Caltech, and that is where I thought I would go to college.” He went to Berkeley instead because he could start mid-year there, and he immediately fell in love with it — and a young girl.

8:55: Barish started as an engineering student, but he liked neither his surveying course nor his engineering drafting course. “By default, I ended up in physics. It’s where I belonged because physics has been great for me.”

11:15: In 1905, Einstein discovered: E=mc^2; and the theory of special relativity: “These solved some long-standing problems in physics in no time at all.”

11:42: In 1915, Einstein came up with the theory of general relativity, which was an extension of the theory of special relativity that added accelerations instead of just velocities.

13:30: In Newton’s theory of gravity, there’s instantaneous action at a distance: When the apple falls, you see it immediately. When something happens in space (a star collapses), it takes light years for the information to get to us. The concept of instantaneous action and distance doesn’t really work for gravity at long distances and Einstein probably realized that.

14:10: In early 1916, Einstein realized in analogy to the theory of electromagnetism, that there would be gravitational waves, but he didn’t prove it very well. He did it by analogy instead of fundamental proof.

14:45: In 1920-21, a British physicist went to the Southern hemisphere and saw a phenomenon that wouldn’t happen in Newton’s theory of gravity, but did in Einstein’s: He had predicted the bending of light: eclipse of sun and as stars went behind the sun their light bent at exactly the amount that Einstein had predicted. “That’s actually what made Einstein a household name.”

15:20: Einstein predicted gravitational waves as a concept, but thought they were too small to ever detect. “Of course that’s because one hundred years ago, he couldn’t envision the types of technologies we would develop.”

16:06: In 1960, Joseph Weber, a student of John Wheeler’s at Princeton decided to look for gravitational waves, using a very clever technique: He made a big cylinder of aluminum, of a diameter equal to his own height and two-three meters long, and if you banged it with a hammer, it rang at some frequency. If a gravitational wave came through, it would ring. “He’s responsible in a very positive way, for starting this field.”

17:10: That student, who turned out to be a “good technologist, but a lousy scientist,” Barish said, wrote a paper touting his own discovery of gravitational waves, which was shot down. “He was bitter that people didn’t believe that he saw gravitational waves, yet he was the one who started the field.”

17:55: A gravitational wave, if it goes through you, stretches you in one direction, and squashes you in another. “It’s like one of these mirrors in an amusement park, where you get taller and thinner if you look at one, and shorter and fatter if you look at the next one. So you get taller and shorter, thinner and fatter at the frequency of a gravitational wave.”

18:25: Barish discusses the creation of interferometers. There are two: in Hanford, Washington (near a Dept of Energy site), and in a pine forest of Louisiana.

20:53: They proposed a final decision to the NSF in 1994. It was the biggest thing at that time that the NSF had ever considered taking on.

21:08: Barish says they made a technical mistake in calling it LIGO, which stands for laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory. The word ‘observatory’ is not a physics word. It is word used by astronomers for their telescopes, and the astronomers thought it was a crazy project.

22:09: “In order to try to find something new, you pretty well have to do something that’s risky, and pushes the technology and pushes the ideas that you have, and oftentimes it doesn’t work. So taking on high-risk, high pay-off projects is something the NSF uniquely does.”

22:30: “Increasingly high-risk projects are getting harder to support. I’m not sure what we got approved in 1994 would get approved by today’s NSF.”

23:00: Ford, referring to the period when Advanced LIGO was under review by the National Science Board, said, “At the time, I was chairing committee on programs and plans (CPP), and certainly I got an earful about why it was a dreadful idea.”

23:50: Barish commends the NSF for taking on a very expensive, high-risk project—and staying with it for 22 years— despite the fact that it had had a certain amount of controversy, and “especially despite the fact that we had not much to show for all those years.”

24:13: The total cost of LIGO was 1.2 billion dollars.

24:36: Barish talks about the major players in getting LIGO up and running: Princeton’s John Wheeler, the father of the general relativity field after Einstein’s generation, and his student Kip Thorne.

26:45: A robust R&D effort started in Europe. At MIT, Ray Weiss assigned his students the idea of doing interferometry.

29:00: Ron Drever from Scotland was brought to Caltech to work on gravitational waves experimentally. MIT and Caltech worked on them together, but Ray was analytical, Drever was intuitive, and they didn’t get along.

30:23: By 1990, a proposal was turned into the NSF, which stimulated the NSF to ask lots of questions.

30:50: The original idea was that the two interferometers would be near the Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California; and in southern Maine. The NSF said that there should be a national competition to decide the respective locations, which as a result, ended up being Washington state and Louisiana.

32:40: “The plan was to make it evolutionary: Build the infrastructure to be flexible enough that we could keep evolving the interferometers as we learned how to do the technology.” That was not the way projects had been done before.

34:37: At a certain point, Barish says that the project got in trouble…it was being done by scientists alone in labs who didn’t get along that well together.

35:20: The NSF was right on the verge of canceling the project when the super collider was canceled by Congress in October of 1993, and around Christmastime, the head of Caltech’s physics department and its president asked Barish to take it over. Within a year, he had hired a lot of good people who were available from the demise of the super collider.

37:00: In 1994 Kip Thorne and Barish testified before the NSF, which is normally done by project managers. The NSF approved LIGO.

37:37: “Continuing with a very strong R&D program through the years has been key to its success. We didn’t over-spend, we met time scale goals. Even though we hadn’t yet made any good science, we managed to satisfy all the goal posts …. They never lost confidence in us.”

38:28: Ford says the detection of gravity waves is a wonderful story: “from Einstein’s initial discovery to the long march of scientists standing on each others’ shoulders…. All of this was for no commercial, military or geopolitical purpose. It was just to know, driven by human curiosity.”

39:08: Barish says, “It’s really emblematic of what the NSF should be about, and of what pure science should be.”

40:09: Barish says we’ve heard the first “beat” or chirp in “Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony” (referring to the title of his IHMC lecture.)

42:22: “Everything we know about our universe comes from the electromagnetic spectrum: looking at visible light, infrared, ultraviolet, x-rays. What we know about the universe has grown tremendously as we move beyond just the optical spectrum.”

43:19: However, all phenomena don’t emit light…black holes don’t emit light. “The two objects we saw were about thirty times the mass of our sun, and about the size of Los Angeles greater area.”

44:20: “It’s going to take years to make more sensitive detectors…both in terms of the future of astronomy/astrophysics and the future of studying the most fundamental things in physics itself…all of this just has a really bright future.”

45:00: Interferometers need to be in extremely quiet environments. But in the Washington location, there were wind generators 10-15 miles away that shook the earth. In LA, huge pipes carried oil from Southern states to Northern states, and they could “hear” the rumbling below.

46:16: “We start with an environment that’s pretty quiet, and then we have to isolate ourselves from everything that’s noisy…but no matter how much we work at it the earth below us shakes at low frequencies, and we have to minimize that.” To do that, they created “a very fancy set of shock absorbers.”

48:24: Barish talks about the international linear collider. “I’m perennially a graduate student; I’m most excited when I’m learning something new.”

52:35: Barish talks about how he pulled together the best physicists from around the world to work on the international linear collider.

55:20: When talking about the likelihood of the international linear collider actually being constructed, Barish said that if it were to be built, that it would probably be in Japan and that the current situation is that the Japanese government has been conducting “super due diligence.”

56:33: Barish discusses being a junior science working with Friedman, Kendall and Taylor (SLAC physicists who won the Nobel Prize for investigations on the deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons). Barish turned down the opportunity to work with them on the project well before their award-winning work.

58:15: Barish talks about his lifelong love of storytelling and fiction.

1:00:46: Dawn thanks Barish for the interview.

1:01:15: Dawn and Ken wrap about the interview. Ford says, “LIGO is a story of courage, curiosity, and intellectual audacity that will be noteworthy for a very long time.”

1:02:10: Dawn and Ken sign off.

 

Episode 9: Rusty Schweickart discusses asteroids and planetary defense

Rusty Schweickart remembers when getting a man on the moon was at the top of the national agenda. JFK’s single minded decision to do that, according to Schweickart, “was perhaps the gutsiest, goal-setting episode in human history.”

And Schweickart was part of that—as the pilot of the first manned test of the lunar module, the lander portion of the spacecraft– during the Apollo 9 Mission in 1969. Schweickart also performed the first space-based test of the portable life support system and spacesuit that was used by the Apollo astronauts who walked on the Moon.

He was later the backup commander of the first Skylab mission in 1973, the first U.S. orbital space station. He served as Director of User Affairs at NASA’s Office of Applications, transferring NASA technology to the private sector. Most recently, he co-founded the B612 Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to defending the earth from an asteroid impact.

In this episode, Schweickart talks with veteran astronaut Tom Jones, also an IHMC senior scientist, about the potential threat of asteroids, the value of space-based asteroid-finding telescopes; and his contributions to getting the U.S. to the Moon in 1969.

Jones and Schweickart also discuss the importance of conveying the hazard posed by asteroids to the general public. The second annual “Asteroid Day” is on June 30^th. For more information: http://asteroidday.org. For more specific information about asteroid hazards, check out: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/groups.html

You can find more information on Rusty at his Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty_Schweickart

Schweickart has given several lectures, including his IHMC lecture, “Deflecting an Asteroid:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VU5R-x24Wc.

1:18: Schweickart and Jones are both experts in planetary defense against asteroids. When IHMC Director (and STEM-talk co-host) Ken Ford chaired the NASA Advisory Council, Schweickart and Jones co-chaired a council task force for planetary defense. Schweickart also co-founded the B612 foundation, dedicated to the discovery and deflection of asteroids.

2:00: Ford and Jones served as strategic advisors to the B612 Foundation, and its current CEO, former astronaut Ed Lu, will later be interviewed on STEM-Talk.

2:18: Ford said the “sky is falling” syndrome may explain why this issue is not a political or public priority. It’s hard to get political leaders very excited about a potentially cataclysmic event that is certain to happen in the long run, but very unlikely in any given year.

3:23: Ford reads a 5-star iTunes review of STEM-Talk from “Ian”: “I liked the personal aspects of the interviews, and the science is explained at a good level: easy to follow, but not dumbed down.”

3:58: Schweickart talks about the Chelyabinsk asteroid that fell over Russia on Feb. 15, 2013. “It was a pretty good wakeup call. The official attention was relatively narrow and off-base, but the reality is that we have a lot of material now; in addition to that, there’s been some very good analysis showing that we learned a lot from the Chelyabinsk impact.”

6:00: Schweickart discusses the B612 Foundation’s Sentinel Mission, which will be an infrared space telescope orbiting the Sun interior to the orbit of Earth for the purpose of mapping the trajectories of asteroids that may pose a future danger to Earth. “Fundraising for a space telescope has never been done before; it’s a pioneering effort that we got involved in, principally because NASA had not been doing much. We took it on as a private initiative since the government seemed to be lagging a bit.”

8:27: Schweickart explains the importance of space-based telescopes. “Infrared is a very important aspect of these space telescopes that are being proposed. In space, an infrared sensor gives you an advantage. An asteroid is a hot object; it therefore glows in the infrared; the rest of the sky is extremely cold, so you are able to see objects shine very brightly.”

10:45: Schweickart talks about having a telescope between Venus and Earth. It’s a great perch for viewing near-Earth asteroids, but “The price you pay is that you end up very far from earth, and your communication problems/challenges are considerably greater than if you were one million miles from the earth.”

12:40: Schweickart says the NASA NEOCam (near-earth object camera) telescope and the Sentinel Space Telescope would both be a great addition to the overall asteroid armamentarium.

13:40: Smaller objects can only be seen from Earth when they are very close to whatever telescope you are using to look for them.

14:12: “There are about a million city-killer-sized asteroids in the inner solar system, and we’ve found about one percent or less of those. If you go down to the Chelyabinsk impactor size, there are about 10 million of those. We’ve found less than a tenth of one percent of those.”

14:43: “We’ve found a lot of objects that hit the earth every fifty years or so [statistically speaking], and we’d like to find those ahead of time.”

15:15: Schweickart says of the Sentinel Space Telescope: “We’ve calculated that in about ten years, we will find about a quarter of the 20-meter (asteroid) population; and 81% of the city-killer population (40-meter objects).”

16:33: “If you can take something the size of 300 Hiroshima bombs and prevent it from hitting…that’s really the goal. On the other hand, if you can get even a last-minute, hurricane-type warning (2-3 days, a week), even if you can’t prevent it from hitting, you could evacuate a local area, and save a lot of lives.”

17:50: Schweickart talks about the NASA-funded ATLAS (asteroid impact early warning system), following the 2008 entry of an asteroid over Sudan, which was discovered in space 19 hours before it struck Earth.

19:43: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

20:02: Jones talks about being an astronaut: “To me, there’s an inescapable education that you get when you’re an astronaut. You can’t help but look down at the earth and see impact scars from past asteroid impacts: both small and large. You look up at the moon from earth orbit and the moon looks very crisp and clear, and it’s of course scarred by thousands and thousands of craters, covering one upon the other.” The goal of planetary protection naturally falls out of this vivid  experience.

21:20: Schweickart says an asteroid impact is the only natural disaster we can potentially prevent. A sizeable asteroid hitting earth might happen only once in a person’s lifetime, and might fall unseen into  the ocean. Yet this largely unseen hazard is real. “If we can use space technology to find these things, to predict an impact and to actually prevent an impact, you’ve gotta do it. That’s a slam dunk.”

23:10: ‘JFK’s goal of getting a man to the moon and back safely by the end of the decade…was perhaps the gutsiest, goal-setting episode in human history.”

24:00: Apollo 9 tested all of the key technologies needed for a lunar landing on the first flight of the lunar module. It also marked the first time the new Apollo space suit was used outside a spacecraft.

27:24: “You spend day after day, and week after week, simulating the things that you are going to do, and in particular, the critical things. In simulations, one thing after another is failing, and you are still trying to get back alive. You get a lot of confidence. The actual flight was much easier.”

29:01: Schweickart recalls testing the Hamilton Standard space suit for Apollo, which he says was far more flexible than previous versions used in the early spacewalks of the Gemini program.

29:40: “Being outside the spacecraft, that’s a real privilege. That’s when the view of the earth comes through to you; this incredibly beautiful planet that we live on; the atmosphere that forms that thin, iridescent blue band that separates this planet we live on from the blackness of space. You come to appreciate ‘mama.’”

30:41: In the mid to late 90s, NASA initiated its program in astrobiology.

31:45: “As soon as you start looking at the origins and history of life on earth, you cannot avoid [considering the effects of] past asteroid and comet impacts on the earth.”

33:35: Schweickart says the next year or so will be a very important time for funding telescopes that are critical to discovering asteroids that might threaten earth. The general public needs to support this issue.

34:20: The Asteroid Day Declaration calls on governments and space agencies of the world to launch an infrared space telescope so we can discover asteroids more rapidly.

34:55: We need to discover asteroids at a rate one hundred times higher than the pace at which we have been discovering them to date. On Asteroid Day, we are asking millions of people involved, to go onto the website, AsteroidDay.org, to sign the Declaration.

36:13: A valuable part of the last planetary defense conference in 2015 was to conduct an Asteroid Impact response exercise.

37:34: Jones said, “One of the biggest problems we face is human nature. How do we get people to plan early to respond to a future and very rare catastrophe so that we have an effective response when the time comes? I think the lessons [from this last exercise] were taken to heart.”

38:45: Schweickart said at that same conference, “national self-interest began to creep in and got in the way of cooperation.” Public confusion about an asteroid impact was also apparent.

42:04: You don’t know precisely where it’s going to hit until very late in the game.

43:40: If we decide to deflect an asteroid, the implications of that effort will affect many countries directly by changing the path of possible future impact points.

44:24: The UN is now on board to take this issue on as a geopolitical challenge.

45:45: The Association of Space Explorers played a key role in advancing UN discussions by commissioning a group of experts to make recommendations for cooperation on the asteroid hazard.

47:30: “For the first time, we are seeing a critical role for the general population to really speak out and insist that we take responsibility for the future of life here on earth.”

48:00: There are two good sources of public information on asteroids: at NASA, neo.jpl.nasa.org (about asteroid hazards); asteroidday.org for information on asteroid day, which is June 30^th.

48:34:  Tom Jones thanks Rusty Schweickart and signs off.

48:43:  STEM-Talk host Dawn Kernagis and co-host Ken Ford briefly discuss episode and invite listeners to visit the STEM-Talk webpage:  stemtalk.us

49:10: Dawn Kernagis and Ken Ford sign off.

Episode 8: Greg Smith discusses the herpes virus

Roughly 80 percent of the U.S. population is infected with the herpes virus. While the virus is very easy to get, it remains dormant in many people, who never even know they have it. This is partly because it effectively evades the immune system, taking up refuge in the central nervous system.

Dr. Greg Smith is a herpes expert. He is a professor in the microbiology-immunology department at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. After obtaining his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, Smith did a post-doc at Princeton University.

His research on herpes looks at novel targets for antivirals and engineering recombinant viral particles as effective gene delivery vehicles.

In this episode, Smith talks with STEM-Talk host Dawn Kernagis about his educational and research path to becoming a herpes expert. He also touches on polio as an example of an earlier virus that was largely defeated, and how that was different than herpes. Finally, Smith touches on the development of viral vectors and vaccines to win against the more severe forms of herpes that some people are genetically predisposed to get.

For a list of Smith’s publications, check out his bio page at web site of Northwestern University: http://tinyurl.com/jl6jsam

:47: Smith’s lab studies the molecular mechanisms that propagate and are responsible for the spreading of Herpes.

2:47: Ken Ford reads 5-star iTunes review of STEM-Talk, from “I prefer DOS IHMC”: ‘Fantastic lineup and well-assembled, informative conversations on fascinating topics. Keep ‘em coming.”

4:18: Smith’s interest in research began in elementary school, when his father bought him an Apple II computer for Christmas—and told him to program his own games. Programming “really helped me think in a logical, progressive way,” Smith said.

5:46: In college, Smith discovered that “molecular biology was a way to get at the programming that underlies life.”

6:12: In graduate school, Smith studied microbes, which he describes as “essentially the best human biologists; if you study them, you are studying yourself.”

7:56: Smith was not interested in viruses initially because they seemed like simple entities. He didn’t want to study just one protein.

8:56: Smith worked with Lynn Enquist at Princeton University, a “bacteriologist-big thinker,” Smith says, who got him thinking: “How do larger, more complex viruses get into our nervous system? That got me started on the path that I’m still on today.”

9:16: Viruses are extremely diverse entities in biology; they are more diverse than the rest of life put together. Any organism is infected by many viruses, which are “small nanomachines that are genetically derived.”

10:43: Smith describes what a virus looks like: a shell made up of a thin layer of protein.

12:00: Smith wanted to study something with a lot of diversity/complexity. With that comes very interesting biology. All viruses have two things in mind: They want to make more copies of themselves, and they want to disseminate those copies all over place. Herpes, because of its larger genetic content and physical size, allows it to do a lot of interesting things to achieve those goals.

13:00: Polio is a small neuro-invasive virus. You ingest it and it replicates in your gut. It can get into your blood, and nerves/spinal chord. This can cause polio myelitis, which was rampant in the 1950s.

14:18: Herpes is evolved to get into nervous system. That is how it survives. It’s extremely good at it.

15:00: Most people know about herpes simplex virus type 1, or HSV-1, which causes cold sores. But it actually goes into the central nerve system (CNS) and sets up shop. It does not express proteins, so essentially lies dormant there. “The immune system doesn’t know it’s there. So now you’ve got it there for the rest of your life.”

17:25: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

18:28: Smith answers the question about how the herpes virus gets into the CNS: “The answer here is two-fold: From the virus side, what kind of machinery evolved to allow to achieve that end? From our side, our body’s side, how is it we are protecting our nervous system so that things like this don’t usually happen?”

18:56: Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, our bodies are pretty good at keeping polio at bay. Most people would only get an upset stomach from polio. Most viruses are low-frequency, sporadic things.

20:25: The herpes virus has figured out how to get around all of these barriers—reliably and efficiently.

22:04: The herpes virus has evolved with a big capacity to travel long distances within the body. Smith describes it as “walking from L.A. to New York in a straight line…it travels a very long distance down the nerve fiber to find a neuron deep inside your head.”

23:04: Basically a herpes virus is like a marathon runner. It can’t get lost or stop along the way.

26:52: The best outcome for the virus is for it to effectively go to sleep, so your immune system won’t see that it’s there; and won’t try to remove it. Then it’s established, and you’re carrying it for life.

28:58: Bacteria in our gut is being infected by other viruses, called phages. The complexity of the biology of all this is really astounding, when you look at the bigger picture.

29:19: Dawn comments: “We’re not just human. We seem to be these walking ecosystems.”

29:25: The microbiome would be “one of biggest organs in our body,” Smith said.

30:03: Some people argue that herpes should not be considered pathogenic; but symbiotic. “Nowhere near that many people experience cold sores.” Most people infected don’t exhibit symptomology. But it does replicate in the neurons. “Is this really a pathogen because it doesn’t cause disease most of the time?”

31:56: Chicken pox is also a neuro-invasive herpes virus.

33:11: Herpes simplex virus type I is leading cause of infectious blindness in the U.S. and developing world. On occasion, it will spread from the peripheral nervous system into the central nervous system, and when it does that, the outcome/prognosis is very poor.

34:36: Cold sores are the most common disease manifestation of herpes that you can get. Other complications include: the virus transmitting into the eye and causing loss of vision. Or in the brain, causing encephalitis.

35:34: Herpes type 2 causes genital lesions, which are contagious like cold sores. If a mother giving birth has an active infection, she can transmit the virus to the child, who doesn’t have a developed immune system. C-sections minimize the risk of transmitting the infection.

38:39: Whether or not a person expresses the virus may depend on the genetic background of an individual. You might have a deficiency that doesn’t allow you to mount a good immune response to certain conditions.

39:40: Smith mentions work of Jean-Laurent Casanova at Rockefeller University in New York, who is heading a large project with contributions from several groups. Their research is on children in whom the virus has gone to the brain, which is the most severe form of the infection. Deficient in both copies of gene, so they can’t make the Toll-like receptor-3 protein at all.

43:52: Casanova found that the kids who were deficient in TLR3 were otherwise healthy, which makes some think that the TLR-3 mechanism might have co-evolved with herpes to protect us.

45:00: It turns out the family tree of viruses is consistent with the family tree of mammals. Every species has its own variants of these viruses.

46:07: We are not gong to win this battle by nature alone. Our bodies are not going to develop a way to protect us from the herpes virus. There is no evolutionary path to that end. The viruses are all moving faster than we are.

49:52: Developing viral vectors to deliver genetic information that is beneficial is one long-term application of these studies. And coming up with vaccines.

51:09: If you can make the virus replicate out at the body’s surface, and never get into the nervous system, your immune system will attack and adapt, but the virus won’t be able to hide in the CNS.

52:42: “Reactivation” in the herpes virus can be caused by stress; for example, virus-associated cold sores often show up during times of stress.

55:50: The science of all this is really from the collective enterprise of the researchers. Annually we meet on this specific topic. This is where initial breakthroughs occur…. Where you start putting these puzzle pieces together.

57:53: These viruses will produce these particles, which transmit the virus from cell to cell or person to person. These particles make up a complex machine. It touches a cell, something is triggered, and you get a series of events.

59:40: We’re just starting to understand the nanomachine machine. Every time we understand something, it’s like a wow moment.

1:00:08: Dawn thanks Smith.

1:00:35: Ford caps the interview: “Herpes must be among the more amazing infections; its ability to move about, evade the immune system, and survive in a quiescent but persistent form seems remarkable—and frankly, somewhat worrisome.”

Episode 7: Mark Mattson talks about benefits of intermittent fasting

Intermittent fasting—alternating days in which you fast or eat only a few hundred calories a day—may have significant long-term health benefits, according to some researchers.

Mark Mattson is a leading expert on intermittent fasting, and one of its proponents on a personal level as well. As a neurosciences professor at Johns Hopkins University, and chief of the laboratory of neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging (NIA), Mattson is particularly interested in how fasting can improve cognitive function and reduce the risk of neurodegenerative diseases.

Intermittent fasting might play a role in preventing or postponing neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s, which fifty percent of Americans living into their eighties are predicted to get.

In this episode, Mattson talks with IHMC Director Ken Ford and IHMC visiting research scientist Dominic D’Agostino about the benefits of fasting and the physiological mechanisms behind those benefits.

Mattson is a prolific scientific researcher, and you can find links to some of his work at Mattson ARR 2015 ; Mattson Cell Metabolism 2012 ; and Mattson Sci Amer 2015.

Mattson recently delivered an excellent lecture at IHMC on intermittent fasting and optimizing cognitive performance: http://tinyurl.com/zc2xxhc. You can also find his TED talk at http://tinyurl.com/nt24z5p.

For more information on Mattson’s career and research, check out his Wikipedia page: http://tinyurl.com/gmpd3we

1:30: Ford says, “Intermittent fasting has become very popular and Mark Mattson is, in our view, the premier authority on this matter.”

2:30: Ford reads iTunes five-star review from “Carl”: “Really smart, really interesting people being interviewed by the same. IHMC is a fascinating place, and attracts like-minded people.”

3:57: Mattson’s interest in science began in ninth grade, when he wrote an essay on cryopreservation.

4:29: He got interested in aging during his Ph.D., while studying developmental neurobiology and cell death.

6:37: Mattson spent eleven years at the University of Kentucky at the Sanders Brown Center on Aging.

7:20: Mattson explains the basic rationale behind intermittent fasting: If you challenge yourself/cells bio-energetically through exercise or fasting, nerve cells respond adaptively—and pathways are activated that increase neuronal resistance to stress and age-related neurodegenerative disorders.

8:10: Mattson conducted studies in which he subjected animals to alternative day fasting, with a 10-25 percent calorie-restricted diet on the days in which they ate. “If you repeat that when animals are young, they live 30 percent longer.” The animals’ nerve cells were more resistant to degeneration.

10:10: Mattson explains the “5:2” study: There were one hundred women in two groups: one group ate 25 percent fewer calories daily; the other group ate only 500 calories/day for two days.

10:57: The take-home message: “Women on the 5:2 diet lost more body fat, retained more lean muscle mass, and had an improvement in glucose regulation. This is consistent with what we know about fasting in terms of general energy metabolism.”

12:08: Fasting for 12 or more hours causes fatty acids to go into the blood stream/liver and are converted into ketones, which are a good alternative energy source for cells.

13:00: Mattson describes how fasting may benefit the brain.

14:20: Mattson talks about three types of fasting regimens: the 5:2 diet; alternate day fasting (500-600 calories on “fasting” days); and time-restricted feeding, where you limit time window that you take in calories to six to eight hours.

16:58: Mattson explains the following dietary “myths”: breakfast is the most important meal of the day; it’s necessary to eat three meals a day; it’s healthier to eat mini meals throughout the day than one or two big meals. “Largely this isn’t based on any good science that we can find.”

17:44: Fasting can elevate ketones to high levels—even those higher than are typically induced on a ketogenic diet.

19:34: Ketogenic diets are still used in some patients with epilepsy, and they work.

20:36: Mattson and others have found that both exercise and fasting increase levels of BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor) in the brain.

20:42: We think BDNF is a key mediator of the anti-depressant effects of exercise as well as the most commonly used anti-depressant drugs. Beta-hydroxybutyrate increases BDNF production, which is also important for learning and memory; and neurogenesis.

22:09: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

23:00: There is interest in doing controlled clinical trials to test the efficacy of exogenous ketones to enhance brain health. Also, some ongoing trials are looking at the effect of coconut oils and branch chain amino acids on Alzheimer’s Disease.

23:55: There’s been no drug effective in slowing down the disease process in Alzheimer’s Disease.

24:15: With age-related diseases, the biggest impact will be on risk reduction: identifying what people can do in mid-life to reduce the risk of getting these diseases when they get into their seventies and eighties.

25:18: Data now show that if you live to your eighties, you almost have a 50 percent risk of getting Alzheimer’s Disease before you die.

25:42: Studies show that exercise and ketones benefit Parkinson’s Disease patients.

26:47:  Ford discusses a recent study that shows that autophagy is a critical regulator of stem-cell fate, with implications for fostering muscle regeneration in sarcopenia. Autophagy typically declines with age and this may cause stem cells to lose their “steminess” and become senescent. Both intermittent fasting and ketosis increase autophagy …  asks Mattson if this might this account for some of the common benefit sometimes seen in both strategies?  Mattson concurs.

27:36: During the bio-energetic challenge of exercising or fasting, autophagy is increased; in part by inhibiting mTOR. Cells go into a protective mode, reducing overall protein synthesis, and at the same time, improving their ability to remove “molecular garbage.”

28:55: The cells’ recovery period is important for increased protein synthesis, and the growth of muscle cells, dendrites and new synapses. All this could be preventive for sarcopenia.

30:00: Mattson says that it is possible to gain muscle during intermittent fasting, which does not necessarily mean caloric restriction.

31:07: There is quite a bit of evidence that high protein intake is not good for aging.

33:04: Mattson himself practices time-restricted feeding. For four to five days a week, he doesn’t eat breakfast or lunch. Then he will eat after working out and in the evening. “I think I’m more productive this way.” Following this regimen, he has also maintained the same body weight for thirty years.

34:12:  D’Agostino, Mattson and Ford discuss training while fasted.

36:22: “There’s no really solid scientific basis that would support a claim that three meals a day is the healthiest approach.” In fact, it’s very unusual from an evolutionary perspective.

37:00: Mattson’s diet includes fruits, veggies, nuts, fish, yogurt, whole grains, and beans. “At least half my calories are from complex carbohydrates.”

37:48: Exercise changes nerve cell circuits involved in cognition. Antidepressant drugs have a similar effect.

41:13: Plato wrote that he did some of his best thinking while fasting. Upton Sinclair wrote “A Fasting Cure,” and even Mark Twain touted the benefits of fasting.

41:41: “You are able to think more clearly in a fasted state; and you begin to contemplate things that you wouldn’t normally think about if you were in a more satisfied energetic state.”

43:26: The impetus for eating mini meals came from working with diabetes patients. The thinking was, ‘It’s important to avoid big spikes in glucose.’ But evidence shows fasting is better than mini meals for regulating insulin sensitivity.

45:10: Within about one month, people adjust to a fasting diet.

49:45:  Discussion of possible benefits of intermittent activation of mTOR as opposed to chronic low mTOR or continually activated mTOR.

51:45: Mattson explains his role at the NIA as chief of the laboratory of neurosciences. The organization of research at each institute is divided into labs, which are roughly equivalent to departments at a university.

53:15: Most cancer cells rely on glucose and are not able to metabolize ketones. Intermittent fasting and/or ketogenic diets, sometimes in combination with chemotherapy, may slow or stop tumor growth—and perhaps even protect normal cells.

54:56:   Ford and D’Agostino thank Mattson for a great interview.

55:10:   Kernagis and Ford discuss interview and wrap-up show.

 

Episode 6: Michael Turner discusses LIGO & the detection of gravitational waves

Michael Turner is best known for having coined the term “dark energy” in 1998. A theoretical cosmologist at the University of Chicago, Turner has dedicated his career to researching the Big Bang, dark energy and dark matter.

He wrote his Ph.D. thesis on gravitational waves—back in 1978—and nearly four decades later—had a bird’s eye view of their recent detection. Turner was assistant director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), which funded the development of LIGO, which stands for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.

This large-scale physics experiment and observatory, which was led by researchers at MIT and CalTech, discovered, on September 15^th, 2015, the existence of gravitational waves via a chirping noise signaling the merger of two black holes over a billion light-years away. The scientists announced their discovery on February 11^th, 2016.

In this episode, Turner interprets this momentous finding, and talks about some of the big player scientists who worked on LIGO. And some of the behind the scenes activities involved in a “big science” project such as LIGO.

Talking with STEM-Talk host Dawn Kernagis, Turner also shares his early development as a scientist and an important mentorship that shaped his career.

Turner has been a popular presence at IHMC as a guest lecturer. His IHMC talks have over 20,000 YouTube views. https://youtu.be/-rVBLwKuDXA

He is also co-author, with Edward Kolb, of The Early Universe:

1:18: IHMC CEO Ken Ford explains what gravitational waves are.

4:29: Five-star reviews of STEM-Talk on iTunes are starting to roll in. Ken Ford reads one from ‘Bobalapoet’: “The individuals interviewed are articulate, knowledgeable and able to clearly convey information about their fields. The interviewers and the institute are to be congratulated for putting this series together for my and others’ enjoyment.”

6:18: Turner talks about his childhood interest in science. “I was always a curious kid,” he said. He tinkered with electronics and became a ham radio operator, talking to people all over the world. “I almost electrocuted myself several times.”

7:21: “I like to say that I went to best schools that money could buy, in the 1960s, which was public schools in California.” Turner describes various high school chemistry experiments and “creating UFOS over LA.” He loved math, physics, and chemistry.

8:58: Turner discovers that physics is his real passion, and “math was but a tool.”

9:05: Turner’s high school physics teacher took Turner and friends to Monday night lectures at CalTech. “It just opened up this world of stuff that was going on at the forefront of science,” adding that’s when he fell in love with what would become his undergraduate alma mater.

11:00: For his Ph.D., Turner went to Stanford on the advice of Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman.

11:36: Turner went to the University of Chicago in 1978 as an Enrico Fermi fellow. Initially his plan was to return to California as soon as possible, but “I’ve been happily in Chicago ever since.”

12:09: David Schramm, an astrophysicist and Big Bang theory expert, brought Turner to Chicago and mentored him until Schramm’s tragic death from a plane crash in 1997. The two met at CalTech, in the gym, where Schramm was assistant wrestling coach.

14:45: “Dave curved the path of my career from astrophysics and gravitational waves to early universe cosmology.”

16:41: “[Dave’s] toughness and his enthusiasm for science are things that I take with me to this day.”

17:00: “[Dave] really changed the face of cosmology and astronomy at the University of Chicago.”

17:25: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

 17:58: Turner discusses his passion for bicycling. He says Chicago is a great place to train because the weather makes you “Chi-town tough.”

18:58: Turner elaborates on calling the gravitational waves discovery “the last big prediction of the theory of relativity.”

20:58: Turner calls the discovery “a Galileo moment.”  “Four hundred years ago Galileo turned the telescopes to the sky, and opened their eyes to the universe, and now we have this new window on the universe.”

22:55: “Galileo would be smiling” about the discovery since he said “make measurable that which is not measurable.” Turner says the challenge in building a gravitational wave detector was to be able to measure such a small distance change over such a large distance.

24:00: When Turner wrote his thesis on gravitational waves in 1978, he thought their discovery was around the corner. It took fifty years.

24:38: The NSF thought LIGO was “moonshot worthy to do.”

25:20: Turner talks about some of the scientists who worked on tools used during LIGO such as the Michelson interferometer (invented by Alan Michelson.)

26:40: LIGO uses lasers and interferometry.

30:11: NSF looked at the proposal for LIGO in the early 1990s and said, “This is a lofty goal. Let’s do this.” CalTech and MIT led the way.

31:05: Turner credits Barry Barish, experimental physicist at CalTech, with really getting the project going.

31:40: LIGO was done in two phases.

33:19: Turner had to make a recommendation to the Director of NSF and subsequently to the National Science Board (which has oversight on large-scale science projects) about continuing the project into the second phase. “It took more than a year for the Board to decide, but they stuck with it.”

35:14: “LIGO is going to earn its O, and become a real observatory. This is going to become a new window on the universe.”

37:00: This discovery qualifies as “Big Science,” a relatively new, post WWII phenomenon.

37:30: “I always harken back to John Kennedy’s quote about going to the moon. He talked about how going to the moon is really hard and said, ‘that’s why we’re doing it.’”

38:18: “Ken Ford was one of these wise people on the National Science Board. They’re the adult supervision in the room.” Turner explains that the Board had to do due diligence to make sure the project was worthy of continuing.

41:31: “These people [National Science Board] were doing a service to the country: by making sure we were spending the money wisely. And also making sure we were taking the calculated risks” behind those really big advances.

43:24: “This is an example where we as Americans can be very proud. Now, other nations including Japan, Germany, and the UK are making investments, but we really led.”

46:48: A year from now, Virgo, the European detector for gravitational waves located near Pisa, Italy, will be done with its upgrades.

49:38: The legacy of the gravitational waves? “The most exciting thing is the thing we haven’t thought of. If history is any guide, there will be wonderful discoveries that will take us in new directions when we open up a new window on the universe.”

51:00: Turner’s next STEM-Talk podcast will be on dark energy and dark matter.

51:23: Also soon up on STEM-Talk: Cal-Tech physicist Barry Barish. Ford says, “I can say with complete confidence that LIGO would not have been successfully constructed without Barry.”

 

Episode 5: Margaret Leinen discusses health of the oceans

Margaret Leinen is a big name in oceanography. She’s the director of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute and vice chancellor of marine sciences at Scripps. She was previously assistant direct of the National Science Foundation, where she worked with IHMC CEO and Director Ken Ford, who calls her “one of the most effective and most pleasant assistant directors of NSF.”

Leinen’s interest in science started early: In high school, she became interested in geology and the history of the earth. When she discovered oceanography in college, she never looked back.

In this episode, Leinen talks about her first dive in the Pacific, where she stumbled onto a huge hydrothermal vent system teeming with worms, clams and other colorful life forms. She also addresses current and future threats to the ocean, a non profit she established to look into mitigating the effects of climate change, and the overall resilience of the oceans.

Host Dawn Kernagis, whose own interest in becoming a scientist—started with her childhood fascination with the ocean—conducts this interview.

3:00: In 2000, NSF director Rita Colwell asked Leinen to come to D.C. to talk to her about working at NSF to coordinate environmental science, engineering and education across entire foundation.

5:32. Leinen says a theme of her career has been cross disciplinary coordination. “I think it takes an optimist, and that’s me, I’m definitely a glass is half full kind of person.”

6:28: “People want to be able to cross boundaries, and most of the time they think that they do, but organizations put obstacles in front of them. My job is to find out what the obstacles are and then embrace them.”

9:10: Leinen talks about her role as director of Scripps, the oldest institute for oceanography, which just celebrated its 114^th birthday.

10:00: Scripps has programs with University of California-San Diego medical and pharmacy schools. The oceans influence human health—and “Not just safety of seafood, red tides, or harmful algal blooms.”

10:24: “When you take a big breath of that wonderful salt air, you’re also inhaling thousands of viruses and bacteria from the ocean.” That may be harmful, or it may confer immunity.

11:57: We’ve gone beyond detecting climate change and attributing it to what is natural or human-induced; and we are now interested in how it impacts humans, the land and oceans—and how we must adapt.”

12:34: Understanding all these threads is “deeply inter-disciplinary.”

13:34: Leinen talks about the non-profit she started, the Climate Response Fund, to research “climate engineering,” or mitigating climate change.

17:15: The Climate Response Fund was a group of scientists and policy experts working with the public, governmental groups, non-profits and scientific groups. “It was a facilitator of discussions.”

18:00: In the U.S., research agencies have been reluctant to fund research in climate engineering, both because of the lack of a good policy framework as well as the potential pubic response. European groups have also struggled.

20:58: Leinen describes her early interest in geology as a high school student. Later, in college, “I just got seduced by oceanography.”

23:05: Leinen talks about the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS), which looked at the carbon cycle in the ocean: “The ocean’s role in really the thing that keep the planet alive.”

24:13: The Equitorial Pacific extends across half the planet. “It’s very, very productive,” but that depends on whether it’s an El Nino time or not.

25:05: During normal (non El Nino) times, there is “An upwelling of deep waters,” and the breakdown of organic material by microbes. “During an El Nino this is limited, [the ocean] is not as biologically productive.”

26:50: JGOFS involved nine different two-month long cruises from the U.S. team, with 70 major scientists and their respective teams. There were other teams from Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Ecuador, Chile.

33:00: Leinen describes her first Alvin dive (three-person submersible), in an area off Washington State.

36:00: There he found a huge hydrothermal system, covered with worms and clams and spewing hot water. “My very first Alvin dive landed in the middle of one of the largest hydrothermal vent systems that we’ve ever seen.”

41:43: “I think the biggest threat to the ocean is our ignorance of it.” Some of the biggest threats include acidification, sea level rise, and the warming of the ocean.

45:28: The ocean is “a lot more resilient than we thought.” Coral reefs, for example, are not as endangered as they are perceived to be.

47:00: “The oceans aren’t going to die. We will be powerfully impacted. But they have been through a lot, and there’s a great genetic treasure trove of resilience built into marine organisms over these billions of years of evolution.”

48:12: The problem is the pace at which we are acidifying the ocean. Oceans have previously been acidic—but over tens to hundreds of thousands of years. “We don’t know how resilient things are to rapid change.”

49:18: PH is a measure of the hydrogen iron content of something. It’s hard to measure in the ocean because there are so many different kinds of acids; stable measuring instruments are also lacking.

52:30: Scripps is the home of instrument standards and instrument development for oceanography and related topics.

54:54: Dawn mentions that Pensacola and other coastal cities have a lot of run-off to the ocean, from petroleum and other sources promoting phosphate growth. Leinen comments that this non-point-source runoff results in enhanced growth of algae and phytoplankton and other plants in the ocean.

59:57: “The history of women in science over the last fifty years is really an extraordinarily good news story.”

1:01:00: Leinen notes that some fields, such as biology, have more women than men at the undergraduate level, but not necessarily in faculty/leadership positions. But the geosciences still have more men than women, producing even more of a gender gap than math or physics.

1:03:50: Lack of exposure partially drives imbalance of students in geosciences. “You would be amazed at how many children in San Diego have never been to the beach…. It’s the same in Florida, Virginia, Rhode Island.”

1:05:17: Leinen talks about her role models and mentors, making a distinction between the two. A mentor “takes an active role in your career…. Is an advocate.” A role model, she says, is someone “seen from afar.”

1:07:36: Ken Ford comments that Leinen has had a “terrific career” as a scientist, administrator and policy maker. “She’s impacted science in the U.S. and around the world.”

Episode 4: Harrison Schmitt discusses being the first scientist on the moon

In this episode, we talk with Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, the first and only scientist to land on the moon. Schmitt was part of the Apollo 17 Mission in 1972, the last Apollo mission.

The geologist turned NASA Astronaut, turned U.S. senator, talks about first seeing the advertisement, in 1964, for scientists interested in space missions. “When I saw that on the bulletin board, I hesitated about ten seconds,” he said.

Called “Dr. Rock” by his colleagues in the Apollo program, Schmitt recounts walking, falling and singing on the moon; and his discovery of orange ash, probably of volcanic in origin at Shorty Crater.

Schmitt says returning to the moon is a gateway to Mars, and that private investors may have a stake in funding future space exploration.

Schmitt recently lectured at IHMC; view his lecture on youtube.  Check out his book, “Return to the Moon,” on Amazon.

STEM-Talk’s host Dawn Kernagis and co-host Tom Jones, a veteran NASA astronaut himself, talk to Schmitt.

3:53: Historic audio tape of Schmitt throwing geologist’s hammer on the moon.

5:11: Historic audio tape of Schmitt and Gene Cernan singing on the moon.

6:00: Historic audio tape of Schmitt discovering orange soil on the moon.

7:12:  Jack excitedly reports from the Moon that he could see ‘orange soil’ on the rim of Shorty Crater in the Taurus-Littrow Valley. When the samples were returned to Earth, they were shown to consist of millions of very small brown-orange glass spheres. These are now thought to represent pyroclastic volcanic activity (“fire fountains”) that occurred about 3.5 billion years ago.

9:39: Schmitt’s parents inspired his interest in science from an early age. His father was an economic geologist who studied ore deposits, and his mother had an interest in botany and ornithology.

12:57: Schmitt’s thoughts on his selection as the first and only science to go to the moon.

15:31: Schmitt describes right before take-off, monitoring gauges in cabin; “becoming competitive with flight controllers” in Houston.

19:12: Schmitt says thoughts of mortality did not go through his mind pre-launch. What was he thinking? “You don’t want to recycle. That means another month of training.”

20:41: Schmitt describes first impressions of the moon: “spectacular mountains.”

22:27: Marvels at the mountains on either side: 1,600-2,100 meters above surface, which is higher than the depth of the Grand Canyon. Also notes tracks of boulders rolling down mountain.

24:30: Apollo 17 flight controllers used to call Dr. Schmitt “Dr. Rock.”

25:31: Schmitt spent his free time reading operations manual to be “the best lunar module pilot.”

27:11: Historic audio footage of Schmitt saying “dad-gummit” on the moon.

28:57: Schmitt says the Apollo A7LB spacesuit was a remarkable development. Water-cooled underwear allowed the team to control body temperature long enough for explorations.

30:38: Schmitt discusses samples from Apollo 17 mission: “The samples are the gift that keeps on giving.”

32:56: Apollo 17’s most important result: “an understanding of the early history of the earth.”

33:44: Earth’s early history was “extraordinarily violent.” Complex molecular evolution that led to life was taking place.

34:33: Schmitt believes that the moon was formed (by accretion) near earth’s orbit — not by a Mars-sized object impacting the Earth.

36:09: The orange volcanic ash found on the moon makes it unlikely that the moon was formed by a giant impact. Schmitt calls it the most important finding from Apollo 17.

38:29: Commercial break: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

39:00: Jack answers the question, “why return to the Moon?” To mine it as a reservoir of isotopic helium. And, “It’s the fastest way to Mars.”

41:25: “It’s going to take at least two generations of men and women to get us to Mars.” It’s a much higher-risk environment than the near-earth orbit.

42:56: “If I were to make make one recommendation on what it’s going to take to get us to Mars, it’s an agency that can stay young.” Cites Navy as an example of recruiting and keeping young generations.

44:24: “The initial decision to limit the Apollo program was made in the Johnson Administration.” It was a budgetary decision to only buy ten Saturn Vs, “the true enabling technology for working in deep space.”

47:14: Schmitt explains why the moon is a good source of Helium-3: Because of its lack of lunar atmosphere. “It’s [Helium-3] not abundant, but it’s so valuable in terms of its energy content, that the economics I think begin to make sense.”

49:34: Describes role of robotic explorers on moon in pre-planning human exploration and in follow-up.

51:10: Schmitt says robot field assistant “might get in the way”—at least more so than a graduate student.

53:52: “A settlement on the moon is quite doable,” Schmitt says. And carries potential economic benefit.

55:00: Current political leadership does not understand geopolitical importance of being a leader in space exploration.

56:20: “We had a lot of things going for us in pre-Apollo days,” Schmitt says: political leadership, young Sputnik generation; an adequate technology base; the geopolitical challenge of the Cold War.

58:00: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

58:36: Schmitt discusses books that formed him, from childhood through present day. History books were especially influential.

1:01:09: Schmitt’s own book project: re-casting a diary of Apollo 17, along with insights garnered from that mission in past 43 years.

1:02:50: Schmitt advises future explorers/scientists to “read a little bit of history everyday…. Including the history of exploration. “It is important to understand what has motivated people to explore if you want to be an explorer yourself.”

 

 

 

 

 

Episode 3: Rhonda Patrick discusses why your genes influence what you should eat

Before Rhonda Perciavalle Patrick “stumbled into research”—at the renowned Salk Institute—the Southern California native was a biochemistry major and a passionate surfer.

She’s still an avid surfer, but of her college major, Patrick said, “I wasn’t feeling connected to synthesizing peptides in the lab, so I decided that I wanted to try out biology.”

After earning her undergraduate degree in biochemistry from the University of California at San Diego, Patrick worked at the Salk Institute’s aging laboratory, where she became fascinated with watching how much the lifespan of nematode worms could fluctuate depending on the experiments done on them.

Hooked on aging research, she pursued that thread all the way to the laboratory of renowned scientist Dr. Bruce Ames, who developed the Triage Theory of Aging, which focuses on the long-term damage of micro-nutrient deficiencies.

Patrick is currently working with Ames as a post-doc at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Hospital. Together, they are looking at strategies to reverse the aging process.

She also received her Ph.D. in biomedical sciences from the University of Tennessee, where she worked at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Patrick lectured at IHMC in Ocala in December. https://youtu.be/wQZz5PklDB0. She also has her own podcast show, called “Found My Fitness,” at:  http://www.foundmyfitness.com

STEM-Talk host Dawn Kernagis and co-host Ken Ford talked with Patrick about her research and development as a young scientist who is now at the forefront of the longevity field.

:35: Dawn introduces Rhonda Patrick as “an American biochemist, cell biologist, science communicator and podcaster.” Patrick is currently studying the effects of micro-nutrient inadequacies on metabolism, inflammation, DNA damage and aging.

4:23: Patrick discusses her appreciation for her graduate school mentor. “I got a lot of micro-management,” she said, adding that she acquired the tools she would need to answer interesting biological questions regarding cancer metabolism, apoptosis, and nutrition.

6:00: Nutrigenomics, Patrick said, is a “complex interaction between the nutrients, micro-nutrients, macro-nutrients (fat) and certain genes that we have.”

6:43: As humans, Patrick said, “We all have the same genes, but alternative forms of these genes for unknown reasons. A single nucleotide change in the DNA sequence of a gene can alter the gene function.”

7:13: Certain polymorphisms, or genetic variants, probably emerged because of environmentally-induced genetic stressors, Patrick said. For example, soil high in selenium may have caused people to develop a polymorphism that inhibits the absorption of selenium because they get so much of it naturally.

8:11: Even if the polymorphism changes the gene in a negative way, you can often find a benefit, Patrick said. “That’s probably why it’s survived.”

8:42: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

9:25: Hundreds of genes interact with micro-nutrients and macro-nutrients that we take in. For example, half the population has a polymorphism that changes the way your body metabolizes folate and folic acid, the oxidized form of folate.

11:05: Folate helps us make methyl groups, which are used for various biological functions. The MTHFR gene helps with that process, so people with a genetic polymorphism need to take a methyl folate 5 supplement.

12:00: The TRPM6 gene is a transporter of magnesium, an essential micronutrient required in over 300 enzymes in body. Some of its functions include making/using ATP; repairing DNA damage; establishing new neuronal connections in the brain.

12:27: People with a genetic polymorphism cannot transport magnesium in/out of cells, and have a significantly higher risk of diabetes than the average population.

12:52: Forty-five percent of the U.S. population does not meet the Recommended Daily Allowance for magnesium, which is 350-400 milligrams a day, Patrick said. “That, coupled with a high refined carbohydrate diet is like a ticking time bomb for Type 2 diabetes.”

13:19: Patrick notes another polymorphism for the PPAR gamma-macronutrient, which is very important for how the body metabolizes certain types of fat; and how the body can deactivate carcinogenic xenobiotics, foreign chemical substances within organisms.

13:34: “Our bodies are beautifully designed to handle all types of stress; but our genes have to be working; they have to have the right nutrients.”

14:08: Gene polymorphisms regulate our phenotype—including features such as eye and hair color. But they also regulate our risk of diseases; and the type/amount of certain foods we should take in or avoid.

15:05: Clinical trials in nutrition are often not done adequately, Patrick said. This is because of cost, and the heterogeneity of the population.

16:41: Heterocyclic amines, chemicals formed when you cook meat at a really high temperature, are shown to be carcinogenic in mice studies and linked to an increased cancer risk in humans in epidemiological studies. Some people have a gene polymorphism that does not allow them to inactivate the HCAs quickly, and the build-up can form a carcinogen.

18:51: More nutritional studies are needed because “There’s a very complex interaction between genes and diet.”

19:18: More and more physicians are becoming aware of nutrigenomics as patients bring it to their attention, armed with data from gene tests such as 23andMe.

20:33: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

21:00: Patrick has had her own DNA polymorphisms sequenced by 23andMe. She takes supplements and avoids certain foods based on this knowledge.

22:50: Diet/lifestyle/stress can alter gene expression, which can carry over to the sperm/egg DNA and be passed onto offspring.

24:17: An Australian study published in Nature showed that obese, insulin-resistant mice on high inflammatory diets had female offspring, who despite being fed normal diets and having lean bodies, developed Type I diabetes.

25:40: The Journal of Cell Metabolism published a paper comparing methyl groups of obese males versus lean ones. When the obese males lost weight, there were changes in their epigenetic markers that control hunger hormones.

27:20: While bad diets affect your disease risk and that of your offspring, “You can make a change,” Patrick said. “If you’re obese, overweight, eating a terrible diet, it’s not too late.”

28:30: Unique gene signatures occur at various ages. Researchers can look at a blood cell and tell a person’s age within a few years.

29:30: Environmental factors affect the epigenetic markers that affect the genes controlling metabolism, DNA repair, new stem cell production. Certain diet/lifestyle factors can positively affect those genes.

30:44: Lifestyle factors such as exercise, sleep, a good diet high in micro-nutrients/low in refined carbs, and low stress likely affect changes at the epigenetic level. “More and more scientists are beginning to study this and will be able to tease it apart.”

32:16: When you heat shock an organism you activate genes involved in stress resistance.

33:17: Some of the benefits of exercise come from heat shocking the body. One Finnish study showed that men who regularly used the sauna had lower all-cause mortality. Other studies have shown that mice, flies, and worms can increase their lifespan by 15-20 percent.

34:39: Heat stress increases the brain-derived neurotropic factor, which is important for growing new neurons; maintaining neurons; and strengthening the synapses between neurons.

35:20: Exercise and sauna together have a synergistic effect. May positively affect your brain.

35:33: Ford notes that wrestlers, boxers and other athletes sometimes use sauna to elevate their heart rate. Sauna use also seemed to help with recovery.

36:51: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

38:40: Vitamin D is important for making serotonin in the brain, and for early brain development. It helps shape the structure of the brain, guides neurons to the right place and ensures that the right type of neurons develop.

39:33: The developing fetus depends on maternal levels of Vitamin D. Deficient levels might alter brain development and lead to conditions like autism.

40:19: Serotonin plays a well-known role in mood alteration; it also affects impulse control, long-term thinking, planning and memory.

42:15: Many people have polymorphisms in serotonin-related genes, including Patrick herself. These polymorphisms, coupled with deficient Vitamin D intake, can be a “double whammy” for people.

43:11: “It is possible that this complex interaction between serotonin and Vitamin D may make a huge difference in peoples’ lives that are Vitamin D deficient.”

Episode 2: Br. Guy Consolmagno: The Vatican Astronomer

Guy Consolmagno is not your typical scientist. The director of Vatican Observatory is also a Jesuit Brother, astronomer extraordinaire, MIT graduate, former Peace Corp volunteer and self-described science fiction geek.

The second-generation Italian-American, born in Detroit, now divides his time between the Vatican Observatory in Italy and the Mount Graham International Observatory in Tucson, Arizona.

In 2014, Brother Guy received the Carl Sagan Medal from the American Astronomical Society for his unique position as a scientist and man of faith, and he believes firmly that the scientific and spiritual inquiry are more complementary than conflictual.

Consolmagno is the author of several books about astronomy, and science and faith, including most recently, “Would You Baptize an Extra-terrestrial?” He also authored “God’s Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion,” and gave a lecture at IHMC on that topic. That lecture can be found on YouTube at https://youtu.be/MJGsdY2bcsk

In another IHMC lecture, Brother Guy discusses “Discarded Worlds: Astronomical Ideas that Were Almost Correct”: https://youtu.be/Gr0R5oiIoak

Brother Guy writes for a blog called the Catholic Astronomer, which can be found at www.vofoundation.org/blog

STEM-Talk co-host Tom Jones, a former NASA astronaut who shares Brother Guy’s love of astronomy—as well as the same MIT thesis advisor, John Lewis—interviews Brother Guy about his life-long journey to understand the universe and the role of faith in that pursuit.

Introducing this podcast episode is host Dawn Kernagis and IHMC CEO Ken Ford.

1:15: The Vatican Observatory is in a town outside of Rome called Castel Gandolfo, which is also the Pope’s summer residence. Ford and his wife Nancy first met Brother Guy there a few years ago.

3:52: A day in the life of Brother Guy in Rome: after his 6 a.m. wake-up call, he works until the Italian coffee break at 10 a.m., then goes back to work until the big meal of the day at 1:30 p.m., which is followed by an afternoon siesta. In late afternoon, he spends an hour of prayer walking in the gardens, followed by Mass. Then he works again until 9 or 10 p.m., responding to emails from America.

4:44: “It’s a full day, but it’s almost like getting two days of work in,” Brother Guys says of his daily routine. “It’s exhilarating because it reminds me of all the different worlds I get to live in.”

5:07: A “Sputnik kid,” Brother Guy was in kindergarten when the Soviets launched the first satellite into the earth’s orbit. He was a high school senior when NASA astronauts landed on the moon. “How could you not be crazy about astronomy and science?”

6:18: Brother Guy followed his best friend to MIT for college. “I discovered MIT had weekend movies, and pinball machines, and the world’s largest collection of science fiction, and I knew I had to go there.”

6:55: At MIT, he studied geology, quickly discovering meteorites. “From then on meteorites were where my heart was. I never looked back.”

7:36: Astronomy reminded Brother Guy about “bigger things than what’s for lunch”; and also our human intellectual capacity to puzzle about these things.

7:52: Since the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church has backed the study of astronomy at universities, Brother Guys says. “In those days, understanding how universe works was a way of understanding how the creator works.”

9:01: In 1891, Pope Leo XIII established the Vatican Observatory to show that the church supported science. This came during a politically-charged atmosphere of anti-clericalism in France and Italy, based in part on the church’s opposition to the fashionable science of eugenics.

9:45: “You can’t do science without faith,” Brother Guy says. This means that you must have a positive world view to sustain scientific inquiry—in other words, “not think people are inherently evil.”

10:34: Not every religion can support science.

11:15: Noblemen and clergymen founded science in the 17^th and 18^th centuries because they had the free time to explore and think about the world.

11:41: “It’s a nineteenth-century myth that the church opposed Galileo.”

15:03: “What science has done is to remind us forcibly over and over again how big, how incredible, the creator of the universe must be. So science can only enrich our view of God.”

17:55: Brother Guy briefly considered becoming a priest, but realized he wasn’t a people person, so went to “nerd school” instead. After MIT, he did his Ph.D. at the University of Arizona, followed by two post-docs, at Harvard and MIT.

19:32: Brother Guy leaves academia to join the Peace Corp in Kenya. “I was lying in bed wondering, ‘Why am I doing astronomy when people are starving in the world?’”

20:30: He reaffirms his love of astronomy in Kenya, teaching it to graduate students, and observing the stars with villagers. “To be able to share with people that thrill of seeing the universe outside yourself; to remind them that we’re all part of the human race that went to the moon. That’s why we do astronomy.”

21:15: Brother Guy joins the Jesuits as a scientist. He must take three vows: chastity and poverty, harkening back to his graduate school days, were easier than obedience—until he got a letter ordering him to go to Rome. “I had to obey,” he says. “Life is tough, but there it is.”

22:30: He lauds the stable funding situation at the Vatican Observatory, compared to academia.

23:00: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

23:51: Brother Guys compares the asteroid belt to the “scrap heap of the solar system: The bits and pieces that didn’t get into a planet, and tell us what the ingredients of the planet are.”

26:07: Pope Benedict made references to astronomy during his homilies and was fascinated by the Vatican’s own meteorite collection.

29:35: Brother Guys ruminates on being a student at Arizona, where he studied meteorites from Vesta, the brightest asteroid in the sky. “We were able to show conclusively that they were ten times in richer in trace elements than typical meteorites.”

30:07: Also learned about Vesta, from the Dawn spacecraft in 2011-2012: the core of Vesta was twice the expected radius; the crust was six to eight times thicker. “Suddenly we realized Vesta was not pristine. Vesta is a second-generation body. It’s something that was a lot bigger.”

31:50: “Science is not about finding the answers—but understanding the things we do know in a deeper and more profound way all the time.”

33:07: The commercial mining potential for asteroids nearby earth is just beginning; contains great potential for rare elements, platinum and gold; iron and nickel. “What’s that gonna do to the economy of the earth? It’s going to change things.”

34:49: “We’re probably not going to remember the first companies that exploit space. We’re going to learn from their mistakes.”

35:09: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

35:34: Brother Guys mentions the need to take “inventory of what’s out there.” Advance warning of potential catastrophic events is key to deflecting or preparing for them. We can have three to four years of advance warning of a comet.

36:20: International cooperation is also key to understanding and handling such events. “Something that was big enough to destroy the dinosaurs didn’t care what species of dinosaurs they were. They all went.”

37:47: To a scientist, the question is not ‘Is there life on another planet, but what is that life like?’

41:00: In 2012, a British journalist asked Brother Guy, “Would You Baptize an Extra-Terrestrial?” His answer: “Yes, if she asks…” That answer fundamentally changed the frame of the question, by making it the extra-terrestrial’s choice.

43:07: Similar to being in love, a lot of prayer is just shutting up and listening, Brother Guy says. Turning off your brain and your concerns; remembering the universe that you are in and the presence of love in that universe.

44:36: Other times, praying involves asking. “Sometimes in the asking, you end up recognizing the answer that’s been sitting there all along.”

44:47: Commercial Break: Brother Guy’s two IHMC evening lectures can be found on YouTube. Look for: “God’s Mechanics: The Religious life of Techies”; and “Discarded Worlds: Astronomical Ideas That Were Almost Correct.”

47:20: “Believing in God doesn’t mean rejecting reason.”

50:12: “Looking for the elegance of the universe is not only a pointer to scientific truth, but ultimately a pointer to God.”

52:37: Brother Guy doesn’t get caught up in criticizing the bureaucracies of big organizations. NASA, after all, “got us to the moon,” he says.

53:54: Science works best as a conversation in a community. “Sometimes the greatest advances occur when we don’t even notice—and we need somebody next to us to point it out.”

54:45: Brother Guy writes for a blog called the Catholic Astronomer at www.vofoundation.org/blog. There you will also find his calendar of speaking engagements and travels.

55:33: Saturday tours of Mt. Graham International Observatory and Discovery Park in Safford, Arizona.

56:11: Work is being done on a visitors’ center at the Vatican Observatory at Castel Gandolfo, Italy.

Episode 1: Peter Attia on how to live longer and better

Dr. Peter Attia, the guest for this episode of STEM-Talk, is a modern-day “Renaissance man,” says IHMC CEO Ken Ford. That term gets tossed around a lot, but in Attia’s case, it’s true. He is a top-notch physician, a former McKinsey consultant, and an ultra endurance athlete—who once swam twenty-something miles to Catalina Island, off the coast of California.

During the podcast show, Attia talks about his academic journey, from studying math and engineering, to then pursuing clinical medicine and developing research interests in longevity. The birth of Attia’s daughter marked his interest in quantity of life—as well as quality of life.

Attia discusses his eight “drivers of longevity,” all of which depart from the concept of preventing the onset of chronic disease. These include optimal nutrition, exercise, sleep habits, hormone optimization, stress management, sense of purpose/social connections, medications, and avoidance of harmful behaviors.

Check out Peter Attia’s blog “The Eating Academy,” at http://eatingacademy.com. You can also check out his TED talk “Is the obesity crisis hiding a bigger problem? https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_attia_what_if_we_re_wrong_about_diabetes?language=en

STEM-Talk’s host Dawn Kernagis and Ken Ford chats with Peter Attia.

3:25: In college, Attia volunteered at a children’s hospital, which inspired his interest in medicine.

4:08: Ford notes that math and engineering provide a useful background for medicine. Attia later notes that his early academic background in both these subjects “still colors how I look at the world.”

4:32: Attia’s advice to college students who are aspiring physicians: “I think you should study anything that you are not going to learn in medical school.”

5:25: Two things drive significant change in a person’s life: “abject misery and profound inspiration.” The former drove Attia out of clinical medicine.

6:27: The birth of Attia’s daughter spurred his interest in longevity.

7:05: Commercial break:

8:32: Centenarians get diseases 20-30 years later than most people.

9:20: Longevity is first and foremost about delaying the onset of chronic disease.

10:13: Animal literature shows that caloric restriction increases longevity; so do drugs that prevent mTOR (mammalian target of rapamycin).

11:52: Eight things improve longevity and quality of life: food, exercise, sleep patterns, management of chronic stress, hormone optimization, medications, sense of purpose/social support network, avoidance of harmful behaviors.

12:28: Accidental death is the fourth or fifth leading cause of death in the U.S.; 80 percent of these are auto accidents, accidental poisoning and falls.

13:09:  Ford and Attia agree that trade-offs sometimes exist between interventions likely to increase lifespan and those aimed at aimed at increasing healthspan.

15:50: People who consume fewer calories are likely to have a lower risk of diabetes, heart disease and cancer; they may also have more deficient immune systems and greater susceptibility to catastrophes like falls.

16:10: Caloric restriction creates an environment of cell signaling, cell growth, and nutrient sensing that slows down aging.

16:36: One of the greatest challenges in studying longevity is the inability to accurately measure biologic signals such as mTOR activity.

17:08: Attia characterizes protein optimization: “We want to see IGF-1 levels lower; AMP kinase more active; Ras less active.”

18:36: “Three things I walk through life wanting to keep at a minimum,” Attia says: How to minimize mean level glucose, variability of glucose, and insulin AUC (area under the curve).

19:24: Attia eats 125-150 grams of specific carbs per day, at times when he can maximally dispose of it. He also wears a continue glucose monitor that measures glucose every five minutes.

20:47:  Ford and Attia discuss the benefits of a ketogenic diets and the implications for IGF-1, mTOR, insulin, and amino acids.

22:18: The ideal diet minimizes glucose and has moderate but sufficient protein; the majority of the diet becomes fat.

23:30:  Ketogenic diets do not work for everyone.  The efficacy of the ketogenic diets mqy have a genetic basis and it does not seem appropriate for everyone.

24:27: We should talk about molecules and physiology instead of diets.

25:19:  Ford and Attia discuss the trade-offs associated with leucine supplementation which increases mTOR1 … which in turn stimulates protein synthesis necessary for maintaining and increasing muscle mass and staving off sarcopenia.  On the other hand, chronic elevation of mTOR is not desirable in terms of lifespan.  Attia and Ford discuss how they use amino acids around exercise.

28:00: Attia discusses his blog “The Eating Academy,” which he initially called “The War on Insulin.”

30:30: In the blog, Attia discusses how the ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting increase longevity.

30:57: A recent, retrospective paper on exceptionally long-lived humans finds they have low levels of IGF-1.

32:34: Low IGF from neck down is beneficial in preventing cancer/cardiovascular disease; high IGF above the neck helps prevent Alzheimer’s Disease.

33:54: Attia and Ford discuss IGF-1 and sacrocpenia in the context of healthspan.  Low IGF-1 may be correlated with increased longevity, but IGF-1 (and mTOR) is an important driver of muscle protein synthesis and, all things being equal, the more muscle mass you have, the better. We should all be striving to have as much of it as we can, Attia says.

34:45:  Ford notes, that although the causes for sarcopenia are multifactorial, it does seem that one of the drivers of sarcopenia is a general anabolic hormone resistance, very much like insulin resistance that we discussed earlier.

35:07: There’s a difference between training with massive specificity to optimally perform a specific task like pro athletes; and training to stay healthy and not get hurt. As we age, we need to focus on the latter and train to be the “athlete of your life.”

39:14: Nothing trumps resistance training.

40:18: More muscle allows you to tolerate greater glucose input.

41:10: The loss of muscle mass accelerates as we age.

43:12: We’re evolved to deal with acute stress; chronic stress is a newer, more difficult phenomenon.

44:12: Attia calls literature on meditation “messy.” His advice? Pick one and run with it. His choice is transcendental meditation.

45:20: “Phosphatidylserine” is a wonderful sleep agent that suppresses the adrenal glands in the evening.

46:06: “There’s no doubt that keeping cortisol levels in check requires the most work.”

49:19: Our ancestors spent one third of their lives sleeping. The benefit must have eclipsed the survival risk because we’ve held onto this habit.

50:00: Clinical trials on sleep show that between seven and a half and eight and a half hours of sleep is optimal.

54:04: Sleep agents like Ambien provide very little good quality sleep (stage three and four).

55:14: Sleep expert Kirk Parsley will be an upcoming guest on STEM-Talk.

55:39: Hormone replenishment takes place during sleep.

56:58: As we age, we get slower, fatter, colder, less energetic. Hormones drive those tendencies.

57:12: In men, the androgen system undergoes a slow and predictable decline; in women, it is more precipitous at menopause.

57:42: Attia discusses the flaws of the Women’s Health Initiative, which unnecessarily stigmatized hormone replacement therapy.

58:07: A woman without estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone in her body is neither healthy nor feeling good.

59:20: Testosterone is the dominant hormone in a woman’s body.

1:01: Attia discusses relative risk versus absolute risk.

1:03:18: There are no absolute black and whites in pharmacology, Attia says. Drugs such as statins and metformin are context-specific.

1:05:38: Heart disease is still the number one killer in both men and women.

1:05:40:  Attia discusses elevated uric acid levels.

1:06:08: Attia keeps a tool kit of 20-25 drugs. “It’s like building a custom home for somebody,” he says, based on their phenotype, risks, etc.

1:07:20:  Attia discusses Berberine and Metformin.

1:07:52: Ford mentions a newly approved study which will examine Metformin as a longevity drug.

1:09:19: People who work longer versus retire sooner have better cognitive outcomes. The more active the brain is, the better the brain is.

1:12:20: Attia says genetic testing is “a little over-hyped” and not a panacea. It is insightful for pediatric metabolic diseases and cancer germ-line mutations, but much of what genes are doing is still unknown.

1:17:54: Attia’s last (but not least) driver of longevity is to not do “stupid things.” Half of auto deaths occur on the freeway; of the half, most occur at intersections from the left-hand side. So at an intersection, first look left.