Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast Epigenetics & The Full Story of Inheritance with Bianca Jones Marlin About this episode Was Lamarckian evolution actually right? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, & Gary O’Reilly learn about the new field of epigenetics and how the lived experiences of past generations can get passed down genetically with neuroscientist & epigeneticist Bianca Jones Marlin.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So Gary, Chuck, I love me some neuroscience.
0:02 Gary O'Reilly? Good.
0:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I think I'd be a neuroscientist if I were not an astrophysicist.
0:06 Gary O'Reilly? Really?
0:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, I think so.
0:08 Gary O'Reilly? What would your catchphrase be? Because you can't use "keep looking up."
0:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, keep looking within.
0:13 Gary O'Reilly? All right, there you go.
0:14 Chuck Nice? Keep thinking about it.
0:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, it's just, there's so many frontiers. We learned that trauma in one generation can manifest in generations yet to be born.
0:27 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah.
0:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You can only learn that by studying the brain.
0:30 Chuck Nice? Or my family.
0:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All that coming up on StarTalk Special Edition.
0:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, you're a personal astrophysicist, and today it's special edition. You know what that means? We've got Gary O'Reilly. Gary?
1:01 Gary O'Reilly? Hey, Neil.
1:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How you doing, man? Former soccer pro?
1:03 Gary O'Reilly? Allegedly.
1:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chuck?
1:06 Chuck Nice? Yeah, what's happening?
1:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Good. You know, I'm loving these special editions because what they all have in common is something about the human condition.
1:12 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
1:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What it is to be human, or what it is to no longer be human because a machine is going to replace our mind, body, and soul. All of that is in special edition. Yeah, so today's topic, epigenetics and you. Gary, set the stage here.
1:30 Gary O'Reilly? Uh, okay. Plenty of great ideas start with a question, and podcasts for that matter, right? And that question would be, what if? So, using what if, the stresses and traumas experienced by your grandparents could affect your genetic makeup generations later?
1:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I don't want that to be the case.
1:51 Gary O'Reilly? All right, hold that thought.
1:52 Chuck Nice? I already know that's the case.
1:53 Gary O'Reilly? Right?
1:54 Chuck Nice? You have to remember my grandparents. They wouldn't let me forget that their stresses and traumas actually are affecting...
2:01 Gary O'Reilly? That's a verbal doubling down, but even though those stresses and traumas would have taken place long before you were conceived, yeah, we're back on an epigenetic trail, but this time our destination is transgenerational, not intergenerational. So it's transgenerational, epigenetic inheritance. Yes, it's for real, it's a thing. And we may have found the sharpest blade at the cutting edge of epigenetic research. So having said all of that, please, Neil, introduce our guest.
2:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Are you saying we have a sharp blade sitting among us?
2:32 Gary O'Reilly? Hmm. In a metaphoric way.
2:36 Chuck Nice? I'm letting you know right now that the orderlies have said that that's not allowed.
2:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Dr. Bianca Jones-Marlin, welcome to StarTalk.
2:43 Speaker 03 Thank you for having me.
2:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, so you you just right up the street here at Columbia University.
2:48 Speaker 03 Yes.
2:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, my gosh.
2:50 Chuck Nice? This stuff.
2:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? At the Zuckerman Institute. What goes on at the Zuckerman Institute?
2:54 Speaker 03 We study the mind, the brain, and the behavior of humans, of model organisms, and how the world works.
3:01 Chuck Nice? Can I add, what's a model organism?
3:03 Speaker 03 Model organisms. There's like the ones that we really like that work really well for our genetic questions, like mice, flies, non-human primates, like like rhesus, macaque, and monkeys. But we also have non non-model organisms, like naked mole rat, for example, which are precious, yes.
3:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You can't beat that.
3:21 Speaker 03 Exactly.
3:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What what's the difference between a naked mole rat and a?
3:25 Speaker 03 A New York City rat? A lot. Um, one's brilliant. One will steal your wallet.
3:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They're cloned. No, no.
3:34 Chuck Nice? You'll never see a naked mole rat with a piece of pizza in his mouth throwing down some stairs.
3:38 Speaker 03 They're like, ew.
3:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Pizza mole rat. Right. So what makes the mole rat a different category of animal to study relative to the list you just gave?
3:46 Speaker 03 Yes, it's because we're looking at model organisms because we have a question that can pretty much generalize amongst organisms. When you have a non-model organism, like my good friend, Dr. Ishmael Dusabore, who studies his naked mole rats at Columbia, he's looking at pain. And a cool thing about them, they don't feel pain. They don't feel pain. They also don't get cancer, and they live kind of forever.
4:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So they're outside of the paradigm of what you're investigating. I did not know that.
4:09 Speaker 03 They're also precious, but it allows us to, you know, ask different questions that we can't ask in my set diet within two years.
4:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Your background is in neuroscience, as it specifically applies in these challenges. So first, let's just set the stage. We need to know what epigenetics is. And I know what an epicenter is. It is, you know, the part of the earth above, directly above where the sent the earthquake took place. Okay, epidermis is the skin above all your body and organs. So what is epigenetic? Is something sitting above your genes?
4:43 Speaker 03 Perfect. On the nose.
4:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, I don't want to be the one who explains it.
4:47 Speaker 03 You did it so well.
4:51 Speaker 03 I don't want to woman-splain you what you just said to me.
4:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, that's awesome. I want you to woman-splain me. No, no, what did I... Surely, there's missing content there. Go.
4:59 Speaker 03 Yes, and so our genetic code, this is our DNA, this stays the same. And the cool part, it's the same in every cell. Our genetic code is the same in every cell. But we have eye cells, we have liver cells. We don't have eye cells growing in our liver, hopefully, and vice versa. And this is because we have epigenetic markers, same as the epicenter and the epidermis. Epi means above, so epigenetics means above the genome. These are big proteins, big markers, that sit on the genome. And they say, nope, don't read this part of the genome, or come read this part of the genome. And they change the way that DNA is wrapped around histones or sit in a space.
5:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So it turns them on and off? Is that a way to... Can we think about it that way?
5:38 Speaker 03 You can... Yes, I think you can.
5:40 Chuck Nice? So the expression of the gene itself...
5:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Expression, that's a better word, expression.
5:44 Chuck Nice? Is dependent upon the epigenetic determination?
5:47 Speaker 03 How much is expressed and when it is expressed depends on the epigenetic environment.
5:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So here we have transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.
5:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How does that get inherited?
5:59 Speaker 03 Oh, my goodness. I mean, if we all knew how it got inherited, like, that quickly, I think you'd be addressing me in my Nobel Prize.
6:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah!
6:07 Speaker 03 But since we're not there yet, but there are questions surrounding that.
6:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Promise here, when you get your Nobel Prize, you're coming back here on the show.
6:11 Chuck Nice? Yeah, exactly.
6:12 Speaker 03 All right, Girl Scott Donner.
6:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
6:14 Speaker 03 So there's many questions that are left unanswered when it comes to how transgenerational epigenetic inheritance works. I think we're at the space now in neuroscience where we are observing that intergenerational inheritance of an experience is pretty much canon now. We can say, with my studies as well as others, that an experience in a parent will change the way the offspring develop. And I'll be pretty specific with this.
6:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Experience in a parent?
6:36 Speaker 03 Experience in a parent.
6:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Even before the child is conceived?
6:40 Speaker 03 Exactly. Before the child is conceived. So not a pregnant model organism.
6:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because we heard that that can be influenced.
6:47 Speaker 03 You can envision a way. If you have a pregnant person that's pregnant with a female, the eggs of their granddaughter could be inside of them. So you pretty much can be talking to three generations in one space.
6:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, well, catch me up on Bio 101. So I knew that a girl born has all the eggs she'll ever drop.
7:06 Speaker 03 Yes.
7:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But how does the egg that she drops have eggs?
7:12 Speaker 03 Which means she has the genetics of her granddaughter, who will then make up the body and the eggs of the granddaughter, inside of those eggs that's inside of the mom. So it's basically like a Russian doll. Okay, alright, alright.
7:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I got two Russian dolls here, okay? Pass me my Russian doll. Oh, okay.
7:28 Speaker 03 Oh, she's got a space, space station.
7:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Whose office do you think you're in?
7:33 Speaker 03 Oh, that's funny.
7:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Here in the Haiti planetarium, Neil deGrasse Tyson's office.
7:37 Speaker 03 Because it was a Russian doll. I turned around and expected to see like, I don't know.
7:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is the International Space Station.
7:41 Speaker 03 That's cool.
7:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And inside there is Soyuz.
7:44 Speaker 03 Soyuz. That's how they get there.
7:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so each of these is sort of a genetic expression within the previous one.
7:51 Speaker 03 So is the one inside of there.
7:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? She wanted me to keep going.
7:54 Speaker 03 The one inside of there. So let's say, let's say mom's space station had like stressful experience.
7:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
8:00 Speaker 03 And then baby, what's on baby?
8:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is Soyuz.
8:03 Speaker 03 Baby Soyuz?
8:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
8:04 Speaker 03 Yeah, baby Soyuz is probably gonna be stressed, but baby Soyuz was there in the, in the ether, right? Now we're talking about grandbaby. Who's grandbaby?
8:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, I don't know what this thing is.
8:11 Speaker 03 Nor do I.
8:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's sci-fi to me.
8:12 Speaker 03 Okay.
8:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so this is now grandchild, okay?
8:15 Speaker 03 It sits well with, I don't know. This is way too transgenerational. We're not about great grandchildren. I don't know anything about this yet.
8:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, so then the last one here, we're now four generations in.
8:23 Speaker 03 Yeah.
8:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And guess what that is? Oh. It's buttonk, yeah. Buttonk. And it's Russian all the way through.
8:32 Speaker 03 Oh, look at that. That's a good one.
8:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you're telling me that some parts, some elements of all of our behavior is not our fault?
8:41 Speaker 03 Ooh, I'm saying that in some model organisms. She was like, ooh, so listen. Because my kids are listening to this, okay? Like, no, that's on you.
8:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, wait, let me not be so negative. Are you suggesting that some components of our character, personality, demeanor, and the like?
9:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is traceable to forces that occurred outside of the lives we've lived.
9:05 Speaker 03 What I'm saying is that in some model organisms, there's an experience that can happen in a parent that leads to epigenetic changes, that leads to changes in development of offspring. Now, we've demonstrated this in worms. My lab specifically looks at mice. When it comes to humans, the best study surrounding, the most studied topic surrounding intergenerational and transgenerational inheritance comes from after World War II, the Dutch Hunger Winter. So this is a period of time where the Netherlands were cut off from food and it led to a man-made famine. So this is also, I think, something pretty particular. We're not talking about it, really.
9:37 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah, 1944 to 1945.
9:39 Speaker 03 Yes.
9:40 Gary O'Reilly? And then, then the generations were suffering from serious medical conditions of diabetes.
9:45 Speaker 03 Diabetes, hypertension, even schizophrenia, not just for the children. And we're speaking about young children who were, young children who were starved, but were not pregnant, were not procreating, were starved. They went on to have children, who went on to have children, which is our generation now, like the generation of these, these people are alive now. And what we observed is that, what other studies have observed, this is not what my lab particularly does, is that there's an increase in hypertension, diabetes, schizophrenia. And I also think it's very particular to. They think the Dutch were black. I was just gonna go there.
10:20 Speaker 03 This is a man-made famine. This is not something that's tracking with like the environment in a way that all, all things are aligned. This is a man-made famine. So you can envision a space where you have a man-made famine, a man-made decrease in food, increase only in salted food because that's all you have access to. Salted reserves food.
10:38 Gary O'Reilly? Yes, exactly, yeah.
10:39 Speaker 03 Plus, a lot of stress, I would assume, if we're talking about the black population prior to, you know, the 1900s. And then introduce food deserts and access to low-quality food. We can envision an epigenetic space. Yeah, so a food desert is a common, a common terminology that we use for a space in which there's not fresh food available in like a X-block radius, like a walking radius.
11:04 Chuck Nice? That's a food desert, okay? You can get McDonald's before you can get broccoli.
11:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chuck has defined food desert.
11:23 Speaker 04 I'm Ali Khan Hemraj and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
11:38 Gary O'Reilly? So you've got this Dutch winter famine in forty-four, forty-five as a realtime observation? A dataset. Yeah, and I think it is possibly the only one that's been able, sadly, created so far.
11:50 Speaker 03 It is the best studied and this is because the Netherlands took very clean note of who served in the military. So they started to see these data come about. Now we know that there is a Chinese famine that took place. We, of course, can look at the black American and Native American population and tie food deprivation with stress and look at health outcomes. But this one is well studied in a short period of time.
12:13 Gary O'Reilly? If we take that and use that as a starting point.
12:16 Speaker 03 Yes.
12:17 Gary O'Reilly? Your research at your Marlin Lab. What a coincidence. You work in a lab called the Marlin Lab.
12:23 Speaker 03 Voila. I chose well. I heard the boss there is great. She's fab.
12:30 Gary O'Reilly? What a coincidence. Exactly, yeah. What are the odds of that? So your research covers a number of things, but what about this epigenetic inheritance? What is your research about? What is it finding and how are you finding it and going about getting the results?
12:44 Speaker 03 Yes, we spoke about the Dutch Hunger Winter in black America and our work is really motivated on how do we make tomorrow better than it is today? What does it mean to be a human in this space and in this place? Have experiences that are both positive but also negative? How that affects the way the brain develops, the body develops? How that affects offspring, interactions with offspring? And how does that affect therefore communities which affect the world? That really is the heart of what we do in the Marlin Lab. And if you didn't get it, the Marlin Lab is my lab.
13:14 Gary O'Reilly? That's your lab.
13:15 Speaker 03 Yes, and so I take my passion for figuring out how we can make tomorrow better than it is today and my love for science, biology and neuroscience and bring this together. So although our mission is to aid the world in this way, we use model organisms such as mice and techniques such as studying epigenetic inheritance to get to this answer.
13:37 Gary O'Reilly? So how do you, I mean, okay, if we're back to trauma. What are you sadly doing to mice to inflict trauma? And how do you then balance that out to see how these changes take place?
13:47 Chuck Nice? Well, first we paint the mice black.
13:50 Chuck Nice? That's the first thing we do.
13:51 Speaker 03 You know what the sad part is? Oh, gosh. They're called C57 black six. Those are the name of the mice. It's just like in the name. Every time we write it down, we're like, black mouse. Yeah.
13:59 Chuck Nice? Oh, what a shame.
14:00 Speaker 03 But we treat them very well.
14:01 Chuck Nice? Right.
14:02 Speaker 03 Because we really want to see-
14:03 Chuck Nice? Except we will not allow them to get a mortgage in certain areas.
14:05 Speaker 03 We do redline them.
14:11 Chuck Nice? Time for our first commercial break. We'll be back.
14:14 Gary O'Reilly? After we reset. You cut off parts of the maze.
14:20 Chuck Nice? A maze with no exit, right? Just stuff, just messing with you.
14:24 Speaker 03 Yes, because we want to see like how, what is the bare minimum that you could do to create an epigenetic change? We really try to do the bare minimum. And we also respect the fact that every mouse that is part of this experience, experiment and experience is a mouse that we're asking them to dedicate their life to this experience. So we do take that very seriously.
14:43 Chuck Nice? Did she say she's asking them?
14:45 Speaker 03 We do. We do. Look, they have names. After underscore black six, they have a name. We give them a name. So, yeah.
14:50 Chuck Nice? There's Tyrone.
14:57 Speaker 03 You're gonna get me in trouble here, okay?
14:59 Gary O'Reilly? I am forbidden from saying anything right now.
15:01 Chuck Nice? Yeah, yeah, you better.
15:05 Chuck Nice? The leak is my favorite. The T-shirt.
15:09 Speaker 03 Guys, okay, I'm pulling it back.
15:12 Chuck Nice? Go ahead, go.
15:13 Speaker 03 Y'all are gonna get me in trouble. All right. So they pretty much have a pretty regular mouse life, right? They hang out in a cage, they get food, sometimes they get to have sex, they live their best life. This is what they do. So there's not much, many dynamic things happening in their life when they're here in the lab. What we do is we place them into a new chamber, so they haven't seen this chamber before. We then introduce an odor, a smell. This is the smell, it kind of smells like almond. It's called acetophenone. And we present acetophenone for 10 seconds and then it co-terminates with a light foot shock. We give them a light foot shock on their foot and they jump back. But in a mouse who pretty much has had the best life of eating, drinking and hanging out-
15:47 Chuck Nice? This is a terrible thing.
15:49 Speaker 03 Yes.
15:49 Chuck Nice? Yes.
15:49 Speaker 03 It's like-
15:50 Chuck Nice? Right.
15:50 Speaker 03 It's a big deal.
15:51 Chuck Nice? It's like, this is when they find out, oh my God, I'm black.
15:57 Chuck Nice? This is the
15:59 Speaker 03 When did you find out you were black?
16:01 Chuck Nice? Until Life was
16:02 Speaker 03 One day, I smelled almond, yeah.
16:03 Chuck Nice? Okay, alright. Smelled some almond and I got a shock.
16:05 Speaker 03 Foot shock, right? So they're like, what is happening? This happens, uh, five times in a row. And then we put them back in the cage over the span of 10 minutes. Okay.
16:13 Chuck Nice? Oh, wow.
16:14 Speaker 03 We put them back in the cage. And we take them out the next day. We put them in the chamber. You could already tell they
16:20 Chuck Nice? Just from their chamber itself.
16:21 Speaker 03 Their experience they do. Yes, they freeze. It's called freezing. Mice do two things. They'll either freeze or run away. Those are their two responses to stress. So they freeze when they get in. We have not given them the odor. They already know the room is already stressing them out. So then they get kind of chilled with the room, like, okay, nothing's happening. And then we turn on the odor and they freeze again.
16:37 Chuck Nice? Of course.
16:37 Speaker 03 And they're waiting.
16:38 Chuck Nice? Even before you shock them.
16:38 Speaker 03 Right. And they're counting down for the foot shock. And so they freeze, freeze, freeze when they smell it. And then they jump because they get the foot shock.
16:44 Chuck Nice? Yeah, they're good.
16:45 Speaker 03 We do this for 10, 10 minutes a day for three days. There's many way, many things you can use, many things neuroscientists use to, um, create this pairing, like odor, or we can use sound. We use odor for
16:55 Chuck Nice? Sensory correspondence.
16:56 Speaker 03 Sensory correspondence, yes. And I even said the vision, like going into the chamber will also make them scared.
17:00 Chuck Nice? Right, exactly.
17:01 Speaker 03 But we use odor for a very specific reason. And I could either tell you now, you could ask me and I could tell you. What do you want me to do?
17:06 Chuck Nice? No, let's do it.
17:07 Speaker 03 Do not leave me guessing. Okay. We use odor because odor is just a really cool sense. The lab studies smell, taste and sound, these three. And focusing on odor, when you breathe in, you aspire. You're smelling my lovely Aqua de Parma perfume, right? And you'll, you'll remember this moment forever because of this. This is how we interact with the world. When you breathe in, there's some neurons that interact both with the world and with the brain. These neurons are called olfactory sensory neurons. So they're first order neurons that like explore the world and also can send a message back to the brain. And, um, I was lucky enough to train under Richard Axel for my postdoc. He won the Nobel Prize for understanding. He, along with his, uh, postdoc, Linda Buck, won the Nobel Prize in 2004
17:48 Speaker 03 for ironing out what it means to have a mammalian sensory system like the, like the nose. What we see in the nose is that every neuron in the nose expresses only one olfactory receptor. So it could pretty much only respond to a chemical that binds only to that receptor.
18:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow.
18:03 Speaker 03 So there's a level of specificity. And in speaking about epigenetic inheritance and transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, what does it mean for us to be stressed because of our ancestors? This is what we're missing in the field. And this is why I'm so proud that my lab has been able to bring this to the field, the level of specificity. Because we're not talking about your feelings getting hurt. We're talking about an odor that only binds and activates this one receptor in this nose.
18:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
18:25 Speaker 03 And what we've been able to replicate, because another lab did this first, and it came up with a lot of controversy, and then demonstrate to a finer extent, is that those neurons that smell that almond, you take that mouse out, not the mom's, only the dad's. You breathe them, and you look at the next generation. And those generations are born with a different olfactory sensory.
18:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Get the hell out of here.
18:50 Gary O'Reilly? So how do you?
18:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That is insane.
18:52 Gary O'Reilly? It's not as if you can look up the nose and say, oh, you've got more, or you've got the same. So how are you testing? How are you finding your results to prove?
18:59 Speaker 03 Yes, we have a really cool new technique.
19:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That is amazing.
19:02 Speaker 03 Thank you, yes, yes.
19:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I mean, that's really, I mean. Let me back up just for a minute. Yeah. You described the experiment as though it was written on a tablet somewhere. But you had to sit down with either yourself or with colleagues and figure out what would make a good test for the hypothesis.
19:17 Speaker 03 Hands down. That took a lot of time.
19:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I just want to give credit.
19:19 Speaker 03 Thank you.
19:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's easy to say, put them in. No. Give them, no, you have to think that through. I mean, that's just tremendous. Okay. And you want it to be simple enough.
19:28 Speaker 03 Yes.
19:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So there's not another, a lot of complicating other factors.
19:31 Speaker 03 Exactly.
19:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? To isolate the causes and effects. Right, right, right.
19:33 Speaker 03 On the nose, yes.
19:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's so great.
19:35 Speaker 03 And it's not an easy part of the brain to get to. We created techniques, and we use techniques now in the lab. We do brain clearings. We can clear the entire tissue.
19:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. Yeah, I'm gonna see, I'm, you know, listen.
19:47 Speaker 03 And use light sheet imaging, and that is so cool.
19:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Brain clearing.
19:51 Speaker 03 Brain clearing and light sheet, yes.
19:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Straight up, they clone Tyrone.
19:55 Chuck Nice? And I'm not sure.
19:56 Speaker 03 Transgenerationally, yes. It's like a little transgenerational Tyrone.
19:59 Chuck Nice? So how, and now how exactly and where exactly?
20:02 Speaker 03 That's gonna be the name of my first book, like, Transgenerational Tyrone. Transgenerational inheritance of trauma.
20:07 Chuck Nice? So what's the brain clearing, though? That's, how do you, how do you get to that space?
20:11 Speaker 03 I totally skipped a part because we're seeing that the offspring have a brain that looks like the parent. But I didn't tell you what the parent brain looks like. We take the animal out of this chamber after three days of odor shock pairing. We actually let them relax. Day 10, they actually get to, you know, have a little fun. They breed because we're gonna look at those kids later. And 21 days later, we ask them to sacrifice their life and then we look at their brain.
20:32 Chuck Nice? Right.
20:33 Speaker 03 And if you look at the animals that just got an odor and no shock, or just got a shock and no odor, or got odor and shock but it's not co-terminating at the same time, their brains all look the same. The paired animals, we call it, the animals got the odor, co-terminating with shock. They have more neurons that respond to that odor. So I want to give a second to like, give the beauty of biology that, that sits there before we even get to the next generation. The brain does, the brain takes energy to make new things, to change.
21:01 Chuck Nice? It's, it's an electric, it's an electric device, so it makes sense.
21:05 Gary O'Reilly? So what period of time does it take for this generation of more receptors to actually happen?
21:11 Speaker 03 We are seeing it in the order of 21 days, about a month. Cool part about the manual factor epithelium, there's stem cells in this area.
21:19 Chuck Nice? What part, that's the part where the, where the smell?
21:22 Speaker 03 Exactly, the neurons that can smell the world and then send information to the main olfactory epithelium. Epithelium.
21:29 Chuck Nice? There's another epi.
21:30 Speaker 03 Look at that.
21:31 Chuck Nice? Okay, epithelium, good, okay.
21:33 Speaker 03 And so this tissue, it has a stem cell population. There are very few areas of the brain that have stem cells. One is the hippocampus, an area known for placement and memory. One is the olfactory bulb. This is where these neurons send the information to that go to other parts of the brain. And the manual factor epithelium. So there's neurons that are, that are there. They're not neurons, I take that back. There are cells that are there and they're like, uh, what am I gonna be when I grow up? And they usually hang out and they're like, okay, I'm gonna be a peppermint cell because that's what my epigenetic modifications will allow me to be. And then we give them this experience, this odor shock pairing. And what we've been on, gone on to demonstrate, what my lab has demonstrated, is that these neurons are going to be peppermint and say, mm. As important as peppermint is, almonds more important.
22:14 Chuck Nice? I'm not gonna do that. I gotta, I gotta, I gotta make a detour.
22:17 Speaker 03 Buy it as my receptor choice, yeah.
22:19 Chuck Nice? I gotta make a detour, cuz, cuz that's more important for me. Cuz now I have this experience.
22:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I just wanna just.
22:24 Chuck Nice? That, that becomes a stimuli, basically.
22:26 Speaker 03 Exactly, it is stimulus, exactly.
22:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just so we, just so we're on.
22:29 Chuck Nice? Wow, you're brilliant.
22:29 Speaker 03 Thanks.
22:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just on the same, on the same mouse page. How long does it take a newborn mouse to be old enough to have a next generation?
22:39 Speaker 03 It takes about six weeks.
22:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, a mouse is born, six weeks later it can get pregnant?
22:46 Speaker 03 Yes.
22:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And how long is the gestation period?
22:48 Speaker 03 Twenty-one days.
22:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's why you said twenty-one days before, because?
22:51 Speaker 03 It just happens to be a, um, a coincidence, that also twenty-one days is a good time in the nose.
22:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And the typical life expectancy of a mouse is a few years?
22:58 Speaker 03 Uh, uh, uh, two years in the lab.
23:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Two, two years.
23:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, a year and a half, yes.
23:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Two years, okay.
23:02 Speaker 03 In the wild, a lot, a lot shorter.
23:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, because they're tasty snacks for owls and foxes and things. So, I guess what I'm getting at is, mice, which are interestingly genetically similar to us, cuz we're mammals and vertebrates and this sort of thing, I get that. But, what would take us decades to manifest as an organism, happens in weeks.
23:27 Speaker 03 Yes.
23:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In your lab. So that if you need to go through multiple experiments, it's way more efficient.
23:35 Speaker 03 Uh, people also study flies and worms, and they can do this seven generations in two weeks. So, we're, we're dead smack in the middle. It takes, it takes a while to get to the transgenerational part.
23:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Flies and worms show up in these kinds of conversations. You would not do it on Galapagos tortoises, cuz that would just take too much.
23:51 Speaker 03 Oh, no. Zero percent chance.
23:55 Gary O'Reilly? So you conduct this experiment with a, with an adult?
23:59 Speaker 03 Yes.
23:59 Gary O'Reilly? How many generations will this be present?
24:04 Gary O'Reilly? This change.
24:05 Speaker 03 We are observing it right now, from parent to offspring. From sperm of male to offspring. Our preliminary data suggests that this is not carried on to the next generation if you do nothing to the parent. And this makes evolutionary sense. If your parent has gone through a trauma and you have not come across this stressor or trauma in your lifespan, why would you give your offspring anxiety? Why is it that you would pass that on to the next generation if it's not relevant? Biology's smart, it's smarter than us. And so, we sometimes speak about this in a lens of like fear, we don't want this. But really, it's, I view it as biology wanting us to survive. Because if you have more neurons in the next generation, you probably can sense this odor.
24:49 Chuck Nice? Right.
24:50 Speaker 03 More quickly.
24:51 Chuck Nice? It becomes a defense mechanism, in a manner of speaking.
24:54 Speaker 03 Adaptive, in a way.
24:55 Chuck Nice? Right, right.
24:56 Speaker 03 And I wouldn't call anxiety or stressors in this area adaptive. But I do think biologically, the hope is that it becomes something that the animal, will allow the organism to survive.
25:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It gives a defense mechanism that wouldn't otherwise be there. And it needed it for the almonds, even though, why would you need to defend against almonds?
25:14 Speaker 03 Because you had to learn.
25:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Except you, in your lab, gave him the electric shock.
25:16 Speaker 03 Because that's what the world looks like, right? The world is dynamic, it's always changing. We're not, we're good, there may be times where something that originally is neutral becomes something that has to be aversive and your brain has to learn that. It's the beauty of being able to learn that, having your genome learn that, and having that be passed on.
25:32 Gary O'Reilly? So if your generations are in the same environment that caused all the trauma and stress for the original parent, and it stays like that, understandable, you've got the mechanisms that you should be able to survive. But what if that environment changes? And you don't long lead it? Surely you've got a slightly mal-adapted series of offspring?
25:52 Speaker 03 It's the question of mal-adaptation. I cannot create a space in my mind that would describe biology being mal-adaptive.
26:00 Gary O'Reilly? Okay.
26:00 Speaker 03 Because what if that odor did come back? Like, the odor could never come back, and then, yes, you probably have a few more neurons, you maybe smell a little bit less peppermint. But what if that odor does come back? Because not smelling peppermint won't kill you, but not smelling almond could.
26:15 Gary O'Reilly? Yes, see that?
26:16 Chuck Nice? Wow.
26:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And that's evolution, right in a nutshell, right there.
26:20 Chuck Nice? Happening much quicker than we normally would intend to think.
26:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's not epigenetic, but it's, in the skeptics community, we describe...
26:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Why it is we are so good at seeing patterns? Even when there's no pattern there. And it's been plausibly traced back to, if you think you see a lion in the bushes, and you run away, even though there wasn't a lion in the bushes, you live another day. Voila. If you don't think there's one there, and there is, then that's the end of your gene pool. Game over.
26:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So there's a benefit to the caution, to be on the cautionary side of all of this.
27:02 Gary O'Reilly? Let's throw it into the moment. We have a war in Ukraine. We have a war raging in Gaza.
27:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Both with huge tolls on the next generation.
27:12 Gary O'Reilly? The stress and trauma must be unimaginable for the likes of me and anyone else I'd imagine. Are we likely to see future generations experiencing all sorts of issues like we did with the winter famine?
27:28 Speaker 03 Scary thought. It's a really sad and heartbreaking.
27:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's going to be the new black people of the world. Yeah.
27:34 Speaker 03 This is generations on generations, right? And I do think, and I would love to add, my hope as a neuroscientist is that biology is adaptive and wants us to survive. And so although there is going to be an element of inheriting the man-made trauma, right, this not of ethological trauma, this is man-made trauma that we are having.
27:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Notice that phrase hasn't become degendered. Man-made trauma. I said what I said. I was going to say.
28:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I didn't stutter. It's kind of hard to degender that. It's like human-made trauma. Political, man-made trauma. Deal with it.
28:12 Speaker 03 I would want to finish the fact that we can still learn. And so my hope is that in understanding what's happening with these mechanisms that the Marlin Lab is studying, we can also understand a little bit more about what it means to readapt when things are not in a state of trauma. That's what we hope to bring forward. So not all hope is lost.
28:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is there a difference in heritability between the male who experiences the trauma and the female? The female's carrying eggs, but the male produces sperm. Yeah.
29:01 Speaker 03 This, could we sit on that for a second? This is the part that makes me excited about science. The manolfactory epithelium turns over in the order of 21 days, maybe 40 days. Like, there's a neuron, it's born, live your best life, you're dead in 40 days, and a new one comes in. In humans and mammals.
29:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Why does it die away?
29:17 Speaker 03 So, for example, maybe if anyone's had COVID over the last few years, you'll come to know you can't smell. But then after all, you begin to smell, right? Because there's a turnover.
29:25 Chuck Nice? Or you smell things that you're not smelling, like gas.
29:28 Speaker 03 Okay, I'm sorry you had that.
29:30 Chuck Nice? That was my experience. I kept saying, "Who left the stove on?" I'm running around the house like, "Someone left the stove on." And they're all looking at me like, "What is your problem?"
29:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Terrifying.
29:39 Speaker 03 We have an electric oven.
29:44 Speaker 03 But now you can smell fine. If you ever, maybe, I mean, you played soccer, you probably head-butted a ball.
29:48 Chuck Nice? Yes.
29:49 Speaker 03 And for a period of time, you probably couldn't smell well, or your taste was kind of funny. But no, I can see what you're saying. There's a direct cause and effect. Because those neurons send their dendrites, or the part of the neuron that takes in information, out into this, like, this area in the nose.
30:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Remind us of the parts of the nerve cell?
30:07 Speaker 03 Yeah, so we have the cell body, that's represented here by my well-manicured hand. And then we have the dendrites here. The dendrites just sit out in the ether of our nasal cavity. And so as we breathe in, as we respire, we get these molecules, they bind to the dendrites.
30:20 Chuck Nice? And the dendrites are those looking like tentacles coming off of the cell body.
30:24 Speaker 03 Yes, coming off the top of the cell body, exactly. And then they'll send this message to the cell body that says, "Okay, there's enough of these molecules that are bound, let's make this neuron fire electrically," because neurons are both chemical and electrical. And so it'll fire electrically, and it sends that electric signal down the axon.
30:39 Chuck Nice? Right.
30:40 Speaker 03 And then it ends in what's called the manolfactory bulb. So this is when it starts sending information to the brain, to places like the amygdala, which represent emotion, places like the piriform cortex.
30:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So this stimulus gets shared with parts of the brain that can take action on it?
30:53 Speaker 03 Yes.
30:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is that a fair way to characterize it?
30:54 Speaker 03 Yes, exactly. And this is important because it turns over every 21 days, 21 to 40 days. So do sperm. Our data has demonstrated that when you mate a animal, forty days after the odor shock pairing, we still see this change in the next generation.
31:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So that's gotta be the female.
31:15 Speaker 03 Females are never shocked. We would never do that in the Marlin.
31:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, wait, then how does it go beyond?
31:21 Speaker 03 Exactly. It's something happening that gets down to the sperm.
31:26 Chuck Nice? Right. It's being stored.
31:27 Speaker 03 And even new sperm.
31:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It creates the sperm. Yes. In the gonads. The epididymis.
31:33 Gary O'Reilly? Is it epididymis?
31:34 Speaker 03 Oh, well, the epididymis, yes, and the epididymis.
31:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's a word.
31:36 Speaker 03 Epididymis.
31:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It shouldn't be.
31:38 Speaker 03 Epididymis.
31:39 Gary O'Reilly? But then again, it's, yes, it's F P again.
31:41 Chuck Nice? It's your epididymis.
31:42 Gary O'Reilly? Don't go technical on me.
31:44 Speaker 03 Exactly. Epididymis, the epididymis.
31:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's the, that's the what? The thing that creates sperm?
31:51 Speaker 03 The epididymis is an area of the, inside the testes, in which immature sperm, so like their sweet baby sperm, they go into the epididymis and they get what's called an epididymisomal payload. This is not the work that we have pioneered, this is work that others have pioneered that demonstrate if you have like, for example, low food, so in metabolics has been demonstrated, there is a payload of information that comes from the liver, or that's in the liver and also found in the epididymis. And what happens is these sperm go through the epididymis, they mature, they get grown, and they also get this payload, the epididymisome, that says, you were starved, and they bring that down to the next generation.
32:29 Chuck Nice? Yes. So I, years ago, and I'm, you, maybe you'll know this, and I can't, I'm so sorry, but I read a study.
32:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You were trying to look it up?
32:39 Chuck Nice? I was trying to look it up, but I was trying to look at the study itself. And it dealt with sperm production and cocaine use in men. Do you know the study I'm talking about?
32:50 Speaker 03 I believe I do. It was done at Penn?
32:52 Chuck Nice? Yes.
32:52 Speaker 03 Yeah.
32:53 Chuck Nice? Yes.
32:53 Speaker 03 Yes.
32:54 Chuck Nice? And it was fascinating because the men were passing the information on in their sperm that equated back to the cocaine use.
33:07 Gary O'Reilly? Wow.
33:08 Chuck Nice? And it was just fascinating, too, but this is exactly what we're talking about.
33:11 Gary O'Reilly? So what you're saying there is, outside of a stress trauma, certain environmental circumstances can have an effect.
33:20 Gary O'Reilly? On the way the the epigenetics are altered.
33:24 Speaker 03 We do know that that stress and trauma do.
33:26 Gary O'Reilly? Then so does cocaine use his lifestyle. There must be all sorts of other things. I'm guessing environmental pollutions and also.
33:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So do you have a list? I mean, can you make rank list of avoid this because it'll mess up your gonads? I mean, that's.
33:39 Speaker 03 Well, we don't want to say mess up.
33:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? People will respond to that list.
33:42 Speaker 03 It may not be mess up. It will change. Change is not always bad.
33:46 Chuck Nice? That's true.
33:48 Gary O'Reilly? But are you willing to take that experiment on to see if it goes good or bad?
33:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right. So all right. All right. So what has risen to the top of people's research efforts are studying the bad effects. So give me an example of something that could be a good effect in the epigenetic transgenerational.
34:06 Speaker 03 Could I give you something that would be an example of a good effect? I think a good effect is biology saying if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Right? Like, it may not be that we need to.
34:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The good effect is the neutral effect.
34:15 Chuck Nice? Yeah, the neutral effect is right. Yeah.
34:18 Speaker 03 No, studies are going on.
34:19 Chuck Nice? You spend a lot of time on a yacht and your children come out going, wow. Oh, damn, mom, I'm so terribly, terribly hungry.
34:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, the starvation threshold is different when you're on a yacht.
34:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But for example, just as an example.
34:35 Speaker 03 Yes.
34:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's long been known that suicide rates are higher among people who are less traumatized. Right? So suicide rate for black Americans was way lower than for white Americans, especially wealthy white Americans.
34:53 Chuck Nice? And and and black females is the lowest.
34:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, but of course.
34:57 Chuck Nice? And they have it the hardest.
34:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Those numbers are creeping up a little recently, which is a sign of more equality, I guess, but.
35:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I guess.
35:09 Chuck Nice? We finally made it.
35:10 Gary O'Reilly? What a metric.
35:13 Chuck Nice? We did it, guys.
35:14 Speaker 03 Was angry as a white man. Okay, cool.
35:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So I don't know if this question is relevant or even interesting, but as they say, your biggest problem is your biggest problem. So if you're on the yacht and there's a delay
35:27 Speaker 03 Okay, I see where you're going with this.
35:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? in the caviar and you have a big party you're trying to put on.
35:31 Speaker 03 Okay.
35:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You could be very stressed by that.
35:33 Chuck Nice? Don't judge my trauma.
35:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, yeah, okay.
35:35 Chuck Nice? Don't judge my trauma. My trauma is my trauma.
35:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? To the therapy session.
35:38 Speaker 03 Yes.
35:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Your trauma is your trauma.
35:39 Speaker 03 From a psychologist's lens, yes.
35:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
35:41 Speaker 03 The biggest deal in this mouse's life is that it got its foot shocked. We all stubbed our toe at some point within this last week. We're not really gonna remember, right? It happens often. But in the dynamic of this mouse, yes, that's, oh, oh. It's better than us.
35:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm coordinated, okay? Sorry, I'm not gonna apologize.
35:58 Speaker 03 Yeah, yes, I can see the biggest problem being the biggest problem. I think when we think about looking at humans, you have to take culture into consideration. And that's what we separate when we study mice. Why we have a model organism like mouse is because we can control everything else.
36:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
36:13 Speaker 03 There are definitely cultures in which morbidity associated with suicidality is higher. My mother's from Guyana, South America. At some point, it had the highest suicidality rate. It no longer does. I think it's number three now.
36:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In the world?
36:26 Speaker 03 In the world.
36:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow.
36:28 Speaker 03 Right, and we saw that there was a trend with the three major populations, which are Indo-Guyanese, Afro-Guyanese, and Chinese-Guyanese, or like Asian-Guyanese, as well as the native population. And it was higher in the Indo-Guyanese. But there are also different cultural aspects of being Indo-Guyanese. So I think it's harder to parse that out.
36:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you gotta get the basic science in there first before you get sociological.
36:47 Speaker 03 Yes, before you jump hands down. I think it's wise, yeah.
36:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Interesting, of course.
36:50 Speaker 03 It's wise and respectful to go that way.
36:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Otherwise, it's a big tangled mess and you don't know what your causes and effects are.
36:54 Speaker 03 And no one fix anything.
36:54 Gary O'Reilly? What happens if the shocks were generational and continued?
37:00 Speaker 03 Yes, so right now, what we are observing is an intergenerational change. But what if the environment doesn't change, even in the next generation or the generation after that? This is when we can start to envision a space where what we're looking at is an actual evolution change, change in evolution, and not just an epigenetic change.
37:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Interesting.
37:17 Speaker 03 Because if what, and we have not demonstrated this, nor have other labs, but it could be the space in which for seven generations, you get the odor foot shock.
37:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
37:25 Speaker 03 And then you have the eighth, you'll expect to see the change in brain. What if you do nothing to the eighth and then look at the tenth? Is this when it finally has stopped becoming intergenerational? And finally overrode?
37:35 Chuck Nice? So in that twelfth generation, what we see is the same expression that we did in the eighth and the seventh, but we created that eighth and seventh.
37:45 Speaker 03 And then for a few generations.
37:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, but wait, wait. But that smells Lamarckian here.
37:51 Speaker 03 People say Lamarckian as if it's like...
37:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, well, okay, let me, all right, let me do right.
37:56 Chuck Nice? First of all, who was Lamarck?
37:57 Speaker 03 We gotta do right by Lamarck, okay? Jean Paptiste Lamarck, Jean Paptiste Lamarck, came maybe a half a century before Darwin's. You also want to give credit where credit's due. Darwin's work is built upon what Lamarck studied. If I could put that in a nutshell, pretty much what Lamarckian inheritance would describe is a giraffe walking in its giraffe space, and it sees green leaves on top of a tree, and it's like, okay, I really want these green leaves, I'm gonna hope and wish and stretch, try to get those leaves.
38:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And just try to get the leaves.
38:24 Speaker 03 And as you try, your neck gets longer. And then you have a longer neck, voila.
38:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And the next generation is even longer.
38:30 Speaker 03 Exactly.
38:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So it's an acquired characteristic from things that happen.
38:34 Chuck Nice? Based on your circumstances or surroundings.
38:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Good.
38:37 Speaker 03 Exactly.
38:38 Chuck Nice? All right.
38:39 Speaker 03 Whereas Lamarck, I mean, Darwin says, you were born with a long neck, you eat all the top of the leaves, all your cousins die with short necks, and now you get to breed more and have a longer neck.
38:45 Chuck Nice? And that would be, you were selected to remain because your neck was suited for eating trees.
38:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And everybody else died.
38:52 Speaker 03 And it doesn't mean that it's one or the other. It does not have to be nature versus nurture in this space. It could be an end or.
38:57 Gary O'Reilly? So is this adapt and survive, or is that just a, just too broad a stroke?
39:01 Speaker 03 I think this is what it comes back to, how many generations does the smell continue on? What we can say is that former, studies that went on after Lamarckian inheritance became a concept, where scientists would go in and they would say, okay, well, let's see, if Lamarck is, is real, we're gonna go take this mouse, we're gonna cut off its tail, and let's see if the next generation is born with no tail. In fact, let's do it for three generations. We do not do this in the lab, let me clarify, right? But for three generations, you cut off the mouse tail, and you see...
39:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They do it with poodles. So, don't apologize for not doing it to mice.
39:30 Speaker 03 Okay, okay, exactly. And poodles are still born with tails.
39:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, with long tails. They cut them short to make a little bushy tuft, but, right.
39:37 Speaker 03 So, I mean, they said, okay, Lamarck is wrong. But what they didn't study is, are the mice now afraid of the scientist who comes in with the lab coat and scissors? So what are we really focusing our question and answer on?
39:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because that would be a psychological trauma, not just a physical change.
39:51 Gary O'Reilly? Let's turn this around, because we've talked about traumas. We're gonna cut the tails off young animals, right? How cute, how wonderful. What if you get exposed an animal to something pleasant and continued that pleasant exposure? Do you find that that becomes a more balanced, a happier creature? I know, this is not gonna happen anywhere, right? But is it possible to have other things transferred, not just trauma?
40:19 Speaker 03 If I were to have a conversation with biology, I think what biology would say back to me is like, "Let's survive so we can thrive." If sugar is good, if flowers smell good, we're good.
40:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But do you have conversations with biology often?
40:31 Speaker 03 All the time, all the time, and it speaks back to me.
40:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, okay.
40:36 Speaker 03 And the way neurons fire, like, science is so beautiful. But what we think is happening when it comes to a stressor is that there's something called coincidence detection. And we talk about this as electrophysiologists who record from neurons in the brain. When one neuron fires and another neuron hears that firing and also fires, it's coincidence detection. We have an animal who's smelling the environment, so those neurons are firing, and it gets a shock. That's another pathway that's now firing the same time those olfactory sensory neurons are firing. If we have something pleasant, we could have the smell of a flower, maybe some dopamine be released, and like, that could be paired. But it may not be-
41:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Dopamine makes you feel good.
41:11 Speaker 03 Dopamine's a neurotransmitter that makes you feel good. But would that be enough of a threshold to say, "Now let's take all the energy necessary to make sure animals smell flowers more"? It's already roped into what the pleasant circuitry looks like. But I think the best way to answer that question would be, "Let's override it with something really good. Let's give them some good cocaine." Right? Because it's so good that it's bad. How does that change the next generation? That's the way I would approach that experiment.
41:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Isn't that true with most things? They're so good, they're bad?
41:44 Chuck Nice? Well, yeah, I mean, sugar is certainly, like, you know, we, there are sugar receptors in our stomach, on our tongue, in our brain.
41:51 Speaker 03 But why? Because it's essential for survival.
41:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's got high calorie density.
41:55 Chuck Nice? Exactly, but at one point-
41:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Then it gets hijacked by candy bar companies.
42:00 Chuck Nice? But the scarcity is what allowed it to be, "Oh, it's so good, and hey, I gotta get this," because you're not going to get it. But now that it's abundant, now it's a bad thing. Because you can get it all the time.
42:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
42:13 Chuck Nice? It's subject to abuse.
42:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Those same receptors have been hijacked by modern civilization.
42:19 Chuck Nice? Right.
42:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You would agree, or possibly even lament, that these features of our adaptability in modern times, if you don't need that adaptation, yet you still have manifestations of it, a clever advertiser or a clever marketing person can hijack those sensory urges.
42:40 Speaker 03 Of course.
42:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, absolutely.
42:43 Speaker 03 And whose responsibility is that to fix that?
42:46 Gary O'Reilly? So, we've discussed Chuck's need for sugar. He quite needs to survive. Senses, sight, smell, taste, they're all sensory, so it's all survival. This whole thing of epigenetic inheritance is...
43:01 Speaker 03 Survive to thrive.
43:02 Gary O'Reilly? A simple umbrella to my mind is survival. And so therefore, it's as necessary as oxygen.
43:09 Speaker 03 Oh, hands down, hands down.
43:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oxygen to aerobic...
43:14 Speaker 03 Yeah.
43:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They're anaerobic life that doesn't want oxygen, just to be...
43:21 Speaker 03 We're being specious, we're just only talking about the important ones.
43:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I don't want you to be speciesist. Correct.
43:26 Gary O'Reilly? No-isms.
43:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, let's see if we can land this plane, this fascinating plane. Let me be cynic here. So what, now you understand the phenomenon. What are you gonna do about it? An entire generation of people survived the depression, famine, racism, slavery. Can you do anything about it, other than just come behind us all? Is that, well, here's why you're that way, and then go back to your lab? Meanwhile, Chuck has hypertension, he's got issues... Anxiety, anguish. He's got race issues. Prostate. Okay? If you can't do anything about it, what good is this? And if you can do something about it, then are you playing God?
44:10 Speaker 03 And this is a twofold answer. And one is for the love and need of understanding science, and the other one is for the love and need of understanding people. If there was a space in which someone who had gone through trauma ancestrally, and then are born here in modern day, and are suffering from all these elements, even though they eat healthy, they exercise, they still have hypertension, they still feel this anxiety. I believe to have a neuroscientist say to you, "You can take that burden off you. It's not your fault. This is just the way that you've inherited experiences of your ancestors." That validation within itself will probably create a shift for better.
44:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So that thing there, "It's not your fault." "It's not your fault."
44:49 Speaker 03 I mean, I just heard you talk about sugar, so maybe that one is your fault.
44:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? "It's not your fault." The "It's not your fault" mantra. It's not your fault except for sugar.
44:58 Speaker 03 That part.
44:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That runs deep. That's great.
45:00 Speaker 03 And I think the other is, if we have to understand what's happening in a "maladaptive situation," quote unquote, in a bad situation, we have to understand the basics of biology. We can't fix something unless we know how it broke.
45:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In the hit series, The Expanse, there's talk of adapting a life form that can just simply live in the vacuum of space. Because that's a new frontier where a lot of people are hanging out in all the time. So I'm just wondering, do you, generally in science, if you understand something, ultimately, you can manipulate it and control it.
45:32 Speaker 03 Yes.
45:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is there a plan for that going forward? Where you can go in and nip, tuck, tweak, pinch, and all these symptoms go away, thereby removing the epigenetic forces operating.
45:46 Speaker 03 If we understand it, can we go in and come in and nip, tuck? In the same way, if we understand the need for sugar, should we pound it into our food and candy and give it to our children? I think it has to do with responsibility as scientist to say, "We now have the ability to do a little nipping and a little tucking, but do we understand how this is going to change generations to come? If we take out the ability for you to change this adaptation."
46:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You could doom a future generation to not want sugar, and then they won't even have...
46:10 Speaker 03 Or not smell the smell and not have anxiety, but then constantly get slapped up.
46:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's a really good answer. I can't even rebut that. The unintended consequences. Why you give me such a good name? I've got nothing to ask you now. You answered my question so good.
46:26 Gary O'Reilly? That's why the good doctor is here.
46:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I know, I know.
46:29 Gary O'Reilly? To give the good answers.
46:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, I'd love everything you've described. Is there any controversy in your, among your colleagues about what you're doing? Or are they, are there competitive ideas? Where does your work fit in the landscape of other neuroscientists?
46:43 Speaker 03 It is dead smack in the center of the controversy. And a lot of it has to do, A, with what we're taught in textbooks and what we decide is canon, decide is truth, and then we see that maybe Lamarck wasn't all wrong, and that really draws people's brains. So, our job as neuroscientists is to say, put your textbook aside, this is the data. Let's look at what our studies have demonstrated and take it from there on a clean slate.
47:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But presumably, there are other labs.
47:07 Speaker 03 There are other labs, yes.
47:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If you publish what you do, it's then reproducible. So, why should anything be so controversial as what is poking mice?
47:15 Speaker 03 I think you, on a very, a very important note of this reproducibility.
47:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Unless you just have special black mice that nobody else gets.
47:21 Gary O'Reilly? Stop.
47:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Stop, Paul Tyrone.
47:24 Speaker 03 We are.
47:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Any of your mice named Tyrone?
47:27 Speaker 03 I can't answer the question now because you know who one is, and I can't say it now, of course. But I will say that my lab was the first to replicate this study.
47:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
47:36 Speaker 03 Of the original change in the parent.
47:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Fantastic.
47:39 Speaker 03 This study was done.
47:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's a start.
47:40 Speaker 03 Yes, Brian Diaz and Carrie Russell, they got a lot of fire for it because.
47:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They got a lot of fire.
47:45 Speaker 03 They had a lot of fire for it. So, I entered into the flames thinking like, first things first, can we replicate this cleanly? Using our brain clearing and using our cool microscopes, we've been able to replicate that. We then built upon it by showing this is the mechanism. I think that unfortunately, we have to sometimes wiggle our brains out of the old mindset and just look at the data and see what that looks like. And I think that's why shows like this are so important because you're motivating people to think slightly differently and have that little different of a spin and that can take them in a different direction.
48:12 Chuck Nice? The way the cutting edge of neuroscience works. I mean, when you look at addiction, just addiction alone, the work that has been done to prove that addiction is not a matter of willpower, it's not a matter of desire.
48:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There's more going on, yeah.
48:25 Chuck Nice? It's actually a brain malady. I mean, if you had told somebody that 30 years ago, they'd have laughed at you. They'd have said, "You're a quack." And now it's just accepted, you know? So, yeah, to keep going.
48:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is great. That dovetails with the free will question.
48:42 Chuck Nice? Right.
48:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How much are we actually in control of our body, mind, and soul?
48:46 Chuck Nice? Right, and how much of it is a chemical response?
48:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
48:48 Speaker 03 And how much of it is man-made?
48:51 Chuck Nice? Right, well, that's where you've introduced an entirely new aspect to the conversation.
48:55 Speaker 03 I only bring the data, yeah, I only talk about the data show.
48:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Now, we have to ask, because we've, we like neuroscience in StarTalk Special Edition, so, so we're compelled to ask, how much genetic control do you have over your husband?
49:09 Speaker 03 I rely heavily on epigenetics in my relationship with my husband and my children.
49:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Completely obedient household.
49:18 Speaker 03 Epigenetics and prayer, yeah.
49:20 Chuck Nice? That's so funny, that's so funny.
49:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Thank you for sharing your expertise, and you're just up the street in Columbia.
49:25 Speaker 03 Yes, I am.
49:26 Chuck Nice? Yeah, we gotta come back.
49:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, just a couple miles north of here. We're at the American Museum of Natural History, and you got your own lab?
49:33 Gary O'Reilly? And there's more research going on in different areas in the Marlin Labs, so we may well be revisiting soon.
49:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, all right. Doctor, professor, thank you for joining us.
49:43 Speaker 03 Thank you, thank you for having me.
49:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chuck, always good to have you, man.
49:44 Chuck Nice? Always a pleasure.
49:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, this has been StarTalk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always, bidding you a good night.
Previous Cosmic Queries – In a Zeptosecond Next Life in a Mars Simulation with Kelly Haston Page updated September 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
