Host: Jay Allison
[Uncanny Valley by The Drift]
Jay: [00:00:12] From PRX, this is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Jay Allison, producer of this radio show. And this time, we bring you stories from a live event held at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall. It was produced in collaboration with the World Science Festival. You'll hear from a geneticist, an oceanographer and an astronaut. The theme of the evening was Making Waves. And your host is Adam Gopnik, staff writer for the New Yorker. Here's Adam.
[applause]
Adam: [00:00:39] Welcome, everyone. Tonight, welcome to Lincoln Center. Welcome to The Moth. I'm Adam Gopnik. We're incredibly thrilled to be here tonight at Lincoln Center, at Alice Tully Hall. We tell stories here at The Moth. When you think about it, at first, you might think that science and storytelling are different kinds of activities. We tell stories that are true, but that draw on our sense of astonishment, wonder, our capacity for comedy.
But in another way, all that human beings do is tell stories. We just tell lots of different kinds of stories. When you think about it, when we all began as primeval men and women, and we gathered around the campfire and all those little primeval moths were coming around and incinerating themselves as we told tales.
And some of us, we just told all kinds of different stories. Some told wonderfully compelling stories, and they became writers. And some told stories about great figures in the sky, and they became religious people. And some told stories where the sounds were all the same at the end of the sentences, and they became poets. [audience laughter] Some of the writer’s told stories that never seemed to end, and they became New Yorker writers. [audience laughter]
[cheers and applause]
And around that campfire, I always imagined that there was one little girl who said, “I love, that's a wonderful story you just told, but I don't think that story is true.” And in that little girl's question for me is the beginning of the scientific spirit desire to sort out all the countless stories human beings tell and say, “Is this one really true? Is it ultimately true? Is it truly true? And can you show that it's true?” That's what, for me, science is all about. It's where storytelling and science meet. And we hope will show that meeting place in the many, many ways that anecdotes and data really do form the singular and plural of each other tonight.
Our first storyteller is one who is familiar to all of us here at The Moth, is a wonderful favorite. His name is Michael Massimino. And when I asked Michael, “What was the last thing was that rocked his boats?” His answer was perfect. He said, “It was the Mets playing in the World Series last year.” Would you welcome, please, Michael Massimino. Michael.
[cheers and applause]
Michael: [00:03:25] A couple of weeks after I got my phone call from NASA, that I was selected to be an astronaut, my information packet came in the mail. And the cover letter had a paragraph at the beginning that said, “Congratulations.” And then, there was the second paragraph, and it said, “Practice your swimming. You will be required to pass a swim test in order to go to water survival training with the United States Navy in Pensacola.” I could not believe this, because after years of applications and interviews and medical examinations from head to toe, and an extensive background check, never once did anyone ever think to ask, “Do you know how to swim?” [audience laughter] And if they did, my answer would have been, “Not really.” [audience laughter]
Although I grew up on Long Island and was surrounded by water my entire life, I didn't like swimming and I completely hated the water. I was a skinny little kid who was always freezing when I got wet. I didn't like having my head under the water. I couldn't breathe. I didn't like having chlorine in my eyes. When I would go to a pool party, I would go on my tippy toes, just so my head was exposed and pretend like I was having a good time. [audience laughter]
And now, the one thing that I hated and avoided my entire life had now become the one thing that I had to do well, and the one thing that was going to stand between me and my dream of flying in space. I wasn't going to let that stop me. I had the summer to get ready. I took my kids to the pool every day, and I swam, and I practiced and I practiced and I practiced. At the end of that summer, I reported for duty at the Johnson Space Center. A much better swimmer, but still very, very nervous about what I was going to have to do there. I reported there with 43 other new astronauts, but we weren't really astronauts yet. We were astronaut candidates, or as our senior astronauts called us, “Ass cans.” [audience laughter] We were all 44 new ass cans. [audience laughter]
And in our initial briefing, they told us how we could grow up to be astronauts. They gave us a list of things that were going to be doing over the next two years. All the different examinations and qualifications that we would have to get in order to do that. And the very first test we were going to have was the swim test. And I was like, “Really? [audience laughter] Can't we have like a math quiz [audience laughter] or a physics test?” And then, the briefer went on and said, “Okay. All the strong swimmers in this class, raise your hand.” And a couple of the military people raised their hand. We had a Navy diver who raised her hand. And then, he asks, “Okay, all the weak swimmers, raise your hands and be honest.”
I sheepishly raised my hand, along with a couple other egghead PhDs. [audience laughter] And he said, “Great. You strong swimmers and you weak swimmers, this weekend, you're going to work together. And you strong swimmers are going to get these weak swimmers ready to pass the test.” And that's exactly what we did. We showed up that next week, all 44 of us, to take this test in full gear, flight suit, boots and helmet. And the feeling that day was everyone was going to pass. We were not going to leave that pool until everyone passed.
We got in the water and we did our long-distance swim, demonstrating all the survival strokes that we needed to show. We did a lap underwater. We demonstrated that we could save each other, do a rescue swim. We drown proofed. Eventually, we got on our back with only our mouth exposed, bringing in sips of air to fill our lungs, so we get buoyancy on the water. And then, after you were good and tarred from all that, it was time to tread, tread water. And in the last few minutes of that tread, they blew a whistle and you had to bring your hands out of the water. And if your hands went underneath the water, you failed and you had to do the whole test over again.
As I'm treading for dear life with my hands out of the water, those last few minutes, I'm looking around at my new classmates. I look for Mike Fink and don't see him anymore, but I see his hands. [audience laughter] They didn't say anything about your head being out of the water. [audience laughter] They only said, your hands had to be out of the water. And by golly, Mike was not going to let his hands go under that water. [audience laughter] I realized just how determined this group of people was, these people that I had now become classmates with, future astronauts with. Every one of us passed. Everyone passed that test.
A few weeks later, we flew down to Naval Air Station Pensacola, the home of naval aviation. And for a kid who dreamt about being an astronaut and watched The Right Stuff a thousand times and read that book about 100 times, I was in heaven. There were F18s with blue angels in them screaming overhead. There were young Navy and Marine recruits exercising and running all over the place, and then there was us. We were there to be trained to eject out of a high-performance aircraft, be able to work our parachute and our survival gear, and survive in the water long enough for someone to come and get us.
Now, this is something that I would never dream of doing in a million years. I found out how the Navy was going to get us ready to do this. You don't jump out of the plane the first day. What you do is you take it step by step and they build you up inch by inch, baby steps, until you're ready to do the big exercise at the end of the week. So, what we started to do was get by the end of the pool, just on the edge of the pool and jump in. Then once you got that down, you went on a platform about a foot off the water and you jumped from there and you got progressively higher. And then, they taught us how to go through our checklist.
Once we ejected from the aircraft, make sure your canopy was good. You needed a good canopy above your head. And if you didn't have one, they told you what to do to fix it. And then, you went through all your other checks. Make sure your mask is off, your visor is up, deploy your seat kit with all your survival gear. And then, make sure, most important, one of the most important things for me anyway was that your LPU, your life preserver unit was inflated, because that's what's going to keep you floating when you hit the water. And then, pull three lines, a three-line jettison, which allows you to steer the parachute. After you got into the water, they taught us how to get away from the parachute and how to release from it, because that could fill with water and take you to the bottom of the ocean.
We did this step by step, and the graduation exercise came at the end of that week. What that was going to be a parasail above the Gulf, where we were going to release from the boat, enter the water, get into a raft, signal for help and they would come pick us up and we had to do that twice. And if you did that twice successfully, you passed the water survival course.
That Friday came, and I'm out on the Gulf of Mexico on a platform ship getting ready to be hooked up to a cable to be taken parasailing for this final exam. My classmate right in front of me is Stephanie Wilson. Stephanie Wilson is about 5 foot 2 and weighs about 100 pounds. Stephanie Wilson is about the size of one of my legs. [audience laughter] Stephanie starts marching in place. She gets a little tug from the boat, takes about a step and off she goes like Peter Pan. [audience laughter] Okay.
Then he hooked me up to the boat, to the line. I'm really, really nervous, because not only am I scared of the water, I am also afraid of heights. [audience laughter] Yeah, I know, let it out. [audience laughter] An astronaut who's afraid of heights. I start marching in place, just like they told me and then I start walking and I'm getting pulled, and then I start walking faster and then I start running. And then, I start thinking, this boat is not infinitely long. [audience laughter] I get to the edge of the platform and I'm still moving my legs. I haven't gotten airborne yet. I start going toward the ocean. [audience laughter] I plunge and belly flop about 20ft and do a face plant into the water. And then, the boat starts dragging me through the water. [audience laughter]
As I'm trying to gasp for air, and look, I see this chief petty officer, our instructor, in the back of that boat, signaling to me, telling me, “Release from your chute. Release from your chute.” I released from the chute just like she told me. Then they come and get me. And my LPU, the thing that's supposed to save me, the life preserver unit had popped on impact. They had a Navy doctor check me out, and he turns to the chief petty officer and says, “He'll be okay.” She looks at me and says, “That's good. You still got to do it twice. That didn't count.” [audience laughter]
I get hooked up to the boat again. I start marching, I start running, I hit the edge of the boat again and here comes round two with the water. [audience laughter] But this time, I skim the water with my feet. My sail inflates and I rise above the water. And then, I get a signal from the chief petty officer. The green flag's waving at me, and that means to release from the boat and I do that and then I go through my check. Canopy, visor, mask, seat kit, LPU, three-line jettison and I steer myself down. I keep my eye on the horizon, horizon, horizon. Let it come. Wait for it. Wait for it. I see the horizon coming up. My feet get a little bit wet. I release from my chute. I do my survival exercise. They come get me, and I have to do it one more time and I can pass.
They hook me up again. I march, walk, run, drop, [audience laughter] don't get wet, come up high. [audience laughter] I paused for a moment and I looked around, it was a beautiful day above the Gulf that day. I could see the coast of Florida. I could see the Atlantic Ocean. And it hit me what I was doing. What an extraordinary experience this had been. This skinny kid from Long Island was going through water survival training as an astronaut candidate, soon to be astronaut hopefully with the United States Navy. And then, I looked down at the boat and frantically the chief petty officer's waving a flag. [audience laughter] I release, do the whole routine again, land in the water and they come get me.
I had this great feeling of accomplishment, more than I ever had in my life. I mean, I had gone through some tough tests as an undergraduate at Columbia. It almost killed me to get through my qualifying exam for my PhD at MIT and to complete my dissertation. But those things for some reason seemed doable. This was facing one of the greatest fears I had, and I had to do this in order to achieve my dream of flying in space. I just felt like a superhero getting this done.
] And then, I realized I had become a good swimmer. Over those months of practicing and going through the swim test and all these lessons and the Navy, I had become a really good swimmer. I had swim goggles. I had a bathing suit. [audience laughter] I could maybe do this for exercise for the rest of my life. [audience laughter] Since that day over the Gulf of Mexico 20 years ago, I have never swam another lap.
[cheers and applause]
Adam: [00:16:44] Michael Massimino.
Jay: [00:16:47] Michael Massimino served as a NASA astronaut from 1996 until 2014. He was the first person to tweet from space. He lives in New York City, where he is an engineering professor at Columbia and an advisor at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum. Michael's first book is Spaceman: An Astronaut's Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe.
If you visit our website, themoth.org, we have a picture of Michael at water survival training in his full gear and the class photo of all the astronauts, as well as his first ass can photo.
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by PRX.
Jay: [00:18:21] This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jay Allison and we're bringing you a live event from Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall. It was produced in collaboration with the World Science Festival. Here's your host, Adam Gopnik.
[cheers and applause]
Adam: [00:18:35] Our next storyteller-- Now, the reason I consulted my notes is not because his name is difficult, but because his name is so simple that I'm sure I'm going to forget it. It's one of those reverse spin things. But George Church, the great George Church, is our next storyteller. When I asked George, “What had last rocked his boat?” He told me that “He wasn't sure what had last rocked his boat, but he was sure that he had rocked the human boat not long ago when he announced the enterprise of synthesizing many human genomes. Would you welcome, please, George Church.
[cheers and applause]
George: [00:19:18] I was born a mammal. [audience laughter] Part human, part guinea pig. I grew up in love with my single mom and her mother, an Ashkenazi immigrant who had converted our home into a boarding house full of fascinating and strange people. While she was busy taking care of their needs, fixing their meals and their plumbing, handing out personal advice and sharing medicines, I was running wild through the house, invading everybody's privacy. I would check out their crutches, and their false teeth. Really, they were living in our home and they weren't really concerned about privacy. They were more excited about telling their stories, and it was wonderful.
My mom at this time considered herself a poor, divorce lawyer, because most of her cases ended up with reconciliation. [audience laughter] So, she slowly transitioned into being a psychologist. [audience laughter] During that time, I became her favorite guinea pig. She would come home excited with new ideas, like, whether I could rotate geometric shapes in my head. She would test out theories like preventing my five-year-old brother from becoming a pyromaniac by giving him lots of matches to light until he got tired. That did not work out well. [audience laughter]
So, a few years later, I'm starting college at Duke. I'm taking psychology classes in my mom's footsteps, and they require all of us to become guinea pigs in their government funded psych research. And of course, they're playing mind games with us, because they are psychologists, after all, and they're saying they're doing one thing and they're actually doing something else. I'm trying to figure out what this is, but the main thing I'm figuring out is how if you're not forthright with the people that you're doing experiments on, there's a lack of trust there. [audience laughter]
So, a few years later, I'm a student now at MIT, and again a guinea pig in my spare time, this time on nutrition study, where the scientists are trying to starve us of leucine, which is required for life. [audience laughter] I think it's really great. 300 bucks and all the food you can eat. But the food is this fake jello, as if jello wasn't fake enough, made out of cornstarch and bright red and like fake cookies made out of corn starch and a little vial of amino acids which really taste terrible.
They want to make sure that we don't gain or lose weight. So, I'm eating tons of this terrible tasting stuff, because I'm fairly active. By the end of the study, everybody has dropped out of this. They also, by the way, make us collect all of our metabolic-- put it politely, our metabolic outputs. [audience laughter] I'm living in fear that my metabolic outputs will escape during one of my classes where [audience laughter] I'm trying to be a normal quantum physics student. And they didn't. I did make it through the whole 45 days. Like I said, everybody else dropped out. I learned a little bit more about getting people to stay in research studies. [audience laughter]
Soon thereafter, I'm a professor now in my own lab, my new shiny lab, and I'm getting government funding to develop new DNA sequencing methods, reading your genomes. It's suddenly going very, very fast, astonishingly fast and we're going from very simple experiments to being able to do lots of human genomes. I realized really, before we can do human genomes, we have to get permission and we need to learn all about proper protocol and consenting people once again.
So, I take the course and the test that helps you get approved for this process. We learn all about the abuses in the past, like the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment or the abuses in the name of eugenics both before and after World War II. This makes historical sense. But what doesn't make sense is the advice they have for what we're supposed to do today. We're supposed to not tell the people in the study anything about themselves, any data we collect. Even if we find out something that could save their lives, we're not supposed to know who they are and we're not supposed to have collected data that's good enough to make a recommendation even for a simple follow up diagnostic.
Craziest of all is we're supposed to promise them that we're going to keep their data completely private when many much more well-funded government agencies are having their data leak out in a whole variety of ways from hackers, including medical records and WikiLeaks and so on. So, I'm uncomfortable with this and decide that we really have to challenge it, ee have to do the opposite, we have to make waves, in a sense. And so, we proposed to give the data back to the people that are participating in the study. They might find some use for it, and they might tell us where we're wrong and to enable them to share the data and get educated about interpreting it.
And so, we get permission from the ethics review board at Harvard Medical School. One of their conditions is that I become a guinea pig, again, in my own study. I'm not quite sure what this means, but I figure, I've been guinea pig all my life, why not get this project going? So, we have permission to take samples from all over the body, saliva, blood, skin, gut components.
One day, so, I make a deal with one of the dermatologists at local hospital to get some skin. I'm guinea pig number one. But I soon learned that he is the reincarnation of the Marquis de Sade, [audience laughter] because he has a pet theory that the anesthetics that we usually use to reduce pain are actually toxic to the cells we're trying to collect from the hip. This is his story. And so, he does 12 anesthetic injections around the sites, pretty far away from the site, [audience laughter] and then jams in this gigantic metal punch about six millimeters, twists it. Sorry, I should have warned you this was graphic. [audience laughter] And then, lifts the skin and cuts it with scissors and it takes 11 stitches to hold it together.
The labels that my mother used to assign start ringing in my ears as stoic with pathological calm in the face of danger. [audience laughter] But I say, “No, none of the other participants in the study are going to do skin biopsy that particular way.” And so, weeks go by, and we're not really collecting skin, because I don't know what to do. We do, however, get a new physician that joins our project named Joe Thakuria. Wonderful guy. He also does studies right across the way at the Children's Hospital. He commonly mentions someday that he’d collected a few skin biopsies from the kids.
I'm thinking, gee, you know, all that screaming and thrashing. [audience laughter] I say, “Joe, how do you do that?” “There's no problem. We just put a little anesthetic cream on, wait a little while, take this itty-bitty punch, punch it in there and put a bandage on. So, no injections and no stitches.” I say, “Huh, [audience laughter] let's do that.” And that's how we've been doing it ever since. It slowly dawns on me why it is the Harvard Ethics Board has asked me to be guinea pig number one in my study is to make sure that everybody else has a pleasant experience [audience laughter] and doesn't quit the way most of them did in the nutrition study.
So, fast forward to today and this edgy, strange, small, to be ignored project, 10 years later is now setting the standards literally almost every project now. It's very hard to not return data to patients. Patients are more and more often asking for it, and it's even being written into laws. Literally, two of the major standard setting government agencies, the NIST and the FDA, which set standards for kilometers and therapeutics and so forth, have adopted in a project called the Genome in a Bottle, have adopted our people, our genomes as the world standard for genomes, because none of the other projects were properly consented.
And so, I've been a guinea pig all these years. I'm still guinea pig today. I think back to when I was trying to please my mom as a young guinea pig-- [audience laughter] I think, well, maybe I'm a lot more sophisticated today about my relationship to science. Or, maybe not. I still think about respecting this lineage going all the way back from my grandmother to my 18-month lovely granddaughter and how we're all sharing our stories like we did in this boarding house, all within the house. We're trying to exchange information about our health to make the house and everybody in it a little bit healthier. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Adam: [00:30:32] George Church.
Jay: [00:30:35] George Church is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and director of personalgenomes.org. His 1984 Harvard Ph.D. included the first methods for direct genome sequencing, molecular multiplexing and barcoding, which led to the first commercial genome sequence. George has a book out called My Life as a Guinea Pig. You can see a photo of six-month-old George as a guinea pig in training at themoth.org.
[triumphant music]
We'll be back in a moment with our final story from this live event at Lincoln Center.
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by PRX.
Jay: [00:32:12] You're listening to The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jay Allison, producer of this show. And we're bringing you a live event which took place at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall and was produced in collaboration with the World Science Festival.
[applause]
Here's your host, Adam Gopnik.
Adam: [00:32:29] When I asked our next, our last storyteller, Sylvia Earle, “What had been the last thing to rock her boat?” She said, and this is the attitude we all should have, that what she was thinking about was the next thing that would rock her boat. She had gone past the last things that would rock her boat. And that the things that she was looking forward to was her next trip where she'd be able to study the aquatic culture 2,000ft? Was that right? 2,000ft approximately. Deep. Deep is the concept here. [audience chuckles] Deep below the sea, and that she's led a life that's not about remembering the last boat rocking, but looking forward always to the next boat rocking. Will you welcome, please, Sylvia Earle.
[cheers and applause]
Sylvia: [00:33:29] I was knocked over by a wave when I was three-years-old. And the ocean got my attention. And it has held my attention ever since. But it wasn't just the ocean, all that water and the joy of rocking around in the waves, it's life in the ocean. So, it was natural that I become a biologist.
Over the years studying biology, I think I was ready as a botanist actually at Duke University, on my way to earning a PhD when I was asked if I would be willing to go for six weeks to the Indian Ocean as a botanist. Mm, irresistible. An ocean botanist at that, because my specialty has been and is still seaweeds, those lovely plants, the "photosynthesizers in the ocean.
So, it was only after I actually got on board and arrived in Kenya, Mombasa, a newspaper writer interviewed the science team, and we poured our hearts out. There were 12 of us who were really charged with exploring the Indian Ocean from the deck of a National Science Foundation funded ship, the Anton Bruun. This was my first experience with newspaper interviews. Nobody expected the headlines the next day, but there they were, “Sylvia sails away with 70 men.” [audience laughter] The subtitle, “But she expects no problems.” [audience laughter]
I'm not sure what kind of problems they were expecting, but we did have a really big problem, all of us. We were on a little boat. On the top of the ocean, the ocean average depth is two and a half miles and life all the way. Maximum depth, seven miles. We had to assist us with exploring the ocean, hooks, nets, dredges, trawls, the things that you can lower from the deck of a ship into the unknown depths below.
Imagine trying to understand New York City. Imagine aliens coming here up in the sky with clouds obscuring the view below, lowering hooks, dragging through the streets, [audience laughter] taking little bites out of New York City and trying to figure out what's going on here anyway [audience laughter] based on the little fragments that they would be able to examine. Well, that's the way it is with the ocean. Even today, only about 10% of the ocean has been seen at all. And it dominates the planet. That's where 97% of Earth's water is. And of course, water is the key to life.
Well, fast forward a bit. 1969, when the first footprints were being put on the moon. I was at Harvard at the time and saw a notice on the board asking for those scientists who wish to participate in an experiment living underwater as aquanauts. Aquanauts. I mean, astronauts were big news. So, the appeal of being able to use the ocean as a laboratory by actually living in the ocean, diving and staying underwater, getting to know life by being in the middle of the action.
I mean, people do it on the land all the time. If you want to understand a desert, you go to the desert. If you want to understand life in the forest, you go explore the forest and you can stay there for long periods of time if you choose to do so. But to go into the ocean, living 50ft underwater, to be able to go outside and really use the ocean as your laboratory, what a concept.
So, I put in my application, never expecting what happened next. No one expected women to apply. There were no women astronauts in 1969, 1970, not until the mid-1980s. All those footprints on the moon are made by guys. [chuckles] It's okay, they're people too. [audience laughter]
[cheers and applause]
But the head of the program, James Miller, had to decide, because I wasn't the only woman who applied. And those who did had qualifications that were, you know, they were okay on a par with the men who applied. He said he thought about it, really considered it, because there were some objections. Were there ever some objections? But he said, “Well, half the fish are female, [audience laughter] half the dolphins, half the whales, I guess we could put up with a few women.”
Well, remember, this is 1970, when this program finally came into action. “Hanky panky on the reef, oh, what would people think if you have men and women living together underwater?” [audience laughter] They made an all-women's team which made headlines. It was a little off putting when you think about it, that people were so excited about the thought that there would be a women's team. No real attention to me at all. [chuckles] There were nine teams of just guys and one team of women, but the women got all the press.
They wanted to know, “Oh did you wear lipstick? Did you have a hairdryer?” [chuckles] But mainly, mainly, they wanted to know what it was like to live underwater. This idea of women living underwater seemed to light a lot of fires, because we got a lot of attention. Ticker tape parade down State Street. We had a luncheon at the White House after our two-week stay underwater. People just wanted to know what's it like. I was faced with microphones. Not just one, a whole bevy of microphones. So, I did try to share the view.
Root for the National Geographic, I told about how these beautiful silver tarpon came and swam with a full moon silhouetting them. And that even in the dark, there was light because their bioluminescence. Swimming at night around our underwater home was like swimming through stars. And here's the thing, I got to know the fish. I got to know them as individuals. There were five angelfish that came from different places after they slept, got up really early, I got up really early to watch them. They'd gather together and they'd pal around the reef all day. And at night, they'd go their separate ways.
Little butterfly fish would team up. Well, they apparently do stick together, mate for life by two and two and two you'd see these little butterfly fish, like some people, they mate for life, go figure. [audience laughter] There was a big beautiful green moray eel we couldn't resist. We called him Puff. Like, Puff the Magic Dragon. He was there at night when we would make our excursions. It was just a transformation for me, because I'd seen fish before diving in and out, up and down. You casually see grouper and snapper. But this time, I got to meet that grouper, that snapper, that eel, that parrotfish, those parrotfish that gathered together.
I'd also seen plenty of fish swimming with lemon slices and butter. [audience chuckles] Haven't you all? But the idea of seeing them with new eyes and realizing that everyone is different. I could recognize them. Their faces are different, their spots were different, their attitudes were different. Call it personality, if you will. Some were shy, some were aggressive, but they were all part of this immense system, a coral reef where I was a visitor and getting to know what life was about.
Well, all right, fast forward to 2012. I had a chance to go back to the same place the underwater laboratory had been removed, but I was reflecting on before I took the plunge to see what it was like after 42 years, what had happened to the world in 42 years, what had happened to me? I had the opportunity to dive in many places around the world. I actually helped foster new technologies to be able to explore the ocean, to stay underwater, to enjoy the gift of time by helping to design and build little submarines. So simple to drive that even a scientist can do it, [audience laughter] I’m a living proof.
1970 to 2012, it's been a seismic shift in attitude in scientific discoveries. You just reflect on how far humankind has come in just a few decades. We have taken the ocean for granted, thinking, oh, we can use the ocean as a place to put things we don't want close to where we are. And the ocean is so big, so vast, we can take out of it whatever we want, no problem. The ocean is too big to fail. We thought in 1970.
Now, we know. And there I was, perched on the edge of a little boat, looking at the place where the Tektite laboratory had been ready to take the plunge and I wondered, I wonder if that eel is still here, because fish can live a long time. Sharks can be as old as any of us or older. Older than your [chuckles] grandparents, some of them. Where’s that big grouper? Oh, I love that big Nassau grouper, where was he? I mean, I knew where he used to be.
Armed with these hopes, I took the plunge. And it was a ghost town. I suppose if this had been my first dive, if I hadn't known what it was 42 years before, I would have thought, oh, this is beautiful. The water's clear. There's some of these big, lumpy boulder corals and they're still there. None of those branching staghorn and elkhorn corals that they used to write about and talk about. But I see fish, well, yeah, little damselfish, a few. One little tiny grouper. But basically, it had been stripped of most of the creatures that I had come to know and use as part of my understanding, the baseline of understanding about what the ocean should be, what coral reefs should be, these thriving, vibrant communities of life.
A lot of bad news, it would seem. But here's the good news. Not far from where the Tektite Laboratory was situated and where I found this disappointing scene, there's a place called Buck Island that in 1961, it was protected by president Kennedy. And ever since, it was associated with a national park on the land, the national park extended into the sea.
Diving there is like diving 50 years ago. It's amazing. Protection works. This is the centennial of national parks. Some say, it's the best idea America ever had. Well, it's certainly a good idea. And now, blue parks are beginning to catch on around the world nations, including our nation. The United States is beginning to step up. And not only embrace more of the land, but with blue parks.
As of this time last year, 1% of the ocean had protection for the creatures that live there, where even the fish and the lobsters and clams and oysters were safe. Now, we have 2%. Still not very much if you think that the ocean is the blue heart of the planet that makes our lives possible, but it's a trend in the right direction, we doubled it in a year, there's plenty of reason for hope. What is going to be our story, your story? Those of us who are around early in the 21st century, we have a choice. We can protect nature, we can save the natural world and nature can save us. Now is the time. Let's do it.
[cheers and applause]
Adam: [00:47:37] Sylvia Earle.
Jay: [00:47:41] National Geographic Society Explorer in residence, Sylvia A. Earle is an oceanographer, author and lecturer who's been called a “Living Legend,” by the Library of Congress and “Hero for the planet,” by Time magazine. Earle has led more than 100 expeditions and logged more than 7,000 hours underwater, including setting a record for solo diving in thousand-meter depth.
The Moth's artistic director, Catherine Burns, had a chance to sit down with Sylvia.
Catherine: [00:48:11] Now, they called the men aquanauts, but how do they refer to you, guys, in some of those headlines?
Sylvia: [00:48:18] Occasionally, the women were referred to as aquanauts, but more often. Well, I don't know, the press people just couldn't resist, we were aqua babes, we were aqua chicks, we were aqua belles. The one I loved the most was the aqua naughties. I thought at the time, hmm, I wonder how Neil Armstrong would have reacted to being called an astro hunk.
[laughter]
I don't think it would have gone over quite so well. But you know what? We didn't care what they called us. Just so we got to go do our thing.
Catherine: [00:48:54] I think sometimes when people hear things like this they feel very overwhelmed. So, what can ordinary people do to help fix things?
Sylvia: [00:49:03] The key is hold up the mirror. What am I good at? Is it math, is it numbers? Do I have a way with kids? Do I have a passion for music? Or, whatever. Whatever it is, use your power. Everyone has power.
Catherine: [00:49:19] You talk a lot in your story about the headlines that have followed you throughout your career. And I'm curious if you could write a headline for yourself for 10 years from now, what would that headline say?
Sylvia: [00:49:31] I think the ultimate headline that I would wish, is that “Sylvia Earle has lived long enough to see the turnaround from this time, this great time of decline, to leveling off and then ascending in the other direction that we have come to understand that our lives depend on taking care of nature.”
Jay: [00:49:53] That's Sylvia Earle in conversation with Catherine Burns. By the way, we discovered that Sylvia is referred to as “Her Deepness” by her friends and colleagues. You can hear more of that interview by going to The Moth website, where you can also pitch your own story. That's themoth.org.
That's it for this episode of The Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us next time. And that's the story from The Moth.
[Uncanny Valley by The Drift]
Your host this hour was Adam Gopnik. Adam is a New Yorker staff writer and has been contributing to the magazine since 1986. With the composer David Shire, he's written both book and lyrics for the musical comedy Table, produced by the Long Wharf Theatre.
The stories in this show were directed by Meg Bowles and Catherine Burns. The rest of The Moth's leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin Jenness and Jenifer Hixson. Production support from Mooj Zadie and Timothy Lou Ly. Special thanks to everyone at the World Science Festival, especially Tracy Day, Brian Greene, and Kate Roth.
Moth stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Moth events are recorded by Argot Studios in New York City, supervised by Paul Ruest. Our theme music is by the Drift. Other music in this hour from Bill Frizzell. You can find links to all the music we use at our website.
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by me, Jay Allison, with Viki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This hour was produced with funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. The Moth Radio Hours presented by PRX. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.