Little Atoms Road Trip

On a rainy afternoon in Boston, Neil recorded the last interview of his month long American road trip, with astrophysicist Sara Seager. Sara Seager is the Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Science and Physics at MIT. Her science research focuses on theory, computation, and data analysis of exoplanets. Her research has introduced many new ideas to the field of exoplanet characterization, including work that led to the first detection of an exoplanet atmosphere. Before joining MIT in 2007, Professor Seager spent four years on the senior research staff at the Carnegie Institution of Washington preceded by three years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Her PhD is from Harvard University. She is on the advisory board for Planetary Resources and the Rosalind Franklin Society. She was the 2012 recipient of the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences and the 2007 recipient of the American Astronomical Society’s Helen B. Warner Prize.

During his time in Boston, Neil spent as Morning at MIT visiting with Seth Mnookin. Seth Mnookin is the Co-Director of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, won the National Association of Science Writers 2012 “Science in Society” Award. He is also the author of the 2006 New York Times bestseller Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top. His first book, 2004s Hard News: The Scandals at The New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media, was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. Since 2005, Seth has been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and in 2002 and 2003, he was a senior writer at Newsweek, where he wrote the media column “Raw Copy” and also covered politics and popular culture. His blog on science, medicine, and media is part of the Public Library of Science (PLOS) Blog Network.

On a warm spring day in Brooklyn, Neil attempts to interview astrophysicist Lucianne Walkowicz in the sculpture garden of the Pratt Institute, until the weather intervenes. Lucianne Walkowicz is the Henry Norris Russell Fellow in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton, and a 2012 TED Senior Fellow. She studies stellar magnetic activity and its effects on planetary habitability using data from NASA’s Kepler Mission. She’s a leader in the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a new project that will scan the sky every night for 10 years to create a huge cosmic movie of our Universe. And she’s also an artist, working in a variety of media, from comics, to oil paint, to sound.

This show was recorded behind the scenes at the American Museum of Natural History at Central Park West in New York. There are three interviews with curators working at the museum. Ross MacPhee is a curator of Vertebrate Zoology in the Department of Mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History. Known for his paleomammalogical research on island extinctions, he has focused his most recent work on how extinctions occur, particularly those in which humans are thought to have been implicated during the past 100,000 years. In 1998, in collaboration with colleagues from the Russian Academy of Scientists, Dr. MacPhee collected the remains of woolly mammoths on Wrangel Island in the Chukchi Sea to determine how this last-surviving mammoth population was wiped out. Recently, Dr. MacPhee worked with geneticists and molecular biologists to develop the new tool of “ancient DNA” as a means for studying the population structure and ultimate collapse of Pleistocene mammals. He was a member of the scientific team that published a major new study of the genome of the woolly mammoth in Science in early 2006. He has been involved in several television documentaries on mammoths and their world, including “What Killed the Megabeasts?” for Channel 4. Peter Whiteley is a curator of North American Ethnology in the Department of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History. Dr. Whiteley studies the cultures, social structures, social histories, and environmental relations in Native North America from the 17th century to the present. His research focuses on a number of areas, including Hopi society, culture, and polity in northern Arizona, based on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research over the last two decades, and Eastern and Western Pueblo intercultural relations and sociopolitical transformations during and after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. John Flynn is Dean of the Richard Gilder Graduate School and Frick Curator of Fossil Mammals in the Department of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History. Author of more than 125 scientific publications, Flynn’s research focuses on the phylogeny and evolution of mammals and Mesozoic vertebrates, geological dating, plate tectonics, and biogeography. Dr. Flynn has led more than 50 paleontological expeditions to Chile, Perú, Colombia, Madagascar, Angola, India, and the Rocky Mountains. In 2001 John Flynn received a Guggenheim Fellowship for a year of research, writing and expeditions in South America and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2009.

In Cambridge, Mass. on his last day recording interviews, Neil paid a visit to writer Leslie Brunetta. Leslie Brunetta is a freelance writer whose articles have appeared in the New York Times, as well as on NPR and elsewhere. An English graduate of both Princeton and St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, she is the co-author of Spider Silk: Evolution and 400 Million Years of Spinning, Waiting, Snagging, and Mating with Catherine L. Craig, who is an internationally recognized evolutionary biologist, arachnologist, and authority on silk.

While passing through North Carolina, Neil paid a visit to Duke University in Durham, and spent a great afternoon talking to geneticist Misha Angrist. Misha Angrist is an assistant professor at the Duke University Institute for Genomic Sciences and Policy. His doctoral and postdoctoral work was in human genetics, and he was formerly a board-eligible genetic counselor. Misha also writes fiction, which has appeared in numerous literary journals. In 2007, Misha Angrist became the fourth subject in George Church’s ambitious Personal Genome Project, and he wrote a book, Here is a Human Being: At the Dawn of Personal Genomics, about that experience.

While in Boston, Neil spent an afternoon at the Church Lab at Harvard Medical School. George Church is a Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Sciences & Technology at Harvard and MIT, As well as a director of the U.S. Department of Energy Center on Bioenergy at Harvard & MIT and Director of the Center for Computational Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He co-developed the first direct genomic sequencing method in 1984 which helped initiate the Human Genome Project and resulted in the first commercial genome sequence of the human pathogen Helicobacter pylori in 1994. His revolutionary approach pioneered the use of automation to analyze millions of genetic sequences in one run, and his current research focuses on new technologies in personal genomics leading to his initiation of the Personal Genome Project in 2005. George Church sits on the advisory board of more than 14 biotech companies, including personal genomics startup 23andMe and biofuel pioneers LS9.

On the journey from Washington DC to New York City, Neil stopped in at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to chat with Paul Offit. Paul Offit MD is the Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and the Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. A pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases and an expert on vaccines, immunology, and virology . He is the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine that has been credited with saving hundreds of lives every day. He has been a member of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and was a Founding Board Member of the Autism Science Foundation. Paul Offit is the author of Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens us All.

While in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Neil spent an afternoon talking cosmology at the apartment of the theoretical astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan. Priya Natarajan is a Professor in the Departments of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University. Her research is focused on exotica in the Universe – dark matter, dark energy and black holes. She is noted for her key contributions to two of the most challenging problems in cosmology: mapping the distribution of dark matter and tracing the growth history of black holes. Her work using gravitational lensing has provided a deeper understanding of the granularity of dark matter in clusters of galaxies and offers a novel way to unravel the nature of dark matter. Priya also works on the assembly and accretion history of black holes. She is currently exploring a new channel for the formation of the first black holes and its observational consequences at high and low redshift. Priya is the current chair of the Womens Faculty Forum (WFF) at Yale, and is deeply interested in Gender Parity issues in the Academy. Previously Priya was the Emeline Bigelow Conland Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and was the first woman in Astrophysics to be elected a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. She also holds the Sophie and Tycho Brahe Professorship at the Dark Center, Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark.

In this episode, Neil drives to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and visits with Dr Stephen Barrett. Dr Stephen Barrett is a retired psychiatrist who has achieved national renown as an author, editor, and consumer advocate. An expert in medical communications, Dr. Barrett operates Quackwatch, Autism Watch, and a number of other Web sites and edits Consumer Health Digest (a free weekly electronic newsletter). He has written more than 2,000 articles and delivered more than 300 talks at colleges, universities, medical schools, and professional meetings. His 50 books include The Health Robbers: A Close Look at Quackery in America and seven editions of the college textbook Consumer Health: A Guide to Intelligent Decisions. He received the 2001 Distinguished Service to Health Education Award from the American Association for Health Education. His media appearances include Dateline, the Today Show, Good Morning America, ABC Prime Time, Donahue, CNN, National Public Radio, and more than 200 radio and television talk show interviews.

While in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Harvard University and MIT, Neil spent an afternoon at the home of Ig Nobel Prize founder Marc Abrahams.  Marc Abrahams is editor and co-founder of the science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research and its website Improbable.com. He is the founder and master of ceremonies of the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, honouring achievements that make people LAUGH, and then THINK. The Prizes are handed out by genuine Nobel Laureates at a gala ceremony held each Fall at Harvard University and broadcast on National Public Radio and on the Internet. Marc writes a weekly column for the Guardian, and is the author of numerous books about the Ig Nobel awards and improbable research, the latest of which is This is Improbable.

This is a two part show recorded at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. In the first part of the show Neil talks to LANL historian Alan Carr at the Bradbury Science Museum in central Los Alamos about the history of the town and the labs central role in the Manhattan Project. The second part of the show looks at what’s going on at the lab in the present day, in an interview with twoLANL scientists, biologist Babs Marrone and chemical engineer Jim Coons, who are members of a team working on an advanced green algae biofuels project. Thanks to Kim Powell of the LANL Press team for arranging these interviews, and for giving Neil a comprehensive tour of Los Alamos and the National Laboratory.

This is the only interview in the Road Trip series conducted over the telephone. Neil was supposed to meet up with Ian Tattersall when he visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, but a late change in plans meant that the interview recorded from Neil’s hotel room in Chicago. Ian Tattersall was until his recent retirement a curator in the Division of Anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where he co-curated the Spitzer Hall of Human Origins. He is the acknowledged leader of the human fossil record, and has won several awards, including the Institute of Human Origins Lifetime Achievement Award. He has appeared on Charlie Rose and NPR’s Science Friday and has written for Scientific American and Archaeology. He’s been widely cited by the media, including The New York Times, BBC, MSNBC, and National Geographic. Ian Tattersall is the author of Becoming Human, and most recently Masters of the Planet: The search for our Human Origins.

While in New York City, Neil attended a few events at the World Science Festival, including one at which a speaker was astrophysicist Britt Reichborn-Kjennerud. Before the talk Neil met up with Britt at her office at Columbia University and recorded this podcast. Britt Reichborn-Kjennerud received her PhD from Columbia University in 2010. During her graduate career she held a NASA fellowship, and she is currently an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow in Amber Miller’s Lab at Columbia University. An experimental astrophysicist, Britt uses measurements of the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the big bang, to understand the origin, composition, and evolution of the universe. She has been a member of the EBEX experimental team at the Miller lab since 2005, and is currently overseeing the work of the Columbia team as they prepare to deploy the EBEX instrument to Antarctica later this year. This experiment will map a patch of the microwave sky from the top of the stratosphere while hanging from a NASA helium balloon. The resulting data set holds the promise of detecting a signal that originated when the universe was just a tiny fraction of a second old.

Neil visits the University of California, Irvine and talks with Francisco Ayala in this episode. Francisco Ayala is University Professor and Donald Bren Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He received his Ph.D. in genetics from Columbia University. Ayala has been president and chairman of the Board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and many foreign academies. His scientific research focuses on population and evolutionary genetics, including the origin of species, genetic diversity of populations, the origin of malaria, the population structure of parasitic protozoa, and the molecular clock of evolution. He has published more than 1,000 articles and is author or editor of 37 books, Including Am I a Monkey? Six Big Questions about Evolution. A former Dominican priest, Ayala also writes about the interface between religion and science, and on philosophical issues concerning epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of biology. In 2002, he received the National Medal of Science from President George W. Bush at a White House ceremony, and he was the 2010 recipient of the Templeton Prize.