Columbia cuts and "transgender mice"

Summary

Science in Action – “Columbia Cuts and ‘Transgender Mice’”

BBC World Service | March 20, 2025 | Host: Roland Pease

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the ongoing turbulence in US scientific research funding, instigated by political decisions around campus activism at Columbia University and the politicization of health research, notably around hormone studies in animals. Alongside these key stories, the episode highlights significant scientific developments, including breathtaking new data from ESA’s Euclid Space Telescope and troubling news about the spread of H5N1 bird flu in Antarctica.

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1. The Columbia University Funding Crisis

[02:45–10:32]

Background

• Hundreds of Columbia University researchers, including Dr. Kelton Minor, had their federal funding frozen—totalling $400 million—due to claims that the university failed to address antisemitism connected with Israel-Gaza campus activism.
• The NIH Early Independence Award fund, critical for early-career researchers like Minor, is among the terminated grants.

Key Discussion Points

• Shock and Uncertainty for Researchers

  • Dr. Kelton Minor shares the official and abrupt termination notice and reflects on the sudden career instability this creates:

    "In that moment, I felt a surreal sense of disbelief as it dawned upon me. This is my own government revoking access to the grant that I had rightfully won through a meritocratic process. And it felt darkly surreal and, to be frank, brutally unfair."
    —Kelton Minor [04:16]

  • His research lab and planned studies for the next five years are left in limbo.

• Research Impacted

  • The suspensions extend beyond politically sensitive topics:

    "Cancer epidemiology, diabetes management, schizophrenia treatment, environmental health, maternal health and pediatric health...have all come to a halt, in many cases leaving patients and those enrolled in clinical trials in limbo."
    —Kelton Minor [07:49]

  • Dr. Minor emphasizes that environmental, public, and medical health projects—many far removed from campus protests—are directly affected.

• Opaque Decision Process

  • The selection of terminated grants lacks transparency:

    "There are clear patterns and entire topics being dismantled. We all deserve to know what were the criteria that were used to select which grants to cancel and which researchers' futures to alter?"
    —Kelton Minor [09:15]

• Personal Position on Activism

  • Despite fund suspensions citing activism, Minor states plainly:

    "I have not been involved in the on-campus activism and protests."
    —Kelton Minor [09:57]

• Raises broader concerns about why critical research serving public welfare is politicized: > "Why is the government mainly terminating the medical, public and environmental health funding that keeps us all safe?"
  —Kelton Minor [10:15]

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2. The “Transgender Mice” Controversy

[10:34–17:36]

Background

• President Trump, in a State of the Union address, derided "wasteful" NIH grants, notably citing "$8 million for making mice transgender."
• A White House clarification attempted to distinguish 'transgender' from 'transgenic,' but controversy and confusion persisted.
• Dr. Patricia Silvera, whose research was politically targeted, is interviewed.

Key Discussion Points

• Public and Personal Fallout

  • Dr. Silvera describes learning abruptly of her work's political targeting:

    "I started getting email after email...I googled my name and mice...I went back and watched a mini video of what he had said..."
    —Patricia Silvera [11:36]

  • Expresses concern over public misunderstanding and misrepresentation:

    "I don't appreciate the misrepresentation of some of what we do, especially with the general public, because it is taxpayers' money...They trust us to conduct research, to provide data that will help everyone."
    —Patricia Silvera [12:23]

• Clarifying the Research

  • Silvera’s research explores how hormone-driven gene regulation inside cells influences inflammation and asthma, using transgenic ('four core genotypes') mouse models:

    "These particular mice, they have a mutation...This mutation makes these animals have either female hormones or male hormones circulating in their blood."
    —Patricia Silvera [13:26]

  • She distinguishes biological sex from the social construct of gender:

    "The word gender is culturally defined...there could never be a mouse that is assigned a gender..."
    —Patricia Silvera [14:21]

  • While her work can inform provider care for transgender individuals, that is not its sole intent:

    "If somebody has the opposite hormone and their asthma gets worse, my research potentially could help them treat their asthma. But that's not the only purpose of this research."
    —Patricia Silvera [15:16]

• Significance for Public Health

  • Highlights that women are at higher risk and severity for asthma after puberty, likely due to hormones:

    "After puberty...there's always more women with asthma than men, almost twice as many.”
    —Patricia Silvera [15:42]

  • Experiences during pregnancy and menopause also support a hormone link for asthma severity.

• Concerns Over Politicization

  • Laments the impact when scientific work is swept into political narratives:

    "It is sad to hear that health is being politicized...I don't really like that this is taken out of context and making it sound like I'm playing with mice and just making them gendered or whatever they think I'm doing."
    —Patricia Silvera [16:41]

  • Asserts her ultimate goals:

    "I wake up every day and I go to the lab...with the end goal of helping people have a better life and better health."
    —Patricia Silvera [17:24]

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3. Euclid Space Telescope: Mapping the Universe

[19:36–26:38]

Background

• The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid telescope, now a year into its mission, is producing extraordinary wide-field, high-resolution images to map the universe’s structure and probe dark matter and energy.
• ESA astronomer Valeria Peterini joins to discuss the science and what’s ahead.

Highlights and Insights

• Technical Feats

  • In only one week, Euclid generated 35 terabytes of data—a fraction of what’s planned over six years.

• Purpose and Discoveries

  • Euclid will map the full sky beyond our galaxy, with many uses:

    "Euclid has a very wide field of view. It will allow to map the geometry of the universe...in six years, and also have a very high resolution."
    —Valeria Peterini [20:11]

• First batch includes data for strong gravitational lensing (where gravity from matter bends light, distorting galaxy images): > "Here there is already 500 galaxy galaxy strong lensing candidates in the release that we have. And we expect to measure hundreds of thousands...by the end of the mission."
  —Valeria Peterini [22:49]

• Big Data Collaboration

  • The scale of data and international teamwork are unprecedented:

    "It's not about one single astronomer...We are talking of a mission that involves collaborations of almost three thousands of people..."
    —Valeria Peterini [25:38]

  • Daily data flows exceed 100 GB.

• Mapping the Cosmic Web

  • Aims to chart galaxies, voids, filaments, and explore dark matter's role in universe structure:

    "The exact positions, length, number of voids and filaments and galaxies...is what Euclid would measure."
    —Valeria Peterini [24:21]

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4. H5N1 Bird Flu in Antarctica: Alarming Spread

[26:38–31:58]

Background

• The highly pathogenic H5N1 avian flu, first reaching Antarctica last year, is now widespread.
• Spanish virologist Antonio Alcami shares results from this season’s expedition.

Key Updates

• Virus Found "Almost Everywhere"

  • Sampling across 14 species—flying birds, penguins, sea mammals:

    "We have confirmed the worst scenario. We have seen avian flu hypothogenicity almost everywhere."
    —Antonio Alcami [27:30]

• Both Live and Dead Animals Are Infected

  • Indicates active circulation of the virus within Antarctic fauna.

• Species-Specific Impact

  • Some species experience significant die-offs, e.g., 40–60 dead animals found at site, possibly 50% mortality in some groups.
  • Unexpected resilience in penguins — little observed mortality, possibly due to resistance or immunity.

• Unseen Toll Among Sea Mammals

  • Many sea mammal deaths likely go undetected, as carcasses can be lost at sea or on inaccessible ice.

• Challenges in Research

  • Six-week expedition, 27 sampling sites, but Antarctic vastness precludes exhaustive monitoring:

    "Still this expedition has a limitation, is you cannot sample every corner."
    —Antonio Alcami [30:38]

• Research Value and Funding Uncertainty

  • Antarctic provides a unique "natural laboratory" for studying virus adaptation and spread.
  • Alcami notes future work relies on uncertain funding—critical science is vulnerable to financial pressures.

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Notable Quotes

"In that moment, I felt a surreal sense of disbelief as it dawned upon me. This is my own government revoking access to the grant that I had rightfully won through a meritocratic process."
—Kelton Minor [04:16]

"There could never be a mouse that is assigned a gender. The word gender is culturally defined...the description sounded like I could help people who were transgender—which is true—but that's not the only purpose of this research."
—Patricia Silvera [14:21], [15:16]

"We have seen avian flu hypothogenicity almost everywhere."
—Antonio Alcami [27:30]

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Timeline of Key Segments

• [02:45] Columbia funding cuts: Dr. Kelton Minor’s experience
• [10:34] Trump’s “transgender mice” claim and Dr. Patricia Silvera’s research
• [19:36] Euclid telescope’s new astronomical data (Dr. Valeria Peterini)
• [26:38] H5N1 bird flu’s spread in Antarctica (Dr. Antonio Alcami)

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Tone & Atmosphere

The episode combines somber reflection on the impact of politicized funding decisions with a sense of awe at scientific discovery (Euclid) and concern over unfolding environmental threats (bird flu). The voices of researchers are thoughtful yet passionate about the importance and integrity of their work, pushing back on political distortion and highlighting the societal value—and vulnerability—of public science.

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For Listeners Who Missed the Episode

• This episode offers a rare look at how political action and rhetoric tangibly disrupt scientific careers, critical public health research, and international collaboration.
• It clarifies scientific issues at the heart of recent controversies (the nature of gender research in animals, the public value of behavioral science, the real aims of hormone studies) with clear, credible explanations from affected researchers.
• Listeners are treated to both the wonders of cutting-edge cosmology and sobering news about global health threats, all grounded in direct accounts from working scientists.

Transcript

[Roland Pease]

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.

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[Patricia Silvera]

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[Kelton Minor]

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[Kelton Minor]

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[Roland Pease]

Welcome to Science in Action from the BBC World Service with me, Roland Pease. The European Space Agency's Euclid Space Telescope has well and truly embarked on its exploration of the entirety of the universe. Though what we've seen this week is only a sample of what's to come.

[Valeria Peterini]

It'S the start of a journey. It's an incredible journey if you consider that. We are releasing now one week of observations.

[Roland Pease]

It's one week.

[Valeria Peterini]

It's only one week. It's still 35 terabytes of data.

[Roland Pease]

They'll be returning with multiples of that over the next few years. Meanwhile, virologists and zoologists have returned from Antarctica with an update of the spread since last year of the deadly H5N1 bird flu.

[Antonio Alcami]

Through colonies there, we sampled 14 different species. Well, we have confirmed the worst scenario we have seen avian flu hypothogenicity almost everywhere.

[Roland Pease]

Not unexpected, I'm afraid. The details, though, to come. Let's start, though, with the continuing upheaval in US Scientific institutions under the new administration, but from the point of view of individual researchers impacted by the actions. First, Kelton Minor, a climate and environment specialist at Columbia University's Data Science Institute, one of hundreds of staff at the university who learned this week that their federal funding has been pulled because of political activism on the campus regarding Israel and Gaza. $400 million worth of grants have been frozen, including funds for the National Institutes of Health's Early Independence Award Fund, which were helping Kelton to get onto the first rungs of a career in science. Kelton, thanks for joining us. I think you first learned of this impact through a pretty terse memo from the university administration.

[Kelton Minor]

Yeah, thanks for having me on. And it's okay if I actually read the email out loud the beginning of that?

[Roland Pease]

Yeah, please do.

[Kelton Minor]

Yeah, It's a. Dear Dr. Minor, late Friday afternoon, the NIH informed us that they were canceling a significant portion of our awards. We regret to inform you that the above award was on the list and has been terminated, effective immediately. We understand this may be shocking news and create unforeseen and unprecedented challenges for you and and your team. So in that moment, I felt a surreal sense of disbelief as it dawned upon me. This is my own government revoking access to the grant that I had rightfully won through a meritocratic process. And it felt darkly surreal and, to be frank, brutally unfair. I mean, no justification was given why my award was singled out and placed in the line of fire among my colleagues grants. And in about 10 days, more than 400 NIH grants were canceled at Columbia. And so this has left me reeling and contemplating not only my future at the university, but in academia as a whole.

[Roland Pease]

Is that your sole source of funding? In other words, are you effectively jobless at this point?

[Kelton Minor]

Indeed. My assistant professor position was slated to begin this month, and I still have not heard what my status is and what the implications are for not only me, but my entire research lab in the next five years of research that I had planned out as a part of the premier startup grant at the NIH for an early career professional such as myself.

[Roland Pease]

I described you as a climate and environment specialist at the Data Science Institute. This is a National Institutes of Health award. What is it that you're hoping to study?

[Kelton Minor]

Yeah, so I'm a behavioral data scientist. I research how humans are adapting to some of the most Prominent global changes in technology, the environment that we live in and the climate that surrounds us. My research was going to try to estimate what the behavioral costs and benefits of changes in climate are globally for people's physical activity, sleep and other health related behaviors.

[Roland Pease]

I mean, I've seen from some of your earlier papers, which I guess are the ones that persuaded these people, you know, the nih, that you should be funded. You've been using mobile phone data to see, for example, if they're going out and about and as you say, whether their sleep patterns are changing.

[Kelton Minor]

I mean, I've conducted, you know, global scale research showing that warmer than normal temperatures reduce how much people sleep across the entire year. I've conducted other research that shows, you know, different changes in fundamental behaviors and people's emotions and how they express themselves on hotter days becomes more negative, and when it rains harder, people's sentiment is harmed. I do research across the gamut though, and it's not focused on one particular outcome. It's focused more broadly on the determinants of human welfare, well being and life satisfaction. Our everyday behaviors are basically just one component of human health, but a very important one.

[Roland Pease]

I mean, I have seen other commentators mocking this research on social media and it's not the kind of hard atmospheric data that tell us about the state of the climate and so on. I mean, would you defend this kind of science being done? And was this part of the reason why Columbia University or the NIH cut your research?

[Kelton Minor]

The stated reason for these grant cancellations was Columbia's purported failure to adequately address repeated antisemitic harassment on campus. But the practical effect has been to derail a broad scope of predominantly health related research at the Uptown Medical campus, which is far afield from where the protest actually took place on campus. The number of different research threads that have been affected are really a broad mosaic. Cancer epidemiology, diabetes management, schizophrenia treatment, environmental health, maternal health and pediatric health and you know, other aspects of health and medical science have all come to a halt, in many cases leaving patients and those enrolled in clinical trials in limbo and in some cases derailing the entire research studies themselves. So, you know, my research is one component of this. But what has become apparent in the trail of debris of studies that have been canceled and axed is that a large number of them have been environmental health and climate and health related research. What's unclear at this point is where are these decisions coming from?

[Roland Pease]

It's not a blanket ban on all nih. There's been some selection.

[Kelton Minor]

You're saying I want to emphasize this is me speaking from my experience as a researcher, not on behalf of Columbia University, but I can say confidently from personal conversations that I've had and also from talking to colleagues that these decisions were not made by the NIH program officers who usually manage grants. It came from higher up. But the initial evidence from what I've seen suggests that this is not just an indiscriminate. It's a wide cut of research, but there are clear patterns and entire topics being dismantled. And we all deserve to know what were the criteria that were used to select which grants to cancel and which researchers futures to alter?

[Roland Pease]

I should say the acting president of Columbia University has put out a statement agreeing that anti Semitism is a problem at the university that needs to be tackled. I need to ask you whether you have been involved in any of these protests on the campus. Have you been a political activist as well as doing your research?

[Kelton Minor]

I have not been involved in the on campus activism and protests. I do want to, you know, emphasize that if the US Claims to be punishing Colombia for allowing what it describes as, quote, unquote, illegal protests and failing to protect students from quote, unquote, anti Semitic harassment on campus, valid concerns and accusations that we should take seriously, why is the government mainly terminating the medical, public and environmental health funding that keeps us all safe?

[Roland Pease]

Kelton, thank you very much for talking to us.

[Kelton Minor]

Thanks so much for having me on.

[Roland Pease]

Kelton Miner of Columbia University. At the State of the Union address last month, President Trump highlighted several examples of what he called wasteful spending that he was proposing to axe, including this. $8 million for making mice transgender. This is real. Pushing back against accusations the president was confusing transgender with transgenic. In other words, genetically altered. The White House issued a list of NIH supported projects which, in their words, were performing transgender experiments on mice. As we highlighted at the time, the most expensive of these was a study at the Indiana University School of Medicine on the role of hormones in the development of asthma. Project leader Patricia Silvera had just learned weeks before that her research had been listed on a political website and questioning gender research, though she missed the presidential address itself.

[Patricia Silvera]

I was in the lab. I was about to run my lab meeting and I started getting email after email. And then I literally just googled my name and demise. And I saw, I went back and I watched a mini video of what he had said and I understood, you know, how the confusion about transgender versus transgender led the White House to clarify what they meant, but it's just not really an accurate representation of what we.

[Roland Pease]

Do, most research is done quite quietly, and people are getting on with the job that they've been funded to do, and suddenly to be plucked out of, shall I say, obscurity by this kind of statement from, you know, the most powerful political office almost in the world.

[Patricia Silvera]

Yeah, it was a little disturbing. And obviously, the first thing I want to check is if Migrant was still active, because I kept reading in other places that some research had been actually stopped. Migrant is still active despite all this confusion. So, in a way, it's good news. But I don't appreciate the misrepresentation of some of what we do, especially with the general public, because it is taxpayers money. You know, they. They trust us to conduct research, to provide data that will help everyone. And I wouldn't want anyone to think that we are wasting their money or using it for anything that is negative.

[Roland Pease]

I suppose there is a very loose way in which it could be said you're working with transgender mice, but the work you're doing is so much more serious, and it is about the interaction between hormones and health.

[Patricia Silvera]

We are interested in how, inside of the cells, how the genes are regulated to provoke inflammation that then later on contributes to asthma. And some of these genes are regulated by hormones. So in order to dissect those mechanisms, we use transgenic mice. So these particular mice, they have a mutation. This mutation makes these animals have either female hormones or male hormones circulating in their blood. These mice could be genetically male or female in terms of sex chromosomes. So they could be xx, which is the female composition, or they could be xy, which is the male composition. The model is called the four core genotypes, because you basically have four options. You have two hormones and two chromosomes. That allows us to. To determine, for example, if I suspect in my case, that asthma is more prevalent in women than men because the hormones are contributing. What I do is I dissect the mechanism of the hormone alone by putting it in the context of the chromosomes from the females or the chromosomes from the males, and then I see the difference between those two, and then I dig deeper into what genes are being expressed and what happens in the lungs. So it is a tool that I use. Now, when people read that I have a chromosomal composition of a female with the hormones of a male and vice versa, it is tempting, perhaps, to think that that would be a transgender mouse. However, the word gender is culturally defined. Gender is a social construct, so there could never be a mouse that is assigned a gender. In the description of my abstract and my public health relevance, I mentioned that my goal was to study how these hormones contributed to these mechanisms. And I think the way it was written, it sounded like I could help people who were transgender, which is true. You know, if somebody has the opposite hormone and their asthma gets worse, my research potentially could help them treat their asthma. But that's not the only purpose of this research.

[Roland Pease]

In the abstract, you introduced me to something I didn't even know, that girls become particularly more susceptible to asthma during puberty.

[Patricia Silvera]

What we know is that after puberty. Yeah. And throughout reproductive life, there's always more women with asthma than men, almost twice as many. And not only that, women have more severe asthma, they are hospitalized more for asthma, they die more from asthma. And at that point, we believe probably hormones are involved. Other hints that we have regarding hormones participating in these mechanisms is that during pregnancy, some women experience differences in their asthma severity. And also during menopause, a lot of women resolve their asthma. So we have a lot of hints regarding estrogen potentially contributing to the inflammation underlying asthma. But in order to understand what's going on and to be able to treat directly, the problem is we need to dissect the mechanism using these tools, including these mice.

[Roland Pease]

I guess what I'm wondering about, though, is what this episode tells us about what happens when science gets seen through a political prism.

[Patricia Silvera]

Yeah, it is sad to hear that health is being politicized because I think about the patients. I think about the people who receive hormone for a medical treatment or receive hormones because they do want to transition. It's their personal decision. And, you know, they have the right to know if the hormones are going to affect their health. And also they have the right to have a treatment if something goes wrong with their lungs, at least in my case. So, yeah, I don't really like that this is taken out of context and making it sound like I'm playing with mice and just making them gendered or whatever they think I'm doing. I wake up every day and I go to the lab and I do my work and I train people and I conduct my experiments with the end goal of helping people have a better life and better health.

[Roland Pease]

Patricia Silvera on the experience of being catapulted into a political storm. A reminder. This is Science in Action from the BBC World Service.

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[Roland Pease]

Normal Sciences Continuing outside this turmoil, I hope you've had a chance to see some of the amazing new images released by the European Space Agency's Euclid Space Telescope, now a year into its program to map the universe beyond our Milky Way galaxy. The quality of the images gathered by a 600 megapixel camera on the main telescope is stunning, and they remind me of some of those sent back by the James Webb Space Telescope. But ESA astronomer Valeria Peterini told me the Euclid telescope design and purpose is very different.

[Valeria Peterini]

Euclid has a very wide field of view. It will allow to map the geometry of the universe, in fact, to provide a map of the full sky beyond our galactic plane. Very fast, relatively, in six years, and also have a very high resolution.

[Roland Pease]

I mean, the pictures that have come down are absolutely stunning.

[Valeria Peterini]

Yeah, it's fantastic. You can zoom in and zoom in and still see very, very tiny details.

[Roland Pease]

At the beginning of my career as a journalist, distant galaxies were just smudges, rather ugly ones at that. Whereas now you can see, for example, with spiral galaxies, you can see the, the twists and turns of their shapes and in, you know, it almost feels like you can see individual stars in them.

[Valeria Peterini]

Indeed, that's one of the highlights of this data release to see galaxies in their different shapes, how they also change and their shape and orientation changes, for example, depending on their environment and how close they are to what we call the cosmic web.

[Roland Pease]

What's interesting is typically when we do a story, it will be because astronomers have found out something important, like, I don't know, with James Webb, it would be some of the very earliest black holes or some of the earliest stars and things like this. You've got dozens of papers that you've published, but they all seem to be explanations of catalogues and how we searched for something. The titles are extremely boring. But this is the start of a journey for you.

[Valeria Peterini]

It's the start of a journey. It's an incredible journey if you consider that we are releasing now one week of observations.

[Roland Pease]

It's one week.

[Valeria Peterini]

It's only one week. It's still 35 terabytes of data. And we're releasing, as you said, data, video images. And the Euclid Consortium has also submitted 34 papers, 27, which describe several use cases for which this data can be used. These data are already really illustrative of how we can use them for many different purposes in astronomy, from strong gravitational lensing to galaxy clusters to how galaxy evolve.

[Roland Pease]

So when I see a paper, you know, one of them, the Strong Lensing Discovery Engine, A system overview and lens catalog. Most of my listeners, I think, wouldn't say, oh, wow, I must know about that. Why should they?

[Valeria Peterini]

This is an incredible effect, actually. Gravitational lensing is due to the fact that if we observe a galaxy which is far away and there's matter in between, the light that comes from that faraway galaxy doesn't travel on a straight line to us, but it's bent. That means that the image of the faraway galaxy is distorted, is deformed. When this effect is strong and we have a very large deformation, then we talk about strong lensing. Here there is already 500 galaxy galaxy strong lensing candidates in the release that we have. And we expect to measure hundreds of thousands of galaxy galaxy strong lenses by the end of the mission.

[Roland Pease]

So this is, I guess, a bit like looking through slightly disturbed water. So it distorts images. And one of your scientific interests is dark matter, the stuff which isn't stars or gas and so on. Are these lenses a way for you to, as it were, weigh the dark matter?

[Valeria Peterini]

Yes. In the future, the reconstruction of dark matter properties will be indeed done using gravitational lensing, mainly through even tiny deformations.

[Roland Pease]

The reason it's important is because I Think the cosmological theories are that where the dark matter is then influences where galaxies are built and so on. So it all affects the history of the universe.

[Valeria Peterini]

Exactly. Galaxies are not filling space in the same way everywhere. They are forming groups of galaxies, filaments of galaxies, and then there's other regions which instead are emptier. And we call them voids. Altogether, they describe what we call the cosmic web. And the exact positions, length, number of voids and filaments and galaxies, how they distribute in space and time is what Euclid would measure. And these very specific positions depend on the properties of dark matter and dark energy. And so from this map, we will be able to reconstruct and test different models for both dark matter and dark energy.

[Roland Pease]

I suppose what's interesting for me is this is such a big, big data operation, and it's. It's sort of so different from 100 years ago, when Edwin Hubble was looking up through his telescope and started to understand that galaxies were things outside our own Milky Way and that the universe was expanding. And that was a sort of very different effort from this huge international collaboration you're doing.

[Valeria Peterini]

The work is done, indeed, in a very different way from the past. It's not about one single astronomer that looks at the sky from its telescope. We are talking of a mission that involves collaborations of almost three thousands of people combining many different expertise. If you imagine that we are receiving more than 100 gigabytes per day from Euclid, I mean, I don't know if you have managed to exactly to download the images in high resolution. That may already be problematic on a small laptop. Imagine having to download more than 100 gigabytes per day, every day for six years. It involves a huge effort already to store, process, and then share this data and to really know where to look. It's an incredible example, I think, of collaboration across different countries.

[Roland Pease]

Valeria Petturini and I'd recommend you go to sky.esa.int. where you can spend hours zooming in and out of the new maps from Euclid and enjoying that amazing detail. Though I guess we should let the scientists do the data crunching. Two years ago, we first heard on the program about the spread of H5N1 bird flu to the southern tip of South America and the risk of it getting into bird and animal colonies on Antarctica, no longer protected by its remoteness on the planet. Last year, it was the confirmation the virus had reached the frozen wilderness we were discussing. And some of those scientists, including Spanish virologists, Antonio Alcami have been back exploring the shoreline to see how much further it has embedded itself. The news is, as expected, bad.

[Antonio Alcami]

So we set up a new expedition this year and we travel along the Antarctic peninsula. We sampled 14 different species, flying birds, penguins and sea mammals. Well, we have confirmed the worst scenario. We have seen avian flu hypothogenicity almost everywhere.

[Roland Pease]

And just to be clear, when you're doing these samples, were these on live animals or were you finding dead animals?

[Antonio Alcami]

This year we sampled both live and dead animals and we have seen the virus in both live and animals, meaning the virus at the moment just now circulating in Antarctica in live animals.

[Roland Pease]

And what is the mortality rate? Are you able to get an idea of if it's being as deadly as it has been elsewhere in the world?

[Antonio Alcami]

Well, that's difficult, depends on the species. Squirrels is a huge impact on mortality, we think, because we have seen in some areas where we found 60, 40 dead animals. These are large numbers. I mean, this may be 50% of the population in that site. For other animals, we don't have numbers. I must say, for penguins, we were somehow surprised, gladly surprised, because we haven't observed much mortality in penguins, as we somehow predicted from last year. Well, that means the penguins are either resistant to this virus or they are acquiring immunity.

[Roland Pease]

You know, on the one hand it's great if penguins are not dying of this, but it does mean equally that they're carriers and presumably if some of the sea mammals and so on are preying on, then that's a route for further transmission.

[Antonio Alcami]

Yeah, you're right. I mean, there is a lot of opportunities for transmission between species because many of the birds are scavengers of penguins and sea mammals. So if something is infected there, it's going to be transmitted easily to other species. And I think we need to do more work in the future and see the impact in every species. And another important thing we want to tell people is that in the case of sea mammals, we don't have information these animals may be dying in the sea. We don't see them, but we have seen, for example, a report with crevice seals, hundreds of them dead on ice, on top of ice, they disappear. And we found a few in the beach in that area and they were all positive. So probably that massive mortality was caused by the virus. But we don't see the carcasses now from sea mammoths.

[Valeria Peterini]

Right.

[Roland Pease]

I mean, we have to remember this is an incredibly difficult region to study it because you only get a few months in the year. I don't know how long this voyage of yours was and it's a vast area and you have to presumably choose the right places.

[Antonio Alcami]

Yeah, I mean we were six weeks and we sampled 27 sites. Something was really, really exhausting. I think we did a really good job because we covered a very extensive area. We tried to cover as south as we could and take representative sites, sites where people have observed suspected cases. But yeah, is still this expedition has a limitation, is you cannot sample every corner.

[Roland Pease]

I mean for you, this isn't your main line of research, you're a virologist more generally, but clearly you know the fact that you've just spent a large part of your research year down there, this is to you incredibly important.

[Antonio Alcami]

Oh yeah, of course. Because it gives an opportunity to take very, very valuable samples. I mean the way I see it is that the Antarctic continent is really isolated from the rest of the contin and we have seen the introduction of a new virus, highly pathogenic virus, into Antarctica and now we are following the evolution of this infection in Antarctica. We have seen which species are infected, how they transmit, the impact on the species that live in Antarctica. So I think having the picture of the whole process, how the virus is mutating because something we need to do now is to sequence the virus from different species because the prediction is that, as you can see, infect a new species, you will change a little bit to adapt to this species. The impact on every species, the interaction between them. I think there's lots of things to do and this is like a natural laboratory. It's a closed place, relatively isolated place. We are studying how the virus spreads. So for me as a biologist, it's really important to be able to go there, get samples, take them back to the lab and then do more work.

[Roland Pease]

Antonio Alcami now back at his center for Molecular Biology in Madrid. As we wound up, he mentioned the scientific cruise was possible only because of funding from the Spanish association of Insurers, keen to know the health risks of tourism in the Antarctic, but that without additional funding, follow up studies next year may not be possible. You'd hope something this important wouldn't be dependent on random generosity, but there you go, there we go. Science in Action will be back courtesy of the BBC World Service same time next week. Until then, from me, Renault Peace and producer Al Hubbard. Thanks for joining us. This is the story of the one as a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility, he knows keeping the line up and running is a top priority. That's why he chooses Grainger. Because when a drive belt gets damaged, Grainger makes it easy to find the exact specs for the replacement product he needs, and next day delivery helps ensure he'll have everything in place and running like clockwork. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done at the BBC, we go further so you see clearer. With a subscription to BBC.com, you get unlimited articles and videos, hundreds of ad free podcasts and the BBC News Channel streaming live 24. 7 from less than a dollar a week for your first year. Read, watch and listen to trusted independent journalism and storytelling. It all starts with a subscription to BBC.com find out [e-mail] unlimited.