True Crime & Forensic Pathology with Patricia Cornwell & Dr. Jonathan Hayes

How can you get away with murder? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice explore forensic pathology and autopsies with medical examiner and author Jonathan Hayes, featuring an interview with author of Autopsy, Patricia Cornwell.

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

• 0:01Neil 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 here, your personal astrophysicist. And today, we're going to talk about forensic pathology. Not only the real thing, but what happens when it becomes novelized and becomes fictionalized storytelling. Chuck, always good to have you.

• 0:35Chuck Nice?

  Always good to be here, alive, alive.

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think on this topic, we're going to need some serious levity.

• 0:41Chuck Nice?

  Nothing like, I mean, yeah. What do you call it when it's already done? Now, Gallo's humor is when you're about to die. What do you call it when you're already dead?

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if I want to know. So we have a fascinating pair of guests on this episode. First, we have Patricia Cornwell, and we've actually had her on before. And she has another novel she's going to tell us about. And she not only talked about dead people, talks about dead people and the science behind the crimes that are involved, she also took that to space.

• 1:20Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 1:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so that's why we've got her on this show. And but she's a novelist, and she came to the subject as a journalist. But now we have a novelist who started writing novels because he was actually a medical examiner. All right? This is his guy's expertise, Jonathan Hayes. Dr. Jonathan Hayes, welcome to StarTalk. Thanks, Neil. Hey, Chuck.

• 1:46Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's a pleasure. Wow.

• 1:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, so you you came to to the writing profession.

• 1:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Having started as a sort of professional of dead people, what is your official sort of title, other than sort of, you work in the medical examiner's office, but what does someone call you as a profession, as a scientific profession?

• 2:10Speaker 02

  My scientific title is I'm a forensic pathologist. And pathologist is a physician who makes diagnoses by examining samples taken from patients. And that may be a blood sample, or if you have a weird mole, you'll do a biopsy. And it's a pathologist who looks at it under the microscope. A pathologist is also the physicians who do autopsies. An autopsy is an examination of the body after death that's carried out in order to get as much information as possible about the cause and the circumstances of that death. It starts by looking at the outside of the body. Body's examined for scars, or tattoos, or identifying marks, and for evidence of disease or injury. Then the body is opened and examined internally. We'll examine all the organs. We'll place the remains of the organs back in the body,

• 2:54Speaker 02

  and we may do some additional testing. For example, looking for drugs, or we may do some DNA testing. If there are any injuries internally, we'll document those too. And then we'll perform, we'll prepare an autopsy report. So that's basically what a pathologist does. Now, I'm a forensic pathologist, and that's a subspecialty of pathology. And forensic pathologists do autopsies on the victims of violent, unnatural, suspicious deaths. So on a daily basis, I examine wounds and I interpret wounds. So if you get shot or stabbed, and you get to the ER, the ER docs are going to just be examining you to try and save your life. They're not going to interpret the wounds. They may have guesses at what's next in the world, what's next in the world. But that's the area of expertise of the pathologist, the forensic pathologist.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  And so on a daily basis, I'm looking at wounds and trying to interpret those wounds, and what actually happened to the person.

• 3:45Chuck Nice?

  Now, how often, doctor, do you examine someone who has been felled by gunshot? And your determination is, oh, they didn't die of a gunshot wound?

• 4:00Speaker 02

  That has yet to happen. Gunshot wounds tend to be fairly lethal. Gunshot wounds are far more likely to be lethal than most other types of injury. But for example, you're five times more likely to die if you're shot than if you're stabbed.

• 4:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. Ah, look at that. Okay, but so that that that brings to that puts on the table the very question if let's say it's not a gunshot wound with where you have that sort of the easy statistics on that. If two people just sort of got into a fight and then one person ultimately dies, is it important that you find out the actual thing that killed the person? Or or does that even matter if the person's dead and they have multiple injuries?

• 4:46Speaker 02

  No, it's it's.

• 4:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That sort of lead up to it.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  It's critically important that we find out exactly why why the person is is dead. That that's our raison d'etre, you know, we we have to know exactly why the person died. Because you would be surprised at the complexities of the questions that arise, the legal questions and the medical questions when someone dies, particularly in an altercation or a fight. So we we spend a lot of time getting it right, and we have endless debates about the exact wording of the death certificate.

• 5:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. And and are is what you do filmed?

• 5:17Speaker 02

  No, it's it's we document our findings photographically. I mean, occasionally you'll find the video documentation of a prime scene, there'll be a video walkthrough. But what the autopsy itself is not is not filmed.

• 5:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why why not?

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Because I I really don't I don't know. I'm sure there's be a lot of extreme.

• 5:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, just tradition. Tradition.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  I'm sure there'd be a lot of extraneous information. An autopsy can be long, for example, a typical autopsy, say you have a forty year old man who's jogging on a on a treadmill at his at his gym and collapses. That autopsy, assuming he's got something straightforward like heart disease, which is the most likely cause of death there, that autopsy will take about an hour. But if you have a complex case like a a a child abuse case, fatal child abuse case, those can take a couple of days. Um. So it's a long period of time. Also, I don't I don't think anyone likes to be, you know, closely monitored while they're doing, you know, this was sitting him.

• 6:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, no, here's here's why I ask. I mean, presumably forensic pathology has come a long way over the decades. There might be things in ten years someone would know to look for that you don't yet know to look for because the field has not advanced to that point. Wouldn't it be good if we could reopen the videos and have a third party do the autopsy based on the video as though they were your eyes looking at the same body?

• 6:43Speaker 02

  I I understand what you're saying, but the thing is, I I when you say that, you know, forensic body has come a long way, it really hasn't. I mean, a stab wound is

• 6:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  A stab wound in twenty twenty one looks like a stab wound in nineteen twenty one or a stab wound in eighteen twenty one. And we do document things very thoroughly. We take a lot of photographs. I mean, I suppose you could put on some sort of virtual reality headset and video record and that's just a three dimensional, interactive thing going on there. But I don't I don't think that's sort of, you know, that's obviously, you were now talking about unknown unknown. So I don't really know the answer to that question. But I think it would be terribly cumbersome to try and have a video camera up and documenting every single step of the autopsy.

• 7:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So so is what you're saying that for what you do, it it really is the fact that we continue to kill each other kind of the same way. But we don't we don't really get that creative when it comes to killing each other.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  Well, you'd be surprised. I mean, one of the things that I've been doing this work for thirty years now, and every week I see something I've never seen before.

• 7:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, no.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  And it's not so much in terms of the homicides. It's also much the murders. You know, murder is murder. People have knives and guns and baseball bats and whatnot. It's it's more just the peculiar circumstance, the peculiar things that people get, you know, positions that people get themselves into. There'll always be something at a death scene that you can't explain.

• 8:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 8:13Chuck Nice?

  That that's fascinating, actually.

• 8:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, now, I don't know that you can major in forensic pathology in college. So what what does one major in? Is it pre-med?

• 8:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What are some of the trackings that get to where you are?

• 8:25Speaker 02

  It's to become a forensic pathologist, you go to college, you do pre-med, go to medical school. Then after graduating medical school, you do three years of at least three years, three to five years of pathology residency. Then you do a one-year forensic training, which I did in Miami.

• 8:41Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  And then all of a sudden, 12 years after you began, you're a forensic pathologist. Now, I work in a medical examiner system. Medical examiner is a physician who's specialized in forensic pathology. It's not an elected position. And we investigate deaths, violent and natural, suspicious deaths for a city or a jurisdiction.

• 9:05Chuck Nice?

  You're Quincy.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  I've actually never watched that show.

• 9:08Chuck Nice?

  Oh, man. I used to watch that show when I was a kid, man. Quincy was the best. Jack Klugman, man, he used to walk around, he had, he would eat sandwiches.

• 9:21Chuck Nice?

  He would eat sandwiches during the during the autopsy. The guy was great, man.

• 9:27Speaker 02

  I enjoy a good sandwich, but, you know, no one eats to the autopsy room. It's not the sort of place you sit down and go, oh, this is an appetizing place to enjoy it.

• 9:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what of this training and your life experience did you feel compelled to put into your novel? Precious Blood, A Hard Death?

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Precious Blood was the first one, and A Hard Death was the second. And the first, the first is, like I think in most novelists, it's very semi-autobiographical, I should say. It's set in New York City after 9/11. It's a serial killer story. But I used a lot of my day-to-day experiences. I don't, I can't, we don't really talk about our cases. It's a matter of medical privacy. But I wanted to talk about the things I've seen and the things that disturbed and upset me. So I put a lot of that into the book. And 9/11 was one of the things that disturbed and upset me. My work after that, I worked in this office for, you know, for eight solid months, just trying to identify people. That was, that was the hardest part of my life, I think, absolutely.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  But I tried to make, I tried to make the the description of, you know, what forensic is and what it feels like to be in a morgue and the smell and the sights of death. I tried to make them realistic. And I think I did a pretty good job.

• 10:41Chuck Nice?

  So let me ask you this, but since you just brought this up, I don't want to get super personal, but you kind of broached the subject here. How do you deal with all this kind of morose, just depressing information that you're absorbing almost daily?

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Well, the last few years have been, have made it pretty hard to stay positive about anything, but I think, you know, it's been my experience that human beings do do terrible things to each other, but also for the most part, when given the opportunity, people do the right thing. And I recognize that the murders I see, they're the exceptions, and that there may be horrible crimes indeed, on a, on a daily basis, most people are trying to do the right thing.

• 11:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. Okay. All right. It's hope prevails, I think, is how we think about that. So what's interesting, if we contrast Jonathan, your, your pathway into writing novels with that of Patricia Cornwell, who is, shared with us some of what inspires her when she approaches a novel that needs a bit of forensic pathology to make it run. Let's check it out.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  What we're really talking about is exploration. We're exploring, which is exactly why we want to go to the moon and do all those cool things is, and when, if you're going to be an artist, you need to explore and go out and let it tell you what the story is, let it tell you what the painting is, like, you know, James McNeill Whistler, he would have this boat one who would take him out in this flat bottom boat in the Thames at dusk, and he would look, he'd stand there on the filthy Thames in the Victorian era and look at what the light was doing, he'd remember that, and then he would go back and he would paint something evocative because he was there. And you feel he was there, you feel Hemingway was in the places that he's talking about.

• 12:38Speaker 03

  And I very much encourage to people, here's my, I have three words for everybody, just show up.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  Never know what you might find.

• 12:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that I, so I like that because what, what you're saying is that to really, not to put words in your mouth, but to infuse a story with a certain authenticity, it can't be just things you've read about or heard about. If you experience them firsthand, they manifest differently, even in your sentences and in the words you choose. And, and, and, and your emotional investment becomes that much deeper. Is that a fair accounting of what you just told me?

• 13:20Speaker 03

  That's absolutely right. Um, you, you want to invoke your senses. Um, I mean, why go into a morgue if you can just see a video of an autopsy? Um, because when your senses are assaulted by everything in there, it is a totally different thing. It's as different as reality from virtual reality, probably even more so. And for example, I can remember, I can remember how shocked I would feel when I would go down there to scribe for the medical examiners and I would put on the gloves and you know, this was back in the day where we didn't get in space suits like they do today with hazmat and all that. And I would put my hands on the body on the table where I'd lean on it while I'm jotting down whatever they're telling me and I'd, it's like as cold as marble.

• 14:05Speaker 03

  Because, and you would be amazed over and over again about things that, that you would not have emotional reactions to it if you didn't feel it and you weren't there. Um, or you didn't see it, or you weren't, you weren't standing there when the state trooper is looking through the woman's wallet. And she was hit by a car on her way home from the bar at about three o'clock in the morning. And you know, nobody really knew what she'd gone there for or why. And she was by herself such a bad hour. And he's going through her wallet and he finds a little fortune from a fortune cookie that she had saved. And it said, "You will still, you will soon have an encounter that will change the course of your life." So she's going off to a bar to meet her encounter, not thinking it's

• 14:47Speaker 03

  going to be a car. And you look at these things and you don't know whether to laugh or to cry, but you do know, I, I feel this, if, if I don't go and see those things, I have no right to write about them.

• 15:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm. Hmm. So Jonathan, you probably feel the same way, right? Because your writing emanates from your firsthand experiences, good and bad.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that in terms of the sensual aspects, the smells, the sounds, the sights, yeah, there's no substitute for firsthand experience. Then again, I mean, look at speculative fiction and science fiction. People use their imaginations and think, what would it be like to see this or to experience that? And I think that's really rich, too. In some ways, knowing what the truth is, kind of at some level deadens the fantasy. You know, I don't take any, in my own writing, I don't take any liberties with the science because I can't, I wouldn't lie about it. And that limits what you can do with the set of facts in front of you. And so that's one of the reasons I really enjoy a show like CSI, where, as I said

• 15:57Speaker 02

  before, it's not so much forensic science, it's forensic science fiction. I think they take the principles of forensic science and they make it more glamorous and they speed it up, they put sexy lighting on it. And the end result, I think, it may not get the technical accuracy of the forensic science, but it gets the romance of the science, and I really do like that. And it's for that reason I think CSI has been great, because it's attracted a lot of people into forensic. This is a field that really needs good people, with smart young people.

• 16:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you're saying is you, when you're exploring the fiction of your storytelling, it's in the whatever relationships led to the crime, you're not in a position to sort of stretch any other science. I say that only because we look at a Stephen King novel, often he touches on supernatural forces, and it leaves them a little bit cloaked, but something manifests and then adds another dimension that people seem to like. To watch and even read about, but but you're sticking to the facts on this one.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  Well, that's that's just in my writing, and I wouldn't rule out writing fantasy or horror novels, something like that. But even if I do, if like the whale of cuts someone's throat, I want to make, you know, to accurately depict the spray of blood or what have you. And so when I watch, when I watch a lot of like crime stuff, it sometimes it's at a procedural level, like the cops wouldn't do that, or wouldn't say that. For example, when I'm watching a horror movie or a crime movie, and like they visit a crime scene three days later, and all the blood is still bright red, that's upsetting to me because blood goes brown and then it goes black. It just looks so fake.

• 17:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  But I mean, I understand. I mean, since I've written fiction myself, I understand the challenges of creating something interesting, riveting. And I understand people taking liberties with the facts. I don't think Patty Cornwell does that. She too knows what it's like.

• 17:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So guys, we've got to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to find out how Patricia ends up putting her crime in space. Apparently, Earth wasn't good enough. Let's put people in space and have them commit crimes there, where you then need some more forensic pathology to figure out what the hell is going on when StarTalk returns.

• 18:17Speaker 04

  Hey, I'm Roy Hill Percival, and I support StarTalk on Patreon, bringing the universe down to Earth. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 18:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk. We're talking about forensic pathology with bestselling author Patricia Cornwell. And we have an authentic medical examiner in the house, in the house. We've got Dr. Jonathan, Dr. Jonathan Hayes, who's not only medical examiner for New York City, of all places, but also a novelist in his own right. Chuck, right before the end of the second segment, it looked like you wanted to slip in a question. What was that?

• 19:03Chuck Nice?

  Well, because he talked about how when you write forensic science fiction, that it makes it kind of sexy and it draws people into the field.

• 19:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He didn't say sexy, he said romantic. That's different.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  Well, I think sexy is right, too. I may have said sexy.

• 19:20Chuck Nice?

  You know, I'm sorry, Neil.

• 19:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excuse me.

• 19:23Chuck Nice?

  Unfortunately, unfortunately, unfortunately for me, my romance leads to sexy.

• 19:32Chuck Nice?

  But what I'm interested to know is, do you find the same thing in your field of astrophysics? Do you think science fiction causes people to now, like, pursue the science of the cosmos?

• 19:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it does. So that's why, even though, just like Jonathan, I'll call out things that are not real or wouldn't have happened that way. But I say the overall impact is positive. That because what people can do now is they can get interested and then they say, I like that. Let me read some more about it. And then the reading some more about it actually brings them into an anchored state of understanding. Whereas the fantasy sort of tickled their interest upfront. And Jonathan, I heard anecdotally that biology and chemistry professors in college found an increase in women taking courses that were sort of pre-forensic,

• 20:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  inspired by the actors who you like, you want to be like them in the series Crime Scene Investigation in CSI. Did you find this as well, coming up?

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Well, I think that increasingly forensics is becoming a matriarchy. There are a lot of women going into the field. And certainly in my field, my office, I would estimate is probably more than 50% female when it comes to the medical exam and stuff. And I think that's common in other areas, too. But I don't think it's just that they're impressed by the actors. I think they have minds that are interested in problem solving and figuring out how to bury a body.

• 21:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but I mean, I grew up at a time when no scientist was portrayed as anything you'd want to be. Like if you were cool and you saw a movie that had scientists in it, the scientists were not cool. And so there was no, there was no draw. There was no pop culture force operating on how you might align your life's ambitions. And CSI, all the actors are beautiful. The men, the women, the storytelling, what they're wearing. Plus, they're shown with real life problems, right? They have boyfriends, girlfriends, relationship problems. So they're fully fleshed out characters. So Jonathan, are you a fully fleshed out?

• 21:45Speaker 02

  Oh dear God, that's a difficult question to ask.

• 21:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hey, how does that work at the bar? Someone say, what do you do? I studied dead bodies. It's like, that's a, that's a short conversation, it might seem to me.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  No, people, you know, because there is this interest. There was an article in New York Magazine a few years back that said that forensic pathologists are the new supermodels. Because, I mean, you turn on your TV set any hour of the day or night, you're gonna see a forensic show, whether it's like, you know, True Crime, or whether it's some sort of thriller, whether there's someone's burying a body in the basement or whatnot. And the, the, the way my career and forensics in general is portrayed in popular culture really catches the imagination of people. And I think it's because at some level, in the old days, a hero was a guy with muscles who knew how to handle a gun. And, and forensics is, is, is an area where a nerd with a brain and, and some sharp insights is able to be even more powerful than that. And that's why the forensic science, I think, become, it makes, forensic scientist becomes a good hero.

• 22:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so let's, uh, let's pick up with my interview with Patricia Cornwell, who in her next book, there's like crime in space. Let's see what she says about that.

• 22:55Speaker 03

  I think that I might be the first author that has written about a, a, a case of violence in low Earth orbit and microgravity in space, I know the words. To do it in the credible way that, that it's not science fiction. I mean, everything that I have in that scene, that Scarpetta has to remotely work from the Situation Room in the White House to get, I mean, it's all within the realm of possibility. And the physics of it. What would happen when there's blood? Or the type of projectile somebody might use if you were going to do that? And look, you know as well as I do, the Russians have carried guns up there to the space station. They don't, you know, NASA doesn't advertise that, but it's true.

• 23:38Speaker 03

  And we, it's, the, the whole point is, my little mantra these days is from, from Earth, from space to ground, to six feet under. Because wherever we go, we will export what we do. Whether it's in orbiting laboratories down the road, or when people actually go to the moon and try to set up habitats, or Mars, or, it's, it's gonna happen. And we're also gonna have death. You know, we're gonna have things that we don't like to think about. And for me, I'm always wondering, what are you gonna do about that?

• 24:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So people will be people, whether they're on Earth or in space. And you're there to tell that, that kind of story.

• 24:19Speaker 03

  Well, you know, the thing that's kind of fun about it, because I talk to the real people, I talk to NASA people about this, you know, I talked to, to Jack Fisher, the, you know, astronaut who was up there for a while, and we talked about what blood would do, and fluids, and...

• 24:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, blood that's not in your body.

• 24:35Speaker 03

  That's true, blood that's not in your body.

• 24:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Blood that has spilled out of your body, what will it do?

• 24:40Speaker 03

  And then what happens, you know, if, where you've got a scene where something like this has occurred, and some astronauts, you know, come and will use the Dream Chaser, I know it's not crude yet, but it probably will be. And they, you know, they get to this, this orbiter that's in peril. Well, if you've had anything where you have death inside, and a violent death, what's that gonna be like? And how does a medical examiner work that?

• 25:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Jonathan, the, uh, I, this brings up an interesting question. You are completely trained for Earth-based crimes. That is, crimes operating under the sort of laws of physics as they manifest in 1G here on Earth. Can you imagine a future where... If we have colonies on the moon or Mars or beyond or hotels in space, can you imagine a branch, a sub-branch of your field that then has to sort of learn space physics to do your job?

• 25:36Speaker 02

  Neil, I don't know how much space physics is going to be involved. I think the periods of time that that man is going to spend in zero gravity are going to be fairly limited. And perhaps not when it comes to things like the space station. But when you're looking at actually larger colonies where where people would actually live, which is where I think violence is mostly like like it's way out. I think they'll be at normal gravity and, you know, the traditional medical examiner role is going to be pretty much the same. I think it'll be fairly specialized, the cases like like Patty was talking about, like I'm assuming some sort of violent blood spilling murder takes place in in microgravity or zero gravity. And I don't know if that's going to be frequent enough occurrence that it's going to develop into its own full fledged specialty, but it's going to be.

• 26:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'd hope not.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Well, I almost hope not. But that that will be a that will be a challenge. And when I was thinking about that too, what it could mean, a crime scene in zero gravity. The first thing that certainly was what Patty was talking about was the blood blood drop that spatter dynamics going to be different. Because, you know, you've probably seen your, you know, when you walk along after you've cut yourself, you can see the the shape of the blood spatter on your floor or whatever, and you can interpret the way you're moving and or if you're standing still, if you're standing still, a person is standing still and dripping blood from, say, a weapon onto the floor, it tends to have a round appearance, whereas when you're moving, it tends to have a teardrop appearance. But that's going to be different in in in microgravity or zero gravity.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  And so I think there's going to be some interesting science that's probably going to evolve because of that. But I have to say, I mean, this is a question for you, just how realistic are these? We talk about, you know, colonizing distant planets. But on a large scale, how realistic is it? I mean, we had the Concord in, what, nineteen sixty five or something like that? We had supersonic travel available to to, again, the very wealthy man. But it's gone now. And so how realistic are these dreams of colonizing foreign planets?

• 27:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I think if I I'm I'm tend to be a little on the skeptical side that any of that is going to happen anytime soon, but that shouldn't prevent people from getting ready for it, either legally or medically or the like. Little things, for example, as I understand it from movies I've seen, if you die while you're seated, then blood collects in your butt and in your feet or something, right? Because you don't have this sort of action, this vascular action to keep blood circulating. And if in zero G, the blood doesn't collect anywhere. So a lot of your cues you would use to judge how long a body's been dead are not available to you.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a fascinating thought. You're absolutely right. And how quickly will people bleed from an open wound if there's zero gravity?

• 28:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right. That's all of that. And so.

• 28:25Chuck Nice?

  Let me ask you this from a, I was just gonna ask from a forensic standpoint, because one of the things that happens in space is like a common death is like soup malfunction or something, and the person freezes solid because they're in space. Now, could, would you be able to do an autopsy on, like, if the person died, would you be able to do an autopsy on a solidly frozen body?

• 28:50Speaker 02

  It's like, you know, when we have a frozen body, it's like trying to chip into an iceberg. You're not going to get very far. So all you have to do is thaw the body, and of course, as you thaw the body, the body begins to break down fairly rapidly. Of course, in space, I think there may also be issues of desiccation, the body drying out very quickly, and there are questions of barotrauma, and even there's far more about this than I do, where the body is subjected to tremendous pressures out in the vacuum of space or removed from the vacuum of space. So it'll be, when we do start to see it, it'll be interesting, but I think I may have retired before that happens.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  I want to retire.

• 29:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I have to ask, you know, how often am I hanging out with a with a forensic pathologist? Could you explain exactly what rigor mortis is?

• 29:37Speaker 02

  Rigor mortis is stiffening of the muscles that occurs after death. The muscle proteins gradually kind of coagulate and as they coagulate, they stiffen up, the muscles stiffen. And you first detect it in, well, the first place you can detect it is with goose flesh because you have tiny little muscles that raise and lower the hairs in your body to trap air and keep you warm and all. So in the early stages, when rigor first comes in, you'll start to see a little bit of goose flesh developing. And you see these tiny little muscles pulling.

• 30:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, just to be clear, you're on a first name basis with rigor mortis, okay? You call it rigor. Rigor.

• 30:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, rigor mortis. Rigor, yeah.

• 30:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, I'm not on a first name basis, I'm sorry. Maybe I'll warm up to that.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  I hope you know.

• 30:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But go on.

• 30:24Speaker 02

  But you test for rigor by trying to bend joints and fairly small joints like finger joints become stiff first because it takes a lot of muscles to stiffen the hip joint or the knee joint. So we test in the fingers first, then we test in the jaw and then the arms, etc. And so from the from the amount of rigor that's present in the body, you can get some soft sense of how long the person has been dead to get that degree of stiffness. Now, a lot of it relates to the body temperature at the time of death. And if someone has a seizure at the time they die, they have a violent seizure, say they're doing cocaine or something, I don't know, they have a seizure and they die, that will raise the body temperature and the person will go into rigor mortis faster. So you have to be very careful. Interpreting the times since death is one of the hardest things we do.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  It's part of the science that's closest to an art, really.

• 31:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, wait, and so then I heard that rigor mortis eventually goes away. So what happens there?

• 31:17Speaker 02

  It does, the muscle proteins begin to break down again and the rigor slackens. But now you're starting to get on to, you know, the body is beginning, it's about to begin to break down. Typically, you can feel rigor mortis by about six hours after death. It's generally there by about 12 hours and goes off by about 36 hours.

• 31:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, wow. Wow. Okay, so that whole that whole expression where someone, you refer to a dead body as a stiff, that's a temporary condition.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I think stiff sounds better than temporarily stiff. We, we. Temporary stiff.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  We don't use that expression. You'd actually be surprised. I mean, because we see death the whole time, we're not alarmed or surprised. There's not an intense emotional reaction. There's not an intense emotional reaction to it unless it's the death of a child or some particularly tragic circumstance there. So we don't say the word cadaver. We don't say corpse. We just call them bodies.

• 32:10Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow. Yeah, that's very politically correct. I, I, I, I'm just gonna say, Jonathan, I don't, I don't think they'll be offended.

• 32:23Chuck Nice?

  And, and if they are, who are they gonna tell?

• 32:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how about this? If, just before we go to break, if a crime is committed in a distant place, again, I'm thinking space here, because Patricia's novel was in space. If some, a crime happens in space, are you able to talk someone through an investigation of a scene? If, let's say they're just generally scientifically literate, but they have no medical background such as what you have. Can you talk them through it and then have them submit a report on your behalf for having done so?

• 32:58Speaker 02

  I think I, I mean, I think I could. I could tell them what to look for. I could tell them how to turn the body and what to check for. I think I could do that. I mean, obviously, I'd want to document as far as they could, whether, you know, photographs or videos, so I could see for myself.

• 33:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, exactly. So you could do this from the beach while they're up there doing.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  In theory, in theory, but there's no real substitute for seeing with your own eyes. That's actually what autopsy means. Autopsy means own eyes. It says, having your own eyes looking at the body and seeing what's going on inside it.

• 33:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. I hadn't thought about that.

• 33:30Chuck Nice?

  Look at that.

• 33:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, all right. And another thing.

• 33:33Chuck Nice?

  All right, now, one last question.

• 33:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got one. What is the temperature of the? Of the the slidey things that you put the body in down in the morgue.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  We don't.

• 33:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I always wondered what that is.

• 33:43Speaker 02

  We don't use those anymore. There's there's I'm sorry about that.

• 33:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, come on. No, no. Bring them back. We need them.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  The old superstitions have to be disposed of. No, I mean, it's like it's like you couldn't clean the floors of those refrigerators, you know, because of the because of the slide in and out thing. So eventually they begin to reek and and build up fluids. So it's a horrible thing. It's just walk-in refrigerators, like you have at your local restaurant and a system of girdies for transporting the bodies in. The only time we see those draw type.

• 34:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He means meat locker. Chuck, did I hear him say meat locker?

• 34:17Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I was gonna say.

• 34:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's exactly what he said.

• 34:18Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, I hope to God it's not like my local restaurant.

• 34:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we got a slab of steer right here, and we got Ernie. Yeah, Ernie didn't make it through last night. We're gonna take a quick break, but more on forensic pathology with our two guests, Patricia Cornwell and Jonathan Hayes. We're gonna start talk return.

• 34:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back with Jonathan Hayes, medical examiner of New York City. Jonathan, what? Right before we took a break, you were about to tell a story because we were talking about meat lockers.

• 35:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 35:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because we think that's what you were describing.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  Well, no, we do. Modern storage of bodies is in walk-in coolers, which are just a very efficient way to handle the space and they're easy to clean. But, you know, in terms of meat lockers, during the cocaine wars of the 1980s and into about 1990, in Miami, there were so many homicides that they weren't able to hold all the bodies in the morgue refrigerators. And so what they were forced to do is to rent trucks, and they rented some refrigerator trucks, and some of them had the Burger King logo on the outside of those. And when word got out.

• 35:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, oh.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  When word got out that bodies were being stored in Burger King refrigerator trailers, apparently there was such an outcry amongst the population that the the agency got a large amount of money to build this beautiful new state-of-the-art facility with appropriate body storage. So that was a really upside of that.

• 35:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not a tactical, actually.

• 36:01Chuck Nice?

  Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce and the dead guy. Thanks.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  Well, I think the thing is, medical examiner's offices really only sort of rapidly improve when there's been a scandal. I mean, it's one of the sad truths. They tend to be fairly neglected politically. No one wants to talk about them. No one wants to fund them. So we tend to jump forward when there's something terrible like that happens.

• 36:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so I have to ask, in these meat lockers and in refrigerator trucks, how are the dead humans stored? Are they on meat hooks, like slabs of beef?

• 36:31Speaker 02

  No, actually, Neil, they're not on meat hooks like slabs of beef.

• 36:34Chuck Nice?

  I am, I am so disappointed now.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  This has really been disillusioning for you both.

• 36:41Chuck Nice?

  I know. It really is.

• 36:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Look, I'm sorry we interviewed you. We'd rather just imagine this stuff. Don't ruin it all with facts.

• 36:50Speaker 02

  That's, that's what I was saying. My, my old boss, Dr. Charles, she used to have an expression, to slay an ugly theory with a beautiful fact. It's always the other way around. To slay a beautiful theory with an ugly fact. And I'm sorry to have made this such a sad thing. I mean, no more bodies hanging on meat hooks in, in.

• 37:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you have to at least store them horizontally, right? Otherwise it won't work.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I mean, I suppose you could store them vertically, but the, the blood would pool, as you were talking about earlier. Yeah. No, the, the bodies are stored in a shelving system with it. And it's, it's all very modular and very efficient.

• 37:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  There are all sorts of systems for mass storage of bodies and, you know, all, all agencies are prepared for mass fatality events.

• 37:32Chuck Nice?

  Wow. So can I ask you this? A, a long time ago, I interviewed a police officer and he talked about a person who was murdered and they found him in his apartment in New York City. The way they found him is he leaked through the ceiling. Ew. So what would that be?

• 37:54Speaker 02

  Your question, Chuck?

• 37:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. My question is. What happened if that's the case? Or was this guy messing with me?

• 38:02Speaker 02

  No, I'm sure he was telling you the truth. What happens is after death, the body begins to break down. There's no immune system anymore. The white cells die off. The bacteria now rage throughout the body. And the bacteria produce gas. They cause the body to bloat and they break down the blood and cause it to go red and green and create a lot of discoloration. And as the pressure in the tissues builds from the gas as the body swells, the body will exude fluids as its tissues break down. That fluid will be called purge fluid and that will spill out around the body. And sometimes it'll soak through the ceiling.

• 38:36Chuck Nice?

  Ooh, holy crap.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  I know, it's not an attractive thing.

• 38:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's terrible.

• 38:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the bloating, that makes the body much less dense than it once was? Because it's the same mass now occupying a bigger volume. This would then cause the body to float if it was dead and at the bottom of any in the river. So that's why you need cement boots, right?

• 39:05Speaker 02

  That's exactly why you need cement boots. But it's also why if someone goes into the water, into the East River or to the Hudson during the winter, it may be a few months before the body develops enough gas from bacterial overgrowth that it actually starts to float up to the top. So there may be delay between someone drowning and us actually finding the bodies. There's this popular notion that when spring comes and the weather warms up and the water temperature warms up, then you get a harvest of bodies bobbing up to the surface. It's not quite that extreme, but yeah, bodies that are floating tend to be. Sometimes they get clothing traps some air or they may have swallowed some air and they can float because of that.

• 39:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so just to be very precise, this, because you're breaking down this whole, the whole evolution of a dead body. So the rigor mortis, that gives us the language. Where's the stiff, right? So we got that. Then you bloat and then that makes you buoyant. So that gets us the cement boots part of crime, right? And, okay, I'm just fleshing out the full picture here. So this is highly illuminating for me. Thank you.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  Good. No, I mean, clearly you're on top of this stuff. You should have gone into forensic medicine rather than master of physics. You could have used people like you.

• 40:26Chuck Nice?

  So dovetailing on what Neil just said, could you commit the perfect murder?

• 40:34Speaker 02

  You mean in terms of killing someone and getting away with it?

• 40:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, Jack, ooh.

• 40:38Chuck Nice?

  Leaving, leaving behind no evidence or no discernible cause of death or no way, I mean, forget alibis and all that kind of police work stuff, just like they would never be able to trace it back to you. Could you do that?

• 40:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it put Jonathan together with the TV series, How to, what's it called? How to Commit a Perfect Murder.

• 41:00Chuck Nice?

  How to Get Away with Murder. How to Get Away with Murder.

• 41:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is. So the two of them, because they know what everybody's looking for. Yeah. So Jonathan, Jonathan.

• 41:08Chuck Nice?

  I better never see you having lunch with Viola Davis.

• 41:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there plotting?

• 41:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Viola Davis, the star.

• 41:15Chuck Nice?

  Somebody's going, somebody's going down.

• 41:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Viola Davis, the star of How to Get Away with Murder. So wouldn't that make you a prime suspect in a murder where there's otherwise no evidence?

• 41:28Speaker 02

  I, I, I hope not.

• 41:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good answer. You should just stop there. Don't say anything else.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  No, I should. No, I, I think, I think it is possible, it would be possible to kill someone without leaving any, any clues or trace. Let's not go.

• 41:44Chuck Nice?

  Okay. All right.

• 41:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it is true. It is true. It's very hard to dispose of a dead body.

• 41:51Speaker 02

  That's the problem. It's not killing people. It's getting, getting rid of the body. We had a, a case where a, a man murdered his wife and then he buried her in the basement. And then for the next couple of weeks, he sat there watching endless repeats of CSI. And then finally he went to the police station and says, look, you're going to get me sooner or later. I'm going to tell you I murdered my wife and I buried her in the basement.

• 42:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, wow. Wow. So CSI solved the crime, even though.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  It did. Well, CSI also creates problems because now for a while at least, when the show was, you know, on the air all the time and everyone loved it, there's six different variations. I think CBS is actually bringing it back. But the juries began to demand higher levels of, of visual proof. They wanted more sort of glamorous, you know, animations and like incredible cutting edge science, which as I said, is on the border of science fiction.

• 42:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. And by the way, CSI wasn't just medical. There was also some physics involved and thermodynamics. I mean, not in every episode, but they would bring in, you know, the, some of the physical sciences when they related to the crime. And the murder so that there were some scientifically literate people there. CSI had a traveling museum exhibit where you would then solve your own crime. Kids, a kid exhibit where you go step by step and they give you clues and you have to figure it out. So it was a big force on the television landscape. So I was very impressed to watch that unfold. Well, how about the future of AI? AI is going to touch all of us in every way.

• 43:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It already has in some professions, but I think Patricia thought about that. And she was very impressed with what the future of AI might bring. So let's find out what she tells us.

• 43:32Speaker 03

  What's happening today is so amazing. And the line between what's real and what isn't, assuming we even know the difference between the two. The line is getting blurrier and blurrier. And so basically, when you think of an Alexa or these devices that we have, ultimately, everybody is you're going to have artificial intelligence assistance, even if even if you don't know you've got it. And and that's the thing that's both good and bad about it is that it we can't be without it. I mean, we can't, we can't manage this world, in my opinion, without artificial intelligence, especially think of air traffic control when you have drones buzzing around and things like that.

• 44:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, wait, wait, you just said something very important. You're suggesting that the complexity of the world we are building for ourselves may one day require AI just to navigate it.

• 44:29Speaker 03

  Well, look at what's happened with with your mobile phones. I mean, we've created many computers that people really almost can't function without.

• 44:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So so Jonathan, is there? Can you picture a day where AI conducts the investigation and not you?

• 44:48Speaker 02

  I think a system would be would be closer. I don't think AI will ever be. For example, things like an autopsy, not all bodies are the same. Everybody has numerous different idiosyncrasies. There are very subtle little anatomic differences in structure. And actually examining the body is a very complex thing. It's visually, like sometimes olfactory. And then it's, you know, the touch and, you know, the feeling of, you know, actually putting your hands in and examining the length of the wound, etc. I think it'll be a long time before there's. You know, robots or whatever that are sensitive enough to to be able to do that with the discrimination a human can do. That said, when they do, I expect they may have a slightly higher degree of accuracy. I think there's less room for observer bias then.

• 45:33Speaker 02

  But for a long time, those robots will have to be overseen uh by, you know, someone human to see if they're if they haven't gone hopelessly off the rails. I think where AI will be useful is things like in a crime scene, that there is a thousand, there's a million things going on in a crime scene. I think the big problem is trying to decide what's relevant to the crime and what's not. For example, if you have a dead body lying on the floor, there's blood spatter over the place. There could be a thousand blood spatter droplets distributed about the floor and the walls, even the ceiling of the apartment sometimes. And if you think at some point the killer stood with his knife over the victim or was carrying the knife and and may have left his own blood on on on on the scene.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  How do you figure out which of all those drops of blood is significant and which which relates to the killer and is not actually the victim's blood? And I think with pattern recognition and, you know, that's the sort of thing that I think that AI down the road might be able to look at. At like a dense information field, look for patterns and find out the subtle exception that would escape the human eye. But I do think it's a long time, I I and I, you know, I do think it's a long time before we'll be able to rely on AI. For example, at the moment, there's a lot of discussion in forensic pathology about stopping doing an autopsy and just doing it all virtual. Vertopsy is an examination of the body using a T S a C T scanner.

• 46:52Speaker 02

  And the the the Swiss are very keen on this and they feel that it can completely replace doing the autopsy itself. They don't, they still do autopsies. Uh but I think increasingly they're moving towards virtual autopsies. New York, in the legal system, New York lawyers are not going to say, you know, are not going to just sit back and accept that the uh the uh virtual, the C T scan is accurate, that it's that it's a subdural hematoma rather than, say, meningitis that you're looking at. So I think there's going to be, it's going to be a while before that sort of technology comes in and plays a Specifically a guiding or controlling part.

• 47:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you sound like Chuck, because I said this of Chuck, he said, nope. Comedy is too complicated for AI to take it over. So Chuck just wants to make sure he's still employed going into the.

• 47:36Chuck Nice?

  Oh, absolutely, yeah. Yeah, there's no way, there's no way they could tell a joke. Not, not, not with all the nuance that a comedian does. And by the way, if they ever do, you can rest assured, a glass of water inside their circuitry is waiting.

• 47:54Chuck Nice?

  Coming right.

• 47:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's called murder, Chuck.

• 47:58Chuck Nice?

  Yes. But it.

• 48:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Roboticide. There's a word for it. Roboticide.

• 48:03Chuck Nice?

  Oh, what?

• 48:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Roboticide.

• 48:05Speaker 02

  I don't know if you can tell something that's inanimate, but that's a philosophical discussion for another forum, I think. But I think you're right. I think that gets in it because if someone, can you imagine a robot comedian trying to handle a heckler? You know, the complexities involved in that, the analysis of what was being said, which will have probably obscure cultural references if you're a silicon-based machine.

• 48:26Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  And then actually trying to have to formulate a response. It's a really good example, I think, even just in the Turing test, if a computer to pass the Turing test is still, well, that's a lot less challenging than it was before.

• 48:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It reminds me, there's a brief moment in the movie Terminator where he's, he's repairing his injured arm in a hotel room. And the, someone knocks on the door and he has to figure out what response to give him. So you see this, you see through his mind's eye, I mean, through his computer eye, you see a multiple choice. It's, um, go away, I'm busy, or come back later, or [bleep] you asshole. He goes and chooses that response. So it could be if you're, if you have a, an AI comedian and there's a heckler, they can decide whether they're nice to the heckler or not. There's just a, it's a, it's a knob that you turn.

• 49:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but Jonathan, you said something very important, which I am very sensitive to just in my own field. Where pattern recognition, humans are good at it, but we can be very biased. If you take an unbiased. Pattern recognizing AI, it can for complex things, just like you said, the splatter pattern of blood, or the a pattern of of of casings, shell casings, where they landed and how, they might be able to do a back extrapolation into where the gun was when it was fired. And there could be some interesting sort of three dimensional analysis that AI could perform that we couldn't.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  Absolutely. That's how I think it'll unroll. I mean, when I first started, when I first came to New York, and it was 1990, we had this nightmarish homicide rate, we're having six murders a day. And they were just had no time to investigate the cases. So we'd be working off for the scene investigation. I didn't go to the scenes, but we'd get the investigating detectives would show up in like six or seven Polaroids of the crime scene. You know, poor resolution, not ideally photographed, not ideally lit. And it just wasn't great. And then, you know, fast forward, you know, whatever 30 years, and we've got, you know, video, we've got high resolution. Even even the photograph your iPhone takes is is just amazing. And we have this really cool machine now that you you put it in the center of the room, and it just scans the entire room, very late runner machine, scans

• 50:50Speaker 02

  the entire room, and measures all the distances and can rebuild a model of that room. And that's fascinating technology. And I think that's where things are going. I mean, you see it in the real estate market now, you know, when people are selling their houses, they can have a virtual walkthrough using this thing. But you can measure accurately down to the centimeter. Discriminating between what's real and what is irrelevant is really a big problem in forensics. And it's one of the things that frustrates me, and like CSI, Gillian Priss, and he'll walk into the scene, and then he'll pick up a single fragment of glass in a whole field filled with glass. And this just doesn't fit. This is the problem. And that is the answer. And it just doesn't work like that, sadly.

• 51:30Chuck Nice?

  But but if if that were Sherlock Watson, the AI, Sherlock Watson, the AI, would be able to do that.

• 51:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, they would.

• 51:40Chuck Nice?

  Sherlock Watson, Sherlock Watson would walk in and just be like, this man's been dead for 12 hours.

• 51:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  12 hours and 36 minutes. Yeah, so.

• 51:49Chuck Nice?

  Right. They're like, yeah, but the rigor rigor mortis isn't right. And he'd be like, rigor, please. No, this man, I can tell you, has been dead.

• 51:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sherlock Watson. Okay, that's a good one.

• 52:01Chuck Nice?

  Sherlock Watson, the AI.

• 52:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good.

• 52:04Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, that's the direction we're going in, but I, you know, you know how, you know, how fallible computers are, you know, it's still, they still depend, I, I still think for a very long time, and maybe forever, they're gonna need humans to sign off on them, that they haven't got the stick on. And of course, that reintroduces the whole question of bias, which is one of the big challenges.

• 52:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, of course, of course.

• 52:25Chuck Nice?

  Well, once again, Sherlock Watson sends another black man to jail. Damn. Damn.

• 52:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That means it's time to end.

• 52:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jonathan, it's been great having you on. You're the first forensic pathologist I've ever had a conversation with, and, and maybe it showed, for better or for worse.

• 52:48Speaker 02

  Have you been to the other forensic pathologist or something?

• 52:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I just haven't.

• 52:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's, it's just a non-overlapping Venn diagrams in my life, but it was delighted to have you on, so I want to thank you for taking time away from your import, very important and busy schedule to join us in my interview with Patricia Cornwell, and delighted to hear that you, you have a, two novels out there, Precious Blood and A Hard Death, and I, we'll, we'll look for them, wherever books are sold, of course. And so Chuck, thanks for being here, as always.

• 53:23Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure, always.

• 53:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and Jonathan, I think, we're gonna try to find you again, because this, this, this topic has no end.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  Good, it, it doesn't. And I was really interested to hear your thoughts about the future of space colonies, because that's something I think about a lot over the last few months, as we've watched the private enterprises take people into space. I'm just curious.

• 53:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, here's a quick one for you. You ready? So if you bury someone on the moon, there are no microorganisms there to decompose the body. So the only organisms are the microbes that were in your body when you were buried, but there's nothing exterior to that. So the whole decomposition arc will be very different because of that, because it's not really soil.

• 54:01Speaker 02

  But that's, that's, that's all you need, though. You, we carry, there's some sort of horrific statistic about what percentage of our body mass is, is bacteria, and it's a significant portion. That'll be enough.

• 54:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I just, I just, I just looked at it. We have more bacterial cells in our body than we have body cells. So that, that, that's pretty freaky.

• 54:20Speaker 02

  The rate limiting thing there is going to be cold and is also going to be water. Bacteria, most bacteria likely have a bit of warmth and water to germinate.

• 54:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jonathan, delight to have you on. Thanks for taking time out. Chuck, Chuck, always good to have you. This has been StarTalk, Forensic Pathology Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Keep looking up.