Mysteries we can’t stop thinking about
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It's Unexplainable. I'm Noam Hassenfeld here with Thomas Liu, who's a new producer joining us from NPR, from Bloomberg, from HBO. Welcome, Thomas. Howdy, howdy. So, Thomas, you've been working on a lot of science shows before. What's it like now that you're with us just focusing on the unanswered parts, just living for the questions? I think that's one of the most intriguing and exciting parts for me is that

I feel like a lot of my science work has been, what is the answer? What is the explanation? But for this, it's like, what are the things people are asking? What are the things people are curious about? And I'm here for it. So we wanted to welcome you in by giving you a tour, so to speak, of some of our favorite episodes, kind of take you behind the scenes and show you the pieces of the stories that

in a way kind of made the stories what they are, but didn't end up in the final cut. Like I'm sure you've heard about killing your darlings. Yeah.

And it's really tough, right? It's so tough. There have been many times when I've done like mountains of research on a story. I've talked to 20 different scientists and I only have room for two. I lose an entire storyline that I was in love with, but it just doesn't make sense for the scope of the story. For sure. But today is the day for our darlings. Justice for darlings. Justice for darlings. So we are going to talk about some of our favorite bits that didn't make it in.

And we've got three darlings for you this week. One from me, one from our senior reporter producer, Bird Pinkerton. That's me. And one from our producer, Manding Witt. Hey, Thomas. Let's go. So, Bird, you're up first with a darling. Oh, okay. So, last year, Thomas, we did a whole series on pregnancy mysteries, including an episode where...

I lightly bullied my mother to tell her a little bit about something called microchimerism. So a chimera in myth, right, is this creature that has a lion head and a snake tail and a goat body. But in the episode, I spoke with Amy Boddy, who is a wonderfully named biologist at UC Santa Barbara. And she explained that in biology, a chimera is something kind of different.

It's multiple individuals existing in one host body. So essentially, like, whenever you have a living thing that's made up of pieces of more than one individual, that is a chimera. You can find them in plants, in animals, and you can even find them in humans. Like, if you see organ transplantation or something like that, where you have, like,

a large tissue, right, that's from someone that is a completely different individual, you can consider that person a chimera. It's like a human collage.

It's not quite as exciting as a human with like a goat head, right? It's just sort of one person who contains bits of two genetically different people. And then, as we explained in the episode, a micro chimera is that on like a tiny scale because in the womb, we swap some number of cells with our birth parents. So like...

My mother gave me some of her cells. I gave her some of my cells. I might be a tiny bit chimerical. And if you want to hear more about that, you should listen to the episode. But as we were talking about chimera, Amy Boddy kind of

casually mentioned this other story that blew my mind. So this is the darling that I could not fit. But now, today, the grand unveiling of the chimera story that has haunted me for over a year.

So our story begins in the early 2000s with this woman who was living in Washington state. And she had three kids, but she wasn't employed, so she applied for assistance from the state. And as part of this process, apparently, the state wanted to make sure that her boyfriend was actually the bio dad for her kids. So her family was kind of tested to prove that they were all related. And when the DNA test came back...

They showed that her boyfriend was the father and her kids were related to each other. But the tests also showed that this woman

What? How's that possible? Right. Like, she was the mother of the three kids. Like, she gave birth to them. She had a doctor who was present for the births, right? He said he would testify that he was there. She had, like, photos of herself pregnant. She had their birth certificates. But...

These tests were coming back and saying, like, you're not a match. And so the state was, like, checking her out for potential welfare fraud. They were threatening to take her kids away. Like, this was really awful. But eventually, after some more testing, they were able to show that she was related to her kids. So according to National Geographic, in the kind of initial tests, the ones that did not match, they were using DNA from, like, skin, hair, and blood.

But when they looked at a cervical smear, the DNA did match her kids. So, like, why would the DNA in her hair, say, be different from her cervix? Like, this was very confusing. But as Amy told me, she was a chimera. So in theory, what's believed to have happened is that she had a twin, another fertilized egg with different genes,

And the two eggs might have fused together and turned into one person. In that case, it blows my mind because which one is her? So this woman might kind of be both herself and her own twin. And so different parts of her have different DNA.

Just so I can make sure I'm understanding this, when she was just an egg inside her mom, there was another twin with her. Yes. And those eggs potentially fused. Like, so she is potentially to quote-unquote people. Yes. Wow. But then also, the other thing that this made me think is, like, she didn't discover this until they tested it. Mm-hmm. Like, I could potentially...

Be my own twin. Oh, my God. Are you trying to tell us something, Bird? Is this your coming out? Like, who knows? It's not something that we, like, test for very often. I mean, I feel like this is all ripe for a very good movie. It feels like it might have been ripped from the headlines and turned into, like, a CSI or Law & Order thing. Oh, my goodness. But I think just sort of philosophically, it raises...

These really fascinating questions about like oneness or where you begin and someone else ends. Yeah, I'm curious, Bird, why this didn't make it in and why it's also stuck with you for so long. Yeah, I think it didn't make it in because if you introduce the idea of like

a person can contain their own twin, it's like hard to then focus on anything else. Like, it's just one of those things where sometimes you remove a darling because it would just derail an entire episode because you spend the entire rest of the episode being like, I'm just thinking about the twin thing. But I think I've been thinking about it because it's,

It makes me think a lot about the borders of a person, I guess. Like, where do you begin and where does someone else end? This complicates what seems sometimes like a really simple set of boundaries in a way that I find really fascinating.

We have two more darlings for you, Thomas, but would it be okay if we take a quick break first? Yeah. I agree, but my twin. Whoa. Okay, so we'll be back in just a sec. Support for Unexplainable comes from 1Password. Forgetting a password is pretty frustrating. One minute, you're excited to watch British people baking cakes.

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Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. All right. So we're back with Thomas, with Bird, with Mandy.

And we've got two more darlings to bring back from the dead. Mandy, you are up. All right. So the darling that I am bringing back to life is related to a story I did a while ago, Thomas. It was about how there aren't enough organs for the people who need them. Like in this country alone, there's something like over 100,000 people just waiting for a new heart or lung or kidney transplant.

And 17 people die every day just waiting for one. So I spoke to surgeons who are trying to put genetically modified animal organs into people. Wow. Which is, you know, in this case, another kind of chimera problem.

They're working with pig organs specifically because pig organs, they're actually pretty similar to ours. And if scientists can get these pig organ transplants to work, the idea is that there could be an almost endless supply, which sounds great, but they haven't quite figured out the science yet. Scientists have been experimenting on animals to figure out the right kind of like immunosuppressant drugs or the right gene edits they can make to these organs to basically get our bodies to accept them.

And so they've put pig organs in monkeys. But, you know, monkeys aren't people. And so here's what I didn't really get into into this original episode is I also talked to surgeons who are trying to put these pig organs into brain dead human bodies. And the idea here is that the brain dead are closer to living people than animals are. Just to be clear, Mandy, when you say brain dead patients, that means...

The rest of their body seems to be working fine, but they are dead. Yeah, it's a little complicated. They're technically and legally considered dead. They have no brain activity, but their bodies are still functioning. Their heart is still beating. But to remain in that state, they have to be like hooked up to machines. Got it.

But it's also just a really weird, like, gray space to do research on brain-dead bodies because it's not something that's done regularly in science at all. We know how to design and do ethical experiments on animals and, you know, clinical trials on people. But with the brain-dead, not really. Do they—how—because I guess if you are going to do an experiment on someone's body—

after they die, they still have to have given consent in their life, right? That's a really good question. And I think there's not like any firm regulations around how to do this. But how? Who's giving them permission? Who's like saying, here's a body. My aunt is here and ready for your testing. Yes. So let me explain. I'm going to continue my story. We have lots of questions.

But these are great questions. We have a lot of questions about this darling. Okay. One of the people I talked to for the story that didn't make it in, her name's Jamie Locke, and she's a surgeon who did the first ever operation of putting a genetically engineered pig organ into a brain dead body. I will admit I had a lot of reservations about it. Was it the right thing to do? Was it the ethical thing to do?

Because this research is rarely done, there's not really any sort of like regulation or rules. We don't know all the risks, right? We don't. We think we do, but we don't because it just hasn't been done. So she actually had to come up with her approach kind of from scratch. We felt very strongly that before we did anything, we really needed to get an external ethicist to make sure that she and her team did this right.

So the deceased was named Jim Parsons, and he died in a bike accident. He was originally an organ donor. He wanted to donate his organs, but he wasn't eligible to because of medical reasons. So his family actually agreed to let Jamie and her team study his body instead.

So they were worried about how to treat the brain-dead body itself in a respectful way. But the immediate biggest concern was how to do this experiment in a way that also respected the living, specifically Jim's family. Talking to them about the study, what it meant, what that meant for them, what it meant for them spiritually. So Jamie and her team decided to run the experiment just long enough to see if the pig kidney worked and wouldn't get rejected.

And once they put the kidney in, it stayed there for about 77 hours. And in the end, it worked. The kidney managed to filter blood and produce urine. And this whole time, Jamie kept Jim's family in the loop. We had daily conversations about where we were in the process, how the kidneys were doing, how he was doing, all of those things. And I think that is really recognizing that the donor families are a critical part of the research team.

What's crazy, too, is since then, there's been more experiments like this, more pig organs put in brain-dead bodies, the longest being sustained for two months. Two months in a brain-dead body? Yes. Oh, my God. That is... I think... It's just...

I think this just raises so many... Yep. When Brian Resnick and I did an episode about the definition of death and sort of how the line is drawn between someone who is brain dead and who is alive and how tricky, I guess, that line can be. And I find it interesting how...

Viscerally, I feel like I'm reacting to this. There is a part of me that feels deeply, deeply uncomfortable with this. That's so interesting, Bird, because I have, I feel like I have the opposite reaction. I guess something feels uncomfy here, but I remember talking to Mandy for this episode, and so much of this is just stuff that feels like it gives you the ick.

But it also feels really helpful and useful. You know, if the argument is between giving a brain dead person a pig kidney to see if it works and an actual living person, to me, it just seems reasonable to try it on a brain dead person and not risk a living person's well-being. But I totally I totally see it. Right. Like this is putting us in a very, very difficult moral and scientific place for sure.

I guess the living person can agree, though. I know. I know. Yeah. Talking to Jamie, I was so interested in, like, hearing how she navigated ethical tensions and to, like, hear about the effort she was putting in really highlighted for me how on the frontier and weird and not usual this kind of science is. And for me, it really made me ask, like—

Is this going to open the door for more research on brain dead bodies, like maybe in other fields of biology? And what would that mean? And what guardrails should be there? And like, is this going to encourage more people? Like, I think that's a really spooky rabbit hole. I can see why this was also a darling that...

would have derailed an episode. Totally. Because I'm going to be thinking about this for a long time. Yes. Yes. So, okay. I have one last darling for you. I want to take us to outer space.

And bring us back to an episode we did on the Artemis program. What's really cool about Artemis is that it's not just going back to the moon. It's got this much bigger vision. It includes a permanent moon base, an orbiting space station around the moon called Gateway, with the eventual hope that we're going to have a crewed mission to Mars in the late 2030s. And the reason this is such a big deal, which we talked about in the episode, is because everything we know about spending time

a long time in space is that space really, really sucks. Like, there's just so many ways that space will hurt you and kill you. There's radiation. There's prolonged weightlessness. There's the isolation. There's moon dust. All the dust on the moon is really jagged because there's no wind. So there's all this...

audio from the Apollo missions of these astronauts just going like, I have never seen so much dirt in my whole life. Ever. One of the astronauts, I think he said, you know, we can fix any challenge of space, but we can't fix moon dust. Wow. And in the episode, I talked to all of these people, astronauts, writers, scientists, and I asked them, you know, would you want to go on a long-term mission? And they were all basically like, no. No.

Even people that have been to space. But I did talk to one guy who was very, very into it. Like, so charged up that it felt like he was angry if people didn't want to go to Mars. If we want to have a future, even if our sun is dead, we got to become multi-planetary species.

then we can survive in the long term. So I talked to Jonathan Zhang, who's a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL, which is this NASA lab that does all kinds of stuff with robotic spacecrafts and deep space exploration. Heard of it, heard of it. We talked to him a bit in the original episode, but the part in the episode we didn't really get into was this little bit in the tape there that I just found so fascinating. Even if our sun is dead,

He's talking about the end of the sun. Eventually, the sun is going to become a red giant. It's going to expand and engulf Mercury and Venus and Earth and Mars. So, you know, if humanity is going to survive billions of years into the future, again, billions of years into the future, we're talking. A long time. We're going to need to make it to the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, maybe even further,

But Jonathan, he doesn't want to wait millions, billions of years into the future. He published a paper with a few colleagues that tried to estimate how long it would take to get to Jupiter's moon, Saturn's moons further. He is assuming more technological development, more funding, faster ships. But he says that JPL is already working on this. They actually just tested a new ion propulsion engine. It's at least 10 times more efficient than normal rocket fuel.

But, you know, overall, he says, quote, "Our model suggests human landings on worlds beyond the Moon and Mars

may well be witnessed by many alive today. - Yes, and I'm going to be dead. - You know, I told you that most of the people I spoke to didn't really want to go to space permanently, and Jonathan is a huge outlier. So you would buy a one-way ticket to Mars? - Yes, right, yes, yeah. - Why? Why would you want to do that? - I tell you what, people are going to die sooner or later. So we have the same destiny. Let's say I have three years to live, okay? Now, if there's an opportunity

to go to a new place. I start something new, I die there, it's fine with me. And, I mean, you are a scientist at NASA, at JPL. Like, you know how bad Mars is. You know how cold and toxic and how far away it is. And you would still say, I am going to leave this, like, paradise of Earth and go to Mars. Yeah. I don't know. I found that kind of mind-blowing because...

There is something inspiring about someone that looks at this void, this endless empty void, and says, "I want to put myself into it." I want to think about that void. I want to go into that void.

I find that kind of inspiring. Wait, so, Noah, would you do it? Wait, wait, would I, like, go to Mars personally? Yeah. Hell no. Okay. You were swayed. You were like, wow, that's amazing, but not me, though. No, I find it inspiring, but I find a lot of things inspiring that I don't want to do personally. That's totally fair. I was just curious. I wouldn't either. Maybe that's just me. I don't know. But I do think, like, there is something here about these kind of...

extreme possibilities that there's reason that we don't include them in the original story, but it's worth considering them because they just like, they stick with you. And these conversations that we had with all these people, they really helped us design these episodes, even if they didn't make it in. Right? No, yeah. And it feels like these stories are taking you to like the edge of science, but then the closer you get, the blurrier it gets. Yeah, I think also...

In the moment, there are things that would totally derail a story. But I think it's important to acknowledge that, like, in science, sometimes when you follow the things that seem to be derailing the story you're trying to tell, it can be really fruitful and really helpful. Not everything fits neatly into little narratives, but sometimes the things that don't fit are the most interesting. We should do more of this. Like, I think...

In a story, there's a bunch of seeds and we choose one to grow. But what about all the other ones, you know? This episode was produced by Meredith Hodnut, who runs the show. It was reported by Bird Pinkerton, Manding Nguyen, and me, Noam Hassenfeld. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala. Music from me. Fact-checking from Anouk Douceau. And thanks, as always, to Brian Resnick for co-creating our show.

If you have thoughts about Unexplainable, send us an email. We're at unexplainable at Vox.com. And you can also leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. It really helps us find new listeners. You can also support this show and all of Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. You can go to Vox.com slash members to sign up. And if you signed up because of us, send us a note. We'd love to hear from you.

Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We're off next week for the holidays, but we'll be back first thing, like January 1st in 2025. Support for this show comes from Ocean Spray. Remember your favorite holiday parties where all your loved ones got together and shared wonderful memories and memorable food? You can have it all over again. Just add Crayon.

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