The Age of Aquaticus

Summary

Radiolab: The Age of Aquaticus – A Detailed Summary

Hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser, Radiolab's episode titled "The Age of Aquaticus," released on April 25, 2025, delves deep into the serendipitous journey of scientific discovery and its profound impact on modern science. This episode intertwines the story of Hudson Freeze's groundbreaking research with the broader implications of funding cuts to publicly funded science today.

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1. Introduction to the Story

The episode opens with hosts Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser introducing listener Hudson Freeze, a scientist whose early career experiences have become a poignant metaphor for the current state of scientific research funding.

2. Hudson Freeze and the Discovery of Thermus aquaticus

Early Beginnings: Hudson Freeze recounts his humble beginnings in a small railroad town in Indiana and his formative experiences at Indiana University. As a high school junior, Freeze conducted a science project exploring microbial survival on Mars, igniting his passion for science.

Expedition to Yellowstone: Inspired by Dr. Thomas Brock, Freeze joins an expedition to Yellowstone National Park to investigate hot springs for extremophiles—organisms that thrive in extreme conditions. At Mushroom Spring, they encounter a pool with temperatures soaring to 70°C (160°F), challenging the then-accepted upper limit for life.

Discovery of Thermus aquaticus: In a moment of breakthrough, Freeze discovers vibrant, living specimens in the boiling water. Observing moving worms under the microscope, he realizes they've found Thermus aquaticus, an organism capable of surviving temperatures previously deemed lethal. Freeze poignantly reflects, "Life will still continue to exist as long as you have liquid water. Life finds a way" [13:36].

3. The Invention of Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR)

Enter Kary Mullis: Fast forward to the late 1960s in Berkeley, California, where Kary Mullis, a biochemistry Ph.D. student, grapples with the inefficiencies of DNA replication. Inspired by a visionary moment while driving through Mendocino County, Mullis conceives the idea of PCR—a method to amplify DNA exponentially.

Collaboration and Realization: Mullis' team at Cetus Corporation, initially skeptical, eventually harnesses the power of Thermus aquaticus's heat-resistant polymerase enzyme (Taq polymerase). This enzyme remains stable at high temperatures, a critical component for the success of PCR. Freeze highlights, "PCR made it so much easier and faster to read DNA, suddenly scientists everywhere start using it." [29:03]

4. The Monumental Impact of PCR

Revolutionizing Science: PCR transforms genetic research, making DNA amplification swift and reliable. Its applications span diverse fields:

• Medicine: Diagnosing genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis and HIV.
• Forensics: Solving crimes through DNA evidence.
• Ancestry: Facilitating genealogical research via platforms like 23andMe.
• Research: Enabling the decoding of the human genome and studies on human origins.

Popular Culture Connection: The episode ties PCR's influence to Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, inspired by the use of Thermus aquaticus in ancient DNA research. Freeze notes, "Life finds a way," echoing the film's iconic line, showcasing the unanticipated cultural ripple effects of scientific discoveries [43:24].

5. The Golden Goose Award

Recognition of Curiosity-Driven Research: In 2013, Hudson Freeze and Thomas Brock received the Golden Goose Award, celebrating federally funded research that seemed obscure but led to transformative outcomes. Freeze reflects on the award, emphasizing the intrinsic value of curiosity-driven science over immediate practical applications.

6. Current Threats to Science Funding

Guest Insight with Carl Zimmer: The episode shifts focus to the present-day challenges facing scientific research. Carl Zimmer, a New York Times columnist, provides a sobering analysis of extensive cuts to government science funding under recent administrations.

Impact of Budget Cuts: Zimmer outlines drastic reductions across agencies:

• NASA: Proposed halving of the science budget threatens missions like the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, essential for understanding cosmic evolution and searching for extraterrestrial life [37:17].
• EPA and CDC: Potential shutdown of climate science programs and loss of critical health experts, undermining responses to public health crises like lead poisoning emergencies [38:14].
• NIH and NSF: Massive layoffs and grant eliminations jeopardize ongoing research into diseases like tuberculosis and the development of vaccines and antivirals [38:17].

Consequences: These cuts not only stifle current scientific endeavors but also discourage emerging scientists, with 75% considering leaving the field altogether [41:04]. The cumulative effect threatens the United States' leadership in global science [41:39].

7. Conclusion: A Parable for Our Time

Reflecting on Loss and Potential: The narrative of Hudson Freeze serves as a cautionary tale about the fragile nature of scientific progress. The discovery of Thermus aquaticus and the subsequent invention of PCR underscore the unpredictable benefits of funding basic research. As current policies push back against scientific advancement, the episode urges a reevaluation of priorities to preserve the foundational knowledge that drives innovation and societal benefits.

Final Thoughts: Latif Nasser encapsulates the episode's essence by highlighting the intrinsic value of life’s resilience and the boundless potential of scientific inquiry: "It's wild crazy, right?" [30:51]. The episode closes on a hopeful yet contemplative note, celebrating past achievements while warning of the perils of neglecting scientific curiosity.

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Notable Quotes:

• "Life finds a way." – Hudson Freeze [13:36]
• "PCR made it so much easier and faster to read DNA, suddenly scientists everywhere start using it." – Latif Nasser [29:03]
• "We're well on our way to the United States losing its prime position in science." – Carl Zimmer [41:39]
• "Life will still continue to exist as long as you have liquid water." – Hudson Freeze [13:36]

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Key Takeaways:

• Serendipity in Science: Hudson Freeze's discovery of Thermus aquaticus exemplifies how basic, curiosity-driven research can lead to groundbreaking innovations like PCR.

• PCR's Ubiquity: Polymerase Chain Reaction remains a cornerstone of modern biology, enabling advancements across medicine, forensics, and genetic research.

• Vulnerability of Basic Research: The episode underscores the vital importance of sustained funding for basic scientific research, highlighting the dire consequences of reduced governmental support.

• Cultural Impact: Scientific discoveries often transcend their immediate applications, influencing broader cultural narratives as seen with Jurassic Park.

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Conclusion: "The Age of Aquaticus" serves as both a celebration of scientific ingenuity and a poignant reminder of the precarious state of scientific funding. Through engaging storytelling and insightful interviews, Radiolab emphasizes the indispensable role of curiosity-driven research in shaping our understanding of life and advancing society.

Transcript

[Latif Nasser]

Radiolab is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart choice. Make another smart choice with Auto Quote Explorer to compare rates from multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.

[Hudson Freeze]

Listener supported WNYC studios.

[Latif Nasser]

Wait, you're listening.

[Hudson Freeze]

Okay. All right.

[Latif Nasser]

Okay.

[Hudson Freeze]

All right. You're listening to Radiolab Radio Lab from wny.

[Latif Nasser]

See? Yep. Hey. Hey, how you doing?

[Lulu Miller]

All right. It's freezing in here, so I have on a winter hat and a blanket.

[Latif Nasser]

Well, you're in luck because we're actually headed somewhere. Somewhere hot.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay.

[Latif Nasser]

Extremely hot.

[Lulu Miller]

Can't wait.

[Latif Nasser]

And our guide there, ironically enough.

[Hudson Freeze]

Hi.

[Latif Nasser]

Hey. Hi, how you doing? Is a scientist named Hudson Freeze. Dr. Freeze.

[Hudson Freeze]

You know, there have been a lot of comments on that. What's Freeze doing? Working on hot stuff. Right.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah, just the sort of gutting the avalanche of cuts to publicly funded science and basic research that we are witnessing right now.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Hudson Freeze]

Well, well, let's see. I was born in a small railroad town in Indiana. And as a junior in high school I spent some time at Indiana University. It's thrilling. For somebody who hasn't seen more than a two story building before. This was a big deal and I met faculty people there.

[Latif Nasser]

HUD says he actually did a science project while he was there about what it would take for a microbe to survive on Mars. And he says he just fell in love with the university, with the SC he was learning there. And so when he graduated from high.

[Hudson Freeze]

School, I came back to Indiana University and I was able to get in the bacteriology department.

[Latif Nasser]

And he really wanted to work with one scientist named Dr. Thomas Brock.

[Hudson Freeze]

I had heard him give a lecture before about mating types in yeast. And you know, anytime you're talking about mating types in college, you know, you're going to be a hit. And so anyway, I go down to see him thinking I'm going to work on mating types. And he says, well, we're not working on mating types anymore, but we are going to Yellowstone national park to look into the hot springs for bacteria.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Lulu Miller]

Burn, boil, shred itself to death.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Lulu Miller]

Like what?

[Latif Nasser]

Like mosses and like algae, bacteria, little spider mites, stuff like that.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay.

[Latif Nasser]

And he thought maybe this could be a place where he could find some little microbe that is defying that limit of life.

[Hudson Freeze]

That's right. And so he had a small, relatively small grant in basic science, a grant.

[Latif Nasser]

Of $80,000 from the US government to.

[Hudson Freeze]

Go out and see what he could find.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Lulu Miller]

Ooh.

[Hudson Freeze]

And I thought that's perfect. You know, I had done before was Mars and it's cold there, you know, now I'm going to go to the complete opposite. I'm going to go where it's boiling hot.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Hudson Freeze]

Never west of Chicago.

[Latif Nasser]

So he hops on a train.

[Hudson Freeze]

I got on in Garrett, Indiana and then went through Chicago. That's where I picked up the train.

[Latif Nasser]

That went nonstop through the farmlands of Wisconsin into the plains of the Dakotas.

[Hudson Freeze]

20 some hours altogether.

[Latif Nasser]

And he was like this doe eyed kid just looking out the window.

[Hudson Freeze]

A lot of the Midwest is pretty flat.

[Latif Nasser]

But then as he crossed into Montana.

[Hudson Freeze]

And I looked, looked at, I said, boy, those are funny looking clouds. Oh my God, those are not clouds man. They're mountains. They're real mountains. It's just like mountains that I used to see in the cowboy shoes, you know, I mean I was just, I was really thrilled to be able to see this kind of stuff. Oh, I'm really getting out there. So I mean it was, it was just a great trip. So I get off in Billings, Montana and take a bus to West Yellowstone. That's where the lab was set up in this little cabin, you know, a kitchen and sort of a living room, but it was sparse. You know, you wouldn't advertise it as a lab in these days. It looked more like, you know, where Ted Kaczynski might hang out.

[Latif Nasser]

Just like a shack.

[Hudson Freeze]

It was a shack, yeah.

[Latif Nasser]

Anyway, Brock and his crew, you know.

[Hudson Freeze]

We get going at about 7:00, something like that.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Lulu Miller]

No, I haven't, I haven't. I've never gone. I would love to.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah, please. I would love to.

[Latif Nasser]

Okay.

[Lulu Miller]

Oh, I haven't seen that. Wow. So we've got. Yeah, we've got. It looks almost like this, like, unicorn eye of dazzling blue rimmed with yellow, rimmed with oranges and reds.

[Hudson Freeze]

Yeah, you'd start out more yellowish and then the orange would start coming through. I mean, it's just beautiful.

[Latif Nasser]

And there was one hot spring in particular that Brock and his team got interested in.

[Hudson Freeze]

Mushroom spring.

[Latif Nasser]

At the center is a pool of water.

[Hudson Freeze]

It's about 30ft across.

[Latif Nasser]

Water at the center can reach 70 degrees Celsius, 160 degrees Fahrenheit.

[Hudson Freeze]

Steam coming off every direction, surrounded by.

[Latif Nasser]

Light gray rock and dead trees. And so they'd walk right up to the edge of this pool, trying to get as close as they could.

[Hudson Freeze]

And we would take these glass slides that had nothing on them, put them in the spring. So if there were any organisms that were bubbling up out of the interior of the earth, they might be able to attach.

[Latif Nasser]

Trawling, basically trawling for life. And the water is so hot that if they happen to fall into the spring.

[Hudson Freeze]

Oh, adios. Yeah.

[Latif Nasser]

Luckily, no scientists were harmed in the doing of this research. But they got their samples, they took them back with them to their little shack lab, and what they do is they would add these radioactive chemicals that would react with stuff in the sample, whatever proteins or sugars or whatever.

[Hudson Freeze]

Yeah.

[Latif Nasser]

And that would be a sign of something living in there.

[Hudson Freeze]

And we actually proved that the material was actually live.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Hudson Freeze]

Yeah. Yeah. So I had a whole series of different tubes at different temperatures.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Hudson Freeze]

So every day I would go in there and I'd look to see if there was anything that looked like it might be growing.

[Latif Nasser]

But he has to keep refilling these.

[Hudson Freeze]

Hot water baths, and the darn things could run dry.

[Lulu Miller]

The water keeps burning up, the water.

[Hudson Freeze]

Keeps boiling off, running up the electric bill of the microbiology department.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Hudson Freeze]

Them, always looking for a change in the soup. If bacteria were growing, it would be cloudy. It might even start to smell a little bit.

[Latif Nasser]

So he's waiting. He's waiting. The liquid is clear. Day one, he's waiting. Day two, he's waiting. He's waiting. A couple days, I couldn't find anything.

[Hudson Freeze]

And then on the fourth, maybe fifth day, September 19, 1966, he picks up.

[Latif Nasser]

One of the vials.

[Hudson Freeze]

I just tapped it with my finger and there was all this swirly stuff that came up. I mean, it looked like. It looked like diamonds kind of running around. It was like all around inside the tube. And I thought, oh, my God, maybe this is it.

[Latif Nasser]

So he takes a look under a microscope, and what he sees are these little worms, kind of like cut up spaghetti just floating around in there.

[Lulu Miller]

And they're moving.

[Latif Nasser]

And they're moving.

[Hudson Freeze]

Yeah, they're alive at almost boiling water.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Lulu Miller]

They were like proliferating.

[Latif Nasser]

They're thriving.

[Hudson Freeze]

And I said, I said, oh, my God, I am the first person in the world ever to see this. The next day, I'm telling everybody in the lab about. I'm telling Tom Brock, and one of the guys in the lab says, well, I think we ought to call it Hudsoni friesiensis.

[Latif Nasser]

Hey, hey, you could have had a. You could have had a species named after you.

[Hudson Freeze]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Latif Nasser]

But then Brock was like, oh, no, no, no, we're not gonna do that.

[Hudson Freeze]

Can't name them after people anymore.

[Latif Nasser]

We are going to call it Thermos Aquaticus.

[Lulu Miller]

Thermus Aquaticus.

[Latif Nasser]

Thermus aquaticus tac. Tac is short for Thermos aquaticus.

[Lulu Miller]

Hot, Hot water.

[Latif Nasser]

It literally just means Hot water.

[Hudson Freeze]

I'm going around the lab saying it is the dawning of the Age of Aquaticus. Age of Aquaticus.

[Lulu Miller]

I like it. It's simple, it's clear.

[Carl Zimmer]

Aquaticus.

[Lulu Miller]

How do they, I mean, how do they do it? How do they live in this temperature that kills so many, so much else?

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Hudson Freeze]

I mean, that's why we can't go out and, you know, sit at 180 degrees because our proteins fall apart, our enzymes fall apart.

[Latif Nasser]

But Taq has evolved proteins and enzymes that are more tightly structured.

[Hudson Freeze]

That's right. They can survive without falling apart, which.

[Latif Nasser]

Beyond being a cool trick, opens up a door that life can do a whole new thing. Like there's a whole new superpower that we didn't even know about, which, which does open up.

[Lulu Miller]

Like, could there be life on Mars? Could there be life in lava? Could there be life in these places we, we thought were inhospitable?

[Latif Nasser]

That's right.

[Hudson Freeze]

Yeah. You know, this was the thing that led us to say, well, what if you go down 5,000ft under the sea where we know there are volcanoes down there? Boy, I'll bet nothing lives down there. Well, yes it does.

[Lulu Miller]

Oh, I haven't seen that. Wow. So we've got, yeah, we've got. It looks almost like this like unicorn eye of dazzling blue rimmed with yellow, rimmed with oranges and reds.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Hudson Freeze]

Yeah. Life will still continue to exist as long as you have liquid water. That if I had to pick anything is really the sort of lesson of this. Life will exist anywhere where there's nutrients. It will go any place where it can find energy to use energy to grow. I'm gonna quote Jeff Goldblum here. Life finds a way. Life finds a way.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Hudson Freeze]

And he's like, no, it has no use. It has absolutely no use. You know, it's curiosity. I mean, it's science for science sake. It's fundamental research. That's the way science goes.

[Latif Nasser]

And the rest of the world, the non scientist world was just like, well, who cares? So and so they, they preserved a sample of tack and they just put it in a kind of like a library of microbes.

[Hudson Freeze]

Yeah, yeah, it's a germ library. Beyond that, we, we didn't think about it.

[Latif Nasser]

They moved on to other things. And then 50 or so years Later, Hudson is sitting at his desk and he gets a call.

[Hudson Freeze]

He said, this is like this, and I want to talk to you about a science prize. And I thought, oh, my God, it's the prize patrol. If I sign up for, you know, Scientific American for six years at this bargain rate, I'm going to get a, you know, something in the mail.

[Latif Nasser]

But what it was, it turns out, was something called the Golden Goose Award. Oh, Golden Goose. Thank you for joining us for the 11th annual Golden Goose Awards ceremony. Right, okay, so you remember we did an episode about a couple years back.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay, well, there's a map.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Lulu Miller]

Check out the scientists outfits.

[Latif Nasser]

Right, right.

[Lulu Miller]

Is this event a big deal? It's the Emmys of science.

[Latif Nasser]

It was held in Washington D.C. in this big fancy building near the Capitol. So I'm asking people what they're wearing.

[Lulu Miller]

What are you wearing?

[Latif Nasser]

That's a good question.

[Carl Zimmer]

I am wearing a suit. It's like mostly blue, but then there's this subtle light blue. It's pretty funky.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah, yeah.

[Latif Nasser]

And then the Golden Goose Award was sort of this tongue in cheek nerdy response in the form of an award that goes to research that is funded by the government. That sounds dumb or sounds useless, sounds absurd, but then turns out to completely change the world.

[Lulu Miller]

Right.

[Latif Nasser]

So now HUD is getting a call from them saying, tack deserves this award.

[Lulu Miller]

The hot worms. But how. I thought they. How did. How did that research change the world? I thought they were sitting, standing on a shelf.

[Latif Nasser]

Well, that is exactly what I'm going to tell you after the break.

[Lulu Miller]

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[Latif Nasser]

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[Lulu Miller]

Life can pull us in so many different directions. With work, our family and our health all needing our attention, it can be difficult to make decisions that are aligned with what we care about most. I'm Emily Falk. In my new audiobook, what We Value, I'll teach you how the brain makes decisions. We'll explore the hidden calculations that can lead to more purposeful, fulfilling choices. Find what we value on Pushkin FM audiobooks or on Audible, Spotify and wherever books are sold.

[Latif Nasser]

Okay, Lulu Latif, Radiolab, Hotworms and the place where the hot worms went next, which nobody could have ever predicted, only really happened because of a drug induced biological fever dream.

[Lulu Miller]

What?

[Latif Nasser]

And that's the story I'm gonna tell you now. Okay, so maybe no surprise, we're gonna leave Indiana and jump instead to Berkeley, California. All right, we're still in the late 1960s. Only now I wanna tell you about a guy called Kerry Mullis, Ph.D. student in biochemistry at UC Berkeley. But instead of being a lab, he seems to prefer experimenting in biochemistry by synthesizing his own lsd.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay?

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Lulu Miller]

Whoa.

[Latif Nasser]

At this biotech startup called Cetus. Okay, now, just to give you a sense, at this point, we're in the late 70s.

[Hudson Freeze]

Today, science is on the threshold of a new era.

[Latif Nasser]

And the thing that scientists everywhere, especially the scientists at cetis, are obsessed with is DNA.

[Hudson Freeze]

Deoxyribonucleic acid, the essence of life, the stuff of which all life is made. The key we've been looking for, they.

[Latif Nasser]

Have this hunch that decoding DNA is gonna unlock lots of secrets about the human body.

[Hudson Freeze]

The answers lie within these long, thin, twisted strands.

[Latif Nasser]

And Cetus, the company where Kary Mollus got his job, they want to be on the cutting edge of this. And so they have teams of scientists trying to figure out how to read DNA.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay?

[Latif Nasser]

And their main problem at the time is that reading DNA is extremely, extremely hard. The whole process of trying to read or even just find and isolate, like, microscopically tiny little molecules of DNA, it was so inefficient that it was just not. It was a non starter. It was not feasible at all. So scientists at Cetis were scratching their heads trying to find a better way to do this.

[Lulu Miller]

Got it.

[Latif Nasser]

Now, Kary Mullis, he was not doing any of that. He was stuck doing very slow, very repetitive, boring lab work. But one day, he's out on a drive after work.

[Hudson Freeze]

I was driving along one night.

[Latif Nasser]

Kary Mullis actually died back in 2019. But while he was live, he did a bunch of interviews where he talks about this moment.

[Hudson Freeze]

I was driving to a little cabin.

[Latif Nasser]

I have in Mendocino county, driving through the mountains on these windy, steep roads. It's super dark.

[Hudson Freeze]

It was really late at night.

[Latif Nasser]

And in his mind, he's turning over the problems of reading DNA the way he described it. He's like, trying to read a piece of DNA at That time was like trying to find a license plate on the interstate in the middle of the night from the moon. And then you still have to read it.

[Lulu Miller]

So just impossible.

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And all of his colleagues are focused on basically devising a more powerful, more precise telescope to spot the DNA. And he's thinking, like, how do you fix this thing?

[Hudson Freeze]

I mean, what would you do?

[Latif Nasser]

And all of a sudden, he sees DNA everywhere. Blue and pink, strands of DNA just floating in front of him as he was driving, like, through the windshield.

[Carl Zimmer]

Whoa.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Carl Zimmer]

And.

[Latif Nasser]

Then he has this thought that just snaps him right out of it. Everyone's working on a better and better telescope from the moon. Right?

[Lulu Miller]

Right.

[Latif Nasser]

What if instead, you futz with the license plate? Like, what if you can make copies of the license plate and copy the.

[Hudson Freeze]

Copies and then copy the copies? So you go from having one copy of it to 2, to 4, to 8, to 16, to 32, to 64, to 128, on up to a million if you've done it 20 times and a billion if you've done it 30 times.

[Latif Nasser]

A billion of them. It's as if the whole planet Earth now is covered in the license plate that you wanted to see. And all of a sudden, it's going.

[Lulu Miller]

To be way easier to find it.

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah. And therefore to read it.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay. Interesting. I don't quite get how having a billion copies would make you see it.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Lulu Miller]

Okay.

[Latif Nasser]

And he's like. He's like, this is it. Like, he talks about he had, like, deoxyribonuclear bombs going off in his head as he's driving. Like, eureka. Kind of a moment.

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah. Okay.

[Latif Nasser]

He literally stops the car and race it. He, like, looks in the glove compartment, he, like, finds an old receipt, and he's, like, writing things down on the back of it kind of.

[Lulu Miller]

Oh, my gosh. Okay.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Lulu Miller]

Oh, no. Why?

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Lulu Miller]

Okay, so this Xerox machine idea is coming in from Carrie. So.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Lulu Miller]

Right.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah.

[Latif Nasser]

Then basically, you find new base pairs to match up with each side of the zipper.

[Lulu Miller]

Oh, yeah, right.

[Latif Nasser]

For every G, you find a C. For every A, you find a T, you can kind of perfectly recreate the other half.

[Lulu Miller]

Right.

[Latif Nasser]

And then it's like you can zip it up with a new zipper.

[Lulu Miller]

Right, right, right.

[Latif Nasser]

Okay, then do it again. Unzip and then copy both.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay.

[Latif Nasser]

And then you keep doing that over and over. Zip, unzip, zip, unzip. You do that 30 times, you have a billion zip Z. Whereas you just started with one.

[Lulu Miller]

Clever.

[Latif Nasser]

By this point, he managed to convince his boss, who has assigned people by force to work with him. And they keep trying it and trying it. They're working on it for months, and they keep failing. One of the problems is to unzip it, for whatever chemical reason, the temperature needs to be really high.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay.

[Latif Nasser]

And then to rezip it, the temperature needs to be lowered by a lot. Huh. And he notices this one part of the DNA zipper, like the slider, the thing that zips the DNA teeth together, is this enzyme called a polymerase. And he notices that anytime he raises the temperature too high, the polymerase falls apart without getting too in the weeds here. The polymerase is a protein. And typically, if proteins get too hot, they just sort of disintegrate. And so Kerry and his team were like, ugh, if only there was a polymerase somewhere that could live at this high temperature. So then someone from their team went to this library, this microbe library.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay.

[Latif Nasser]

And what did they find?

[Lulu Miller]

The hot worms.

[Latif Nasser]

The hot worms.

[Hudson Freeze]

Thermus aquaticus.

[Lulu Miller]

Oh. So he's like, through the card catalog, like, mm, 90 degrees Celsius.

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah. And as Hudson Freeze explained to us, Thermus aquaticus has its own polymerase, as.

[Hudson Freeze]

You might call it, Taq polymerase.

[Latif Nasser]

And again, because every part of Taq is evolved to take the heat, this polymerase, when you heat it up, it.

[Hudson Freeze]

Can survive without falling apart.

[Latif Nasser]

So Kerry and his team are basically like, oh, this is exactly the thing we were looking for.

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah.

[Latif Nasser]

And they plug it into their machine and it basically works like a dream, as if it was made to do that.

[Lulu Miller]

Oh, my God.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Hudson Freeze]

I think we had just finished cloning a gene at Cetus that took 40 people six months. I can do that in one afternoon by myself now.

[Lulu Miller]

Whoa.

[Latif Nasser]

And so the process that they invent.

[Hudson Freeze]

It'S called polymerase chain reaction, or pcr.

[Latif Nasser]

Pcr?

[Lulu Miller]

Pcr, Polymerase chain reaction.

[Latif Nasser]

And it completely changed everything.

[Lulu Miller]

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

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Hudson Freeze]

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

[Latif Nasser]

They finally decode the human genome and all the knowledge that comes with it. And from there on out, I would.

[Hudson Freeze]

Say every biotechnology company in the world.

[Latif Nasser]

Every lab, anywhere that's studying DNA has to use pcr. To put that a different way, every major scientific breakthrough that involves DNA in any way, in the last several decades, it's all run on pcr. Detect genetic markers, like diagnosing genetic diseases, including cystic fibrosis.

[Lulu Miller]

Things like HIV detection and sickle cell disease.

[Latif Nasser]

Determining ancestry. Like, think of like 23andMe ancestry.com all of that. The whole industry. DNA discovery helped a woman meet the little brother she never knew she had.

[Lulu Miller]

We have forensic DNA testing to identify the suspect's DNA.

[Latif Nasser]

The whole world of forensics, solving crimes.

[Lulu Miller]

With DNA evidence or recent DNA evidence exonerated him.

[Latif Nasser]

Proving people innocent, even identifying bodies for things like reuniting loved ones after wars or natural disasters or Osama bin Laden.

[Hudson Freeze]

Is dead, his body identified using DNA evidence.

[Latif Nasser]

Also another thing. This whole renaissance and learning about human origins.

[Hudson Freeze]

Homo sapiens picked up some of the.

[Latif Nasser]

DNA from the Neanderthals. None of this stuff would have been possible without pcr.

[Lulu Miller]

It's just wild. Like, as you're running through this litany, it is wild that it all Runs on something that we found in these random little worms, these random little bacteria that happen to live in really hot water.

[Latif Nasser]

This is wild crazy, right?

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah.

[Latif Nasser]

Okay. And here's my favorite example.

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah. There's something called a pcr.

[Latif Nasser]

At the moment we're using something called a PCR test. The PCR test is the very same PCR that we used during the pandemic to test for Covid.

[Lulu Miller]

That's really the most accurate way to.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Lulu Miller]

That's right.

[Latif Nasser]

Multiplying Covid RNA so it was detectable.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay. This is, it's almost eerie that like these, these hot worms led us to Covid tests.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Lulu Miller]

Totally.

[Latif Nasser]

Now, obviously the development of PCR was not just Kerry, it was this huge team effort. But in 1993, Dr. Carrie Malice, they now ask you to receive the Nobel Prize from the hands of his majesty the King. Kary Mullis wins the Nobel Prize.

[Hudson Freeze]

And the critical component is the tack polymerase.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Hudson Freeze]

But that isn't why you do the science. Right. I realize it was a critical component and that that was sort of payoff in itself to know that my contribution really counted.

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah. Like I had a hand in this, like amazing world changing technology. I don't know, it's kind of like if your kid is like Michael Jordan. This, by the way, is Radiolab producer Maria Paz Gutierrez and he's like playing in every game.

[Hudson Freeze]

Oh, God. Yes. Yes. My little bug. My little bug has made it.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Hudson Freeze]

It took a long time before I was able to use tack and, you know, really make a difference for individuals and keep people alive that likely would have died. It's funny how 1966 was a real turning point.

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah. I find this like a, just a beautiful, beautiful story about what is life capable of? Like, what can life even do?

[Lulu Miller]

Totally.

[Latif Nasser]

And in the end, like, it really became this life changing life saving discovery.

[Lulu Miller]

And in such a pure way, like, it's like this Open ended question, could there be life in this extremely hot place? Let me do really good samples and like did good science to find out. Yep. And then all I do is put it in a library. Like it's, there's something like pure on so many levels.

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah. Like just idle curiosity paying off way more and in ways that nobody could ever expect.

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah.

[Latif Nasser]

All of that came out of one $80,000 grant from the US government. That's why Hudson Freese and Thomas Brock, they won the golden goose award in 2013.

[Carl Zimmer]

Honestly, like you could hand out a Golden Goose Award every day. You know, pretty much anything that is some kind of technology making life better in some way. It all started in basic science.

[Lulu Miller]

So as we've been working on this story, Latif, you know, you mentioned at the beginning it is this sort of parable of our time.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah. So to kind of bring this story, to connect it to the avalanche of cuts coming to publicly funded science, we turn to somebody whose voice you probably recognize.

[Carl Zimmer]

My name's Carl Zimmer and I'm a columnist at the New York Times.

[Lulu Miller]

He has been watching all the cuts really closely, detailing it in his newsletter called Friday's Elk.

[Carl Zimmer]

So what I've been doing is trying to distill for myself just summarizing what my fellow journalists have been digging up.

[Lulu Miller]

And so we called him up to give us a more granular look at what's been frozen, what's been shut down.

[Carl Zimmer]

What'S been lost, I don't think we know yet, honestly. There are lots of efforts to push back that are happening now. There are a number of lawsuits, There may be more lawsuits, but we don't know how judges will rule. We don't know at this point if the Trump administration is going to really adhere to what the judges say. But I can say government scientists are getting laid off in the tens of thousands. Opportunities for young scientists are getting wiped out. Grants are being eliminated. Universities are suddenly having billions of dollars of research suddenly pulled. You know, there was a big diabetes program. There was at Columbia. There was a program on, you know, studying chronic fatigue. These have been going on for years. They're gone.

[Lulu Miller]

No one's in those labs. Just empty.

[Carl Zimmer]

They're gone, they're shut down. Things are happening on all fronts.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Carl Zimmer]

For example, the Trump administration has put forward a budget in which NASA's science budget would be cut in half, which experts have described as kind of an extinction level event for science at NASA. This is all the stuff that you read about in the newspapers, like, you know, what did we discover on Mars? Or there is a space telescope called the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. It is built, if it gets into space, it will be able to give us an incredible picture on the whole universe, including the evolution of galaxies. And even better, look at planets around other solar systems might help us find life on other solar systems in the proposed budget. That telescope is dead. It gets no funding.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Carl Zimmer]

Yeah.

[Latif Nasser]

That's absurd.

[Carl Zimmer]

Send the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's climate science program that is being proposed to be shut down. Just shut down, fully, fully shut down the epa. At the epa, they have research scientists who do science to understand the threats to human health. There's movements to have all 1,000 of them laid off. The EPA will not have a research science staff if this follows through. You know, the Centers for Disease Control, for example, Centers for Disease Control used to have an office full of experts on lead poisoning. And in fact, Milwaukee has just had a lead poisoning emergency. And they would like to have CDC send their experts. There are no lead poisoning experts at the cdc.

[Lulu Miller]

They're just gone now.

[Carl Zimmer]

They've been fired.

[Lulu Miller]

What about, I mean, what about nsf? Nih?

[Carl Zimmer]

Yeah, nsf. Their proposal is to cut it in half. And Department of Health and Human Services.

[Lulu Miller]

That'S the department that houses the national institutes of health.

[Carl Zimmer]

10,000 people have been fired that has included lots of people involved in doing basic research on biomedicine.

[Lulu Miller]

And in one example, Carl told us about a group of scientists who've been working over the last several years trying.

[Carl Zimmer]

To make a coronavirus vaccine that is going to be able to give us some protection against other strains of COVID or maybe some entirely new coronavirus.

[Latif Nasser]

Right.

[Carl Zimmer]

They've made a lot of progress and a lot of that progress came with a deeper understanding of how the immune system works. So they've learned a lot of basic science along the way and it has been delivering a lot of promise. And that grant has just been pulled with no explanation. That research is now over. There are projects looking for antivirals for a range of different viruses that might start the next pandemic. That's been canceled, too. And those scientists aren't even sure if they'll be able to Write up their results. Like, you may not find out what they've done. There's just too many to choose from. I mean, I've been talking with a researcher who has, you know, a massive program on understanding tuberculosis and the immune system. You know, this is the most deadly infectious disease we have these days. It kills over a million people a year. His grant was canceled and honestly, he's not sure why. This huge program that could, you know, give us new insights about tuberculosis and might eventually lead to new treatments is just gone. Just gone. So there are definitely very short term impacts of what this administration is doing. Cutting off the supply of drugs for HIV or halting a clinical trial, potentially give a treatment for cancer. These people are in the middle of these trials and they're just stopping. So those are really short term things.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Carl Zimmer]

That's not great business. You'd be waiting a long time for those drug companies to pick up all that basic research that governments like the United States have been covering for decades. And a lot of this stuff, you know, when it's dropped, it's really difficult to ever start it up again. You don't bounce back from this sort of shock to the system and, you.

[Lulu Miller]

Know, a system of searching for knowledge. There is so much that needs to be ready to go. Equipment, materials, administration, all the gathering up of research subjects and then the scientists themselves.

[Carl Zimmer]

You know, I'm 70. There was a poll that nature did recently. They asked hundreds of scientists about, you know, what, what effect all of this chaos is having on them and their thoughts about their future. And 75%, 75% of these American scientists said they have been thinking about maybe moving. Wow. Other people may just leave science.

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah.

[Carl Zimmer]

35 years of being a science writer, I haven't seen anything close to this.

[Lulu Miller]

And I mean, Carl says what we are seeing right now is just uncharted territory.

[Carl Zimmer]

Really. I mean, at this point, I'm thinking we're well on our way to the United States losing its prime position in science.

[Lulu Miller]

All right, I'm just gonna put my head on the desk and leave it here.

[Carl Zimmer]

I guess maybe we can talk about happier things at another time. But this is what we need to be talking about now.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah.

[Latif Nasser]

But I, I kind of saved. There's one extra detail from the Hudson freeze tax story, knowing that we would need a pick me up at the End here.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay.

[Latif Nasser]

Because. Because it's. It's like one of my favorite little details about this story.

[Carl Zimmer]

Please.

[Latif Nasser]

Well, okay.

[Lulu Miller]

Yes, please.

[Latif Nasser]

In the late 1980s, a Berkeley paleobiologist started using PCR to find DNA in ancient weevils. Okay. And the ancient weevils were found in amber.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay.

[Latif Nasser]

And accounts vary a little bit, but the story goes that the novelist Michael Crichton hear about that.

[Lulu Miller]

Yes. Oh, my God.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Lulu Miller]

Jurassic Park.

[Latif Nasser]

So he wrote Jurassic park, which is amazing because when we interviewed Hudson Freese, his takeaway from his research was like.

[Hudson Freeze]

Life finds a way.

[Latif Nasser]

And you're like, yeah, that's from a movie that was inspired by the thing you discovered.

[Lulu Miller]

That is incredible.

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah.

[Lulu Miller]

Full circle.

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Hudson Freeze]

Dawning of the Age of Aquaticus. Age of Aquaticus.

[Carl Zimmer]

Aquatica.

[Latif Nasser]

That's right.

[Hudson Freeze]

You know, something like that. Give me a little time to warm up.

[Latif Nasser]

Why not? Why not? Yeah, right. Anyhow, thank you as well to Joanne Padrone Carney. Also to her team, Erin Heath, Valeria Sabate, Gwendolyn Bogard, Meredith Asbury and Megan Cantwell at AAAS for being a tremendous help this episode and for administering the Golden Goose Award. Thank you as well to Gregor Kavlik and Derek Muller and the rest of the Veritasium team, who I actually collaborated with to do a YouTube video about this topic. They even go into how post Nobel Kary Mullis went totally off the deep end and lost all his scientific credibility. Check out that on YouTube.

[Lulu Miller]

This episode was reported by Latif Nasser and Maria Paz Gutierrez. It was produced by Maria Paz Gutierrez and Sara Khari, edited by Alex Neeson with help from Sara Khari. Music and sound design by Jeremy Bloom. And our fact checker on this one was Emily Krieger. That's it. Thank you so much for listening. See you next week.

[Latif Nasser]

Catch you next week.

[Lulu Miller]

Hi, I'm Priya Ramachandran D'Souza and I'm from Finland. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soran Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler W. Harry Fortuna, David Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez Sinduk, Nana Samanthan, Matt KLT, Annie McAven, Alex Neeson, Sara Curry, Sara Sandbach, Anissa Vetse, Aria Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

[Latif Nasser]

Hi, I'm Arturo calling from New York City. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Science Sandbox Assignments Foundation Initiative and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

[Lulu Miller]

A whole new season of terrestrials is coming. Radiolab's family friendly show All About Nature. This season we are back with a new batch of episodes where we come face to snout with some of the wildest, gnarliest creatures on this planet. We discover music, magic, medicine and a whole lot of fun starting April 17, all on the Radiolab for Kids feed wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Latif Nasser]

This is Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, the science Friday team has been reporting high quality science and technology news, making science fun for curious people by covering everything from the outer reaches of space to the rapidly changing world of AI to the tiniest microbes in our bodies. Audiences trust our show because they know we're driven by a mission to inform and serve listeners first and foremost with important news they won't get anywhere else. And our sponsors benefit from that halo effect. For more information on becoming a sponsor, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.