Can particle beams be used to treat cancer?

Daniel and Kelly talk about the practical application of particle beams: precisely targeting and killing cancer cells. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Particle physicists love playing with big, expensive toys. The Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland costs more than $10 billion. And hey, what is it good for? Well, you know, understanding the nature of the universe and revealing the fundamental properties of matter, energy, space, and time, it's a pretty good deal if you ask me. But it's not just that. Basic research has also created lots of technology that improves our lives, including all of the electronics you're currently using to listen to me on this podcast. But particle physics has more directly saved lives as well. Usually, we think of particles as dangerous, of radiation as a cause of cancer. But what if particle

• 2:35Daniel Whiteson?

  physicists could do something useful for once? Today on the pod, we'll be asking, what if particle beams could be used to treat cancer? Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary practical universe.

• 3:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Wiener Smith. I study parasites and space, and I'm excited to be talking about newer-ish treatments for cancer today.

• 3:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I didn't get into it to save anybody's life, but I'm happy if it does.

• 3:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. Today, we're talking about a practical application of your work.

• 3:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Amazing.

• 3:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Amazing. And so I know that for some kinds of mathematicians, if it turns out that their basic research has applications, they're like almost bummed out because it makes it less pure. How does the particle physics community feel about this amazing application of their work?

• 3:41Daniel Whiteson?

  The broader community, I think, is positive because they're always looking for ways to sell fundamental science to politicians and to the general public that don't understand that like any investment in basic science is a good idea because it's going to yield something in the long term. And they're looking for something in the short term to use as an example. For me personally, it's a bit more mixed. I got into particle physics because it has almost no immediate applications. Because as you know, my parents worked in the weapons program, and I was like, hmm, it's a little morally complicated to be building weapons of mass destruction. Pointed at civilian populations.

• 4:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 4:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Which is basically what they were doing. And so I was glad that there were no immediate applications. So the idea that you're now building particle beams and pointing them at people, I'm glad that that's a positive thing. I can imagine how there might be other uses for high intensity particle beams pointed at people's heads.

• 4:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yikes.

• 4:34Daniel Whiteson?

  So yeah, I think I would just prefer if the applications were more downstream, so I didn't have to think about it.

• 4:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, you feel like at some point they're downstream enough that you don't have to worry? Like, what if somebody tomorrow did say, okay, this particle beam stuff results in, you know, weapons of mass destruction, but it's 20 steps away. Does that absolve you?

• 4:54Daniel Whiteson?

  As long as it's like, you know, 20 generations and I'm dead when they build the torment nexus from all of my particle physics work, then I think it's not really my fault. What can I do about it?

• 5:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, fair enough. Yeah, I guess you can't see the implications generations down the line in some cases.

• 5:08Daniel Whiteson?

  But I do in general think it's a really interesting philosophical and moral quandary because the only way to prevent people from using ideas to build things to torture people is to have no ideas and to make no advances. And I think that's ridiculous. And so I think we have to take leaps forward into the future and understand the universe, knowing that it's going to change society. We just hope for the better.

• 5:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I totally agree. And so trying to think about how we unroll these new technologies without having too many negative implications. I, soonish got me thinking about this topic a lot. And I feel like we need to be having a lot more conversations about how these technologies could be used. But on the plus side, we don't have to dig into too much of that today because this is an unmitigated good.

• 5:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, exactly. All of those taxpayer dollars spent on building particle colliders have resulted in saving people's lives by curing their cancers.

• 6:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yay.

• 6:02Daniel Whiteson?

  And so today on the podcast, we'll be talking about exactly that topic. How exactly can you use Daniel's ridiculous, the abstract research with his 10,000 friends to cure cancer?

• 6:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  I love that you have so many friends, Daniel. That's fantastic. You're very likable, though. I'm not surprised.

• 6:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I'm rounding them all up to friends. I'm sure there's some haters in that community.

• 6:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, I see. Yeah, I've got that, too.

• 6:23Daniel Whiteson?

  So I went out there and asked our audience if they had an idea for how particle beams could be used to treat cancer. And we're very delighted to have their extemporaneous speculation here on the podcast for you to enjoy. If you would like to contribute for future episodes, please don't be shy. Write to us to [email protected]. Here's what people had to say.

• 6:46Speaker 04

  Particle beams are shot into the cancer at high speeds and just shake it up from the inside out until there's nothing left.

• 6:55Speaker 05

  Directed with magnets would focus on the cancer. Target the specific cancer cells. Radiation treatments, which basically killed the cancerous cells. Through very finely targeted obliteration.

• 7:10Speaker 06

  Using a high energy particle beam, you can destroy the cells in a very targeted way. Just deteriorates the cell growth.

• 7:17Speaker 07

  Particle beams disrupting the DNA of the particular cancerous cells.

• 7:23Speaker 08

  Zapping a location, a cancer with particle beam. The beams heat the cancer and stops it from metastasizing.

• 7:33Speaker 09

  So picking up on context clues here, it's got beam in the name, and I'm pretty sure the main way cancer is treated is by destroying cancer cells. So my answer is via destruction of some kind.

• 7:44Speaker 10

  From all different directions so that those beams all intersect in the exact shape of the tumor. Fry the area.

• 7:52Speaker 11

  The particles in the beam are specifically targeted at the areas in which the cancer is.

• 8:00Speaker 12

  My energy protons emitted from a cyclotron go through a lens that is shaped like the patient's tumor, so that it goes no deeper than the tumor.

• 8:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Focused on the cancer cells directly so that they'll form a constructive interference.

• 8:19Speaker 13

  Concentrated focused therapeutic particle beams directed at solid tumors reduce their viability. The particles damage the malignant cell's DNA.

• 8:27Speaker 14

  The high energy in the gamma range damages their DNA, so they can't replicate themselves anymore.

• 8:32Speaker 15

  I would think by killing everything in their way and thereby also killing the cancer.

• 8:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  These are super fantastic answers. It sounds like a lot of people have heard of this before. And so it's sort of on the periphery of their knowledge, at least. I hadn't heard about this until there was a case of cancer in my family where we were thinking about this as a treatment. Everything turned out okay. My sense is that this isn't in the public consciousness, aside from people who have to think about this sort of treatment. But maybe I'm wrong, because it does seem like almost everybody had an answer that was like, kind of on target.

• 9:08Daniel Whiteson?

  I think I knew roughly how this works. You know, I knew that when you get cancer, your options are like chemotherapy, drinking poison, basically, or radiation, shooting particles at it, or surgery, trying to cut it out. In all cases, they're like versions of localized suicide, like, let's try to kill this part of my body before it kills the rest of me.

• 9:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 9:29Daniel Whiteson?

  But until a couple of friends had weird growths in their brains recently, and it really had to make this decision, radiation or surgery, I never really dug into the details, the physics of like, how does a particle beam hurt a tumor? How do you aim it? How do you make sure you get it to the right spot? What kind of particles should you use? So I thought it'd be really valuable for people to have some sort of understanding of this, so that in the moment when they're faced with these decisions, maybe they have some understanding of these options and what's really going on and the risks. And so when the doctor says, this is going to swell your brain, or this is going to do that, or this is going to damage the other tissue, it makes sense to you and helps you make those decisions.

• 10:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  So radiation is different than the particle beams?

• 10:11Daniel Whiteson?

  It's the same, yes.

• 10:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  It is the same?

• 10:13Daniel Whiteson?

  By radiation, I just mean shooting particles. And we'll get into that in a minute. But yeah, radiation, particle beams, to me, it's the same deal.

• 10:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Excellent. All right. So let's start with, you know, probably the most interesting part, the biology.

• 10:26Daniel Whiteson?

  That's why this is another fun topic, because I was like, ooh, physics curing biological issues.

• 10:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah. Although I think at the top of my list of fun is not cancer, but but curious for cancer is is pretty awesome. So go ahead. Let's hear the physicist's explanation for what is cancer.

• 10:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Wait, I'm explaining it? I was hoping.

• 10:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I'm going to give it a start and you chime in with your informed details.

• 10:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 10:53Daniel Whiteson?

  My understanding is it's a whole collection of things like they have something in common, but you can't really say cancer is like one thing. In general, it's cells growing out of control, but the causes for that can be manifold, right?

• 11:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. I have a friend who studies cancer and he was telling me that even just one kind of cancer can be caused by so many different mutations that that makes it pretty difficult to treat because often you want to know exactly what kind of mutation it is that causes it. And so now we genotype people's cancers to try to figure out exactly which of the many mutations is causing it to target our treatment. So yes, it's a lot of stuff that can cause cancer, but don't let that keep you from sleeping at night.

• 11:34Daniel Whiteson?

  But in general, it's when something goes wrong with the cell's growth function, right? So cells are constantly replicating called this mitosis and the nucleus like splits the DNA and copies itself. And there's a whole bunch of genes that control that copying, but errors can creep in, of course. And then cells keep doing this duplicating themselves, copying themselves for a while, and then they stop. And this apoptosis is when a cell's like, I'm done, disassembles itself and gets like reabsorbed into the body. And this huge variation, like some cells only live for like very short periods, like a day, bone cells can live for like 30 years, neurons can live forever. So you have this whole mechanism where cells are splitting and making copies of themselves and eventually

• 12:16Daniel Whiteson?

  retiring. And in order to get cancer, a bunch of things have to go wrong in just the right way. So it's kind of amazing that cancer happens as often as it does because it requires like multiple mutations, multiple ways for this whole process to go wrong.

• 12:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and give you a P O D in biology. Congratulations.

• 12:37Daniel Whiteson?

  So the first thing that has to go wrong is that the gene that controls how often you're going to replicate, right? These oncogenes, the genes that control replication have to go crazy. So maybe there's like a mutation, or maybe you just got a bad gene from your parent or something. And this gene that controls how often you're splitting can go crazy. So you just get like uncontrolled replication instead of like doing it at a reasonable rate.

• 13:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, it could be because you got a gene from your parents. It could be because you were exposed to something that caused a bad change in your genetic code. You know, for example, that's what happens with skin cancer is you acquire a lot of mutations from the sun, which I know well. And where are your sunscreen, kids?

• 13:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Fascinatingly, that's an example of radiation causing cancer, right? There what's happening are like ultraviolet photons are penetrating into your body and causing damage to your DNA, which triggers cancer. So for a lot of people, they connect radiation with the cause of cancer instead of the cure of cancer. And actually, radiation could end up on both sides of that equation.

• 13:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah. But I think instead of fascinatingly, I would have said something like suckly.

• 13:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Tragically.

• 13:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Tragically, yeah. I have a big scar on my forehead, which my daughter will sometimes be like, oh, it's hard to look at, mom. And I'm like, kiss my butt, kid. You don't have to live with it. Anyway.

• 13:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Is that a scar from a cancer removal?

• 13:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 13:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Glad they caught it.

• 14:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, me too.

• 14:01Daniel Whiteson?

  So we were talking about how cancer cells grow uncontrollably, but that's not enough to be a cancer cell, right? Just because you change the gene that controls replication doesn't make you already cancerous because the cell can just die, right? So in order to have cancer, you need to have uncontrolled replication and you need to break this apoptosis, this thing that tells the cell to turn itself off because you're done, buddy, needs to also break. And so you have to have uncontrolled replication and the cell has to be immortal. This is what I meant earlier when I said, like, you require multiple mistakes in the cell from like happy cell that's growing nicely and playing kindly with everybody to cancer cell that's going to grow uncontrollably, making more of itself and refusing to die off.

• 14:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, and feeding itself, managing to get more blood vessels to be made to feed those cells and stuff. And then it starts choking off other things. And yeah, thinking about all the different ways our bodies can break down, it's amazing they ever do anything right. But Kelly's catastrophizing today.

• 15:01Daniel Whiteson?

  That is a terrifying rabbit hole to dig into. And I've done that sometimes, especially, you know, when under the influence of various substances, but I'm like, wow, I am this pulsing throbbing meat machine. And it's incredible that it just keeps working. And for most people, just works for decades without lots of issues. It's amazing that it survives this long. On the other hand, of course, if it didn't, we wouldn't be here. And so obviously, evolution has done its job.

• 15:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. Well, we all made the wake up list today, so hurrah for all of us. All right.

• 15:33Daniel Whiteson?

  What's the wake up list? The people who didn't die in their sleep? That's dark. My gosh.

• 15:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that is what it means. So anyway.

• 15:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Do you wake up every morning and you're like, ah, I was on today's wake up list?

• 15:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, but I do wake up in the mornings and think, you know, you don't know how many days you've got, so you should try to make sure you're doing, uh, doing good by you and your family and your kids. But yeah, anyway.

• 15:57Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So cancer is uncontrolled, constant growth. It builds these blood vessels. It saps the resources. And you might think, why do I care if I have a little blob of cells that are growing out of control? Well, you know, they're growing out of control, so they get bigger and bigger, right? And if it's like, that's in your brain, it's going to press on important stuff, like the things that control your balance or your memory or your speech patterns. And that's going to be an issue. Or if it's in your pancreas, or if it's in your liver, right? It can impede the function of the normal cells. And also, it can spread, right? That's the real danger. If you have cancer and it's just in one spot and you're like, okay, I gotta get this blob out, then they can just do surgery and cut it out, or they can do radiation like we're going to talk about.

• 16:39Daniel Whiteson?

  But the time the cancer really becomes deadly is when it spreads to the rest of your body. And this is what metastasis is. Usually it spreads into the bloodstream and then the blood carries it all around the body and it lodges somewhere and then it keeps doing its cancer thing. And now instead of having one blob that's growing out of control that you can maybe deal with, you have lots of them, uncountable number, and they're also spreading. And so very quickly, it goes out of control. So often, it's crucial to catch cancer early before it metastasizes.

• 17:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Future casting here. I'm not going to be sleeping well tonight.

• 17:13Daniel Whiteson?

  We're just doing a lot of ironic foreshadowing because we're going to get to the bit where we're carrying it. We just need to set it up. All right.

• 17:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. All right. Great.

• 17:21Daniel Whiteson?

  But this is not a small issue. Like cancer is a real killer.

• 17:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 17:24Daniel Whiteson?

  3% of people in the United States are cancer survivors.

• 17:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 17:28Daniel Whiteson?

  It's a huge number. Cancer hits about 100 million people a year and there's like 10 million deaths a year.

• 17:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 17:36Daniel Whiteson?

  So like, this is a real issue. You know, a huge fraction of our healthcare budget is focused on cancer, as it should be. This is what motivated like Joe Biden's cancer moonshot. Like, hey, can we crack this thing? But as you were saying earlier, one of the big struggles with dealing with cancer is it's not just cancer, it's cancers. There's like more than 100 different types of cancer and they come in all kinds of varieties. Like a huge fraction of them are just caused by tobacco use. Like 20% of all cancer is like from smoking or some kind of like snorting or sniffing or sucking on those leaves. But there's another chunk, like 20% that are due to infection. Like some virus comes in

• 18:17Daniel Whiteson?

  and injects its DNA into your cells and now those cells are cancerous because they've changed your cells in exactly the right way to trigger that cancer.

• 18:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Jerks.

• 18:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Jerks. But the good news is like, we know how to deal with viruses. So now we have like vaccines against cancer. That's amazing, right?

• 18:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. Incredibly cool.

• 18:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Like cervical cancer caused by the human papillomavirus. Like we have really treated that. And really, the rates of that cancer have dropped tremendously. So there are real wins here. Even though it's lots of different kinds of cancers, which require lots of different kinds of approaches, people are working hard on this and really making progress. So, you know, go big pharma, go MDS. Like, thank you to all those folks working on the front line of saving those lives.

• 19:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Amen. And also, you know, to focus a little bit more on silver lining, you know, the reason so many of us are getting cancer and having cardiovascular problems these days is because a lot of us are living to be old enough for this kind of stuff to become a problem. You know, before, there was a pretty good chance you wouldn't survive to be five, but now a lot of us, you know, live a lot longer.

• 19:18Daniel Whiteson?

  And cancer doesn't just strike humans. You know, one of the main reasons that rats die, for example, is that they live long enough, if they're well fed, to get cancer. We had pet rats and after a couple of years, they each got these big tumors that were like dragging these things around, like these big blobs hanging off their bellies. And Katrina has a good friend who does cancer studies on rats and she knows how to operate to remove tumors. And so she offered to operate on our rats. And I was like, yeah, I don't know if we need to bring our rats into your like special expensive facilities. Like at some point, you know, you're just fighting a losing battle. You cut these tumors out, you know there are more coming. But it was sad, you know, rats are wonderful little critters and they don't live very

• 20:03Daniel Whiteson?

  long and we bonded with them. But on the flip side, that's when we decided we needed a longer living critter and now we have a dog.

• 20:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, that's fantastic.

• 20:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. But you're right, the bigger picture is as we live longer, as we tackle these things, we just discover new things that are going to kill us, right? The front just moves and we have a new battle to fight.

• 20:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. And it's time to take a break. And when we get back, we're going to talk about why sharks don't get cancer.

• 20:37Speaker 00

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by my friend, John Legend. So you're helping Will.i.am write hooks. What made Ordinary People become the one song from those sound checks you knew you had to make your own?

• 21:05Speaker 16

  I was just writing for the Black Eyed Peas. I wasn't expecting to write something for myself in that session, but I wrote the hook for Ordinary People and I recorded a demo and I'm like, I would rather keep Ordinary People for myself. This station in Chicago, WGCI, they start playing it before we're promoting it. The song spoke for itself. It became the defining song for my first album. I knew it was special, but you never know how special it's going to be and how much impact it's going to have in people's lives. And you never believe that you're going to actually change people's lives with a song.

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• 23:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we're back. That was a trick setup because even though you hear over and over again that sharks don't get cancer, sharks do get cancer. Gotcha.

• 23:10Daniel Whiteson?

  What, Kelly? Are you dispelling another pops eye myth?

• 23:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, sorry.

• 23:14Daniel Whiteson?

  So why was it so commonly said that sharks don't get cancer? Was that just purely invented? Or was it like a crowd study, a misunderstanding of real science?

• 23:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Uh, I don't know. It could be both. I mean, I imagine that a lot of times when animals in the wild get cancer, it debilitates them to the point where something else gets them, you know, a predator eats them, for example. And so it just could be that we didn't encounter many sharks that had tumors or people who did noted it but didn't, you know, publish on it or something. And so, I don't know, somehow this misconception entered its way into the Twittersphere or the exosphere, whatever we call it now. But, uh, but anyway, yes, sharks get cancer.

• 23:53Daniel Whiteson?

  The exosphere is actually a science word already.

• 23:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Mm hmm.

• 23:57Daniel Whiteson?

  It's like when you don't have an atmosphere, you have particles that are just flying around, not interacting with each other. Like the moon has no atmosphere, but it does have an exosphere, even though there's nobody on the moon posting on X.

• 24:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  But that's spelled E X O, right?

• 24:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Mm hmm.

• 24:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. So this would be like the X dash O sphere or something.

• 24:15Daniel Whiteson?

  You can't have two words that sound exactly the same.

• 24:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, you know, the English language is the worst in terms of spelling of stuff. So.

• 24:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, particle beams can't cure the problem of the English language, but maybe they can help with cancer. So let's lower our sights and think about that instead.

• 24:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  So let's overview some of the ways that we can deal with cancer.

• 24:33Daniel Whiteson?

  So if you have cancer, your options are often surgery. Like if it's localized, it hasn't spread and it's not next to something else really, really delicate, then often you can cut it out. Like if you have skin cancer, they can just clip that thing off because you don't need to go inside the body. It's not next to anything else dangerous and it's probably, hopefully hasn't spread yet. And so they can just cut it off. Whereas if you have, for example, something growing inside your brain, surgery is more complicated because they got to go into your brain and maybe it's touching something else really delicate and it's hard for the surgeon to cut out the whole thing without touching that delicate nerve and maybe impacting your brain function. Right? That was the great fear for my two friends who recently had brain surgery because of growths.

• 25:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  You have two friends who had brain surgery? Are they both doing okay?

• 25:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Both of them are fine. Both of them are scientists and both of them were back to work amazingly, just like a month after brain surgery. So it's incredible what modern medicine can do. 10 hour surgery.

• 25:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 25:31Daniel Whiteson?

  To cut out these lumps. And yeah, they're back to work and making the same terrible dad jokes over email that they were before surgery. So I can't even blame it on the cancer.

• 25:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  My daughter is really into puppeteering and her hero, Adam Crutenger, passed away from a brain tumor recently. And so these are, these are difficult things to tackle.

• 25:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it's scary, but you know, there's a lot of people working hard and dedicating their lives to making this better. So surgery is a great option if it's still localized and it's not close to anything else that you're risking. Another option, of course, is chemotherapy. And we can have a whole episode on that if you like, but essentially you're just drinking poison.

• 26:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 26:08Daniel Whiteson?

  And you're hoping the poison kills the cancer, or the poison is designed by clever chemists to kill the cancer faster than it kills you. And so it's a race of attrition there.

• 26:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, as I understand it, cancer cells tend to replicate faster than other things. And so it's targeting very quickly replicating cells. And that's partly why you lose your hair, because you've got like very fast replication happening in those follicles. And they kind of get shut down for a little while. So your hair falls out. And actually, we should get someone who knows what they're talking about, because I'm just vaguely remembering these facts, and they could be wrong.

• 26:43Daniel Whiteson?

  But you're right. In each case, what we're trying to do is highlight a particular sensitivity of cancer, and then take advantage of that in our attack. And the same thing is going to be true for radiotherapy, which is particle therapy, and we're shooting beams at the cancer. The idea is that these cancer cells have a mutation in the place where they're doing their DNA replication, right? When they're replicating, instead of doing it at a normal rate, they're doing it at an uncontrolled rate. And so these cells are actually pretty bad at repairing damage, right? They're already damaged, and they're worse than normal cells at repairing damage. And so if you attack them and try to break up their DNA, they are more sensitive to those kind of attacks than normal cells.

• 27:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Ah, okay. But so you told us that they're also resistant to apoptosis, so resistant to breaking apart. Is the idea just that if you mess up the DNA enough, they just kind of like die and wither away?

• 27:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 27:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 27:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Mm hmm. Exactly. I asked Katrina about this, actually, and she said, another way to look at a crazy cancer cell is that it's less resilient. It has all these broken repair mechanisms that makes it easier to take down. And so if you can shatter its DNA or attack its DNA, it's less likely to be able to survive. So they're more fragile. In that sense, they're more susceptible to radiation than the normal cell.

• 28:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, but chemotherapy often acts throughout your body, and it would be really nice to be able to target so you don't get negative impacts spread throughout the body. And so particle therapy, I'm guessing, can give us that?

• 28:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, exactly. Particle therapy is not just like broadly shooting radiation at your whole body. We're shooting particles in a very narrow beam so we can aim where it goes. If you have a tumor in your brain, we're not shooting particle beams into your toes. And we can get very, very precise with it. And you can think about it in three dimensions as well, because imagine you have a tumor in your brain somewhere, right? The goal is to have the particles hit the tumor and nothing else. That would be ideal, right? Now, we can't do that perfectly. We have to shoot it through some normal tissue to get it to the tumor. So we have a few ways to avoid damaging the normal cells along the way. And we're going to talk about one of them being particle choice. But the other

• 28:57Daniel Whiteson?

  one is very simple, which is that you just shoot from a few different angles. And those beams intersect at the tumor. So the beams are going to hit some normal cells, but the normal cells all just get like one beam, but the tumor gets like four beams. Or the generalization of this is that you have a single beam that sweeps around you. And as it rotates, it's consistently on the tumor, but the normal cells are only getting it part of the time. So the tumor gets it constantly, and it spreads out the beam across a bunch of other normal cells. So the idea is to deposit more energy to do more damage on the tumor cells than on the normal cells. And so the way you do that is by shooting from multiple angles or by scanning around. So the beam stays constantly on the tumor, but it's spread around on the normal cells. Does that make sense?

• 29:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  That does, yeah. So I've talked to a few friends who have had cancer, and the treatment that they got saved their lives, but increased their future risk of getting cancer because it damaged the DNA of some of their other cells. Do we know for this treatment, when you get, I don't think I would love the idea of having particles go through all of my brain, even if I knew they were still focused on one spot, but you know, it still sounds better than the alternative of letting the tumor grow. But do we know with this method 40 years down the road, does it increase your probability of getting a tumor somewhere else?

• 30:13Daniel Whiteson?

  It definitely increases your probability of getting a tumor in that otherwise normal tissue because you're shooting beams through it and you're depositing energy and you're damaging DNA. And so, yeah, you're setting yourself up for cancer in those cells. But people are trying to make this more and more accurate by controlling the dose, by doing really thin scans, by making sure that the dose is like the minimal necessary. People used to have really high doses to make sure they got the tumor. And now they can scale that down and have better models for calculating the dose. They just used to assume like the human body is water. Now they're like, okay, well, there's other tissues in there and we need to take that into account. Think about the scattering, you know, and now they think more about the angles. What is it going to go through? As time goes on, we get better and better at this.

• 30:58Daniel Whiteson?

  And also crucially, we're choosing the particles we shoot because that can determine where the energy lands.

• 31:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so let's talk about what our options are for particles.

• 31:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so number one is photons, right? We all get radiation when we go to the doctor for a broken bone. They use X-rays to take a picture of your insides. And X-rays pass through the body, but they're absorbed differently by bones and by soft tissue. And that's why you can see through the body, right? This is a whole fascinating topic here about transparency. Like, why can visible light not go through the body, but X-rays can? And the answer is that for photons, how far they go through and where they deposit their energy, or if they do deposit their energy, depends on the wavelength of light. Today, we're just going to talk about that interchangeably, right? Radiation is made of particles. One example is a photon. We'll also talk about electrons and protons, but we'll start with photons, mostly X-rays.

• 31:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  I feel like I'm still not really understanding how X-rays work. Can you give me some more detail?

• 31:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Let's think about what happens when a photon hits your body, right? And let's say, for example, it's a normal visual light photon, like a red photon that's just flying around. Well, what happens when it hits your body is it finds a bunch of atoms. And those atoms all have energy levels, right? There are electrons whizzing around those atoms and they can absorb some photons. If an electron has an energy level that matches the energy of the photon that's coming in, it can eat it. Like if the electron is in energy level five and it needs a certain amount of energy to go up to six or to seven, and a photon comes along with just that much energy, boom, it can gobble it up. So this is atomic absorption. And also atomic emission, like we talked about recently in our episodes about what color is the sun.

• 32:40Daniel Whiteson?

  That same atom, if the electron is in the higher energy level, it can release that energy, shooting off that photon. So atoms can absorb photons of specific energy levels, right? This is why red paint is red, right? Because it absorbs everything but the red, it reflects the red. The red doesn't get absorbed by those materials. This is why glass is transparent, because there are no atoms in the glass that can drink light in the visible spectrum, right? So it just passes through. So for very low energy light, like the kind that's in the visible spectrum, whether or not it goes through, or whether or not it's absorbed and deposits its energy, and that's the crucial thing, right? For curing cancer or treating cancer, you want to deposit your energy, depends precisely on what energy you have.

• 33:23Daniel Whiteson?

  But for treating cancer, we're not normally shooting just like light bulbs at people, right? We're shooting higher energy stuff. And so at higher energy, what happens is the photoelectric effect. Instead of the electron just going up in energy level, you kick the electron off of the atom, right? You completely ionize it. So if you have high enough energy, like X-rays, for example, they can kick electrons out of the atom. This is the photoelectric effect that Einstein used to like discover quantum mechanics and all of that kind of stuff. And then at even higher energy levels, what happens to a photon is that it pair produces, it turns into an electron and a positron because of the nuclear electric field. And so what happens to a photon depends a lot on its energy relative to the matter.

• 34:07Daniel Whiteson?

  And so X-rays are a typical thing that we use in radiotherapy. And they do penetrate, right? And so they have high energy, so they can get pretty deep into your body, like if you're You just shoot red light at somebody, it's absorbed at the skin, but X-rays can penetrate. They can go further in. The downside of X-rays for treatment is that they leave a lot of energy in the first few layers. Like they deposit energy and then it sort of peter out. And so a lot of the energy is deposited near the top. So if you want to get like deeper in, you have like a tumor like three centimeters under the skin. You have to shoot a lot of X-rays at it and the normal cells, the cells you don't want to treat that are between the skin and the tumor are also getting a lot of X-ray energy. So that's why for X-rays, it's crucial to like rotate it around the body.

• 34:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so when you go to get an X-ray and you wear a lead. Oh, that lead is not covering the spot where you're getting the X-ray. It's covering everything else. Got it. Okay.

• 34:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. It's covering your critical bits.

• 35:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 35:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Because X-ray penetration also depends on the atomic nucleus, right? If the atom has high Z, a lot of protons and neutrons in the nucleus, then it's likely to absorb the X-rays rather than let them through. And so the lead is like a shield for you.

• 35:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Got it. I really messed up my ankle when I was pregnant and I was so worried to get an X-ray. You know, I didn't want to hurt little Ada, but anyway, she was fine. Thanks to the lead blanket. Or maybe she's weird because something went wrong, but she's weird in the best way possible. So anyway.

• 35:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, they used to take X-rays with incredibly bright sources, right? And now they've reduced those X-rays far as they can and they can still see inside your body, but with much, much lower luminosity. They've improved the detectors they put on the other side. So X-rays are much safer than they used to be. If you're going to get an X-ray in like the 50s or 60s, it's really dangerous. But now it's much, much safer. Yeah. The X-rays you get do not deliver a dangerous amount of radiation. And there are other things we do in our lives, like flying an airplane that do increase our radiation dose. But people don't really think about it that way very much.

• 36:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, I don't, but I'm about to go on a long plane ride. Thanks for ruining it for me.

• 36:12Daniel Whiteson?

  One more thing to worry about.

• 36:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, man, I'm gonna sleep so good tonight. Okay, so how do we make these X-ray beams, Daniel?

• 36:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. If you want to make a beam of red light, you just like heat up a tungsten filament and it glows in the white and you can have like a prism and filter out the red light. But if you want X-ray beams, we don't have stuff that glows in the X-ray. You need like super duper crazy hot gas, like sources of X-rays astrophysically come from like gas near black holes and stuff. And so we don't have that here. It's not easy to generate. So instead, what you just do is you just heat up the electrons, right? Take a bunch of electrons, speed them up using an electric field. Electrons respond to electric fields. They're going really, really fast. This is a lot like what we do in particle physics. And then bend them with a magnet. You have an electron, super high velocity, going in some direction. It encounters a magnetic field, what does it do?

• 37:05Daniel Whiteson?

  It bends, right? And when an electron bends, the only way it can do it is by emitting a photon, right? That's how electrons bend. And in a sense, it's interacting with the electromagnetic field. And so photons are a natural way for that to do it. And so when it's going at high speed and bends through a magnet, it tends to emit a high energy photon, and that's our source of X-rays. Which is why you often have like X-ray crystallography facilities at places with particle beams, like at Argonne National Lab, they have like a world-class X-ray crystallography setup because they're also good at particles.

• 37:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Cool. Okay, so this sounds like a really great method for creating X-rays and finding where tumors are, but this is not something you'd ever use to treat a tumor, right?

• 37:45Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, you can use these to treat tumor. They're not great because they, as we said before, they pass through the body and they deliver energy in many layers, but you can use X-rays. You can use high-energy photons to treat a tumor. But these days, we have more advanced techniques that are superior. Yeah.

• 38:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so we were just talking about electrons. Can you skip the phase where you use a magnet to get X-rays and just use those electrons directly?

• 38:09Daniel Whiteson?

  You can use electrons and shoot them at people, right? And they will deliver their energy, but electrons are not very penetrating, right? Your skin mostly stops electrons. At very low energy, the electron will just like ionize atoms and be absorbed. At very high energy, the electrons will emit a bunch of radiation and slow down. It's called Bremsstrahlung, which is German for like breaking radiation. And so electrons are not very penetrating, mostly because they're very, very low mass. And so like any interaction basically stops them because even at high energy, they don't have a lot of momentum because their mass is so low. And so they're not a great choice for penetrating. The gold standard, the thing you really want is some kind of radiation,

• 38:50Daniel Whiteson?

  which takes a while to stop, which like flies through your body and then deposits its energy all in one go, somewhere deep in your body in a way that you can tune.

• 39:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so we've talked about photons and electrons, and let's let the listeners guess what kind of particle it is that does that. And we'll get back to it after the break.

• 39:19Speaker 00

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• 39:38Daniel Whiteson?

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• 39:41Speaker 19

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• 40:15Speaker 00

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• 41:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So we've already talked about photons. We've already talked about electrons, but the best method is one we haven't talked about yet. And by process of elimination, I'm gonna guess it's protons.

• 41:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Because you only have three particles in your mind, is that why?

• 41:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, you know, you told me particles are complicated. But yes, I guess those are the first three that come to mind.

• 41:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, that's fair because the universe is mostly made of protons, electrons, and photons. So that's a good set to have in your mind. Good choice, Kelly.

• 41:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  I also have this outline in front of me that says protons next.

• 41:39Daniel Whiteson?

  That makes you sound smart.

• 41:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's my trick.

• 41:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Protons are a great choice for treating cancer. And protons are also one of the favorite toys of particle physicists because we can accelerate them to really high energies and bend them around. They have a lot of mass compared to an electron. So you can get them going really fast. And when they go around curves, they don't emit as much radiation because they're heavier. And protons, because of the way they interact with matter, can penetrate deeply and deposit their energy deep under the skin without harming as much the tissue in between.

• 42:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, that's fantastic.

• 42:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 42:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Why does it work that way?

• 42:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it's fascinating. Protons can interact with the electrons in matter, right? Or with the nucleus. And which one they do depends on their velocity. So when they're going really fast, they basically can't see the nucleus and they just interact with the electrons. But it's like glancing collisions. It's too big and heavy to really get slowed down by these electrons. It's like a bulldozer going through a field of snowmen, right? It's just like plows right through them, hardly gets slowed down. I guess you were just reading Calvin and Hobbes.

• 42:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Perfect.

• 42:47Daniel Whiteson?

  And so like each snowman that the bulldozer hits slows down a tiny little bit, but it really doesn't deposit a lot of energy. It doesn't get slowed down. But this interaction is dependent on the velocity squared. And so at some point, it reaches some threshold where it does get slowed down enough. Now it's going to interact with the atomic nucleus and that's going to rapidly sap it of energy. And so there's like a threshold there above which it can mostly ignore what's going on inside the nucleus and just plow on forward. But when it gets too slow, then all of a sudden it's a very strong interaction with the nucleus and it deposits a lot of its energy right there. And so that's why it's excellent, of course, for treatment. And this is called the Bragg peak.

• 43:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  I remember reading about the Bragg peak because when I was reading about space radiation, one of the problems with trying to understand how radiation impacts people is that you often study it in rodents. And rodents are just smaller than humans. There's less mass that the proton needs to go through. And if the particles in some cases are just like shooting through the rats, then you don't really understand the impact of the radiation because the particle didn't stop and release all of its energy inside of the body of the organism. And so there's some concern that like studying rodents doesn't tell you exactly what you need to know because humans are just bigger and we're more likely to stop a particle because it's running into more stuff. Does that make sense?

• 44:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Can't you solve that problem just by like, you know, gluing a bunch of rats together into like a huge sphere of rat? And then you could have enough rat to stop the protons?

• 44:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel, you missed your calling in biology.

• 44:20Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm sure we can get that past the IRB, right? I don't see any problems with that.

• 44:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  That sounds totally ethical. I'm sure they'd have high quality of life.

• 44:28Daniel Whiteson?

  I wonder if you need to have the mouths all pointed out, but then, you know, what's going on in the inside? Yeah, anyway, this is probably not a great idea.

• 44:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  This gets messy, Daniel.

• 44:37Daniel Whiteson?

  So the Bragg peak is a great way to understand where the energy is deposited by these various particles. So if you imagine like we're talking about as a function of the depth, how deep into the tissue, start out with electrons, mostly deposit energy at the very surface. Photons deposit a lot of their energy to the surface, then it fades gradually. But protons like deposit almost no energy and then all of a sudden boom, you're like 10 centimeters in, they deposit almost all of their energy there. That's the peak that they're referring to when they say the brag peak. And this is excellent, right? Because if you could tune this, if you could say, oh, I wanted 10 centimeters in or 15 centimeters in, then you could basically just shoot a beam and have it deposit most of its energy deep within the tissue and spare the normal tissue where the protons are passing through.

• 45:20Daniel Whiteson?

  They're still plowing through those electronic snowmen, but they're not really doing a lot of damage.

• 45:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's amazing. All right, so tell me in a practical sense, how would you do this?

• 45:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so by changing the energy of the protons, you can change the depth. And so where deposits its energy depends on the velocity, right? So if you start out with a lot of velocity, then you're going to go much deeper and then all of a sudden deposit your energy. If you're very close to that threshold already, then you're not going to go very far and then cross over that threshold where you're depositing your energy. So you can tune the depth where the protons are depositing their energy, which means doing damage to those cells, breaking up the cancer DNA by tuning the energy of the protons. So you already have like two dimensional pointing, just by pointing the beam at something, right? Now you have the third dimension of control by tuning the energy of the beam. You can go deeper, you can go less deep.

• 46:11Daniel Whiteson?

  And so you can do this 3D, they call it pencil beam scanning, where you're changing the direction of it and you're changing its energy simultaneously. So you can trace out the three dimensional shape of the tumor, right? You're probably imagining a tumor as a sphere and that's what a physicist would do. And that's probably what they did 20 years ago, like, let's assume a spherical tumor.

• 46:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  What, what was that?

• 46:35Daniel Whiteson?

  That was clueless physicist accent. I don't know.

• 46:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Was it German? It sounded vaguely German, but I'm not.

• 46:41Daniel Whiteson?

  It was a rough average of all the accents I've heard at CERN. There you go.

• 46:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, perfect. All right, move on.

• 46:46Daniel Whiteson?

  There's a little Russian in there, a little German, maybe some Italian and a smattering of Japanese. No, all right, I'm equally offending the whole world right now. But imagine if you can do a 3D scan with like an MRI and you can see exactly where the tumor is. And tumors are never simply shaped. They're like long and thin. They've got a blob over here. And what you ideally want to do is deposit energy everywhere in the tumor and nowhere else. Well, with a proton beam, you can do that.

• 47:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 47:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Because you can aim the beam and then you can change the energy, go back and forth and back and forth over the tumor. And then when you change the angle, now you're intersecting a different part of the tumor with a different shape and different depth. Now you change the energy, the protons back and forth, back and forth. You can scan in 3D. You can like trace out the whole tumor, use the Bragg peak to deposit energy there and almost nowhere else.

• 47:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's amazing. So do we have like complicated models that sort of figure that out ahead of time? And you just press a button and then it automatically gets the whole tumor? Or is somebody like going, you know, step by step and like moving the beam around to get every little part of the tumor?

• 47:47Daniel Whiteson?

  It's all computerized, absolutely, and controlled. So nobody's like, oops, I slipped and I, you know, fried your eyeball or whatever. The disadvantage is that proton beams are harder, right? Like electron beams are easy to make. Electrons are light. You can accelerate them easily. X-ray beams, there's lots of ways to make that. Proton beams are complicated. And the magnets that bend them and point them are huge. We're talking like hundreds of tons of magnets usually.

• 48:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 48:15Daniel Whiteson?

  And so these facilities are much more specialized. They sound fantastic. And if you get cancer, I hope you have access to one, but there are not that many of these facilities yet in the world because they are big and complicated.

• 48:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Is this also a kind of new treatment for cancer? How long has this been around?

• 48:31Daniel Whiteson?

  It's an idea that's been around since the 40s, like Robert Wilson, the guy who designed Fermilab and did all sorts of crazy architecture and was a huge important particle physicist, predicted this in the 1940s in a paper and it was first used in the 50s. It was pretty expensive until around 25 years ago, when people made some improvements in magnet technologies. Now, instead of there being like one center at Fermilab, for example, there are a few dozen centers worldwide. And as of like 10 years ago, like 100,000 people had received this treatment. So it's still not the overwhelming treatment for cancer, mostly because there aren't that many centers and they're expensive, but it's definitely the best treatment you can get.

• 49:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hmm. So we're not medical doctors. So we, I just, I wanna, I wanna clarify a little bit for the best treatment we can get. That probably depends on what kind of tumor you have.

• 49:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes.

• 49:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. Okay.

• 49:26Daniel Whiteson?

  So from a particle physicist's point of view, thinking about maximizing the control of the energy dose, proton beams are, from the physics point of view, the best way to optimize the energy dose delivered. But please speak to your doctor about your treatment needs. Don't listen to me.

• 49:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. You're welcome, I heart. We had all the right caveats there.

• 49:47Daniel Whiteson?

  But for a particle physics nerd, it's very similar to what we do with the Large Hadron Collider. Like how you make a proton beam? Well, that's what we have with the Large Hadron Collider is a proton beam. And so the steps are very similar. Like you start with hydrogen, right? Protons are everywhere. They're the most common thing in the universe. The universe mostly hydrogen, which is a proton and electron. Take some hydrogen, heat it up so the electron goes away and you have protons, right? And then you just need to accelerate them, which means put them in an electric field. We used to just use flat electric fields to accelerate particles. Now we use these cool things called RF cavities. These things have oscillating electromagnetic waves. So the particles like surf on them, which is really cool, and get accelerated more

• 50:29Daniel Whiteson?

  easily over shorter distances to higher energies. And then you have magnets to keep them going in a loop. And that's exactly how the Large Hadron Collider works. And so these are lower energy than the Large Hadron Collider. You don't need crazy energies in order to deposit a dose in your brain, but it's the same technology. And so because it's more similar to the LHC than to like your standard technology, it is more specialized and it is more rare.

• 50:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So let me tie this back to parasites. All right. So when you have a parasite in your body and then it dies, that can often be worse than having a live parasite in your body. Cause now there's all this dead tissue in your immune system like responds to it. Does this process have to get done in stages? Cause if you've killed too many of your cells all at once, your brain now has all of this dead stuff that it needs to sort of process and deal with? Or, or do you not know? Because I, we're way outside of physics now.

• 51:21Daniel Whiteson?

  I don't know in great detail, and maybe some cancer doctors can write in and let us all know. But I do know that the immune system will respond to this. And for example, if you get radiation treatment on a tumor, it can make the tumor swell, even if it dies, like the immune response there can make the tumor swell, which can also be dangerous, because if it's next to something delicate, you don't want it to swell. And so again, talk to your doctor about what the best treatment is for you and all those side effects. But we actually do have some data about what would happen if you shot a super duper high energy particle beam into your head, because it happened once.

• 51:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  What?

• 51:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. There was a Russian guy, Burgoski, and he basically was looking down the particle beam. He was doing some repairs on the beam, and they turned it on. Oops. And so it went right through his head. And amazingly, the guy survived.

• 52:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 52:12Daniel Whiteson?

  He ended up with epilepsy and some hearing loss. And some people say his personality changed a little bit, but he lived his life otherwise. So I wouldn't recommend it, but it is possible to survive LHC level energy proton beam through the brain.

• 52:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, my gosh, this happened at the LHC?

• 52:30Daniel Whiteson?

  No, this was definitely not at CERN or the Large Hadron Collider. This is in 1978 at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Prodinno, back behind the Iron Curtain. And it was Anatoly Burgoski.

• 52:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Poor guy. Well, I'm glad he made it.

• 52:44Daniel Whiteson?

  We're all glad that he survived. And we're sorry that that happened. And I hope that it doesn't happen to you. But you know, the bigger picture is that particles interacting with matter is complicated. Particles from the sun and from the atmosphere can mutate your DNA and cause cancer. But particle beams can also deposit energy in those cancerous cells in a very defined and very calibrated way to help treat your cancer. And so particles are on both sides of the coin of life.

• 53:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. And I'm guessing that most of the folks who are working on these particle related questions did not have in mind that this would end up being a treatment for cancer. So, you know, we're gonna go ahead and bang that drum that we've been banging so much lately. Fund basic research. This stuff results in amazing life-saving technologies.

• 53:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. And you don't know if that's studying to like how ducks mate, or how to synthesize this random chemical, or whether this parasitoid wasp does this or that is going to yield the next great bit of technology that's going to save your life or a loved one, or transform our lives into some way we can never imagine.

• 53:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Amen. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening and we'll see you on the next show.

• 54:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.

• 54:08Daniel Whiteson?

  We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

• 54:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

• 54:20Daniel Whiteson?

  We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at [email protected].

• 54:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky. And on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K Universe.

• 54:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

• 54:40Speaker 21

  With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. Whether you're leading a big project, planning an elaborate trip, or trying to balance work and life, ChatGPT can help. Give it a goal, plus things like files, notes, or project plans. Develop a trip itinerary with daily updates, or create a prioritized schedule. So you can spend less energy sorting out the details and more on bringing your biggest ideas to life. Get started at chatgpt.com.

• 55:08Speaker 22

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 55:39Speaker 00

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 56:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.