Stories of Self-Experimentation

Einsteinium is one of the cleverer-sounding elements you’ll see on your periodic table, but it’s a lot further down the list than something like carbon, or gold, or mercury. While carbon is number 6, gold is number 79, and mercury is number 80, einsteinium is the 99th element! It’s also radioactive, meaning it doesn’t stick around for long before it breaks down into something else. That makes it hard to study, and even though it was discovered in the 50s, we know very little about it. But this week, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory managed to capture some in a molecular cage. Kit Chapman didn’t work on the study but he did write the book on the periodic table, called 'Superheavy', and he took Adam Murphy through the discovery...

Kit - Einsteinium doesn't exist on Earth. Anything beyond uranium, which is element 92 - and remember einsteinium is 99 - just doesn't exist on Earth. And usually these are made through nuclear reactions or particle accelerators, but einsteinium and fermium were actually first discovered from the remains of a thermonuclear bomb explosion. There was a bomb explosion in the 1950s in the Pacific - they were testing this world's first hydrogen bomb - and they actually ordered fighter planes to fly inside the cloud and gather up debris. And from those filters, we managed to find einsteinium and fermium

Adam - Looking at that, can you give us kind of the rundown of what they've done here at the Los Alamos lab?

Kit - Well, this is really impressive because there isn't very much einsteinium in the world. As I mentioned, it just doesn't exist on Earth, you have to make it. And so they managed to get 200 nanograms, which is a tiny, tiny amount. And they started to look at its properties. Now because it's radioactive, we haven't done many experiments on einsteinium. What they did was they took an einsteinium atom and they wrapped it in a sort of molecular cage, and they looked at it from that angle. And they began to do some X-ray tests on it, and from that they could actually study the bonds, and how it bonds with this... what we call a ligand, this cage it's in. And what it found was that it didn't follow the pattern they expected: it doesn't behave like the other actinides, some of the lighter actinides next to it, it starts to behave a little bit differently. And that's really interesting.

Adam - I understand that we don't have very much of it, but how do you determine that this thing exists and then know so little about it for so long?

Kit - The problem is making it. So there isn't any use for einsteinium in the world. There's no practical applications. Californium, which is a bit lighter - that's element 98, the next one along - that's really useful for the oil industry and for a host of other different applications. And so there's a reason to make it. There's a reactor in Oak Ridge, in Tennessee, and a reactor in Russia; and they can actually create these elements, they have the ability to do so. And when they're making californium, they're probably going to make a little bit of einsteinium as well because of the way they're doing it; essentially they nudge things up the periodic table. And so it's only... almost as a byproduct that you're actually producing einsteinium, and that's why we just don't have much of it. It's also only got a half-life of, I think, 275 days, which is incredibly short. It's not the shortest - some of the ones even bigger have half-lifes of minutes or seconds - but it's not very long at all, which means that it rapidly degrades. So you've got to be very quick in terms of the experiments you do,

Adam - As you were saying there, einsteinium doesn't have any practical applications. So why does it matter that we can do this with this now?

Kit - It's one of the building blocks of the universe! And the more knowledge we have about the universe and how it works, the more we can understand things. Just because einsteinium doesn't exist on Earth, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist in nature. You'll find it inside supernovae; you'll find it inside of neutron stars colliding. And so the more that we can understand about how these building blocks work, how they interact with things, how what we call relativistic effects affect the way that chemicals work... really gives us a clearer picture of how the universe is constructed. And that means potentially we have all kinds of applications in the future that we just can't think about yet.

Adam - What's the next frontier in this kind of research? What's the next big thing that's coming out?

Kit - The next big thing really is hard to predict. We're hoping that it could be a new element. So if this stuff has gone over to Japan, and they've fired probably calcium into it - a very interesting isotope of calcium called calcium-48, which was used to create some other elements - then potentially we could have element 119. And if that's the case, then we have an entire new row of the periodic table starting, and that just opens up all kinds of possibilities.

This month a fleet of spacecraft from the United Arab Emirates, China, and the United States are reaching Mars. The missions have coincided because all three took advantage of a two-month launch window last year when Earth and Mars lined up just right in their orbits; this only happens once every two years. The missions are a first on many levels: it’s China’s first independent Mars landing, NASA’s Perseverance mission is taking a helicopter to Mars, it’s the UAE’s first space foray; their orbiter spacecraft is called Hope. Chair of the UAE Space Agency, Sarah Al-Amiri, joined Phil Sansom to explain the mission...

Sarah - We sent this probe to investigate the weather system of Mars throughout an entire Martian year, and to understand the weather dynamics more thoroughly than they've ever been studied before. The difference between this mission and other missions is that other missions have studied the weather system of Mars, but only during two times of the day, that's around 2:00 AM and 2:00 PM local time on Mars. What we're doing is understanding better the full dynamics; so for example, the phenomena of dust storms on Mars that start in a localised area and cover the entire planet.

Another piece of the puzzle that we'd like to fill in is: what role does Mars' weather system play in atmospheric loss? And therefore we're able to link the, for example, dust storms, especially global dust storms, to rates of escape of hydrogen and oxygen. And that fits in very well with the global understanding of what happened to Mars, especially what happened to Mars from the perspective of climate change.

Phil - Sarah, I'm quite shocked to hear that Mars has weather at all. Given not having an atmosphere, I'd imagine their forecast is a lot of, you know, “cold, very cold darkness of space”.

Sarah - It does have a very light atmosphere. There is a cloud system on Mars, there's water vapour that circulates around the planet. You've also got dust within the lower atmosphere of Mars where the weather system is. It's actually interesting, the weather system on Mars, and hence why we're understanding it better throughout an entire year, because that hasn't been covered extensively; and scientifically, it actually does have a good link into looking into Mars today, just to understand from the wider space of things as historically what happened to this planet.

Phil - So you've got sort of the traces of an atmosphere, and you've got some weather going on. Your Hope probe is going to be orbiting - if all goes well - around Mars. I assume it's not got a weather vane because that's pretty low tech. So what's your high-tech equivalent?

Sarah - We're orbiting around Mars in a very unique orbit. Like I said, the previous orbiters have orbited from the North to the South pole and they're very close to Mars. We're about 20,000 kilometres at our closest point and 43,000 kilometres at our furthest point. So we look at the lower atmosphere of Mars; that's where the weather is happening. We use the infrared spectrometer and that allows us to measure dust, it allows us to measure the cloud system and water vapour. Also an ultraviolet spectrometer, and that actually looks at how far a cloud of hydrogen and oxygen shrouds Mars; and that's where atmospheric escape happens, and that's what it measures.

Phil - All this stuff can't be cheap. So why is the UAE getting in on the science of Mars? Why send Hope now?

Sarah - The first and primary objective of this mission is to build capabilities. We're a country that's slowly transitioning into a nation that is based on science and technology. And space, especially planetary exploration, allows you to develop a lot of capabilities in just one programme in one mission. And today we have engineers who are able to design and develop a very complex and autonomous system, and it's already a very difficult mission to undergo. Only half of the missions have succeeded in their first time to get into orbit around Mars. And that gives us a sort of shift in mindset, and as a nation that was built on commodities and natural resources, it's a great transition point for us.

Time for the mailbox: the part of the show where we read out your correspondence! This question is from listener Paola, in reference to our story in January about making replacement blood vessels out of ‘knitted’ human tissue...

克里斯- Paola科学家尼古拉•L'Heureux says the answer is that gases and nutrients only diffuse through the walls of blood vessels, called capillaries, that are hundreds of times smaller than the ones that he’s making for bypass operations, so that won’t be a problem. And regarding 3-D printing, it can be a powerful tool to create very small patterns like the tiny blood vessels you may be thinking of; for his larger blood vessels, it is probably simpler to create tubes using other methods. Plus, 3D printing requires something liquid that can turn solid during printing; very difficult to do with biological materials!

Self-experimentation still happens today, and depending on your definition, it happens a lot - everything from off-the-record sanity checks in medical labs, to your average person trying out a new diet or drug! One person who’s testing the limits of what’s possible here is biohacker Josiah Zayner, who joined Chris Smith to explain what he does...

Josiah - A biohacker is just somebody who does science outside a traditional environment. Generally, I like to think of us as the rogues and the renegades of the scientific community.

Chris - But you are a traditional scientist as well; I mean you've been to university, you've done very high level training.

Josiah - Yeah, so I have a PhD and I was a scientist at NASA before I decided that the traditional scientific environment lacks the risk-taking that needs to be done to actually push science forward.

Chris - Speaking of which, are you supposed to be the first person who has actually done gene editing with this technology, CRISPR, on themselves?

Josiah - I am the first person to use CRISPR. CRISPR is this new modern gene editing technology that allows basically anybody to edit genes in most any organism inexpensively and fast. And for me, trying to get this technology to be used in humans so that we can push ahead and cure diseases is something that was big on my mind.

Chris - And what did you do to yourself?

Josiah - I injected myself with some DNA that was meant to modify the genes in my muscles, supposedly to give me bigger muscles. Now I wasn't able to actually detect that the gene editing worked, but the idea was that this is safe for humans, it's possible, and we should go forward.

Chris - I'm just looking at your picture on your Wikipedia page - was your hair that colour before you did CRISPR on yourself? Hopefully it was!

Josiah - Actually, I think the gene editing caused me to have different colour hair, but don't tell anybody; they'll try to buy it off me!

Chris - But talking of things that go funny colours, because you have taken this beyond just doing things that maybe some would regard as a bit outlandish, like self-inflicted gene editing... you have actually brewed up glowing green beers, haven't you?

约西亚-是的。So we are trying to make gene editing accessible and available to everybody. I think genetic engineering is one of the most powerful technologies we have. So making it so people can experience it in their everyday life, like editing yeast so they can change colour, or fluoresce - like glow in the dark. Or we've also worked on growing up chicken cells in petri dishes, and making like a chicken nugget grown in the lab. So there's a lot of science I think that people can do and experience in their everyday life that's amazing.

Chris - Did the beer actually glow?

Josiah - Yeah, it did. You have to keep the yeast in there because the yeast contained the glowing protein, but it does glow.

Chris - There are some cloudy beers where they do that on purpose so I could see that working. It got you into trouble though, didn't it? The FDA, the organisation that regulates food and drugs in America, had something to say about you doing that.

Josiah - Yeah, the FDA, the California Department of Public Health, and the state of California... everybody comes after me. I think when you're working with new technologies and pushing boundaries, people don't understand it completely. And so you get pushback from it. But to this date I'm talking to you not from jail so I think things are still pretty good.

克里斯,你在跟我说话你的厕所gh, because you also dabbled in doing a "trans-poosion"; you literally changed all of your bacteria in your intestines at one point, didn't you?

约西亚-是的。我有直觉痛苦和肠易激综合症,suffering from gut issues, and I thought that maybe I could take matters into my own hands, because a lot of times the medical doctors would just tell me "oh, you're stressed out. Don't be stressed, exercise". And you're like, “how am I supposed to not be stressed? I don't get that!” And so I took faeces from a healthy donor and transplanted it into my body. Barry Marshall said the bacteria didn't taste that bad - eating faeces is a whole other story!

Chris - Well they say it's a crap-sule that you have to swallow, but maybe that's a story for another show. But look, the key thing is this is a show about self-experimentation. So why are you doing this? And why are you using yourself to do these things on?

Josiah - It gives me the ability to do things I normally wouldn't be able to do because experimenting on other people, especially things that are risky, I think is unethical to me.

Chris - You've also made a COVID vaccine. You quite famously teamed up with a bunch of others and you have made a COVID vaccine that you have self administered. Has it worked?

约西亚-是的。So we were able to detect neutralising antibodies in our blood to the protein that the virus makes. Whether it works or not is a very complicated question that would probably require a big clinical trial. But for all intents and purposes, we saw results that were very positive.

Chris - I just want to finish by asking you, really, whether you think this is responsible? Because obviously there are some pretty powerful things we can do in a garden shed with molecular biology these days. Do you think what you're doing is encouraging people to perhaps go beyond what's responsible and sensible?

约西亚,我可以认为你无法工作that was more responsible. Genetic engineering is the most powerful technology we have. We can literally engineer self-replicating matter. And to give that power to very few people in universities and big companies and to not let the public experience this technology I think is wrong. So I think the greatest responsibility I have is to allow people to use this technology.

Is George Church's DIY vaccine a good idea, or will it come to nothing? Bioethicist Arthur Caplan, from New York University, joined Chris Smith to weigh in on whether George Church is on shaky ground...

Arthur - Yeah, I do. I think he's on very shaky ground. Look, when you do vaccines, you're developing a product that you're planning to give to billions of people. You would have to have a manufacturing partner, you need to make sure you follow regulatory requirements, because the risk of something going wrong at huge numbers is just too great. I also think this notion of self experimentation, while it has some role to play in the history of medicine, we learned a lot about experimentation and we know that it matters… your health, your age, your gender. Just showing that something works on one person, or two people, or even ten people, proves nothing about what's going to work in the diversity of people that take drugs and vaccines today, not as it was in the 19th Century.

Chris - Even when it's somebody with a lot of reputation to lose, like George Church? And also, when you wrote your commentary in the journal Science last year, when a lot of this began to surface, you said, "do-it-yourself (DIY) vaccine research is morally troubling. It's an obstacle to securing trust." So why wouldn't people trust it if it's got somebody with a good reputation behind it?

亚瑟——毫无疑问,乔治是一个品牌illiant scientist, but that doesn't make people trust vaccines in particular. There are plenty of brilliant scientists who keep saying, "take a vaccine, trust vaccines," and many, many people around the world do not. They worry that people are promoting their pet ideas; they worry that they're out to boost their reputation; they worry that they're out to make money; they're worried that they're short-cutting the regulatory process. So if you're going to get people to trust that a vaccine is something they ought to accept, there may be a few here and there who would say, "if a leading scientists took it, then maybe I'll do it, or maybe I'll brew it up in my basement," but that doesn't cover the vast majority of people with doubts... hesitancy... and I think saying, "yes, it's a do it yourself vaccine! Go ahead, take it, trust in it," is not the path forward to getting a lot of people to take vaccines.

克里斯,你让约西亚Zayner佤邦s saying when I put it to him that perhaps by encouraging people to do not just vaccines, but this sort of experimentation, with tools that in the wrong hands can do dangerous things, is there not some degree of irresponsibility? And he said, well, he thinks it's irresponsible that the technology is only in the hands of a small group of individuals, scientists, and academic institutions; corporate hands as well. Do you think he's got a point?

Arthur - No, it's not safe to take genetic engineering and have people who aren't necessarily properly trained to handle it muddling around in their own homes with no supervision or accountability. These are powerful techniques; many people around the world already don't trust things like genetically modified foods. And again, if you want to ruin the future of genetic engineering, which I don't - either medically, or for food, for animal use, or even in humans - then I think the easiest way to do that is to have people think that there are nuts in the basement doing what they want.

克里斯,你的看法是,目前的a fragile trust, and that's easily broken, because if things go wrong because of a lack of regulation or people just stepping outside the boundaries of what's sensible - and then accidents do happen, let's face it - that will shatter what we do have left of that thread of trust, and we might not get it back?

Arthur - Absolutely right. I think it would take one leak of a modified organism, one death from a do-it-yourself vaccine or drug, and all of a sudden you have fundamentally damaged public trust in drugs and vaccines, or genetic engineering technology. It's seen as too risky, too dangerous, just to have it in the hands, if you will, of amateurs. Look, the public can barely trust it when it's in the hands of professionals, even when there's some oversight. I don't see it as doing anything but creating more mistrust.

Chris - Where do you stand on the point that we heard earlier from... the example given was the discovery of hashish, and the person then documented their own reactions to it, and so on. Obviously this sort of self-experimentation is going on all the time, around the world, with illicit drug use and things like that. People are experimenting; occasionally they might discover interesting things that actually turn out to have enormous therapeutic potential, which if we were not doing that kind of thing, we wouldn't necessarily discover.

Arthur - People do try things, taste things, chew on things; but that's different as a form of self-experimentation from saying, "let's try and disseminate a product, let's get people to pick up on a drug or a vaccine in a big way." Finding out that something might have a beneficial impact on your headaches by chewing a unusual substance is a baby step, and you're not going to stop that, nor should you. But trying to develop products that the world takes - that's not going to happen through self-experimentation alone.

Chris - Has it not gone too far though? Because - and just very briefly - Barry Marshall, whom we heard earlier, has said he's doubtful, in the present regulatory environment, because of ethical controls and so on, that he would make the same discovery again.

Arthur - But if you will, what we're talking about is the need to produce products. And that's where the regulation is essential to cement that trust.