Decoding the secret messages of data, biology and music

It's easy to focus on the nuances that get lost in translation, but what about the insights that are found? This hour, TED speakers reveal what we gain by adapting and translating information. Guests include textual scientist Gregory Heyworth, economist Ralph Chami, microbiologist and nanotechnologist Fatima AlZahra'a Alatraktchi and polyglot Lýdia Machová. Original broadcast date: May 19, 2023 TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at: plus.npr.org/ted http://plus.npr.org/ted. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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

• 0:00Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 0:24Speaker 01

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• 0:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  Delivered at TED conferences.

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• 0:29Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 0:32Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 0:37Speaker 01

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• 0:39Manoush Zomorodi?

  Challenge you.

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• 0:42Manoush Zomorodi?

  And even change you.

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• 0:48Manoush Zomorodi?

  Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi.

• 1:02Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is music from German composer George Philip Telemann.

• 1:08Speaker 06

  Telemann is the most prolific Baroque composer.

• 1:12Manoush Zomorodi?

  He wrote more than 3,000 compositions. And in the 1700s, he was incredibly popular. But eventually, Baroque music went out of style. And many of Telemann's scores sat collecting dust in Germany. Forgotten, including this concerto.

• 1:32Speaker 06

  And this was a piece that had just simply existed, really only one manuscript, and no one had really seen before.

• 1:39Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is Gregory Heyworth. He's a professor at the University of Rochester and calls himself a textual scientist. We'll explain what he means in a minute. But for the last two decades, Gregory has been hunting down and translating lost manuscripts all over the world, including at a library in Dresden, where many of Telemann's works were archived alongside a treasure trove of other manuscripts, all of them badly damaged in World War II.

• 2:10Speaker 06

  Yes. At the end of the war, both the British and the Americans had bombed Dresden, as we all know. The manuscripts which had been in the King's Library at the time had been stored in an underground room near the river, the Elbe. And with one of the bombings, the side of the river broke and it flooded this underground room. And many of the manuscripts lay in water for about two weeks. And of course, there was chaos. And then conservatives from Berlin came and they dried the manuscripts out.

• 2:51Manoush Zomorodi?

  So these manuscripts went through a lot. And when the war ended, things didn't get that much better.

• 2:58Speaker 06

  Dresden became part of the Eastern Bloc. And the kind of restoration that was available to them was limited.

• 3:07Manoush Zomorodi?

  And so they remained, wasting away and illegible, until 2009. That's when Gregory went to Dresden to try out a new scanning technology. He spent the next few years rescuing all kinds of documents there, including that Telemann concerto.

• 3:25Speaker 06

  It was one of those badly damaged items that the music curator knew about and said, hey, have a look at this.

• 3:31Manoush Zomorodi?

  The score was stained by mold, the notes nearly impossible to read. And for two years, Gregory and his team worked on it.

• 3:40Speaker 06

  And we managed to recover most of what was gone.

• 3:47Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is a 2017 recording of the concerto, the first time it was performed in hundreds of years.

• 3:55Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 3:55Manoush Zomorodi?

  Do you remember listening to the concerto? And like, I mean, it's like you resuscitated something that was truly dead and buried. And then you could hear it come alive.

• 4:06Speaker 06

  Well, what's fascinating about this particular piece is that many of the objects that we image are esoteric. They're in languages that people don't speak anymore. And the public has a hard time relating to them. But by far, the most compelling is music, because it communicates to the general public on an emotional level. And so that's really exciting, to be able to take an object from total invisibility to sharing with the public. And so the moment of actually hearing and recovering an object is really intimate.

• 4:44Manoush Zomorodi?

  A musical masterpiece revealed. Those notes on the page would have remained illegible smudges, but the right person and the right technology came along to interpret them. Which brings us to our show today, "Found in Translation." Ideas about making sense of data, biology, and language that can change the way we understand entire economies, diseases, and human interaction. So, back to Gregory Heyworth. His evolution from medieval scholar to so-called textual scientist began 20 years ago, when he was just a reader of texts.

• 5:25Speaker 06

  What an unsatisfying word "reader" is.

• 5:28Manoush Zomorodi?

  Here's Gregory Heyworth on the TED stage.

• 5:31Speaker 06

  For me, it conjures up images of passivity, of someone sitting idly in an armchair, waiting for knowledge to come to him in a neat little parcel. How much better to be a participant in the past? An adventurer in an undiscovered country, searching for the hidden text. I read and taught the same classics that people had been reading and teaching for hundreds of years. And with every scholarly article that I published, I added to human knowledge in ever-diminishing slivers of insight. What I wanted to be was an archaeologist of the past, a discoverer of literature, an Indiana Jones without the whip, or actually with the whip.

• 6:13Speaker 06

  And so, I changed the direction of my career.

• 6:17Manoush Zomorodi?

  Gregory changed the direction of his career all because of one manuscript. In the early 2000s, he was working in that same Dresden library, studying a medieval manuscript that was in bad shape to begin with, made even worse by the Cold War.

• 6:33Speaker 06

  And it was called "Les Héritages d'Amour," "The Chess of Love." And it is perhaps the last major, long poem of the European Middle Ages that has never been-- well, it's never been transcribed, and it's never been edited.

• 6:49Manoush Zomorodi?

  When you first saw the manuscript, the poem, what did it look like?

• 6:53Speaker 06

  Well, because it'd been in water, it looked like a series of huge ink blots. And what the Soviets had done was, they had decided to clean up the extra ink.

• 7:07Speaker 06

  And they did it using a technique that was popular among the Soviets at that time. They used urea, which is basically made from urine.

• 7:16Manoush Zomorodi?

  Pee?

• 7:17Speaker 06

  Yes. And it's acidic and it actually is quite effective. But in so doing, it had two effects. First of all, it removed ink, but it also removed ink from the text. So much of it was so faded that you couldn't see it, although all the ink blots were now largely gone. The second thing it did is it caused in many places the parchment, which of course is animal skin, to turn translucent, a kind of gray translucent quality, which is typical of urea. And that really damaged and destroyed some last of it. But I managed to transcribe, oh, maybe a few thousand lines

• 7:56Speaker 06

  using the standard tools of the trade at the time, which was like a black light and a lot of effort. And then I ended up not being able to go any further. And so I went online to try to figure out what technological means I could use to improve the reading.

• 8:14Speaker 06

  And there I learned about how multispectral imaging had been used to recover two lost treatises of the famed Greek mathematician Archimedes. I decided to write to the lead imaging scientist, Professor Roger Easton. And to my surprise, he actually wrote back.

• 8:34Speaker 06

  With his help, I was able to build a transportable multispectral imaging lab. And with this lab, I transformed what was a charred and faded mess into a new medieval classic.

• 8:50Speaker 06

  The idea behind multispectral imaging is something that anyone who's familiar with infrared night vision goggles will immediately appreciate, that what we can see in the visible spectrum of light is only a tiny fraction of what's actually there.

• 9:03Speaker 06

  The same is true with invisible writing. Our system uses 12 wavelengths of light between the ultraviolet and the infrared. And these are shown down onto the manuscript from above from banks of LEDs and another multispectral light source, which comes up through the individual leaves of the manuscript.

• 9:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  So multispectral imaging means shining different wavelengths of light onto a manuscript and taking numerous photographs with a very special lens.

• 9:35Speaker 06

  And by taking separate photographs of the same object in multiple wavelengths, we can reveal or are able to see things that the naked eye can't see.

• 9:45Manoush Zomorodi?

  Computers then help refine the photos.

• 9:48Speaker 06

  You know, statistical algorithms which help enhance the images. And starting with that, we work with scholars to try to decipher and transcribe the manuscript so that we can understand them better.

• 10:02Manoush Zomorodi?

  Gregory and his team have used this technology to restore everything from biblical gospels to maps from the 1400s. And what they discover often helps historians understand what the writers were thinking at the time.

• 10:17Speaker 06

  So spectral imaging can recover lost texts. More subtly, though, it can recover a second story behind every object. The story of how, when, and by whom a text was created, and sometimes what the author was thinking at the time he wrote. Take, for example, a draft of the Declaration of Independence, written in Thomas Jefferson's own hand, which some colleagues of mine imaged a few years ago at the Library of Congress. Curators had noticed that one word throughout had been scratched out and overwritten. The word overwritten was "citizens." Perhaps you can guess what the word underneath was. "Subjects."

• 11:02Speaker 06

  There, ladies and gentlemen, is American democracy evolving under the hand of Thomas Jefferson. Through this lens, we witness the mistakes, the changes of mind, the naiveties, the uncensored thoughts, the imperfections of the human imagination that allow these hallowed objects and their authors to become more real, that make history closer to us.

• 11:29Manoush Zomorodi?

  I'm a little embarrassed to admit, Gregory, that the images that are coming to mind for me are Sherlock Holmes and invisible ink and Nick Cage in that movie National Treasure trying to hunt down precious manuscripts. I mean, it is kind of as exciting as that, though, right?

• 11:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is a kind of, you know, recovery of the past, which has, I don't know, maybe exaggerated or lurid elements of recovery. But it's something that I hope will become much more common as students begin to learn textual science. It's something that we need to be able to do, because otherwise, we're going to lose forever parts of our past in the next 50 years.

• 12:13Speaker 06

  Several years ago, I conducted a survey of European research libraries and discovered that, at the barest minimum, there are 60,000 manuscripts pre-1500 that are illegible because of water damage, fading, mold, and chemical reagents.

• 12:33Speaker 06

  Imagine worldwide how a trove of hundreds of thousands of previously unknown texts could radically transform our knowledge of the past.

• 12:45Speaker 06

  Imagine what unknown classics we would discover, which would rewrite the canons of literature, history, philosophy, music.

• 12:56Speaker 06

  Or, more provocatively, that could rewrite our cultural identities, building new bridges between people and culture.

• 13:05Manoush Zomorodi?

  In a minute, how this technology can be used to scan documents written now, too. Today on the show, "Found in Translation." I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

• 13:29Speaker 04

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• 14:35Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, found in translation. We were just talking to textual scientist Gregory Heyworth. He helped develop technology that uses multispectral imaging to recover manuscripts that would otherwise be illegible. And he's working on more recent documents, too, including some written by prisoners of war in Syria.

• 15:05Speaker 06

  They're scraps of cloth with inscribed names in Arabic. And they came from an escapee of the prisons of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. These prisoners had found themselves in these horrific conditions, and they wanted to record, at the very least, a story of who had been there. And they agreed that if anyone got out, they would make multiple lists of this, and they would be able to contact people and tell them their mother, their father, had been there.

• 15:43Speaker 06

  In order to make these manuscripts, they ripped pieces of linen cloth from their shirts.

• 15:48Manoush Zomorodi?

  Wow.

• 15:48Speaker 06

  And they used chicken bones as a stylus, and ink made from a mixture of the blood from their gums with the rust from the bars.

• 15:59Manoush Zomorodi?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 16:00Speaker 06

  And they inscribed names. And then they rolled them up and they sewed them into their hems. And one man escaped. And he delivered these precious lists to the Holcoss Museum.

• 16:14Manoush Zomorodi?

  So did they actually take the lists then?

• 16:18Speaker 06

  Yes, so we imaged the list and made it more legible so that we could read some of these names and have a real record of them. And the images now exist at the Holcoss Museum as a testament to who had been disappeared.

• 16:33Manoush Zomorodi?

  So you are looking at things that have been written incredibly recently and can help us make sense of what is going on in the world right now.

• 16:42Speaker 06

  Yes, in fact, many cultural heritage objects from the last century and a half, for example, are in much worse shape than objects from 1,000 years ago. One of the things that we're particularly interested in are modern objects that have been censored by governments, beginning with Nazi-censored documents, many of them like postcards and letters from the camps. And that should, I hope, fill in gaps which otherwise we would never be able to know.

• 17:14Manoush Zomorodi?

  So we're calling this episode "Found in Translation." And it occurs to me that we could use the word "translation" to describe your work on numerous levels. I mean, there's the literal translation from an ancient language to languages we speak now. There's the translating from what looks like absolutely nothing on a page to making sense of it with the help of this technology. There's the translating it from the page to our ears with the Telemont Concerto. I wonder how you think about it.

• 17:49Speaker 06

  Well, this particular Telemann piece, it was written in the hand of Giovanni Vivaldi, who was Antonio Vivaldi's father. And Antonio Vivaldi had wanted to hear this particular concerto. And so he sent his father to copy it. So what we're hearing is Giovanni Vivaldi's interpretation of some of the lines as well.

• 18:16Speaker 06

  So manuscripts are objects that evolve. We're used to books in which the same text is printed in all the copies of that same book. But a manuscript evolves and changes because it's copied by hand. One of the things that multispectral imaging has taught us is that our present is changing our past in ways that will really reshape our understanding of culture and the transmission of that culture. And at its best, I hope, bring people together and eliminate or reduce misunderstandings from the past.

• 18:53Manoush Zomorodi?

  That's textual scientist Gregory Heyworth, professor at the University of Rochester and founder of The Lazarus Project. You can find his full talk at ted.com. And that 2017 performance of Telemann's concerto was played by students from the Eastman School of Music.

• 19:16Manoush Zomorodi?

  Today on the show, found in translation.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  I'm sitting at the edge and suddenly this magnificent creature surfaces. And I'm thinking, that's a blue whale.

• 19:32Manoush Zomorodi?

  Ralph Shammy was on a boat in Mexico's Gulf of California when he saw his first whale up close.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  And she's massive, massive. And she comes up. To breathe and that breath is like a train. She dives and she comes up and she blows all that air out.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  I mean, I had tears in my eyes. I'm seeing this incredible mystery unfolding in front of me, thinking, where have I been all this time? And life has never been the same.

• 20:09Manoush Zomorodi?

  Ralph is an economist who recently left the International Monetary Fund after 25 years there.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  And within the IMF, I worked on all kinds of issues. I'm an expert on fragile states and conflict-affected countries.

• 20:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  It was a very stressful job.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  What happened was after you work on fragile states and you lead missions, these are dangerous missions, really. And you become fragile yourself.

• 20:39Manoush Zomorodi?

  So in 2017, he was on a rare break. An old friend who knew how much he loved the ocean got him a spot on an expedition studying whales. The researchers told Ralph he had one job.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  If you really want to help Ralph, clock when the whale reaches, when it dives.

• 20:59Manoush Zomorodi?

  At night, the whole team would go ashore to unwind.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  We'd all cook together and some of us would cook, some of us would clean.

• 21:08Manoush Zomorodi?

  One night, Ralph joined a dinner table discussion that stuck with him.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  And so we're sitting around the table and having conversations about the whales. And I'm on my third glass of wine, trying to get into a conversation. And I overhear a conversation about whale carbon.

• 21:26Manoush Zomorodi?

  Whale carbon, the amount of carbon dioxide that a whale houses in its body away from the atmosphere.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  They said, well, they have tremendous amount of carbon.

• 21:37Manoush Zomorodi?

  Because whales eat massive amounts of krill, which themselves feed on phytoplankton, single-cell plants.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Now, why is phyto important? Because phytoplankton is really where the biological life of the ocean starts. They capture about 33 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year. That's equivalent to the work of four Amazon forests. So the whales eat krill, the krill eats phyto. And then what does the phyto need to survive?

• 22:06Speaker 06

  Well, they need phosphorus, nitrogen, and iron. And all three factors are in the poop of the whale. So it's a virtuous cycle. Whale feeds on krill, krill feeds on phyto, phyto needs the poop of the whale. So this whale is not only grabbing carbon on its body, it's fertilizing the phyto. So the whale is a great ally in the fight against climate change, you see?

• 22:33Manoush Zomorodi?

  Hmm.

• 22:34Speaker 06

  It was the greatest story never told. That's what I kept saying to myself.

• 22:40Speaker 06

  So you have this wonderful cycle.

• 22:43Manoush Zomorodi?

  Here's Ralph Chami on the TED stage.

• 22:45Speaker 06

  The whale feeds on the krill, the krill feeds on the phyto, and the phyto needs the poop of the whale to get more active. And when the phyto gets more active, it grabs more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Now, that's good news, right? Yeah. Except that whales are dying.

• 23:05Speaker 06

  They're dying from ship strikes. They're dying from pollution, then dying from entanglements.

• 23:13Speaker 06

  In fact, they're dying because our current economic system puts zero value on a living whale. But chop a whale, sell it for its meat, it acquires a value.

• 23:28Speaker 06

  The value of a living whale is zero, zero dollars, zero in any currency.

• 23:35Speaker 06

  I'm a financial economist,

• 23:38Speaker 06

  and I'm listening to these scientists bemoaning what's happening to the whales, and I wanted to help. I didn't know how to help. And I thought, wait a minute. Maybe I can bring your message to the audiences around the world. Maybe I can translate all of that value, those services they do for us, in a language that we can all understand. It's the language of dollars and cents.

• 24:03Manoush Zomorodi?

  What was going through your mind? I mean, it sounds like your brain was kind of set on fire in some ways.

• 24:09Speaker 06

  Yes, right away, my mind went to value. Value of the carbon captured by a whale. Because, you know, I'm an economist, I work on wages and people's earnings. And I said, so whale carbon, how much would I be paying the whale for fighting climate change? What if I could value the services of the whale?

• 24:33Speaker 01

  I was Googling and I found nothing on this at all. I'm a financial economist, so I'm looking at it from a market valuation. And I knew that a dead whale was worth a lot of money in countries where they still eat whale meat. So that whale had a value, forty thousand to eighty thousand, depending on the size of the whale. But a living whale had no value. So I'm thinking, well, how would I go about doing it? After all, the whale is a living system. The whale captures carbon on her body, and she gives birth to baby whales who also grow up to capture carbon on their body, and they give birth to whales and so forth, and indirectly through the fertilization of phyto.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  So how would you do something like this? Well, I looked at it, and I said to myself, wait a minute. This looks like a share of stock that pays dividends. Except those dividends are live dividends. They give birth to more dividends. So if I were to track the whale over her lifetime and keep track of all these dividends into the future, and then multiply that by the price of carbon, and discount that all the way to the present, I can figure out what is the present value of the lifetime earnings of a single whale. Would you like to know how much? Would you like to know how much?

• 26:03Speaker 01

  At least three million dollars. At least.

• 26:08Manoush Zomorodi?

  Three million dollars per whale. Now, that's just an estimate, because for now, there's no standardized way for countries and companies to price carbon. But Ralph says that needs to happen ASAP, because companies and governments have made a lot of promises to go carbon neutral. And pretty soon, they'll need to deliver on those promises.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  So voluntary carbon markets, that's what we have right now. But in Europe, the regulation is coming. Even the Biden administration is coming around the idea of interest, around the protection of nature and its biodiversity, and dealing with climate change. And it's no longer the privy of just the governments. The consumers are asking companies, what is your footprint?

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Investors, I mean billionaires, I know some of them, that are saying now, I don't want my money to be invested in extractive services. I don't want to be linked to companies that have a huge carbon footprint.

• 27:09Manoush Zomorodi?

  For the last six years, Ralph has been working to envision a new kind of marketplace, one that doesn't extract from nature, but puts a value on it. He calls his solution "science-based finance", and he's not just applying it to whales, but to elephants, wildebeest, seagrass. Right now, he's working with the Bahamas on one pilot project.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  So they mapped the seafloor of the Bahamas and discovered that the Bahamas is sitting on 30% of the total mass of seagrass in the world.

• 27:40Manoush Zomorodi?

  In the world?

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, according to my calculations and my colleagues, that is worth about $150 billion. So I am sitting on seagrass, and you, Microsoft, you need to offset your carbon footprint. You made a commitment to go carbon negative. So here's what we do. How much carbon do you need? And Microsoft says, well, for this year, I need 100 tonnes. For next year, 150. I say, OK, I'll sell you these from my seagrass. You pay me that money. Because remember, in order for the seagrass to do its work, it has to stay alive and well, which means you also have to look after the sea turtles and the apex predator, the tiger sharks. Because if the tiger sharks die,

• 28:26Speaker 01

  the sea turtles would completely destroy the seagrass. So when you're investing in seagrass, you're impacting food security. When you're investing in seagrass, you're looking after fauna. When you're investing in seagrass, you're looking after the people, the communities. You're alleviating poverty, you're creating employment, you're bringing new businesses. So suddenly, for Microsoft, they can put on their website, "Look, we are purchasing the carbon of the seagrass. We're ensuring that seagrass lives forever. We're investing in nature in perpetuity. By creating resilience in nature, we create resilience in the people."

• 29:06Manoush Zomorodi?

  Not to be cynical, though, Ralph, but who is going to keep track of all this? Who's going to make sure that the people who say they're going to grow more seagrass actually grow it? Who's going to make sure that the companies actually spend the money to buy the carbon offsets from the seagrass growers? How do we keep track of all this?

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Exactly. Who verifies the verify? Who certifies the certify? Who's watching the watch person? That's what you're asking.

• 29:33Manoush Zomorodi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Well, I've worked on financial development for 30 years. Every nascent market is subject to gold rush behavior, double counting, triple counting, cheating. For Pete's sake, even mature markets, how many times do we hear about all kinds of insider trading on Wall Street? So especially nascent markets are subject to these things. But if the market is to take off, we need to solve these issues. Some of them the market themselves would solve, some of it would need a policy. Because I'm now telling people, conservation is not a cost proposition. Conservation, now we've turned it upside down, is a profit-making proposition. Just think about it. What this paradigm does, it turns it upside down, says, no, you are conserving what is

• 30:18Speaker 01

  now an asset. And that asset has value. It's producing cash flows for you. So of course you need to protect it.

• 30:27Manoush Zomorodi?

  Part of me feels very sad that we humans don't know how to value nature in and of itself, that we need to translate it into monetary value. Is money the only language we really speak?

• 30:43Speaker 01

  You know, with this calling, I've met so many people. I remember being at the International Labour Organization. And right before I spoke, a woman, she said to me, I'm appalled that you're putting a price on nature. And I said, do you work for free? And she said, no. I said, why should the elephant work for free? Why do I allow for myself what I would not allow for nature? I find that the epitome of arrogance.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  That humans prefer to sing songs about nature and write poetry as they watch it die, taking its last breath in front of us. You see, if we were not in the 11th hour, if all people appreciated nature for its intrinsic value, you wouldn't be interviewing me. But we are at a point in time where despite our best efforts, nature is dying as we speak. And we're dying because the language that we have chosen for ourselves is the language of dollars and cents. Leave the tree where it is and make money. Leave the whale for itself and make money. So I'm really not about nature, I'm really about changing people's behavior.

• 31:56Manoush Zomorodi?

  You're like the Lorax, you speak for the trees.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  I would love to. I would be honored if I'm thought that way. But I'm trying my best to take what the scientists are saying and translate it into the language that we have chosen. If we choose a different language, it's a translation. Now, all translations suffer, right? But let's not wait till we get it perfect. Because if we want to make it perfect, there'll be nothing left.

• 32:28Manoush Zomorodi?

  That's economist Ralph Chami. He recently retired from the International Monetary Fund after 25 years. You can find him at bluegreenfuture.org. To see his full talk, go to ted.com. On the show today, found in translation. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

• 33:29Speaker 05

  Comes from Planet Visionaries. If you're looking for a dose of optimism, Planet Visionaries is the podcast you need. Host Alex Honnold sits down this season with extraordinary doers, creating real climate action. It's a lineup that proves hope isn't naive, it's fuel for change. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. This message comes from LexisNexis. Meet LexisNexis Protege, AI built for how legal teams and professionals work. Research, analyze, draft, and verify work you can defend. Protege is AI held to the standard of law.

• 34:14Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, found in translation.

• 34:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  One thing we've all gotten used to over the past couple of years is testing ourselves at home for the COVID virus, translating an infection into a thin pink line that tells us to stay home or go about our day. But let's say you test negative and still have a fever that just won't go away. One day, you might be able to take another test at home, so you could know immediately if you have a bacterial infection and need antibiotics, stat.

• 34:57Speaker 05

  Oh, it would be amazing. It would be amazing just to know that at least as a patient, you don't need to go somewhere and deliver your sample in a place where you could get an even worse infection.

• 35:10Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's a long road to making research in the lab so user-friendly. And one of the people leading the way is this woman.

• 35:18Speaker 05

  My name is Fatima Alzara Alatrakchi. I'm a researcher within the intersection of molecular biology, micro and nanotechnology, and medicine.

• 35:27Speaker 06

  I'm also a founder of a company called PreDiagnose, where we create the sensors for the detection of bacteria.

• 35:35Manoush Zomorodi?

  In the future, you may have a version of Fatima's invention in your own home. For nearly a decade, she's been using her expertise in highly complex nanotechnology to watch and listen as bacteria cells communicate. Yes, bacteria talk to each other in their own microbial language.

• 35:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, bacteria speak to each other. They can communicate. They send out signals to each other and they respond to these signals. And they are able to coordinate their activities based on their communication.

• 36:11Manoush Zomorodi?

  But instead of words, the tiniest organisms on our planet communicate with signaling molecules.

• 36:20Speaker 06

  They're all ways around, whispering, making secret plans, building armies with millions of soldiers. And when they decide to attack, they all attack at the same time.

• 36:37Manoush Zomorodi?

  Here's Fatima on the TED stage.

• 36:39Speaker 06

  To coordinate all the functions bacteria have, they have to be able to organize. And they do that, just like us humans, by communicating. But instead of using words, they use signaling molecules to communicate with each other. When bacteria are few, the signaling molecules just flow away, like the screams of a man alone in the desert. But when there are many bacteria, the signaling molecules accumulate. And the bacteria start sensing that they're not alone. They listen to each other. In this way, they keep track of how many they are and when they are many enough to initiate a new action. And when the signaling molecules have reached a certain threshold,

• 37:22Speaker 05

  The bacteria sense at once that they need to act with the same action.

• 37:28Manoush Zomorodi?

  So bacteria use different messages to rally each other, to say, band together, or build a colony, or start a mutiny.

• 37:38Speaker 05

  They are really smart. But we are trying to decode what their conversations mean.

• 37:46Manoush Zomorodi?

  Hmm, so, okay, let's say that they do decide to attack, that they've been hanging out, they've been multiplying, and now they're thinking, you know what? We're bad, we're mean, we're nasty bacteria, and we're gonna show off a little bit. How would that work?

• 38:01Speaker 05

  Then they would all at once start producing something that will be harmful for the host or for other bacteria that they would like to get rid of. Because they would also, sometimes they are really dominating. They would really like to dominate the space they are in. And that would be secreting something that would kill the other bacteria.

• 38:23Manoush Zomorodi?

  And this is where Fatima's sensor comes in. She uses it to interpret these molecular conversations between bacterial cells and possibly predict what they're up to. In one trial, she listened in on the signals they were starting to send each other and used those early whispers to diagnose infections before they spread.

• 38:46Speaker 05

  I followed 62 patients in an experiment where I tested the patient samples for one particular infection without knowing the results of the traditional diagnostic test. Now, in bacterial diagnostics, a sample is smeared out on a plate, and if the bacteria grow within five days, the patient is diagnosed as infected. When I finished the study and I compared the tool results to the traditional diagnostic test and the validation test, I was shocked. It was far more astonishing than I had ever anticipated.

• 39:20Speaker 05

  My device caught bacterial conversations in more than half of the patient samples that were diagnosed as negative by traditional methods.

• 39:29Speaker 05

  The words, more than half of these patients went home thinking they were free from infection, although they actually carried dangerous bacteria. Besides these wrongly diagnosed patients, bacteria were coordinating a synchronized attack. They were whispering to each other. What I call whispering bacteria are bacteria that traditional methods cannot diagnose. So far, it's only the translation tool that can catch those whispers. I believe that the timeframe in which bacteria are still whispering is a window of opportunity for targeted treatment. Together with doctors, I'm already working on implementing this tool in clinics to diagnose early infections.

• 40:12Manoush Zomorodi?

  Fatima, I just read that in 2019, 7.7 million people died of bacterial pathogens. I mean, that is over 13% of all global deaths that year. And then you found that using normal diagnosing methods, half of the patients in the study went home thinking that they were fine, but actually carrying dangerous bacteria. So if we can diagnose people early, would that change the way that we treat them?

• 40:44Speaker 05

  Yes. So one of the big questions was if we are able to detect that early, what does it mean for the patients? Do we then treat with antibiotics when we are in all other fashion not able to see the bacteria? So when we're not able to detect the bacteria with our routine techniques, what do we do then? Do we treat them? Is it okay to treat patients that early? What would happen to the patients if we do that? Would we develop resistance? All sorts of questions started popping up just by the scenario of being able to detect early. If we understand their communication, maybe we're also able to diagnose better, diagnose

• 41:28Speaker 05

  earlier, and set in with alternative treatments that enables us to use way less antibiotics than we're doing today.

• 41:38Manoush Zomorodi?

  I wonder if you could just describe to me what your vision is for this technology, maybe five, 10, 20 years from now?

• 41:46Speaker 05

  Our vision is that in the short term, the tools that we create can be used at clinics. So they can be operated by the healthcare professionals. For example, when the patients come in during initial screenings, then they can use these tools to quickly get an overview of how the patient is doing. On the long term, we hope that it's possible for the patients to administrate this themselves. We really hope that if we can identify a group of really problematic infections and then work on a tool that only can detect them, then we're able to say, okay, if you

• 42:28Speaker 05

  have a surgery, if you're susceptible, then stay at home, measure at home, and then the results will go to your doctor. And then your doctor can take action from there. But at least you don't need to get in somewhere and be exposed to having an infection from the hospital or from another site where a lot of sick people come in.

• 42:51Manoush Zomorodi?

  And it all starts with decoding the language of bacteria.

• 42:55Speaker 05

  Exactly. If we are able to understand them, then maybe we're better treating them, better diagnosing them. That's the whole concept. That's why we do this basic research.

• 43:09Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was inventor, microbiologist, and nanotechnologist Fatima Alzara Alatracati. You can see her full talk at ted.com.

• 43:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  As we come to the close of our show, "Found in Translation," we want to acknowledge that people usually say "lost in translation" to refer to all the nuances that get missed when you try to express yourself in a language not your own. Because learning a new language can be daunting. And even though you can just download an app these days to translate things for you, Lydia Makovas says there are good reasons to keep learning new languages. And it's actually not that hard if you discover the method that works best for you. Lydia herself speaks nine languages. Here she is on the TED stage in 2019.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  I love learning foreign languages. In fact, I love it so much that I like to learn a new language every two years. When people find it out about me, they always ask me, "How do you do that? What's your secret?" And to be honest, for many years, my answer would be, "I don't know. I simply love learning languages." But people were never happy with that answer. They wanted to know why they are spending years trying to learn even one language, never achieving fluency. And here I come, learning one language after another. They wanted to know the secret of polyglots, people who speak a lot of languages. And that made me wonder, too. How do actually other polyglots do it? What do we have in common? And what is it that enables us to learn languages so much faster than other people?

• 44:53Speaker 02

  I decided to meet other people like me and find it out. The best place to meet a lot of polyglots is an event where hundreds of language lovers meet in one place to practice their languages. There are several of such polyglot events organized all around the world. And so I decided to go there and ask polyglots about the methods that they use. And so I met Benny from Ireland, who told me that his method is to start speaking from day one. He learns a few phrases from a travel phrasebook and goes to meet native speakers and starts having conversations with them right away. He doesn't mind making even 200 mistakes a day, because that's how he learns, based on the feedback. And the best thing is, he doesn't even need to travel a lot today, because you can easily

• 45:36Speaker 02

  have conversations with native speakers from the comfort of your living room using websites. I also met polyglots who always start by imitating sounds of the language, and others who always learn the 500 most frequent words of the language, and yet others who always start by reading about the grammar. If I asked 100 different polyglots, I heard 100 different approaches to learning languages. Everybody seems to have a unique way how they learn a language, and yet, we all come to the same result of speaking several languages fluently. And as I was listening to these polyglots telling me about their methods, it suddenly dawned on me, the one thing we all have in common

• 46:18Speaker 02

  is that we simply found ways how to enjoy the language learning process. All of these polyglots were talking about language learning as if it was great fun. You should have seen their faces when they were showing me their colorful grammar charts and their carefully handmade flashcards, and their statistics about learning vocabulary using apps, or even how they love to cook based on recipes in a foreign language. All of them use different methods, but they always make sure it's something that they personally enjoy. I realized that this is actually how I learn languages myself. When I was learning Spanish, I was bored with the text in the textbook. I wanted to read Harry Potter instead. So I got the Spanish translation of Harry Potter and started reading,

• 47:03Speaker 02

  and sure enough, I didn't understand almost anything at the beginning. But I kept on reading because I loved the book, and by the end of the book, I was able to follow it almost without any problems. And the same thing happened when I was learning German. I decided to watch Friends, my favorite sitcom, in German.

• 47:23Speaker 02

  At the beginning, it was all just gibberish. I didn't know where one word finished and another one started. But I kept on watching every day because it's Friends, I can watch it in any language, I love it so much. And after the second or third season, seriously, the dialogue started to make sense.

• 47:42Speaker 02

  We are no geniuses, and we have no shortcut to learning languages. We simply found ways how to enjoy the process, how to turn language learning from a boring school subject into a pleasant activity which you don't mind doing every day. So meeting other polyglots helped me realise that it is really crucial to find enjoyment in the process of learning languages. But also, that joy in itself is not enough. If you want to achieve fluency in a foreign language, you'll also need to apply three more principles. First of all, you'll need effective methods. If you try to memorise a list of words for a test tomorrow, the words will be stored in your short-term memory, and you'll forget them after a few days.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  If you, however, want to keep words long-term, you need to revise them in the course of a few days repeatedly using the so-called "space repetition". We're all very busy, and no one really has time to learn a language today. But we can create that time if we just plan a bit ahead. There are so many things we can do without even planning that extra time, such as listening to podcasts on our way to work or doing our household chores. The important thing is to create a plan in the learning. I will listen to a YouTube video while having breakfast. If you create a system in your learning, you don't need to find that extra time because it will become a part of your everyday life. And finally, if you want to learn a language fluently,

• 49:10Speaker 02

  you need also a bit of patience. It's not possible to learn a language within two months, but it's definitely possible to make a visible improvement in two months if you learn in small chunks every day in a way you enjoy. And there is nothing that motivates us more than our own success. I vividly remember the moment when I understood the first joke in German when watching Friends.

• 49:39Speaker 02

  I was so happy and motivated that I just kept on watching that day two more episodes. And as I kept watching, I had more and more of those moments of understanding, these little victories. And step by step, I got to a level where I could use the language freely and fluently to express anything. I can't get enough of that feeling, and that's why I learn a language every two years. Now, some of you may be thinking, that's all very nice to enjoy language learning, but isn't the real secret that you polyglots are just super talented and most of us aren't? Well, there's one thing I haven't told you about Benny. Benny had 11 years of Irish Gaelic and five years of German at school.

• 50:20Speaker 02

  Couldn't speak them at all when graduating. Up to the age of 21, he thought he didn't have the language gene, and he could not speak another language. Then he started to look for his way of learning languages. And today, Benny can easily have a conversation in 10 languages.

• 50:39Speaker 02

  Does that sound like a miracle? Well, I see such miracles every single day. So if you've also tried to learn a language, and you gave up thinking it's too difficult, or you don't have the language talent, give it another try. Maybe you're also just one enjoyable method away from learning that language fluently. Maybe you're just one method away from becoming a polyglot.

• 51:04Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was translator and polyglot Lydia Makova. You can watch her full talk, "The Secrets of Learning a New Language," at ted.com.

• 51:15Manoush Zomorodi?

  Thank you so much for listening to our show this week, "Found in Translation." This episode was produced by Hersha Nahata, Andrea Gutierrez, Blaine Kaplan-Levinson, and Fiona Giran. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes James Delahoussaye, Rachel Faulkner White, Matthew Cloutier, and Katie Monteleone. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. Our audio engineers were Patrick Murray, Josh Newell, Hannah Glovna, and Trey Watson.

• 51:46Manoush Zomorodi?

  was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Michelle Quint, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Balarezzo. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

• 52:03Manoush Zomorodi?

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