The Amazing Extremophiles

Summary

Podcast Summary: "The Amazing Extremophiles"

Podcast: Unexplainable (Vox)
Air Date: February 11, 2026
Host: Bird Pinkerton
Featured Guest: Elizabeth Henff, artist & biologist; Brad Vogel, Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club

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Main Theme & Purpose

This episode dives into the hidden microbial life thriving in one of New York’s most polluted waterways—the Gowanus Canal. It explores the notion of "extremophiles": microbes able to survive and even remediate extremely toxic environments. The episode also investigates the scientific, historical, and artistic significance of these organisms, drawing parallels to comic book superpowers.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Gowanus Canal: A Toxic History

[01:08–08:58]

• Bird Pinkerton introduces a comic book trope—ordinary people exposed to toxic waste gaining superpowers—and contrasts this with the grim reality of the Gowanus Canal.
• She tours the canal with Brad Vogel, member of the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club, describing the polluted waterway: "It's a gray day in November and I'm on a narrow street in a low lying part of Brooklyn..." (Bird, 01:23).
• Historical context: originally a creek and marshland used by the Lenape, later transformed by European settlers and industry.
  • "All the bad uses kept getting pushed down into Gowanus. It was a sewer, literally." (Brad Vogel, 05:39)
• 19th-century and modern pollution includes coal tar, heavy metals, and sewage. The EPA declared the canal a Superfund site in 2010.

2. Life Amidst Toxicity: Discovery of Extremophiles

[12:02–15:59]

• Elizabeth Henff, artist and biologist, is drawn to the question: What lives in the toxic sludge?
  • "Toxic sludge at the bottom of the canal is not the most hospitable place for life...if there's a lot of life going on, it's probably invisible." (Elizabeth Henff, 12:58)
• Community scientists collected "black mayonnaise"—sludge from the canal bottom—using protective gear and PVC pipes.[13:54]
• DNA analysis identified at least 455 microbial species—organisms called extremophiles.
  • "These are organisms that love being in extreme environments." (Elizabeth Henff, 15:59)

3. Microbial Superpowers: Survival and Remediation

[16:09–18:07]

• These extremophiles have evolved metabolic pathways to degrade and neutralize pollutants:
  • "This community as a whole is able to degrade a whole cocktail of different contaminants." (Elizabeth Henff, 16:36)
  • Capable of breaking down coal tar and solvents like toluene.
  • Some microbes "fix" heavy metals: inactivating their toxicity so they’re less likely to be absorbed by plants or animals.

4. Supervillains Among Us: Antibiotic Resistance

[18:07–18:41]

• Some Gowanus microbes possess antibiotic-resistant genes, a potential threat if pathogens acquire this resistance.
  • "Is the environment kind of increasing its capacity for antibiotic resistance...if you have a new emergent pathogen, then it would be more likely that...it’s also carrying those resistant genes." (Elizabeth Henff, 18:19)

5. Learning from Extremophiles: Scientific and Environmental Potential

[19:14–21:31]

• Henff proposes two ways extremophiles could help us:
  • Resource Recovery: Use microbial specificity to extract rare earth elements or heavy metals from waste.
    • "Living organisms are actually quite good at...producing proteins that are specific to particular kinds of metals." (Elizabeth Henff, 19:41)
  • Waste Remediation: Engineer or optimize microbes/environments to enhance their pollutant-degrading abilities.
    • "Are there some tweaks, genetic engineering tweaks that we can make to have these organisms be more efficient?" (Elizabeth Henff, 20:17)
    • Consider bioreactors and environmental adjustments (e.g., more oxygen).

6. Collaboration & Biofilms: Microbial Communities as Teams

[21:31–23:47]

• Henff, blending scientific inquiry and artistic practice, observes how biofilms—layers of cooperating microbes—may work together to degrade complex pollutants.
  • "The first organism will do the first couple of steps, hand it off to the next one..." (Elizabeth Henff, 22:49)
• She draws an analogy to the human digestive system: multi-step processing by different parts.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the canal’s legacy:
  • “All the bad uses kept getting pushed down into Gowanus.”
    —Brad Vogel (05:39)
• On discovering life where none was expected:
  • “If there’s a lot of life going on, it’s probably invisible.”
    —Elizabeth Henff (13:08)
• On microbial superpowers:
  • “This community as a whole is able to degrade a whole cocktail of different contaminants that they’re challenged with.”
    —Elizabeth Henff (16:36)
• On danger of antibiotic resistance:
  • “It’s just not great to have big reservoirs of antibiotic resistant microbes hanging around.”
    —Bird Pinkerton (18:41)
• On potential environmental applications:
  • “Living organisms are actually quite good at...producing proteins that are specific to particular kinds of metals.”
    —Elizabeth Henff (19:41)
• On microbial cooperation:
  • “The first organism will do the first couple of steps, hand it off to the next one, which will do the next few, and so on and so forth.”
    —Elizabeth Henff (22:49)
• On the wonder of extremophiles:
  • “They are the stuff of literal comic book fiction. And yet even though they don't wear spandex or particularly care about saving us, they are nevertheless real, super powered organisms living in our midst, our very small, not all that friendly neighborhood extremophiles.”
    —Bird Pinkerton (23:47)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:08] Bird introduces the comic book connection and begins the Gowanus history
• [03:09] Brad Vogel defines "feral pockets" and introduces the Gowanus Dredgers
• [05:12] Gowanus’s industrial and pollution history
• [10:01] (Break)
• [12:02] Elizabeth Henff’s entry into Gowanus sludge research
• [14:55] Discovery of hundreds of microbial species—extremophiles
• [15:59] Explanation of what "extremophiles" are
• [16:36] Microbes’ abilities to break down and neutralize toxins
• [18:19] Concerns about antibiotic resistance
• [19:14] Microbes as a path to resource recovery and improved cleanup
• [21:31] The possibility of harnessing or enhancing microbes’ powers
• [22:01] Artistic inquiry into how microbial communities cooperate
• [22:49] The biofilm teamwork analogy
• [23:47] Reflecting on the marvel of these organisms

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Conclusion

"The Amazing Extremophiles" explores the surprising discovery of microbial life in an environment where little was expected to survive. These extremophiles are real-world analogues to comic super-beings, holding immense promise for environmental science—from cleaning up pollution to resource extraction—while also raising essential questions about risks like antibiotic resistance. Ultimately, the episode stands as a testament to resilience in unlikely places, scientific curiosity, and the mysteries still hidden in the world around us.

Transcript

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[Bird Pinkerton]

There's a trope in comic books where someone ordinary falls into toxic waste, or toxic waste falls on them somehow, and they emerge either as a superhero like Daredevil or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or as a super villain like the Joker. Of course, in real life, if you fell into toxic waste, you would not get a cool nickname or superpowers. You would probably just get really, really sick. Except what if I told you that in a canal at the edge of Brooklyn, there are in fact life forms in hazardous waste that have been kind of transformed. This is unexplainable. I am Bird Pinkerton, and today on the show, I'm going to tell you about superfund sights and super powered beings. Okay, before we get to the superpowered beings, I'd actually like to start with the story of the hazardous waste itself. So if this is a comic book, here's the opening panel. It's a gray day in November and I'm on a narrow street in a low lying part of Brooklyn. I'm walking past a place called Wonderful Scrap Metal, past a distillery, past a home goods chain, walking past trucks. Oof. That was not me. That was not my fault. Past all of this, there's a small building and a fence crawling with morning glory vines. Behind that fence there are some concrete blocks, some lockers full of life jackets, and a dock that leads down to a stretch of pale greenish water. It's A place that a guy named Brad Vogel described to me as a feral pocket.

[Brad Vogel]

Now, a feral pocket is sort of an overlooked, forgotten little corner or scrap of land along the waterway. But we're looking out over the water at sort of the back shed of the city, where a lot of the infrastructural systems that make everything happen are actually underway.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Brad is a lawyer and a poet, but he is also a member of a volunteer group called the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club. This is their bunker and their dock. And he and his fellow dredgers spend their time on the Gowanus Canal, a long, thin waterway running through Brooklyn. They paddle along it, they document changes, advocate for the canal, sometimes write poetry about it.

[Brad Vogel]

Right?

[Bird Pinkerton]

Yeah.

[Brad Vogel]

No, I mean, the Gowanus is quite the dark muse, I will say.

[Bird Pinkerton]

And they introduce people like me to the polluted waterway in my own backyard.

[Brad Vogel]

Those are garbage barges right there.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Brad, in particular, seems to know everything going on with this canal. He points out some signs to me, identifies some different things along the water.

[Brad Vogel]

What we're seeing across here, this is a tugboat company.

[Bird Pinkerton]

And then he pulls out one of the dredger's boats, a red canoe that I hop into along with Brad and my colleagues.

[Brad Vogel]

You, Chris Chan, shoving off now. Your feet might get a little bit of a splash on them. As I move back and forth, just.

[Bird Pinkerton]

FYI, Brad starts paddling us up through the canal itself, showing us the sights, all kinds of. You pass rocks covered with plastic bags.

[Brad Vogel]

Candy wrappers, aluminum foil, a strand of caution tape. And there's a night heron coming up out of the rooftop.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Oh, my God. A bird flies up past us.

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[Bird Pinkerton]

And then the rocks give way to concrete walls. We pass industrial kinds of machines, boxy containers.

[Brad Vogel]

We're here in our little cacophony.

[Bird Pinkerton]

It's sometimes very loud. Talk to me about. Just tell me a story about the Gowanus. How did it become the way that it is?

[Brad Vogel]

Oh, my goodness. The canal itself was originally a creek and a series of sort of tributary creeks and marsh. And it's down in a hollow amidst the larger hills that were glacially formed.

[Bird Pinkerton]

The Lenape had settlements in the area and used the Creek. In the 1600s, European settlers came to what's now Brooklyn, and over the next few centuries, the Gowanus chain.

[Brad Vogel]

All the bad uses kept getting pushed down into Gowanus. It was a sewer, literally. So you put your sewage down in the Gowanus, but you also put all of your industry down in Gowanus.

[Bird Pinkerton]

So by the mid-1800s, all kinds of industries had moved in. So there were manufactured gas plants, for example, which took coal and turned it into the gas that people would use to light their homes. During the 1800s, this process had byproducts which wound up in the Gowanus Canal.

[Brad Vogel]

The coal tar really is the stuff that today we see the most of.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Unfortunately, there were also dye works on the canal, chemical companies and tanneries, ink factories and cement manufacturers.

[Brad Vogel]

Just about everything that had, like some kind of noxious industrial process was going in there. Printing, too, like printing ink, even.

[Bird Pinkerton]

And Even in the 1800s, people knew that the water was foul. Articles from that time called the Gowanus a filthy cesspool, a dirty ditch, and obnoxious. In a letter to the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, one 19th century man wrote, permit me to say a few things about the Guanas Canal, that dirty, filthy, stinking sewer pool. It is a disgrace to intelligence, common sense, justice, and civilization. Later, in the 50s, Joseph Mitchell published an essay about New York's waterways and described sludge rotting in warm weather and gas bubbles as big as basketballs that would come to the surface in summer. He wrote, the rising and breaking of sludge bubbles makes the water seethe and spit. People sometimes stand on the coal and lumber caves that line the Gowanus Canal and stare at the black, bubbly water. Nowadays, the former manufactured gas plants continue to be a source of contamination in the canal. But one of the big sources of modern pollution is sewage.

[Brad Vogel]

If you live in brownstone Brooklyn, Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Boreham Hill, Red Hook, South Slope, even Prospect Heights is in our sewer shed for the Guanas Canal, which a lot of people don't realize.

[Bird Pinkerton]

It is a charming quirk of New York's antiquated sewer system that when it rains, sewage sometimes flows into the waterways. There are efforts to contain sewage during rainstorms, like a new stormwater management rule from 2022 and a new containment system that's being built to try and protect the Gowanus. But as of right now, in 2026, hundreds of millions of gallons of sewage still make their way into New York's waterways each year.

[Brad Vogel]

So, antibiotics, and you name it. Condoms. Sometimes we call them Gowanus whitefish up here, but the whitefish sometimes are out after the rainstorms.

[Bird Pinkerton]

They also sometimes see something they call.

[Brad Vogel]

A Gowanus football, which is a bloated, dead, upside down rat that has been flushed out of the sewers by the most recent rainstorm.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Oh, yep.

[Brad Vogel]

So if you go out, I mean, we try to avoid paddling after those storms because it puts a lot of.

[Bird Pinkerton]

The end result of all these generations of waste, past and present, is a poisoned waterway. An assessment of the Gowanus Canal found heavy metals, so stuff like lead and mercury and chemicals that can cause things like cancer. In some parts of the canal, there's an oily goo on the bottom, so industrial sludge, sometimes several feet deep, that has built up over time. The EPA has described the Gowanus Canal as one of the most seriously contaminated water bodies in the country, and in 2010 they added the canal to their list of Superfund sites, meaning that it is a place that is truly toxic and needs to be cleaned up. That kicked off a cleanup effort, but it also kicked off an effort to figure out what, if anything, was actually living down in the toxic depths of the canal, which is where our superpowered life forms come in after the break.

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[Bird Pinkerton]

What's in my new sandwich?

[Elizabeth Henff]

Oh, okay, it's. You got whitefish.

[Bird Pinkerton]

You know whitefish. What else is in it? No condiments. After the EPA had declared the Gowanus a super fun site, they published a plan to clean it up. They said they'd dredge up a lot of the contaminated goo from the bottom of the canal, process that goo, turn it into materials like landfill cover, and then cap parts of the canal with cement. That plan is now underway. They've actually finished dredging and capping the upper section of the canal. And an EPA spokesperson told me they've pulled up more than 70,000 cubic yards of sludge. But when the plan was first published, it left some people with questions.

[Elizabeth Henff]

Gosh, wait a minute. This waterway is going to be dredged and capped? This is such a destructive intervention. What is the environment that is being intervened upon?

[Bird Pinkerton]

Elizabeth Henff is an artist and a biologist, and she says toxic sludge at the bottom of the canal is not the most hospitable place for life.

[Elizabeth Henff]

This doesn't look, from our naked eye perspective to be a super dense and biodiverse and thriving environment. And so if there's a lot of life going on, it's probably invisible.

[Bird Pinkerton]

But what was that invisible life like? Elizabeth actually came to this question because a community biology lab called genspace was looking into it. They had brought up some samples of sludge and were trying to analyze them.

[Elizabeth Henff]

And I was like, wait, what? You guys did what? Because I was like, this is such an extreme environment that involves doing this, like, crazy fieldwork in which you're paddling around in this toxic wasteland. And I was like, yeah, help me in.

[Bird Pinkerton]

So Elizabeth wound up going out with these researchers and with others and with iguana stretchers who we've already met to collect research. More sludge from the bottom of the canal. The stuff that they refer to by the horribly Descriptive term black mayonnaise. So they'd go out in those coverall protective suits that make you look kind of like an astronaut and use PVC piping to pull up mud from the bottom of the canal. They had a technique that's kind of like dipping a straw into a drink and then capping one end of it so you can pull out just a little bit of liquid.

[Elizabeth Henff]

Same principle, much larger scale. You're definitely not going to taste what comes out.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Instead of tasting the black mayonnaise, Elizabeth and her colleagues studied it, and they did, in fact, find life, microbial life. These tiny, tiny life forms that it adapted to survive in the midst of all this muck. And not just a few microbes, by the way.

[Elizabeth Henff]

Hundreds. Hundreds.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Hundreds, yeah.

[Elizabeth Henff]

I think total, we identified 455 different species living in community in the sludge. And that's probably an underestimate.

[Bird Pinkerton]

The way that they identified microbes was not like putting each one under a microscope and saying, aha, it's microbious unexplainicus. Instead, they kind of broke them down, got their DNA, and then compared all that DNA to these big libraries of DNA that exist out there, libraries that have DNA from lots of microbes that have already been identified. Those libraries don't have every microbe in the world, but Elizabeth was able to find matches for a bunch of the ones that she sampled from the Gowanus. And these microbes are the super powered comic book characters that I promised you at the beginning of the episode. They even have a kind of a superhero y name because they're part of a whole category of organisms called extremophiles.

[Elizabeth Henff]

If you break it down to its Latin roots, like extreme being extreme and then phyle being loving, these are organisms that love being in extreme environments.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Now, extremophiles can be extreme in all kinds of different ways depending on the species of microbe in question. So some of them have the power to withstand super high temperatures, for example. These guanis extremophiles are the type that can survive on toxic waste, which would be an impressive superpower in and of itself. But Elizabeth found that some of these organisms had other powers, too.

[Elizabeth Henff]

So some of the superpowers that we discovered were a whole list of metabolisms that indicate that this community as a whole is able to degrade a whole cocktail of different contaminants that they're challenged with.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Take something like coal tar, for example. The byproduct of the old gas plants, Coal tar can have complex carbon molecules in it, molecules which in These particular configurations are bad for your health. But these microbes, it seems, are actually able to break those molecules down into smaller parts that are less toxic.

[Elizabeth Henff]

They're able to degrade industrial solvents like toluene, for example, really commonly used industrial solvent, which makes sense because there were paint making factories in the environment.

[Bird Pinkerton]

And then other microbes have the ability to do something called fixing heavy metals.

[Elizabeth Henff]

So heavy metals are toxic, you know, both to humans and the environment. They're elemental, so you can't break them down into anything smaller, but they can be, I guess, inactivated in a certain way and make them less bioavailable.

[Bird Pinkerton]

So make it less likely that I incorporate it into myself or.

[Elizabeth Henff]

Correct. Less likely that you, or, say, a plant with its roots dipping into the canal would be able to absorb it into its tissues.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Now, there's also an argument for calling some of these microbes supervillains, because Elizabeth and her fellow researchers found some antibiotic resistance in the microbe population that could be cause for concern.

[Elizabeth Henff]

And then the question is, then is the environment kind of increasing its capacity for antibiotic resistance, which could then be a problem, because then if you have all these antibiotic resistant genes in the environment, if you have a new emergent pathogen, then it would be more likely that that emergent pathogen is also carrying those resistan genes with them.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Basically, it's just not great to have big reservoirs of antibiotic resistant microbes hanging around. All in all, though, these microbes are doing some pretty interesting stuff. So what can we learn from it all? Could we borrow something from these microbes in the guanis or other microbes with similar superpowers and benefit from them? Elizabeth has several ideas here. She says, for example, that we might be able to learn something about converting our trash into treasure.

[Elizabeth Henff]

A lot of the material that's in the canal is actually valuable. So if we think actually about those heavy metals or those rare earth elements, there's been a lot of talk in the media about kind of the limitations of access to rare earth elements.

[Bird Pinkerton]

And Elizabeth says microbes might be able to help us separate out different rare earth elements from our waste. So ideally, someone would want to be able to draw out one type of metal, for example.

[Elizabeth Henff]

But the tricky thing is to do that with a certain specificity. And that's something that living organisms are actually quite good at in producing proteins that are specific to particular kinds of metals.

[Bird Pinkerton]

So maybe we could get help from microbes to make something like a metal specific protein magnet of sorts, which would help us extract a heavy metal to then reuse and then on the waste breakdown side of things, if we could learn more about these guanous microbes or other microbes that can break down toxic things, maybe we could help them do their work.

[Elizabeth Henff]

There's a couple of different ways we can think about optimizing this process. One being, can we optimize the microbes themselves so, you know, they're doing a good job. They've had 150 years to evolve and optimize this process. Are there some tweaks, genetic engineering tweaks that we can make to have these organisms be more efficient?

[Bird Pinkerton]

Could we engineer, like, the best possible waste processing microbes? Elizabeth does not imagine that if scientists did do this, they would then turn around and dump a bunch of engineered microbes into the environment for perfectly good.

[Elizabeth Henff]

Biocontainment reasons, but also because they likely wouldn't make it.

[Bird Pinkerton]

But you could imagine people making, say, a bioreactor that they would fill with engineered microbes, and then they would put waste in there and let microbes do their work.

[Elizabeth Henff]

So that would be one direction to go in, and then the other direction to go in is thinking about how could we modify the environment so that the microbes who are already there would be able to do their work more easily? Would they want more oxygen, for example, or. Or more surface area to be in contact with that contaminated material?

[Bird Pinkerton]

Elizabeth also has an idea that she's been pursuing that comes out of her work as an artist. So in the lab, a lot of her work with these microbes involves grinding them up or freezing them or studying them for very specific reasons. Right. But in her artistic practice, she wound up doing something sort of totally different. She and her collaborators put hundreds of gallons of Gowanus water in tanks and just let it be.

[Elizabeth Henff]

And we let it grow for a whole year without actually asking it to do anything.

[Bird Pinkerton]

As she watched the water in the tanks, Elizabeth saw biofilms forming. So these are these layered films that connect a bunch of microbes all together in an organized way. But seeing them got Elizabeth thinking, because the molecules in something like coal tar can be really complex. So she thought it might require a bunch of steps, each involving different proteins, to actually break those molecules down. But what if the microbes weren't doing that alone? What if instead they were forming biofilms and kind of working together to do it?

[Elizabeth Henff]

So the first organism will do the first couple of steps, hand it off to the next one, which will do the next few, and so on and so forth.

[Bird Pinkerton]

It's not a perfect analogy, but I picture something like our digestive system. So your mouth does some work, right? It chews up the food, bathes it in saliva, and then your stomach turns it up some more, breaks it down with acid, and then the food heads into your small intestines, et cetera. So your meal is processed in a bunch of steps by a bunch of different parts of the system. Elizabeth thinks maybe these microbes in biofilms are doing something like that.

[Elizabeth Henff]

And that's one of the big questions that we're trying to figure out now in the lab is how do we understand how this cooperation happens in three dimensional space and how these organisms are able to like organize themselves. So that's one of our big one of like a big open question.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Clearly there are lots of questions for scientists and artists to answer about these microbes, lots of things that we might learn from them. But at the end of the day or the end of the episode, I keep coming back to how amazing it is that these microbes exist at all. They are the stuff of literal comic book fiction. And yet even though they don't wear spandex or particularly care about saving us, they are nevertheless real, super powered organisms living in our midst, our very small, not all that friendly neighborhood extremophiles. If you want to read more about microbes in the Gowanus, I will link to the paper Elizabeth co authored in the transcript. In the meantime, this episode was reported and produced by Me Bird Pinkerton. It was edited by Joanna Solotarov. Christian Ayala did the mixing and the sound design and also came out with me to collect sound. Noam Hassenfeld wrote the music. Melissa Hirsch checked our facts and extra thanks to her this week. Jorge Just Meredith Hodnot, Julia Longoria, Sally Helm and Amy Padula are the fact that the the easternmost and westernmost points in the United States are both technically in Alaska. And thank you so much to Sergios Orestes Kolokotronis. He is another co author on the paper who took a lot of time to explain it to me and I have linked to his lab and the transcript if you want to see more of his research. Thank you also to Aymond Deagle and to Casey Lardner for their time and thank you always to Brian Resnick for co founding the show with me and Noam. If you have thoughts about microbes or if you have something interesting happening in your backyard, or if you have ideas for the show, email us. We are@ unexplainableox.com if you'd like to support the show and the journalism that Vox does. We would love it if you would become a member. It is easy to do. Just go to vox.commembers and you will get access to all of Vox's journalism. But you'd also know that you are supporting Vox's journalism. And for those of you who have emailed us to let us know that you signed up because of Unexplainable, thank you. It makes a very, very big difference. We also really appreciate those of you who have left us a nice review on your podcast platform, and we give somewhere between five and infinite stars. To those of you who have told someone in your life about Unexplainable, thank you. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast network and we will be back very soon with another episode about everything that we don't yet know.