Today, you’ll learn how a catatonic woman’s reawakening could shake up the entire field of psychiatry, plans to stop using forever chemicals, and how scientists plan on growing crops without sunshine.
Today, you’ll learn how a catatonic woman’s reawakening could shake up the entire field of psychiatry, plans to stop using forever chemicals, and how scientists plan on growing crops without sunshine.
Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/catatonic-wake-up-forever-chemicals-crops-with-no-sun
Catatonic Wake Up
Forever Chemicals
Crops With No Sun
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[SFX: INTRO MUSIC/WHOOSH]
NATE: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. Time flies when you’re learnin’ super cool stuff. I’m Nate.
CALLI: And I’m Calli. If you’re dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind. If you’re a loyal listener, welcome back!
NATE: Today, you’ll learn how a catatonic woman’s reawakening could shake up the entire field of psychiatry, plans to stop using forever chemicals, and how scientists plan on growing crops without sunshine.
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: After a woman named April Burrell suffered through a trauma when she was 21 years old, she developed schizophrenia, where she was constantly seeing and hearing things that weren’t there. She eventually became completely frozen within her own body.
CALLI: Frozen? Like…she couldn’t move?
NATE: She could move, but she couldn’t communicate. She couldn’t take care of herself. Her family and her doctors say it was like she was just…gone. Or empty. She didn’t smile. She didn’t laugh or go outside. She just…stared off into space. To put it another way, she was catatonic. This was in 1995.
CALLI: That’s awful. So what happened?
NATE: Well…she woke up. Twenty years later.
CALLI: What?! She just woke up? Just like that?
NATE: Well, there’s more to it than that, which I’ll get to, but her case could have huge implications for the entire field of psychiatry.
CALLI: I have so many questions. Like…did she just…wake up? Or was it gradual? Did she remember anything? I feel like I need some answers here.
NATE: All will be revealed, my friend. But there’s a kind of amazing coincidence that happened in this story that - if it hadn’t happened - April would probably still be catatonic. It turns out April was Dr. Sander Markx’s very first patient out of med school, back in 2000. He saw her briefly and was dumbstruck by her condition. He still says she was the sickest patient he’s ever had.
CALLI: That’s saying something.
NATE: But he left the facility where she was being treated, and time passed. Then, in 2018, Dr. Markx had his own lab, and had one of his research fellows spend time in April’s facility - not even realizing she was still there. But when his colleague described this patient who just stared off into space, he knew immediately who it was.
CALLI: No way.
NATE: Yes way. Because he knew that she’d been there so long, he put together a huge team - more than 70 experts from around the world and from a bunch of different fields to figure out what the heck was going on.
CALLI: So? What was happening?
NATE: After a truckload of new tests, they found that her immune system was producing a ton of antibodies that were attacking her brain - specifically the temporal lobes, areas that are associated with…if you’ve been paying attention…schizophrenia.
CALLI: Why was her immune system attacking her brain?!
NATE: It turns out it was lupus.
CALLI: It was Lupus?
NATE: Lupus. It’s a really complicated, sorta mysterious autoimmune disorder that affects up to 1 and a half million Americans by some counts. But her symptoms were incredibly rare. That said, Dr. Markx hypothesized that the lupus was the underlying factor for her catatonic state. He set her on a six month course of really intense treatment. After the very first treatment…April started waking up.
CALLI: That’s incredible.
NATE: After her full course, she was like a different person. She remembered everything up to the point when her hallucinations began. While April has to undergo ongoing treatment for the rest of her life, Dr. Markx and other neuroscientists have already found and treated similar “lost causes'' successfully. New research is coming out that links autoimmune disorders and other inflammation to all kinds of conditions, like schizophrenia, depression, and even autism.
CALLI: So April and Dr. Markx could change the way these conditions are treated altogether?
NATE: That’s the idea. One study found that treating autoimmune disorders in 91 psychiatric patients actually helped most of them. This could be a real revolution in psychiatric care.
CALLI: It goes to show that the solutions that are the hardest to find are often right in front of you the whole time.
NATE: Couldn’t have said it better, myself.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: Common chemicals found in everything from non-stick pans to candy wrappers are better known as PFAS or Forever Chemicals - and they’re slowly killing us. But pretty soon, there’s a very good chance these forever chemicals are gonna be a thing of the past.
NATE: Oh very nice, love to hear it. Now, forever chemicals, I know that those are very dangerous… chemicals but uh… remind me what it’s an acronym for again?
CALLI: Per- and PolyFluoroalkyl Substances. We’ve talked about these things before - how consuming them for too long can lead to cancer, or weakened immune systems, and a whole laundry list of other health issues. We’ve talked about how virtually every US citizen has some trace of forever chemicals in their system. They are in clothes, fast food, nonstick pans, candy wrappers, probably in a hundred things in any room you enter in the US because they’re used to repel things like oil and water.
NATE: We’ve talked about how forever chemicals have been floating around, literally, for far too long. I know for example that companies like DuPont, 3M, and Chemours use forever chemicals in a NUMBER of products since the middle of the 20th century as a surfactant, which is something that keeps oil and water separated. How would we get rid of PFAS?
CALLI: It might take awhile, but it starts with a proposal set forth, for the first time, by the US government for PFAS regulation in water. Now, for full context on how the government plans to limit the use of PFAS, I have to tell you a bit about what we’ve already done to fight these contaminants. And, again, I wanna be clear, this is only for forever chemicals in WATER. Earlier, the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, proposed designating two specific PFA chemicals as hazardous substances. The government has been already regulating SOME forever chemicals and has provided funding to figure out how to prevent future contaminants. But now, they want to expand to more types of PFAS. If the plan becomes law, public water systems will legally be required to monitor for these additional forever chemicals. And if there’s contamination in place, any water providers will be required by law to immediately notify the public.
NATE: Interesting. But how big of a difference will this really make?
CALLI: The EPA predicts that over the course of many years following this becoming law, thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of injuries will be prevented.
NATE: Okay, yeah. That’s amazing. But like… what about in the meantime? That’s not an immediate fix.
CALLI: Right, and unfortunately, there is no immediate fix. But there are ways to limit your PFAS ingestion, according to environmental chemist Elsie Sunderland. For example, look at the ingredients on any cosmetics or personal care items you use. They all have active ingredients, and if those ingredients list something with the prefix “fluoro,” GET RID OF IT. For anything without ingredients, Sunderland says you can go to a website like Environmental Working Group, who tell you what to look for when identifying PFAS. Ironically, she says the worst offenders are products that say PFOA-free on the label.
NATE: That seems like that would be a good thing?
CALLI: Yeah, but a PFOA is just one type of PFAS. She says those products are actually MORE likely to have PFAS… just not the ones OTHER products have. The distinction is you want to see a label that says “PFAS-free” specifically, or “certified nontoxic.” And even then - do a little research!
NATE: Alright, but what about in the place most PFAS sneak up on us: water? You said earlier that filters can limit the PFAS.
CALLI: Yeah, but they don’t remove all of them. She says the best solution is to find a filter that performs “reverse osmosis,” which more specifically removes smaller chunks of junk in your water, like ions, or chemicals from minerals. It’s done by applying a lot more pressure to the water passing through than a normal filter. Whatever you do, you should probably NOT drink bottled water.
NATE: What?! Why not?
CALLI: Sunderland says there was a case in Massachusetts a few years ago where bottles of water were discovered to have some potentially nasty chemicals in them… because they were distilled from water contaminated by some potentially nasty chemicals. In fact, I found a study that said 39 out of every 100 bottles had traces of PFAS in them. So, our best bet here is… read ingredients. Avoid bottled water. Wait until the regulations kick in. And most of all, take care of ourselves and others while we do our own research to eliminate some of these PFAS uses ourselves!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: NASA is planning on sending humans to Mars in the coming decades, and I have a question for you: what are they going to eat?
CALLI: Uhh, potatoes grown from Matt Damon’s poop. Haven’t you seen The Martian?
NATE: Wow. You went there.
CALLI: Don’t ask the question if you don’t want the answer.
NATE: Fair enough. But even if they had plenty of Matt Damon’s, errr, you know…there’s a problem: not enough light.
CALLI: You mean Matt Damon’s star power doesn’t provide enough warming glow to encourage photosynthesis?
NATE: Not while he’s on Earth and we’re talking about Mars. Maybe if he were there in person. First of all, Mars is further away from the sun than the Earth so, obviously, it gets less than half our sunshine, which makes it harder to grow the crops we are used to on our own planet. But that’s just on Mars. They also need a massive amount of food for the months-long journey to the red planet.
CALLI: Well…according to other sci-fi films, couldn’t they just produce a lightweight nutritional sludge that the astronauts can smoosh into their mouths?
NATE: That’s a possibility, but it doesn’t take into account the fact that humans have evolved to love the experience of eating real food. We crave texture and flavor. NASA is hyper-aware of the psychological effects of the isolation of space. So it’s important to provide the Martian travelers as much normalcy as possible. And that means…real food.
CALLI: I’ve never really thought about how not having actual food could affect our mood. But that makes sense. So lemme reset a little bit here. Astronauts need tons of real food in order to…A: Survive and B: not go crazy on their journey to Mars. But there’s not enough sunshine to grow food, and they can’t pack enough to feed them all on a small spacecraft. So…does that mean Matt Damon’s potatoes are the closest we’ll ever get to the real thing? Is a silly thing like a lack of sunlight going to stop us from becoming a space-faring people?
NATE: Not if we can figure out how to grow food…in the dark. And that’s just what several teams of chemical engineers and other scientists are trying to do.
CALLI: Yeah, this is one of those things that seems like it should be easy when you first hear about it, but then…
NATE: Right? It’s actually incredibly hard, because what these scientists are trying to do is actually overcome millions and millions of years of evolution to fundamentally change the way plants grow.
CALLI: Yeah, when you put it that way, it doesn't seem so simple. So how are they going to do it?
NATE: According to a chemical engineer named Robert Jinkerson from the University of California, Riverside, the answer comes from artificial nutrients.
CALLI: In the dark?
NATE: In the dark. He thinks they can do it by reawakening mechanisms inside the plant that go dormant after germination. Think about it: you put a seed in the ground - away from sunlight - and something inside its genes tells it to start growing. But that shuts off once it breaks the surface and the sun takes over. If you can somehow tell it to keep growing without sunshine, then Jinkerson says he could feed the plants energy-rich hydrocarbons made from water and the CO2 exhaled by the people aboard the ship.
CALLI: Sounds a little more palatable than potatoes grown from anyone’s…
NATE: …we get the idea. And check this out: his team has already shown that a plant can survive on this no-sunshine carbon dioxide cocktail.
CALLI: So…problem solved? We going to Mars?
NATE: Not so fast. The plants in his experiments have survived, but they haven’t exactly grown. But his experiments and others like it are showing that it’s possible. And the even bigger picture here: growing crops in the dark won’t just be a big deal on Mars - it has huge implications for Earth, too.
CALLI: Absolutely. It means we could grow crops in tiny spaces without having to spend the energy to light it up.
NATE: Exactly. This could change the way we grow food forever. Plants without the sun.
CALLI: Can we still go to Mars?
NATE: Why stop there? We could go to the stars!
CALLI: I like it, let’s go.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Scientists managed to wake up a woman who had been in a catatonic state for twenty years when they learned she was suffering from a rare form of lupus and treated the inflammation it caused, which could lead to enormous breakthroughs in treatments for some with depression and other neurological disorders.
CALLI: Forever chemicals: we know em, we hate em, and soon, we’ll be getting rid of them. A new proposal from the US government will find us severely limiting the acceptable number of chemicals that are allowed to be used in our products and therefore polluted back into the environment. It hasn’t passed yet, and may take some time for us to see an effect, but for the time being, we can do our part and make sure we’re AWARE of where PFAS can be found in everyday products!
NATE: Scientists are on the verge of being able to grow crops without the help of sunshine, which would allow humans to eventually travel to Mars without skipping a meal.