In this week’s episode, both our storytellers experience something that irrevocably alters their lives.
Part 1: Carl Zimmer learns he has a lot in common with bats hibernating in an abandoned mine.
Carl Zimmer is a columnist for the New York Times, where he has been covering Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic. He is also the author of 14 books about science, including Life's Edge: The Search For What It Means To Be Alive.
Part 2: In the midst of a big move, a global pandemic, and social unrest, neuroscientist Aya Osman finds her purpose.
Aya Osman is a UK trained neuroscientist currently studying the connection between the gut and the brain (the gut-brain axis) in a range of neuropsychiatric conditions including addiction and autism at Icahn School of Medicine in New York. Before embarking on her PhD and subsequent postdoctoral research Journey, she completed an MSc in Toxicology and worked for the governmental body Public Health England. Dr. Osman is also an international fashion model who harnesses her unique skill set gained from a public facing role as a model as well as extensive scientific training to communicate important scientific findings to the public in a manageable and understandable format across multiple media platforms, with a particular focus on scientific topics relevant to the Black community.
Episode Transcript
Part 1: Carl Zimmer
It's a bright winter morning in the Adirondacks. There's a fresh layer of snow on the forest floor and I look ridiculous, because I am trying to put on chest waders in the snow, which is something you really shouldn't try to do. I've never really put on chest waders before. I'm not a fly‑fishing type. But this is what I have to do.
So I've got my shoes off and I'm hopping up and down trying not to end up with a foot soaked in snow. What makes me feel even more ridiculous is that standing right in front of me are two biologists, one also named Carl, the other Katie, and they already have their chest waders on. They put them on like an old pair of slippers, because this is what they do for a living.
They're very nice and they wait and they wait and I struggle. Eventually, I get them on and I suit up and the three of us are ready. So we step down into a stream. We're not here for winter fly fishing. We start walking upstream into the mouth of an abandoned mine. This is February 27th, 2020.
And as I'm going from that bright, snowy day into the darkness of the mind, I'm thinking, “This is probably the last adventure I'm going to have before the pandemic,” because it's been a couple months that the pandemic has been on my mind.
Carl Zimmer shares his story with a limited audience at The Tank Theatre in New York City, NY in December, 2021. Photo by Zhen Qin.
I write about viruses among other things for a living so I like to keep tabs on virologist chatter. In early January, they were like talking about some pneumonia in China. I didn't know what to make of it at the time. I mean viruses come and go and I was sort of distracted. I was working on a book about life and what it means to be alive.
So I was in the middle of research and taking trips to labs and deserts and other places to see life in all its extremes, but the virus kept coming back in my face. I would read about how like a dozen cases became a couple hundred cases. China is suddenly shutting down Wuhan. I didn't know how big Wuhan was so I looked it up. It's bigger than New York City.
By the end of January when I would meet with other journalists who write about viruses for a living, I would start to hear the ‘P’ word. We're going to look at a pandemic.
So by February, to my friends I sound crazy because, for me, the coronavirus is like an asteroid heading to earth. Right now it just looks like a little dot in the sky but I have a feeling that pretty soon it's going to be a fireball, I just don't know when.
So I would tell people like, “Hey, maybe you should go shopping for food for a month.” Or they would say like, “We want to make a meeting in June. We want to make plans for a meeting in June.” And I would say like, “I don't think people are going to be getting together in June at all.”
My wife and I went to a dinner at some friends and the door opens and they come out for a hug, and I step back. I'm like, “No hugs. I'm not even going to shake your hand,” which didn't go over very well because nobody had COVID yet. But of course paranoia doesn't make you brilliant. So I would just walk in after not hugging them and sit down and have dinner with them where we'd all breath in each other's aerosols for hours. That didn't give me COVID, thankfully, but I did decide I was not going to be flying anymore, so these trips I had planned for this book cancelled, cancelled, cancelled, cancelled except one. There was one I could get to by car and I really wanted to go. I really wanted to go in that mine.
So, hopped in the car. Drove for four hours to Albany. Met Carl and Katie. They picked me up. We drove into the Adirondacks. Got to the end of our gravel road. Took our gear out of their SUV. We hauled through the snow. Got our chest waders on by the stream. Plunked down into the stream and started walking into the mine.
So this was a mine where they used to mine graphite in the 1800s. This would end up in pencils. But by the early 1900s, the whole thing went bust and so the miners abandoned it and it's been falling apart ever since. We were walking in.
And Carl, the biologist, is telling me about all the ways that I could get hurt as we're going in. He's saying, “Well, the rocks have been falling down and there's sharp rocks in this stream, so don't cut your chest waders on one of these sharp rocks because then freezing water will go into your boots and you'll get hypothermia.”
Then he looks up and he says, “You just don't want to touch the ceiling.”
So we're going in and I'm trying not to get killed and I'm looking around with the flashlight and it's an amazing place. As the water streams down the walls of the mine, it carries minerals with it and then the minerals get deposited in these bizarre ribbons. And Carl tells me that this is called cave bacon.
So I'm looking at the cave bacon and then I noticed that Katie has stopped eventually and has her flashlight trained at something on the wall. I'm wondering what she's seen and so I come up next to her. And there on the wall, there's something that looks like a furry pear. It's a hibernating bat.
So I'm looking at this bat and it's just so marvelous that there's this bit of life in this very lifeless place, very dangerous place. And I think about what life has been like for this bat for the past few months. In the summer of 2019, before anybody knew about COVID, this bat was flying around all night in the Adirondacks. It was eating mosquitoes and moths. Then when the sun came up, it would find a mine or a cave or an attic and it would just roost and just chill out for the day. And the sun went down it would come out again and it would start eating again. And it would just be eating and eating and eating to fuel itself.
Through all of that cycle of day and night of resting and flying around, the interior of its body was very stable. This is like a hallmark of life. Scientists call it homeostasis. Its blood pressure was stable, its body temperature was flat, its blood sugar didn't change. It had feedback loops just like we do, just like all living things do.
But then one day, this bat at the end of an evening when the sun was coming up, went into this mine and it roosted. Then when the sun went down it didn't come out. It just stayed there and it went through an incredible transformation. Its body temperature fell to the temperature of the mine, but that's okay, because the mine itself is very stable. It's a very cool, steady temperature.
Its heart slowed down to a new set point. Instead of just beating a couple hundred times a second, bubububububu, it was now beating maybe ten times a second. Boom, boom. So now it had reached a new kind of homeostasis and this would take it through the winter. It didn't need to eat. It could just live off a tiny little dollop of fat that had built up over the summer.
Carl Zimmer shares his story with a limited audience at The Tank Theatre in New York City, NY in December, 2021. Photo by Zhen Qin.
So I'm looking at this bat and I'm thinking that, to me, this is an unbelievably dangerous place, but for this bat, this mine is incredibly safe because it can find a new kind of balance, a new homeostasis here to get through the winter.
So we go further into the mine and we find more bats. Some are alone on the wall. Some are in clusters. We're talking about what kind of species they are and things like that and, for me, it's fantastic. It's amazing. I've never seen anything like this. I'm so glad I got my chest waders on eventually.
But I think for Carl and Katie, it must be kind of sad because if we were here 20 years ago, we would have seen a thousand bats, not just a couple dozen. The problem is that around 2006, somebody, don't know who, was in Europe and they picked up a little fungus on their shoe I guess. They came here to upstate New York and they went into a mine or a cave or something. They left that fungus there and that fungus got into a bat.
This fungus loves living on bats and these bats in the United States don't know how to defend themselves against this fungus. So when it got cool, the fungus grew into the into the bat's body. It created a little white fuzz around its nose which gave the disease its name, White‑Nose Syndrome.
This is a disease of homeostasis. In other words, the bats can't spend the winter in this stable state. They're fighting the fungus so much that they wake up in the middle of winter. They get thirsty. They try to drink. They might get even hungry and fly out of the mine and immediately get killed by a hawk.
And the bats that make it through the winter are in terrible shape in the spring and a lot of them die. So White-Nose Syndrome started just wiping out populations in New York state and the bats themselves spread it. They spread this pandemic to the south, to the west, to Texas, to California where bats now are dealing with it. This is a colossal problem for the bats.
And we don't really have a good solution for it. There's no White-Nose vaccine. And, even if there was, like good luck vaccinating a bat. So we just have to wait and see.
Yet here I was, looking at these bats who are still here, who are still alive. They have some mysterious resilience we don't understand to White-Nose Syndrome. And now, after withstanding this pandemic, they're withstanding the winter. And in the spring, they were going to come out and live again.
So after a few hours of communing with the bats, we found a slope of rubble and we climbed up with a little bit of light at the top and we didn't kill each other or crack our skulls on the way out. We came out safe and sound into that snowy morning again.
I drove home and I thought a lot about that trip to the mine in the months that followed. Because I came home at the end of February and our kids came home within a couple weeks. They were home you know doing school over Zoom.
I finished up my book and started writing about COVID. Every single day I would wake up in the morning there'd be another story to write about COVID, about the disease, about vaccines, about medications, about a new variant. Every single day was about COVID. It was kind of hard to tell the difference from one day to another. And after a while, I just thought I just have to be like that bat. Every day getting through the winter, waiting for spring to come back.
Thank you.
Part 2: Aya Osman
Thank you. Well, good evening, everyone. It's lovely to be here. My name is Aya Osman and my opportunity to fight or take flight came after I moved here from London in the United Kingdom. I arrived in the middle of a sizzling heat wave in the summer of 2018, B.C. to an empty fifth story apartment in the Upper East Side of Manhattan with absolutely no air conditioning. Back in England, I had left behind adorable nephews, nieces, uncles, brothers, sisters, parents, friends and a five year relationship on its last legs with a struggling musician who smoked weed like a chimney and saw me as a free ticket to New York! Despite all of this, I made the decision to move here to the Big Apple in pursuit of my post-doctoral training as a neuroscientist, as mentioned, at a world renowned research institute where I was to study the connection between the trillions of bacteria living in our gut and how they influence the brain in autism spectrum disorders, and addiction as well. So, I was excited to say the very least. This was to be my second or third time immigrating, depending on how you look at it. My first immigration, having been from Sudan in Africa, where my parents are originally from, to Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, where I was born and then from Saudi Arabia to the UK in 1996 at age seven years old. So because I'd moved around so much, I thought, Oh, moving to New York will be easy.
I recall a couple of incidents in my first few weeks here, which gave me glimpses into both the small and large social challenges I was about to face.
Aya Osman shares her story with a limited audience at The Tank Theatre in New York City, NY in November, 2021. Photo by Zhen Qin.
One of these incidents happened on my second or third day here. I walked into Starbucks already yearning for something familiar. I got to the cashier and I asked for my usual: small cappuccino and a pan-au-chocolate. The cashier looks at me with this blank expression on her face and says of what I repeated myself, I said a pan-au-chocolate, her expression didn't change an inch and she was like “A what?” So this time I pointed at the pastry I wanted and I said, “pan-au-chocolate.” To which she responds, Oh, you mean a chocolate croissant. The expression on her face, screaming, Why must you complicate things? Meanwhile, I'm left thinking this is the place that names all its cup sizes in Italian, but they don't know… anyway. At that moment, at that moment, I was left really thinking this. You know, my official identity here in the states was illegal alien, and I truly felt like an illegal alien.
The second incident carried larger and slightly heavier implications. It was on my first day of orientation. I arrived a little earlier than the proposed start time of 9 a.m. English Breakfast cup of tea glued to my hand. The heat from the cup giving me the sense of comfort. And I took a seat to the edge of the room and I started taking in my surroundings. The room slowly began to fill up, and what I noticed then would honestly probably stay with me forever.
It's what I could only describe as an army of cleaning staff, all dressed in uniform to one side of the room and all of whom, without exception, were people of color. To the other side of the room closer to where I was sitting. The room was filling up with white individuals who were clearly the fellow doctors. Never in my life had I seen segregation that vast, and so I sat back and I started to wonder what this means for me as a black female Muslim immigrant doctor in the United States.
Fast forward, and it's now March 22, 2020. I'm standing inches away from my TV, tuned in to listen to Governor Cuomo provide his daily updates on the COVID 19, or the growing COVID 19, pandemic at the time. He then announces that starting at 8 p.m. that evening, an official stay at home order would commence in New York City. Now, as an international person during a global pandemic, a stay at home order is probably one of the scariest things you could hear. And, so, hearing this announcement, my heart rate shot through the roof, my breathing became shallow and more frequent. My body tensed up. This was my fight or flight response kicking in. I looked to the corner of the TV to check the time, and I realized I had a few hours before 8 p.m. to make a decision on what to do.
Aya Osman shares her story with a limited audience at The Tank Theatre in New York City, NY in November, 2021. Photo by Zhen Qin.
In a panic, I flung open my wardrobe, pulled out my travel suitcase, threw a few pieces of clothing in the bag, my mind racing. Ok, so if I stay to further my scientific career and something happens to a loved one back home and I'm unable to travel and go see them, how would I feel? Would I forgive myself? Did I even want to stay in a place and continue dealing with all the social challenges I'm facing, yet again as a Black woman, this time in a country run by the likes of Donald Trump, a man who is suggesting that drinking bleach might be of benefit during a global pandemic? I was like, this is too much. So at that moment, and over the next few weeks to come, I was left navigating literally one of the hardest decisions of my life.
So what did I decide? My bag was packed and ready to go. By the way, my bag honestly stayed packed and by the front door for weeks and months to come. I recently unpacked it, but something in my gut was telling me to hang on. Probably those trillions of tiny bacteria signaling to my brain, saying, “Wait.” The reasons why becoming clearer over the next few weeks. So, as we move through 2020, it became evident that the people suffering the most during the COVID 19 pandemic were people who have been oppressed or marginalized by oppressive systems in society. For example, we know that Black and Native American COVID 19 death rates was approaching twice that of white counterparts.
This same trend was observed outside of the US, where we know that social inequalities resulted in distinct disease outcomes in… hold on, let me get the acronym we're given in the UK, correct? I believe it's BAME, which stands for Black and Asian Minority Ethnic communities, not to be confused with BAMF, which stands for badass motherfucker. So again, this was compared to White counterparts. And so this striking trend in the US and globally was eventually confirmed to be associated with an infection risk driven by societal factors rather than biological differences in how deadly the disease was. And so this emerging link between the COVID 19 pandemic and social inequalities really started to open up my eyes to the ways that racism in all its forms overt… covert…Institutional… structural, had affected my life as a Black woman across multiple countries. It extended as far back as being the only Black kid in my class, in school in Saudi Arabia and putting up my hand in class to answer a question and seeing the teacher look directly at me for a few seconds before her gaze would move on and scan the rest of the room for someone else to select. One day, when I was in year one, I finished class for the day, again, we were in Saudi Arabia and I go next door to my sister's class to collect her. I get to her class and I see her standing near the front with a nervous expression on her face. She'd taken out the braids in her hair stood there in all its glory and a full afro. I got closer to her and I said, “Why did you take out your braids? Mom's going to be so mad at you. Your hair's all tangled up! You're going to get into trouble. Blah blah blah.” She looks up at me, innocent expression on her face, and she says, “I just want my hair to be soft and smooth like everyone else in my class.” That feeling of being different, being an outsider, being discriminated against extended into our time in the UK shortly after the 9-11 attacks, my brother gets home a lot later than usual and when he gets home, we're like, “What's up? What happened?” And he tells us that he got pulled over by the police for no other reason than being a black man in a car wearing a hoodie. They tell him to step out the car and hand over his license. And so he does that and one look at his license with his Muslim name printed all over it was enough for them to not only start searching his car, but dismantling his car, piece by piece in front of his very eyes, while he's unable to say anything. All under the Terrorism Act. I remember the heaviness in his face and voice as he was telling us the story, and I remember the feeling of hopelessness that I felt in my gut, knowing there was absolutely nothing I could do to protect either my older brothers or my younger brothers who were like eight and 12 at the time from the encounters they are about to face in a post 9-11 world as Black and Muslim men.
We're now back in New York and it's the height of the pandemic. And one afternoon I look down at my phone and I see an incoming call from my mother and of course, as an ex-pat when you get a call from home, the first thing you think is, “Oh, what's wrong?” I answer the phone and instantly from her voice, I knew something was wrong. There was a long pause during which my mind ran through every possible scenario, and she then tells me that her brother, her younger brother had caught the virus a few weeks earlier, was found dead in his home in Sudan that morning. I honestly didn't know how to respond. I asked if she was OK, and then I asked if I could call her back in a few moments. I walked over to the mirror and kind of stared at my reflection in shock. And I remember the thought that ran through my mind was “If Sudan had never been colonized and left in political and economical tatters with poor access to health care, would my uncle still be with us here today? And here I was, stood in the middle of this apartment in one of the most expensive parts of New York with access to some of the best health care knowing so many of my family members didn't.
These realizations, or these incidents combined made me realize that despite everything that made me different in the U.S., there was something very common about my experiences and those of Black Americans. To add insult to injury, during this time of social awakening, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were killed at the hands of law enforcement. This was the final straw needed to ignite the Black Lives Matter protests, a movement that, for me, would be pivotal in solidifying my own identity and how it aligned with the experiences of Black Americans and the Black Lives Matter protests. And so we're now in May, I think it's May 28th. I'm returning from a biking session around Central Park, something I was doing quite often during lockdown, and I'm about to dock my city bike back when I hear a crowd marching down Madison Avenue to my right, shouting “Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter.” I froze for the second time in just weeks, I felt the familiar increase in my heart rate, my breathing rate. My palms started to sweat. I felt the adrenaline run through my body. My hands tightened grip on the bike that was just about to dock. But this time it was different. Mixed in with the fear taking over my body, I felt excitement. Running through my mind at that moment was America's rich history of protests, and I knew that this country was not only founded on them, but had a history of triumphs from such uprisings. And here I was.