Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh and this is this podcast will
Speaker 1: kill You. Welcome back, everyone. I'm very excited that you're
Speaker 1: joining me for this latest bonus episode in our mini
Speaker 1: series of bonus episodes that have been coming out for
Speaker 1: the past few months. Jeff as a refresher, I'm putting
Speaker 1: together these bonus episodes as a way to hopefully accomplish
Speaker 1: two things at once. First, I get to explore in
Speaker 1: more detail some aspect of what we covered the previous week,
Speaker 1: helped along by an expert guest, of course, And second,
Speaker 1: I get to then ask that guest all about their
Speaker 1: experiences in their career, what they like about it, how
Speaker 1: the field could be improved, any advice they may have
Speaker 1: for people interested in a career in public health or
Speaker 1: disease research, or science communication, and so much more. It's
Speaker 1: been such a fun journey so far, and I'm especially
Speaker 1: looking forward to this week's episode, which I think may
Speaker 1: be our most electrifying yet. Last week, Aaron and I
Speaker 1: covered lightning strikes, especially what happens to your body if
Speaker 1: you are unfortunate enough to get in between the lightning
Speaker 1: and the ground. And if you haven't listened to that
Speaker 1: episode yet, you should definitely check it out before listening
Speaker 1: to this one, because in it we cover a lot
Speaker 1: of the basics of lightning and some of electricity, and
Speaker 1: I think it'll really help to provide a background for
Speaker 1: what we'll be talking about today, which is more about electricity.
Speaker 1: In our Lightning episode, we talked mostly about well lightning,
Speaker 1: how it forms, the biological impacts of lightning on the body,
Speaker 1: and some differences between getting struck by lightning and getting
Speaker 1: electrocuted through other ways. But what we didn't really get
Speaker 1: into in any great detail was how electricity in general works.
Speaker 1: For example, what is voltage, what is amperage, what's resistance,
Speaker 1: what's the difference between them, and why do they matter
Speaker 1: in understanding electricity, And also some of the other ways
Speaker 1: outside of getting struck by lightning that electricity and biology
Speaker 1: can intersect, like fish species that can generate their own
Speaker 1: electricity for stunning prey, or how modern electrotherapy is done.
Speaker 1: And part of the reason why we didn't cover these
Speaker 1: things on our regular season episode was because we can't
Speaker 1: cover everything. We have to put at least some boundaries
Speaker 1: on how much we can talk about in a single episode.
Speaker 1: But it also comes down to the fact that the
Speaker 1: principles of electricity, they're complicated and they can be difficult
Speaker 1: to understand. And understanding them well enough to be able
Speaker 1: to explain them in an accessible way to someone else.
Speaker 1: Now that takes a whole nother kind of skill, one
Speaker 1: that my guest for this bonus episode has in abundance.
Speaker 1: Doctor Timothy Jorgensen might be a familiar name to you,
Speaker 1: especially if you've listened to our radiation episode before, which
Speaker 1: features a short interview with doctor Jorgenson in which he
Speaker 1: walks us through exactly how radiation works, or maybe you
Speaker 1: read his book Strange Glow, all about the science and
Speaker 1: history of radiation. Well, as it turns out, doctor Jorgenson
Speaker 1: recently wrote another fantastic book called Spark, and this one
Speaker 1: is all about how electricity works, the ways in which
Speaker 1: our understanding of electricity has changed throughout history, what it
Speaker 1: has taught us about biology so far, and what it
Speaker 1: could teach us in the future. So who better to
Speaker 1: bring on to help us gain a better understanding of
Speaker 1: the ins and outs of electricity. In this bonus episode,
Speaker 1: Doctor Jorgenson and I are going to explore amberage versus voltage,
Speaker 1: how the human body uses electricity, some of the modern
Speaker 1: applications of electrotherapy, and so much more. And since doctor
Speaker 1: Jorgenson is such an accomplished science communicator, I wanted to
Speaker 1: take the opportunity to pick his brain on how you
Speaker 1: go about writing a book on such a wide topic
Speaker 1: and still manage to make it fun and accessible, Ways
Speaker 1: in which grad and med school training could incorporate science
Speaker 1: communication and advice for those interested in becoming science communicators.
Speaker 1: I am super excited to dive in. So we're just
Speaker 1: going to take a quick break here and then I'll
Speaker 1: let doctor Jorgenson introduce himself.
Speaker 2: My name is Tim Jorgenson. I'm a professor at Georgetown University.
Speaker 2: I direct a program in health physics, and I am
Speaker 2: i am a professor in radiation medicine and also biochemistry
Speaker 2: and the medical school. And I've written two books that
Speaker 2: are targeted for a general audience. The one is called
Speaker 2: Strange Glow, The Story of Radiation, and then my most
Speaker 2: recent book is Spark The Life of Electricity and Electricity
Speaker 2: of Life. And I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you so much for joining me today. I
Speaker 1: am really excited to ask you about of questions about electricity.
Speaker 1: So I loved your latest book, Spark, and I thought
Speaker 1: it was a fascinating and brilliant way to tell the
Speaker 1: story of electricity through this lens of biology. What made
Speaker 1: you want to write this book and how did you
Speaker 1: decide on the format that you use, Like, how did
Speaker 1: you decide what to include or what not to include?
Speaker 2: So this book is an outgrowth of my previous ones.
Speaker 2: So I had written the previous book about radiation, and
Speaker 2: in writing that book, I had included an explanation of radiation,
Speaker 2: but I also had mentioned some things about electricity. Scientists
Speaker 2: who work in radiation have one foot in the electrical
Speaker 2: world and one foot in the radiation world, because the
Speaker 2: two disciplines are connected, and I had mentioned some things
Speaker 2: about electricity in those books. So I got some questions
Speaker 2: about electricity too. So the book was quite successful and
Speaker 2: the publisher was interested in me writing another book. But
Speaker 2: I didn't want to write another radiation book. I thought,
Speaker 2: I've said all I can say about radiation. So my
Speaker 2: wife said, well, people seem to be as interested in
Speaker 2: the electrical part as the part of the radiation. Why
Speaker 2: don't you write something about electricity using the same style
Speaker 2: that you did for the radiation stories, and so I've
Speaker 2: thought about that for a while and I thought that
Speaker 2: sounds like a pretty good idea. And the strategy of
Speaker 2: the book is you tell the story a human interest story,
Speaker 2: something that will get people interested in finding out what happens,
Speaker 2: and the story usually something that happens in that story.
Speaker 2: Something technical happens in the story, and you have to
Speaker 2: break the narrative of the story and explain to the
Speaker 2: read the technical thing so they can keep following the story.
Speaker 2: And then you go a little further and then I
Speaker 2: call it the trojan horse strategy. By the end of
Speaker 2: the story, they've learned about Helen of Troy, but they've
Speaker 2: also learned about how to build a wooden horse as well,
Speaker 2: you know. So the idea here is that the person
Speaker 2: will kind of absorb a lot of technical information passively,
Speaker 2: but also they'll remember that technical information because it's in
Speaker 2: the context of a story.
Speaker 1: So there is so much ground that we could cover
Speaker 1: here in our discussion of electricity, and so many different
Speaker 1: aspects that we could focus on. But if we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about even just one area of electricity, it's
Speaker 1: probably best to get a baseline for how electricity actually
Speaker 1: works in our episode last week, Aaron went through the
Speaker 1: basics of how lightning forms. But can we get even
Speaker 1: more general? Can you explain what exactly electricity is and
Speaker 1: what the differences between voltage, ambridge and resistance.
Speaker 2: So electricity as we now know, which was not known
Speaker 2: when it was first discovered, electricity is the flow of electrons.
Speaker 2: Atoms have a nucleus and they have a cloud of
Speaker 2: electrons around them, and some atoms hold on to those
Speaker 2: electrons very tightly, like metals have a very loose grip
Speaker 2: on some of the outer electrons, and so they can
Speaker 2: jump from atom to atom. And when you get a
Speaker 2: flow of these electrons going in a particular direction for
Speaker 2: some reason, that's an electrical current. So some things are
Speaker 2: good at shuffling electrons down to the next guy, and
Speaker 2: those are conductors, like copper wires are good and other
Speaker 2: things like wood and plastic are not so good with
Speaker 2: moving their electrons along, and so those are insulators. And
Speaker 2: rather than just categorize things in terms of insulators and conductors,
Speaker 2: we could think of things as everything has some potential
Speaker 2: to be a conductor, but some are bad conductors and
Speaker 2: some are good conductors. And the reason that they are
Speaker 2: bad is because that they have a property called resistance.
Speaker 2: So resistance is the as it means it's resistant to
Speaker 2: the flow of electrons. Now, a lot of people like
Speaker 2: to describe electricity in terms of a flow of water,
Speaker 2: and it's his for historical reasons. People thought that electricity
Speaker 2: was a fluid, and so it made sense to describe
Speaker 2: things as a flow of this invisible fluid. So if
Speaker 2: we wanted to make an analogy with water, and we
Speaker 2: wanted to make that analogy with a garden hose, for example,
Speaker 2: the voltage would be the pressure at the tap. So
Speaker 2: if you have good pressure, you know it when you
Speaker 2: open the tap the water comes out very forcefully. That's
Speaker 2: the voltage. If you have low pressure, the water just
Speaker 2: kind of dribbles out. The amperage is the representation of
Speaker 2: how much water flows out per unit time. So how
Speaker 2: fast you can how many buckets you can fill us
Speaker 2: a minute, that's the amperage. And if you had to
Speaker 2: describe the resistance, you could say that as you turn
Speaker 2: the valve and you start to close it, you start
Speaker 2: making the hole smaller and smaller for the water to
Speaker 2: pass through. You increase the resistance to eventually at the
Speaker 2: point you shut it off. So if you wanted to
Speaker 2: compare electricity to water, I think that's that's a good analogy.
Speaker 2: A water faucet and the flow in the flow of war.
Speaker 1: And so what influences each of these principles of electricity.
Speaker 2: The reason that electricity flows is because there is an
Speaker 2: over abundance of charge. There are more electrons in one
Speaker 2: place than there are in another place, and so the electrons,
Speaker 2: because they're all the same charge, they repel one another
Speaker 2: and they want to spread out. And so if there's
Speaker 2: a place that they can go to where there is
Speaker 2: less of a density of electrons, that's where they will go.
Speaker 2: That's how things start. So, for example, the earliest electricity
Speaker 2: that we knew about was static electricity, and people produced
Speaker 2: static electricity by rubbing two materials together. It started out
Speaker 2: with rubbing amber with wool. So what's happening there is
Speaker 2: when you rub these two things together, the electrons from
Speaker 2: one thing are being scraped off and moving onto the
Speaker 2: other thing. With wool and amber, that transfer is extreme,
Speaker 2: and so now the charge builds up and the electrons
Speaker 2: on the amber will now try to jump to the wool.
Speaker 2: And that's basically what's going on, and it doesn't have
Speaker 2: to be amber and wool. Amber was hard to find
Speaker 2: and expensive, so people found out that if you rub
Speaker 2: glass with silk you got the same thing, and so
Speaker 2: the first generators of electricity were simply to make a
Speaker 2: glass sphere with a crank on it attached a silk
Speaker 2: pad so that it rubbed, turn it as fast as
Speaker 2: you could, and then bleed the electricity off of the glass.
Speaker 2: The first generator of electricity really stick at electricity machines
Speaker 2: that work just by rubbing things together.
Speaker 1: So you mentioned that there are bad conductors and good conductors.
Speaker 1: What makes something a good or bad conductor? Like why?
Speaker 1: Like why is would a bad conductor versus copper wire?
Speaker 2: So most of the good conductors are metals, and it
Speaker 2: has to do with how available the electrons are to move.
Speaker 2: So the electrons that are closer to the center are
Speaker 2: very tightly bound. But if they have a cloud of
Speaker 2: electrons and some in the outermost shell, they're only weakly attached.
Speaker 2: And if these atoms are right next to each other,
Speaker 2: as they are in metal, they're set in a almost
Speaker 2: like a krystin lattice form. It's very easy for these
Speaker 2: electrons to just move to their next neighbor, and so
Speaker 2: electrons can just flow, particularly if they're being pushed by
Speaker 2: excess charge on one end, they'll just push down and
Speaker 2: the charge will just move to the other end. Things
Speaker 2: like plastics they don't have these weekly held electrons. Most
Speaker 2: of their bonds are covalent bonds that are not involving
Speaker 2: these weekly charged electrons, and so they tend not to
Speaker 2: conduct electricity.
Speaker 1: Can you walk me through the difference between direct current
Speaker 1: and alternating current and what are some of the practical
Speaker 1: implications of the difference between the two and how are
Speaker 1: they used in different settings.
Speaker 2: The story of alternating current and direct current is a
Speaker 2: very interesting one because it involved a war between Edison
Speaker 2: and Westinghouse about which type of current was going to
Speaker 2: be the standard for the United States for power transmission.
Speaker 2: As most people know, Westinghouse won that war, and all
Speaker 2: of our current are household current. Now is alternating current,
Speaker 2: So what is it? So? Direct current is when the
Speaker 2: electrons are moving in one direction only, and in alternating current,
Speaker 2: they move in one direction and then they move back
Speaker 2: in the other direction, and they do this very fast,
Speaker 2: sixty times a second, and they're both electric currents, but
Speaker 2: they have some advantages. The alternating current has a tremendous
Speaker 2: advantage in terms of being able to transmit power great distances,
Speaker 2: and the reason for that, the simple explanation is that
Speaker 2: the easiest way to transmit power great distances is at
Speaker 2: high voltage. You can transmit both types of power, direct
Speaker 2: current and alternating current at high voltage. And when I
Speaker 2: say the best way, that the way that loses the
Speaker 2: least energy to heat. You don't want to produce a
Speaker 2: lot of heat. All that heat is just wasted energy.
Speaker 2: So you do it at high voltage because the only
Speaker 2: other alternative low voltage. You have to push it with
Speaker 2: so much amperage, and amperage is what drives the heat.
Speaker 2: You can do both of them. Both types of current
Speaker 2: can go at high voltage. The problem was at Edison's
Speaker 2: time was that you don't want to bring high voltage
Speaker 2: into the house. Nothing in your house can use this high,
Speaker 2: very high voltage. It has to be stepped down. And
Speaker 2: there was a way to step down alternating current at
Speaker 2: the point of use with local transformers, but there was
Speaker 2: no way at that time to step down direct current.
Speaker 2: So if you wanted to use direct current in your house,
Speaker 2: it had to be transmitted at low voltage, and that
Speaker 2: caused a lot of problems, and it was not possible
Speaker 2: to transmit it more than a mile that way. But
Speaker 2: if you used alternating current, you could transmit it at
Speaker 2: high voltage very efficiently and then drop it down to
Speaker 2: appropriate voltage for household use when it got to its location.
Speaker 2: So this is what the basis of the war was,
Speaker 2: and so it lives with us to this day. Interestingly enough,
Speaker 2: in the nineteen forties, I believe someone invented away to
Speaker 2: step down direct current, and so if the issue it
Speaker 2: wouldn't be such a big issue today, but we live
Speaker 2: with the legacy of the technology of that period.
Speaker 1: How do these principles of electricity, amperage, voltage, resistance, and
Speaker 1: the type of current, how do those things relate to
Speaker 1: the overall risk of injury or the severity of injury
Speaker 1: for humans if someone comes into contact with electricity.
Speaker 2: To oversimplify things, voltage is what causes the pain. If
Speaker 2: you want to make a fence electric fence to keep
Speaker 2: a bear out of your yard, you want something that
Speaker 2: has very high voltage but very low amperage. It's the
Speaker 2: amperage that kills, not the voltage so things like tasers
Speaker 2: and electric fences, and even static electricity shocks that you
Speaker 2: get by rubbing your feet on the carpet. This can
Speaker 2: be like fifty thousand volts and you feel it. Why
Speaker 2: don't you ever die from a carpet shock Because even
Speaker 2: though the voltage is very high, the amperage is very low,
Speaker 2: so you need amperage to kill. You can even make
Speaker 2: electricity less damaging by interrupting the current flow interrupting the amperage,
Speaker 2: and that's how it works on an electric fence. Okay,
Speaker 2: so alternating versus direct current danger The truth is that
Speaker 2: they're both equally dangerous, and they're different enough that and
Speaker 2: all else being equal, comparison isn't possible, But it doesn't
Speaker 2: really make much difference because they're both dangerous and they
Speaker 2: should both be respected equally.
Speaker 1: So in our discussion so far, and also in last
Speaker 1: week's episode, we've largely been talking about electricity in general,
Speaker 1: or what happens when someone comes into contact with electricity.
Speaker 1: But now I want to shift to talking about some
Speaker 1: of the ways that humans and other animals interact with electricity.
Speaker 1: So how does the human body use electricity?
Speaker 2: The chief use of electricity in the body is to
Speaker 2: operate the nervous system. And in Spark, what I tried
Speaker 2: to show is that neuroscience and electrical science developed together.
Speaker 2: The first ways of detecting electricity were feeling it, you know,
Speaker 2: getting shocks like from amber, or getting it to have
Speaker 2: some effect on a living thing. And frog legs were very,
Speaker 2: very popular. If you touch something and the frog leg moved,
Speaker 2: then you knew that it had electricity in it. It's
Speaker 2: because the electricity has the ability to stimulate muscles and
Speaker 2: nerves that it causes that kind of movement. So during
Speaker 2: course of history, people used the effects on the body,
Speaker 2: either animals or human bodies to measure and detect electricity,
Speaker 2: and likewise people use electricity to figure out what was
Speaker 2: going on in the human body. So these two sciences
Speaker 2: kind of leap frog over one another, and when there
Speaker 2: was an advance in electricity, it allowed further advances in neuroscience.
Speaker 2: And when there was an advance in neuroscience, it told
Speaker 2: us more about electricity. And this is basically the understanding
Speaker 2: to this day. It comes right up to the point
Speaker 2: now where we're implanting computer chips in brains to stimulate
Speaker 2: different electrically stimulate different areas of the brains in an
Speaker 2: attempt to cure diseases or power artificial limbs with thoughts.
Speaker 2: And so we've come to the point where we now
Speaker 2: have brain machine interfaces that convert electrical signals into neural
Speaker 2: logical signals and vice versa and so uh. And that
Speaker 2: has all been aided by knowledge about electricity, but also
Speaker 2: knowledge about computers, and also an exploitation of the fact
Speaker 2: that our nervous system works kind of like a computer
Speaker 2: and that it sends binary signals. So when you shock
Speaker 2: a nerve, the amount that it's shocked doesn't go up
Speaker 2: and slowly down. It sends out a bunch of signals
Speaker 2: called action potentials or what are commonly known among neuroscience
Speaker 2: as spikes. And so if it wants a bigger signal,
Speaker 2: it sends more spikes, which is very analogous to what
Speaker 2: a computer does with its binary language. You know, it's
Speaker 2: on or off. Nerves are like sending signals, are not
Speaker 2: on or off, on and off, And so this is
Speaker 2: conducive to these two systems being merged together through these
Speaker 2: brain machine interfaces that actually work both ways. You can
Speaker 2: write information from the computer now into the activating particular cells,
Speaker 2: and the same interface can pick up electrical signals from
Speaker 2: those cells and tell the computer what the brain is doing.
Speaker 2: So this is something that started out with shocking yourself
Speaker 2: with static electricity and frog legs and read up to
Speaker 2: this day, we're looking at brain machine interfaces and how
Speaker 2: they can be used to alleviate disease and pain and suffering.
Speaker 1: I want to talk a little bit more about some
Speaker 1: of these modern applications of electrotherapy. What do we know
Speaker 1: about why or how these modern therapies are effective in
Speaker 1: treating things like epilepsy, certain types of depression, and Parkinson's disease.
Speaker 2: So deep brain stimulation is used primarily for the Parkinson's disease.
Speaker 2: Parkinson's disease is a disease where people have tremors in
Speaker 2: their hands or legs, and these can be quite severe,
Speaker 2: and there was a surgery that partially relieved for people.
Speaker 2: There's there's a part of the brain deep in the brain,
Speaker 2: and physicians found that if you ablated you you removed
Speaker 2: one half one side of this brain part that you
Speaker 2: could relieve the tremors on the other side of the body.
Speaker 2: So you couldn't do both sides of the body because
Speaker 2: you couldn't eliminate the organ entirely because that would cause
Speaker 2: all kinds of other problems. But they could give people
Speaker 2: relief on at least one part side of their body
Speaker 2: using this technique. And they were using electric probes during
Speaker 2: the surgery to try to stimulate and find this particular
Speaker 2: tissue that they were going to cut out, and when
Speaker 2: they used the probe, they found out that using the
Speaker 2: probe alone eliminated the tremors. So the next thought was,
Speaker 2: maybe we don't have to cut this out. Maybe we
Speaker 2: can just stimulate it and eliminate the tremors by permanently
Speaker 2: planting an electrode in it, And that way we could
Speaker 2: control how much electricity, we control how much much we're
Speaker 2: going to reduce the tremors, and we can remove it
Speaker 2: in the future if it presents a problem and the
Speaker 2: patient is no worse for wear. So electrical stimulation for
Speaker 2: a treatment of Parkinson's with these deep brain stimulation became
Speaker 2: a panacea basically, and now that there are many, many
Speaker 2: people who are benefiting from this and it definitely works.
Speaker 2: The person had tremors and now they don't have trembers.
Speaker 2: Exactly why it works is up to debate, but it
Speaker 2: definitely works. And there are other similar stories for treating depression,
Speaker 2: for example with electric convulsive therapy that also works, and
Speaker 2: so we more and more diseases are being treated. Now
Speaker 2: epilepsy is being treated with electrodes on the vagus nerve,
Speaker 2: and these things work. Then they've been shown to be
Speaker 2: worked by randomized clinical trial, but we don't really know exactly.
Speaker 2: There are many theories, and we're getting closer and closer
Speaker 2: to a better understanding of how the nervous system works
Speaker 2: by using these these therapies, but nobody really understands how
Speaker 2: they work.
Speaker 1: Like you said in your book, electricity has taught us
Speaker 1: so much about how the human body works, and in
Speaker 1: a similar way, several animals have revealed a great deal
Speaker 1: about how electricity works. For example, one of my favorite
Speaker 1: stories of electricity involves Volta finding inspiration in the torpedo
Speaker 1: fish to design this first true battery, which is a
Speaker 1: story that I told in the episode last week. But
Speaker 1: what I didn't go into was how exactly these fish
Speaker 1: generate electricity. So would you mind walking us through that?
Speaker 2: So these fish generate electricity very similar to the way
Speaker 2: are neurons do and as opposed to rubbing things and
Speaker 2: getting static electricity that way, or in a battery, you
Speaker 2: have an electrochemical reaction that's generating the electricity In a neuron,
Speaker 2: neurons do it a little differently. What they do is
Speaker 2: they take charged ions. Ions are molecules that in solution
Speaker 2: that are either positively negatively charged. What neurons do is
Speaker 2: they are able to pump these ions from inside to outside.
Speaker 2: What they do is they produce a charge differential between
Speaker 2: the inside and the outside by pumping ions in probably
Speaker 2: positively charge ion ins and pumping them out. And what
Speaker 2: they do is they make a difference in charge between
Speaker 2: the inside and the outside. And as I said earlier,
Speaker 2: whenever you have a difference in charge, there's a potential
Speaker 2: for electrical flow. And so what happens is the neuron
Speaker 2: is able to open up gate to release all this
Speaker 2: charge that it has previously segregated, and that institutes an
Speaker 2: electrical signal which stimulates the next neuron to do the same,
Speaker 2: the next neuron to do the same the next And
Speaker 2: that's basically how our nervous system transmits electrical signal by
Speaker 2: segregating charge and then releasing it. And these fish. You
Speaker 2: mentioned the torpedo fish, they're electric eels. They all do
Speaker 2: it the same way. They have an organ, an electrical
Speaker 2: organ that specifically is a over developed part of their
Speaker 2: nervous system. These cells are specialized in doing this to
Speaker 2: extreme extents. And so these cells, they're called electrocites, achieve
Speaker 2: huge voltages by doing this ion pumping thing, and then
Speaker 2: the fish at will can release all that charge in
Speaker 2: one sudden burst to shock its prey and that's basically
Speaker 2: how it's used. Now. They don't have enough curve to
Speaker 2: kill their prey, so generally what they do is they
Speaker 2: shock prey to stun it and then they attack. And
Speaker 2: that's how these fish do. And it was the inspiration
Speaker 2: of these fish that caused Volta to investigate ways of
Speaker 2: making electricity. Wanted to make an artificial electric organ. When
Speaker 2: he did get something to work, he thought he had
Speaker 2: discovered the way that fish and make electricity, but he
Speaker 2: had not. He had found a different way to make electricity.
Speaker 2: And that's true electric chemical reactions, and so it's a
Speaker 2: fundamentally different process, but it's something that's very much the
Speaker 2: electric fish do, something that's very much akin to what
Speaker 2: our everyday cells do.
Speaker 1: So fish don't just use electricity to shock prey. There
Speaker 1: are also many species that have electroreception abilities rather than electrogeneration.
Speaker 1: Can you talk about how these fish sense electricity.
Speaker 2: The concept of an electrical field is a very difficult one,
Speaker 2: and the first person to even suggest there were such
Speaker 2: things was Michael Faraday. And when he first proposed this
Speaker 2: to people, that there were electrical fields, he got a
Speaker 2: tremendous amount of criticism and he backed off, but he
Speaker 2: was absolutely right that there can be an electrical field
Speaker 2: between any positive charge electrode and any negative charge electron.
Speaker 2: So the way you can think of this, and you
Speaker 2: may have seen this when you were a kid, if
Speaker 2: you had a bar magnet and you spread iron filings
Speaker 2: on a piece of paper over the bar magnet, you'll
Speaker 2: see that there's lines that kind of loop out away
Speaker 2: from the magnet and back to the north and south
Speaker 2: poles of the magnet and produce this kind of like
Speaker 2: a spiderwebby effect around the magnet. And people have known
Speaker 2: about this forever and no one could explain it. And
Speaker 2: the reason for it is that magnets have a magnetic
Speaker 2: field around them, so that's what they look like. Well,
Speaker 2: electrodes have an electric field, which is something similar to that.
Speaker 2: It's harder to see. You can see it if you
Speaker 2: put chemicals on a piece of wetted filter paper and
Speaker 2: some dye chemicals that are charged between two electrodes on
Speaker 2: a piece of filter paper. You can see the dye
Speaker 2: start to make the same kind of lines that you
Speaker 2: would see on a magnet. So that's an electric field,
Speaker 2: and fish use this. An electric eels head is positive
Speaker 2: and its tail is negative, so you have a separation
Speaker 2: of charge. And so you have an electric field around
Speaker 2: the fish, just like you do around a magnet, and
Speaker 2: the fish is able to sense interruptions in that field.
Speaker 2: Many of the fish, particularly in South America, these fish,
Speaker 2: the electric eels with in these very murky, muddy waters,
Speaker 2: eyesight they can't see. In fact, most of them have
Speaker 2: very small eyes because they're almost worthless to them. And
Speaker 2: so they're using their electric field to find prey and navigate,
Speaker 2: and they can sense this interruption in the electric field.
Speaker 2: So they're using it in two ways. They have the
Speaker 2: electric field that's on all the time, and then they
Speaker 2: have this ability to release electricity in huge amounts and
Speaker 2: shock the prey. So they're getting double duty out of
Speaker 2: this electric field, and so that's something else that Faraday discovered.
Speaker 2: He actually got himself an electric eel. He attached it
Speaker 2: in a pan, and he didn't have any electronic instruments
Speaker 2: at the time. To measure this. He started moving his
Speaker 2: finger at various spots around the electric eel and felt
Speaker 2: different strengths to his finger and concluded that electric eels
Speaker 2: have electric fields just like any other two electrodes would.
Speaker 1: That is just so fascinating. I feel like we could
Speaker 1: absolutely keep going down rabbit holes to explore more of
Speaker 1: the world of electricity, but instead, let's take a quick
Speaker 1: break here and then when we get back, I want
Speaker 1: to know all about your research background and your experiences
Speaker 1: as a science communicator. Welcome back everyone. Before the break,
Speaker 1: doctor Jorgenson and I got into some of the background
Speaker 1: of how electricity works, what we know about some modern
Speaker 1: electro therapies, and other adventures in the science and history
Speaker 1: of electricity. But for this next part, I want to
Speaker 1: turn more towards the field of science communication. In addition
Speaker 1: to being a science writer, you're also a professor at
Speaker 1: Georgetown University. Can you talk a little bit about your
Speaker 1: educational journey How did you become interested in this field?
Speaker 2: I have most of my career been a researcher in
Speaker 2: radiation sciences, specifically the sciences that relate to health and radiation,
Speaker 2: as most people know, is used to both diagnostically to
Speaker 2: identify diseases. Everyone's been in for a chest X ray,
Speaker 2: and they also know it's used therapeutically to treat cancer,
Speaker 2: and it can also cause cancer. And so I was
Speaker 2: interested in all those aspects of radiation, and so I
Speaker 2: started out my career. I got a PhD in radiation
Speaker 2: sciences from the John Hopkins School of Public Health, and
Speaker 2: then I started to specialize in radiation being used in
Speaker 2: radiation therapy and how to best use it, how to
Speaker 2: sensitize tumor cells to therapy so it would be more effective,
Speaker 2: more curative, and so in particular, I studied how radiation
Speaker 2: damages DNA because that's the mechanism by which it kills cells,
Speaker 2: and how cells can resist that by repairing their DNA.
Speaker 2: So that was my professional journey. Later on I got
Speaker 2: more interested in how radiation causes cancer because it's also
Speaker 2: through a mechanism of damaging DNA. But this type of
Speaker 2: damage kind of leads to mutations and cells and causes
Speaker 2: them to transform to be cancer cells. So most of
Speaker 2: my research career I worked on those two aspects of
Speaker 2: the problem. As I've aged, I've done less and less
Speaker 2: research and more and more teaching, which seems to be
Speaker 2: the fate of many professors. So now I teach a
Speaker 2: head of a program in Health physic which is a
Speaker 2: master's degree program at Georgetown that teaches people how to
Speaker 2: get into the radiation protection profession. And those people work
Speaker 2: in hospitals. They thought they also work at nuclear power plans.
Speaker 2: They work at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, so to implement
Speaker 2: practical measures to help protect people from the bad effects
Speaker 2: of ionizing radiation while at the same time enhancing its
Speaker 2: value in terms of therapy and diagnosis and things like that.
Speaker 2: I fell into writing for the public accidentally when Fukushima
Speaker 2: happened back in twenty eleven. Being a radiation expert, I
Speaker 2: was asked by television stations to come on and in
Speaker 2: real time explain what the risks were to the workers
Speaker 2: and the surrounding population and the long term risks of
Speaker 2: this catastrophe that happened at Fukushima. Because of that, when
Speaker 2: they had a radiation question, they googled it, my name
Speaker 2: would often come up, and so I was constantly getting
Speaker 2: phone calls and emails about people that were concerned about
Speaker 2: the Chester X ray or eating tuna with radioactivity in
Speaker 2: it or whatever. And I was happy to talk to
Speaker 2: these people, but some of their questions were more complex
Speaker 2: than could be answered in five minute telephone conversation. So
Speaker 2: I was kind of looking for some kind of book
Speaker 2: or other resource that I could push people to that
Speaker 2: explained radiation in Layman's terms, so something that was not
Speaker 2: full of jargon and complicated scientific concepts. There are plenty
Speaker 2: of books out there, but they either tend to be
Speaker 2: textbooks or they tend to be books with an agenda.
Speaker 2: So if you pick up a book that says nuclear
Speaker 2: power the power to save the world, you know it's
Speaker 2: going to be a pro nuclear power book. Or if
Speaker 2: you pick up bokouse it's nuclear power the power to
Speaker 2: kill everyone on Earth, then you know it's not. You know,
Speaker 2: you don't even have to read the book, you know.
Speaker 2: So what I wanted to do was write a science
Speaker 2: based book without an agenda that enabled people to make
Speaker 2: their own decisions about the risk levels and whether they
Speaker 2: were acceptable to them. So I tried in the book
Speaker 2: not to say, well, radon is dangerous or Radon's not.
Speaker 2: I tried to explain to them what the risk levels
Speaker 2: were and let them decide whether or not they want
Speaker 2: to worry about it. And so I did that for
Speaker 2: all the different radiation issues that I had received questions about.
Speaker 2: In doing that, I realized how much disadvantaged people who
Speaker 2: want to get scientific information. What a disadvantage there there are,
Speaker 2: because if you go if they go to journals, unless
Speaker 2: they're a scientist, they can't understand what's written in the journals.
Speaker 2: And much of the of the lay press has an agenda.
Speaker 2: The media tends to see as every issue as a
Speaker 2: black and white situation where they find an expert will
Speaker 2: say one thing, and expert will say another thing, and
Speaker 2: so everything is like this little debate. So that's why
Speaker 2: I wrote the book, and that's how I got into it.
Speaker 2: I didn't. It was an accident, purely an accident.
Speaker 1: How do you feel your experiences as a science communicator
Speaker 1: have influenced either your teaching style or how you approach learning.
Speaker 2: In terms of my teaching style, I try to do
Speaker 2: the same thing in teaching. I try to convey technical information,
Speaker 2: but also I try to tell a story, usually not
Speaker 2: to embed it within a story, but to tell a
Speaker 2: story that illustrates the point. You know. I try to
Speaker 2: make the information not just scientific information in itself, but
Speaker 2: show how why why should I care about this? So
Speaker 2: I think that that's affected me in the classroom outside.
Speaker 2: And the way I like to gather information is is
Speaker 2: that I like to I read a lot, and I
Speaker 2: read on a variety of topics. I'm currently on a
Speaker 2: book about concrete and believe it or not, it's one
Speaker 2: of the most fascinating books I've ever read. And then
Speaker 2: before that, I was reading a novel. So I think
Speaker 2: that again, by reading both fiction and nonfiction, and every
Speaker 2: I try to find something that I don't know anything about,
Speaker 2: and often you find connections to other things, and so
Speaker 2: I think it just the scientific web is. You know,
Speaker 2: as I said earlier, radiation is very much linked to electricity.
Speaker 2: My latest thing is that I discovered that electricity is
Speaker 2: very much linked to sound production, and so I'm reading
Speaker 2: a lot of books about sounds now, and so that's
Speaker 2: the way I approach information is from a variety of
Speaker 2: different different angles.
Speaker 1: You know, something that Aaron, and I hear frequently, especially lately,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure you do too, is that recent events
Speaker 1: have shown just how much the world needs science communicators.
Speaker 1: Do you feel as though graduate students and medical students
Speaker 1: should be trained in or are being trained well enough
Speaker 1: in this style of communication?
Speaker 2: So I'm so glad that you asked this question. I
Speaker 2: am so glad because I have something that I've been
Speaker 2: preaching about this. Okay, So the answer is no, they
Speaker 2: are not trained in this, and in fact, they are
Speaker 2: trained in a way that is counterproductive to communication. So
Speaker 2: what I mean by that is we trained scientists young
Speaker 2: scientists to write scientific papers. Scientific papers are written in jargon,
Speaker 2: but worse than that, they're written in passive voice. Now,
Speaker 2: if you take any English class anything about communication, they'll
Speaker 2: always tell you never use passive voice. But yet sciencecientific
Speaker 2: papers are generally only written in passive voice. But it
Speaker 2: makes for terrible communication, it makes for awful reading. So
Speaker 2: I want to make a plug for the Alan All
Speaker 2: the Center for Science Communication at State University of New
Speaker 2: York at Stonybrook. This is a center that is specifically
Speaker 2: devoted to allow scientists to learn the techniques to communicate
Speaker 2: better with the public. They run seminars and workshops. You know,
Speaker 2: they'll come to your university and offer workshops where they
Speaker 2: try to get scientists to talk like normal human beings.
Speaker 2: And I think that's extremely valuable and we need to
Speaker 2: do more of that.
Speaker 1: So yeah, So what advice would you have for someone
Speaker 1: who wants to learn more about science communication as a career,
Speaker 1: or maybe someone who is in grad school or med
Speaker 1: school and just wants to become better communicators themselves.
Speaker 2: Often people talk about your elevators spiel. So imagine you
Speaker 2: get on an elevator and someone asks, so what do
Speaker 2: you do? You know? And you have to explain it
Speaker 2: by the time you get to the tenth floor or whatever.
Speaker 2: You know. I think that no matter what you do
Speaker 2: as a scientist or anything else for that matter, that
Speaker 2: you should be able to come up with a story, basically,
Speaker 2: you know, a five minute story and tell it so
Speaker 2: that somebody who doesn't know anything about that walks away interested.
Speaker 2: So that's an interesting thing that that person does. You know,
Speaker 2: I need to find out more about that. So I
Speaker 2: think you have to start by saying why does this
Speaker 2: interest me? And you identify the points this interests me
Speaker 2: because of X x X and then write yourself a
Speaker 2: story that includes X x X. When you tell that,
Speaker 2: and other people will become interested too. So I think
Speaker 2: that people can do that all the time, you know,
Speaker 2: and talk less among scientists and more with the public
Speaker 2: and try to ref find their elevator talk, so to speak.
Speaker 2: And I think there'll be a lot of rewards on
Speaker 2: both sides, you know.
Speaker 1: So I've got one last question for you, and that
Speaker 1: is what is the next book or project that you
Speaker 1: would like to work on.
Speaker 2: Well, I would like to work on something I don't
Speaker 2: know what, but I mentioned sound earlier, and I realized
Speaker 2: in writing Electricity Book that I really don't know much
Speaker 2: about sound. And it's extremely interesting when I consider something
Speaker 2: that would be good to write a book about. For me,
Speaker 2: I got it. It's got like it's a three legged stool.
Speaker 2: It's got to be something that's some type of physical science,
Speaker 2: because that's my background. Has like a physical science. It
Speaker 2: has to be health related because that again is my stick.
Speaker 2: I'm in a medical school and it somehow has to
Speaker 2: impact health. And then lastly, it's got to be really
Speaker 2: good stories because I have to come up up with,
Speaker 2: you know, somewhere between thirteen and seventeen entertaining stories that
Speaker 2: have the breath that I can embed the technical information
Speaker 2: that I want to get out. And so I'm I've
Speaker 2: been reading a bunch of books about sound and listening
Speaker 2: to podcasts about sound, and you know, if it turns
Speaker 2: out to be a book, that's great, But if it doesn't,
Speaker 2: I'm just enjoying learning about sound because it's something that
Speaker 2: I hadn't really thought much about before. And so who knows,
Speaker 2: you know, maybe maybe in a couple of years I'll
Speaker 2: be on your program talking about my sound book. But
Speaker 2: it is a very it is a very very interesting.
Speaker 1: Field, doctor Jory, Thank you so much for taking the
Speaker 1: time to chat with me today. I had such a
Speaker 1: fun time exploring more about the basics of electricity, like
Speaker 1: I feel like I finally have a good grasp on
Speaker 1: how it works, and also chatting more about some fascinating
Speaker 1: stories in the world of electricity. And if you want
Speaker 1: to learn more about electricity, I highly recommend checking out
Speaker 1: doctor Jorgenson's book Spark The Life of Electricity and the
Speaker 1: Electricity of Life, and we'll post a link to the
Speaker 1: book on our website This podcast will Kill You dot Com.
Speaker 1: Also on our website are the sources for all of
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Speaker 1: have got a brand new episode on a brand new
Speaker 1: topic coming out next week, so until then, keep washing
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