Patty Vest:
Welcome to Sagecast, the Podcast of Pomona College. I'm Patty Vest. 

Mark Wood:
And I'm Mark Wood

Patty Vest: 
In these extraordinary times, we're coming to you from our various homes as we all shelter in place.

Mark Wood:
This season on Sagecast we're talking to Pomona and Alumni about the personal, professional and intellectual journies that have brought them to where they are today.

Patty Vest:
This episode was recorded in the studios of KSPC, prior to the shutdown of campus due to the covid-19 pandemic. Today, we're delighted to talk to longtime NPR science correspondent, Joe Palca class of 74. So welcome.

Mark Wood:
Yeah, it's good to have you with us. Thanks. 

Patty Vest:
So let's start with your love of science. Can you trace that back to any particular point in time?

Joe Palca:
No, no, I next question. I got I got interested in, I wasn't interested in science PR well, okay. I got interested in sleep research when I was a freshman here, but not here, not because of here. I went to visit a friend at Stanford and he happened to be living in a dormitory that had as its dorm resident, a guy named Bill Dement and Bill Dement was the F is I think he's still alive. I think he is. Yeah. Is the father of modern sleeper search. I mean, he did all the seminal studies in the fifties talking about rapid eye movements and dreaming and all this other stuff. And he had just left New York to go to Stanford and he was a dorm resident and he set up a sleep lab in the basement of the dorm.

Joe Palca:
And I was visiting. I drove up with a bunch of people from here and they dropped me off at Stanford and they went wherever they were going. I think actually I met them at Berkeley cause I have a picture of me in Berkeley from that trip. So it must've been that I continued up the peninsula anyway. I didn't have a place to sleep and Stanford. So I slept in the sleep lab and I was asleep, asleep subject. And I just thought it was really interesting that you could look at squiggly lines on a piece of paper and decide, Oh, this is somebody dreaming. This is, somebody's not dreaming. I dunno. I just thought the idea that you could peer into somebody's brain was pretty interesting. And so I got interested in sleep research and I did some science psychology research, but I wasn't, I mean, my, my interest was fairly narrowly focused cause I didn't take any astronomy or physics or chemistry or any, well, I took chemistry, but that was sort of, I'm not sure why I needed, I needed to fulfill the science requirement. Most people took, you know, rocks for jocks or astronomy for poets or something. But I took I took chemistry and yeah, so it was all, it was not, it wasn't love at first sight.

Patty Vest:
Following Pomona, you went to UC Santa Cruz to to get your PhD. And actually that's probably where the beginning of your interest in sleepy psychology started.

Joe Palca:
No, it's not where it started. It started when I was a freshman at Pomona and I went to visit a friend at Stanford and he, his dorm resident had a had a sleep lab in the basement of the sleep hall asleep in the basement of the dorm. I got in, I didn't, after I graduated from Pomona, I kind of stopped doing sleep research. And I decided I was going to try to go to medical school. And so I took a few classes in medical school and then went back I had to, I had to fill my premed requirements. So I took an extra year of undergraduate classes. And then when I didn't get into medical school, I applied to graduate school in sleep research again, because that was the only other thing I thought I might be interested.

Patty Vest:
And then the transition, when did you decide to transition into journalism?

Joe Palca:
Well, that came at the end of graduate school. I was four years into my dissertation, my work, I had completed all the data that I needed to gather for the project I was working on. And I saw an ad in science magazine for something called the mass media science and engineering fellows program. And what the program does is it take scientists or people in research and put them in a news operation for the summer. And so I spent 10 weeks in the summer of 1981 at the CBS affiliate in Washington, D.C. And that's when it really hit me that I wanted to switch careers because I thought I really liked teaching and I liked learning all the stuff I was learning. And I liked the fact that, you know, when you're a graduate student, you're at the bottom of the ladder in every research setting. But when you're a journalist, they opened the door for you and, you know, give you a cold drink. And I thought that was much nicer way to be treated. So I so I decided to switch, but I, I was all, I was close to finishing my degree. So I came back and finished my PhD.

Mark Wood:
So let's how did you how did you end up at NPR? Can you give us some?

Joe Palca:
Sure. Well after I finished my PhD, I got a job and Washington DC back at the station that I had been an intern at. I should have said that the internship was, yeah. I said Washington. So I got a gig. It was an intern in the station that I worked at. And I w I did a job for, it was more general news. And then I went, I didn't like that very much. And I went off and did something else. And then I came back a year or two later, and I was the science producer. So in one sense, I was doing exactly what I wanted to do, but in another sense, I didn't like local news very much so I I w I, I don't know what would have happened, but one day the editor of nature magazine called up and said, did I want to go and work for them?

Joe Palca:
And I don't know how, you know, there's a, there's the reasons that happened are complicated, but it happened. And so I wound up going to nature in 1986. And that was when my journalism career really started because I local television news is, is mostly, I mean, it was news regurgitation. There was no, we had to do a story every night and it had to have a doctor and it had to have a patient. And it was very formulaic. And I didn't like doing it very much, but at nature, I mean, I was covering the things that were important for us scientists all across the board. And so I did that for three and a half years, and then I got traded to science magazine and I did that for three and a half years. And then I had a difference of opinion about the editorial content of the science section of science magazine with the editor.

Joe Palca:
And so I decided I didn't like it there anymore. I mean, I was the top writer, but I didn't like, I didn't agree with the editors views of the pay of the journal. So NPR, I had met a lot of the people from NPR just by going to press conferences in Washington and getting to know them. And so they had one of the science correspondents was going off to take a year as a foreign correspondent in Africa and they needed to fill behind it. And so they offered me the one year gig to fill behind this guy. And so I took a pay cut and a one year gig to try NPR.

Patty Vest:
You've been in journalism since early nine the early eighties. And, and how can you, how would you say science communication and the coverage of science have changed in the span of your career?

Joe Palca:
Well, I mean, when I started you pretty much had to have a printing press or a broadcast tower, if you wanted anybody to hear you. And now everybody has the same access to the world because they have a cell phone in their pocket. So like, you guys are, you know, I mean, there's no way that this show would get on the air, unless, well, you might put it on KSPC, but there's no national broadcast that would take on a thing like this, but this particular podcast could be listened to by anyone anywhere in the world, pretty much. So, you know, that's the biggest change.

Mark Wood:
So can you tell us about he, um, Sci Commers community that you developed at NPR?

Joe Palca:
Sure. so we, one of the things that I feel very strongly about is the importance of science communication, not just by me, because what, again, what's happened since, since you don't need a broadcast tower or a printing press to reach a lot of people, there's just sort of a democratization of science coverage or science news, and there's not enough science journalists out there to do all the science coverage that needs to be done. So I think scientists should pick up some of the Slack. And so my goal was to encourage young scientists. And I say young, because mostly the older scientist, didn't, weren't as receptive to the, to the message, but I'll take anybody. And I say, you know, here are the, here are the tools that you need to be able to communicate well.

Joe Palca:
But I mean, I can show people or tell people how to, how to talk to the public, but it only works if you do it. And so I, I was I, I started this, I got this group together. I, I, then I had a lot of help from from a a graduate student who came with 10 PRS and an assistant producer. And she helped, she, she really built it into a big operation. Her name is Maddie Sophia, and now she's doing the NPR science podcast shortwave. So listen to that, if you haven't yet,

Patty Vest:
As we record this year on campus for the colleges Weird Science Colloquium on science denial, from your understanding what motivates science denial,

Joe Palca:
I don't know. I mean, I'm not a science denier, so I don't know why people deny it. You should ask a science denier. I don't know. Some, some people feel it's an I mean, I don't know. I don't know why people would say they don't believe that the earth is round, so it doesn't make sense to me. So I don't, I mean, I don't, I'm not trying to convince them otherwise. I'm just, if that's their belief, I'm fine, but it's not based on facts. So I don't know what to say. 

Mark Wood:
It has Uh sort of the fake news climate and the science deniers has said yes. Affected how you, how you present science in any way.?

Joe Palca:
No, I don't think so. I'm I, you know, I may be pissing in the wind, but I don't think that I can do much, but do what I do. I mean, I'm always, I have always tried to a engage my audience and B give them facts in a way that they can understand them and give them some context, but I'm not, I mean, I'm

Joe Palca:
Not saying, Oh, and you know, if he listened to me or you won't be a science denier anymore. No, I don't have any idea. I just, I, I do the thing I do. It's called journalism. And I'm limited by what's reality.

Patty Vest:
How do you think, or you think science, especially climate change became so politicized. And do you think there's a way out of that?

Joe Palca:
Well, again, that's that's not a question that I've ever really. I mean, I see it, but I don't see it with any more expertise than you guys do. I mean, why do you think

Patty Vest:
Depends on values beliefs.

Patty Vest:
So what kind of value would lead you to disbelieve? The climate is changing. If a scientific consensus says it is?

Joe Palca:
Whether or not you believe in science.

Patty Vest:
So you think that the climate denying is all is just based on people don't believe that what science says could be argued.

Mark Wood:
There've been, there've been a vested interests that have pushed on that started way back with, with cigarette smoking and cancer and the ozone hole and sort of, it just feels like it's built over time. This sort of just this, this interest in promoting a different view for, for political and economic reasons.

Joe Palca:
Right. So, okay. So you brought up smoking the people who tried to convince smokers that there was nothing to worry about. Were not science deniers. They were saying the science isn't clear. And here's some scientists who don't agree with that.

Joe Palca:
So they weren't saying, we don't believe it. They're saying here are other scientists. So the people who don't believe climate, I mean, the, the, the Exxon Mobil people in the start were trying to get their own experts paid to say, no, this is our science where we've reached in. The argument is there's no question any longer. I mean, nobody thinks that smoking isn't bad for you. It doesn't happen. And it's not, I mean, nobody denies that science. So we're in this awkward phase where you're saying, well, politically, yeah. I mean, there's obviously people have political interests that say, we want to keep burning fossil fuel car manufacturers make a lot more money with bigger cars, oil companies are making money, selling you products. You know, it's, it's not that people are saying, I don't believe the science. They're saying, no, I want to live my life as I'm living it. And maybe it's not as bad as the scientist say. And there's always a few people who will say, yeah, it's not as bad as they think, or they say, well, sciences are smart. They'll figure it out when the time comes. So I think the whole premise, that's why I asked you I don't, I don't. Yeah. I don't think it's science denial.

Mark Wood:
Well, in your work with, with young scientists about communication, how, how do you communicate well about science? It's it's it's quite often gets bogged down in complexities. How do you avoid that?

Joe Palca:
The answer to the question, how do people communicate? It's they practice? And the other thing is they have to remember that they're not talking to their peers, other scientists they're talking to the public. And so the public want to engage, right? And they don't need all the facts that you have to regurgitate when you're in a classroom or when you're in a scientific conference. So when scientists say, how do I get to be a better communicator? I say, talk to people who aren't scientists and explain to them what you're doing and practice, because the first time it's going to feel awkward. And the second time it's going to feel awkward. But if you keep at it, you'll find some way that connects with people. And the other thing is connecting with people because one of the key elements of communicating effectively is listening.

Patty Vest:
Can you tell us how you choose stories? So you've been, you've been in communicating science for 30, almost 40 years. Can you tell us how, how you go about that process?

Joe Palca:
Yeah. I find things that are interesting and I report on them.

Patty Vest:
And what do you find interesting. What how do you, why do you think your audience will find interesting? Tell us about that.

Joe Palca:
Well, as I said, I don't know what my audience will find interesting, because I don't know. I don't, I can't ask them. I know what I find interesting. And I assume that if I find something interesting, somebody else will too. Am I right? I don't know. I get paid to do it. So I guess I'm right. I find, I mean, while I was walking over here, somebody said, Hey, there's a story about using bacteria, phages to treat liver disease. Okay. I didn't, I didn't know. That was a possibility. And so maybe I'll look into that. I don't, I don't have a list of, you know, stories that I feel I have to do. I don't say, okay, today's climate day and tomorrow is vaccine day. And the next thing is, is something else day. I'm not, I'm not doing that anymore. I'm doing a project. This Joe's big idea project where I, I'm more interested in finding how the scientific process works. And so I've I just pick things that I think are interesting and scientifically relevant in some way or other.

Patty Vest:
And what are some of the most interesting stories have you worked on recently?

Joe Palca:
I think the most interesting story I'm, I'm surprisingly to say was the electric dipole moment of the neutron. Can you tell us more about that? Yes. I never heard of the electron dipole moment or the neutron til I got a press release that said EDM, which is what electron dipole moment are the initials for. It is not just electronic dance music. Did you know that that's what electronic did you ever hear? Electronic music? He's smiling. He's very electronic dance music. So everybody, I thought, well, that's hilarious. Now I know how to start this piece because I started it by playing electronic dance music. And then, then I mean, I made a joke about it because I had Scott Simon say when Joe Palca came to us and said, he didn't want to do a story about EDM. We said, Oh, sure.

Joe Palca:
We can do that. And they started playing electronic dance music. And then, and then Scott comes back in and says, but Joe said, no, that's not the EDM. He's talking about. He's talking about the electric dipole moment on neutron. And we said, what's that? And Joe said, he'd explained. So, okay, now I know that nobody knows what the electric dipole Momo the neutron is, except for people who are steeped in, you know, particle physics and condensed matter physics or whatever. So I had to figure out a way to make people interested in it that they didn't know in advance. So I just totally artificially obviously just had nothing at all to do with electric, electronic dance music, but I figured that was a way to drag people in and maybe they listened to a little more of the piece. And I think it's interesting because the answer is, you know, if you can find an electric dipole moment on the neutron, it will help explain why the universe exists now, what could be more important than that?

Joe Palca:
Right. So I thought that was an interesting story just because it was, I mean, and the other thing is, again, did other people find it interesting? I don't know. I went back to the web people at NPR and I asked what story I did in the last year. It got the most hits and it was that one, I most page use of any story. I did 180,000. And it was, I think in part, because the headline was why corn beef sandwiches and the rest of the universe exists. And it was a great picture of a corn beef sandwich. And I think I thought that it turned into a really interesting story. I mean, maybe it wasn't, but I got interested in it and that's basically what happens. I mean, every story I do you say, well, what does my most interesting story? I, the last one was the most interesting.

Joe Palca:
I think every story I do is something that makes me want to know more about it. And and I think that's something that's very important to bring to every story you do. I mean, I taught statistics to undergraduate psych majors, and there's no class that an undergraduate psych major is more dreading and Le less interested in then statistics for the most part. But I walked into that class with the attitude that this is the most interesting and important class you're going to have in your entire undergraduate career. And so I want you to get excited and enthusiastic and have a good time learning this stuff, because it's pretty interesting that was in graduate school. I feel that the same kind of enthusiasm is necessary to lighten up every topic. I mean, yes, there are certain things that life and death that everybody wants to know about.

Joe Palca:
I mean, you know, I want to know about the politics the day. I want to know when there's a big earthquake. I want an, I mean, I want to hear that news, so I don't have to sell that quite as much. I don't think you should try to make it boring, but you don't have to like, say this is important because you know, 10,000 people were killed. I mean, people get that. Any natural disaster that kills 10,000 people is important and probably worth knowing about, but nobody in the general public, nobody really needs to know about the electric dipole moment of the neutron. So I have to make it interesting. So you asked me what my most, you know, what I, they all are interesting. I mean, there's some, I like doing more than others. I like going to the jet propulsion laboratory and talking about the Mars landing, just cause it's super cool.

Joe Palca:
I mean, we land on Mars. What, what else, what could be more amazing than that? You see a picture? I like the pictures when they send them back of the Rover. I mean, bar Mars is boring. It's red and rocks, but the fact that there's a really complicated piece of machinery built in Pasadena, that's sitting on a plaque, you know, in a plane, in the middle of Mars. That's interesting. That's a good picture to me. So, you know, there's lots of things. I'm, I'm, they're all interesting.

Mark Wood:
And what you've mentioned that EDM is, is pure science, pure science research. And a lot of science reporting seems to really focus in on, on things where they can sort of predict some great outcome it's related to your life. Yes, this is. And you tend to avoid that kind of thing. Why?

Joe Palca:
Well, that's, that, that's absolutely true.

Joe Palca:
And the reason is because I think, I think there's a disconnect in the way science is reported as news. Because if you ask yourself, what are the really important science stories? I mean, what are the medical breakthroughs? We'll use medical breakthroughs as the quintessential most important. We had to know about this right now, we're reporting about CRISPR and there's this really exciting trial about CRISPR, and maybe it will be used to cure sickle cell disease. Well, sickle cell disease is a terrible disease. CRISPR is an amazing technology. This will allow you to, you know, to solve the problem fast. Fantastic. But we're doing patient number one. Yeah. And we're not going to know for 10 years, if, if, if it works in this patient, which it may or may not, it won't mean that it'll work in every patient. It won't mean that it'll work more.

Joe Palca:
Generally it say how much it's going to cost because this person is being zillions of dollars for testing and what have you to make sure that nothing goes wrong. So I've said, look, I, I'm tired of saying, and this could lead to, I mean, I've done a million of those stories about this could lead to a D I hope it does. But I think people get a mistaken impression about how science proceeds when they get those stories, science proceeds by increment and by tedious hard work. And so it's it's a, it's a, it's a false importance that we assigned to things. When we say, Oh, let's talk about CRISPR and curing disease. Well, yeah, let's talk about it, but let's only talk about it a little bit because there's probably a lot of other things we could talk about and I've done it enough in my life.

Joe Palca:
I spent a, I spent probably a decade doing stories about embryonic STEM cells and how important they were and how they're going to, you know, California passed the California Institute of regenerative medicine and $3 billion for STEM cell research. And the scientists all stood up and said, if you give us this money, we'll give you cures from STEM cells. Well, where I said I did, I did the stories. I said, look, this is really important. We should cut. I did a lot of stories about it. And I'm tired of that. I, I think that we have misled people about what science can do. And maybe that's, if you want to get back to your questions about science denying, I think I think people may be, think that that science lets them down. And I think part of that is because we've told them that science is about to do great things all the time, and it does do great things, but they're very incremental and you have to look at them in a decade timeframe instead of a day or a week or a month.

Joe Palca:
And people get cynical about it. I mean, you, if, if, if a disease moves cured every time there's a story about a disease being cured, we all live forever. Right? Exactly. I mean, I, I was, I was in a hotel room and in in Texas or someplace and a local news person came on the air and said, scientists are reporting a cure for breast cancer. And I thought, how did I miss that? I'm a science correspondent. I'm supposed to know about these things and how first they didn't have a cure for cancer. Yeah. But, but there's this tendency. I mean, otherwise, why would we talk about it? Who wants to hear about, you know, you don't win any points in a newsroom by coming in and say, small earthquake, few injured. You can come in and say, this is a cataclysm.

Joe Palca:
So you don't come in and say, this might lead to a cure in 20 years, you come in and say, this is really exciting. And it's a breakthrough or the scientists play any role in hyping that too? Or is it the news or is it the reporters who were just on the front page? I think there's a lot of finger pointing. I mean, scientists always pointed at the media and we do it. I mean wheat, but it takes two to tango. If they didn't want to play along, we wouldn't have a story. So you know, I'm getting press releases. The people who are conducting the CRISPR trial, they're not protect preventing the press from coming in. They're welcoming and the men are not welcoming. I mean, we have a great reporter I'm I really don't want to make it sound like they're doing bad things.

Joe Palca:
I'm just saying the nature of news forces you into a circumstance where science tends to be overblown. And yeah, maybe, I mean, maybe it's false promises, but I, I think it's a good question about where, because when the scientist goes to the national institutes of health or some other place and says, I need money for my research, they don't say I need money for my research, because I'm really interested in this one little enzyme. They say, I'm interested in this one little enzyme because it plays a critical role in this pathway, which is listening to this disease, which is something. So they're all, we're all there. We're all saying it. It's just the journalist's finished. Start with that last line of the grant application and scientists, you know, don't so that's, that's the big difference.

Patty Vest:
You mentioned that science or it's a process and, and, and you get all these releases or information about studies, whether, and you know, whether they're close to a breakthrough or, you know, they're in patient one how do you, how do you go through those and say, okay, this is something that is it's. I need to report on this because it's close to happening. Or this is quite, this has not been reported on yet, but it's not fully baked. Right? How do you go about that?

Joe Palca:
There's it, it it's. I wish I, you know, I wish I could assure you that it was thoughtful and measured and carefully vetted it's haphazard. First of all, I don't know which ones are going to work. Second of all, I think most of them aren't going to work. And third of all, if everybody's already reported on it, I don't need to tell them also. I mean, I I'm I'm very uncomfortable with pack journalism. Nobody likes it, but there's times when we all report the same thing. So you know that the way science journalists see these things is, yeah, we get press releases, but we also get an embargoed copy of the journals, you know, about that. So I know what's going to be in next week's nature magazine, or next week science magazine, our next week's new England journal of medicine. And if I see something there that has that kind of like I'm vaping is killing thousands of people.

Joe Palca:
That's a big story. I think that's a story that you have to tell, but I'm not the only one that's going to notice that. Right. Right. So where I'm at in my career is I'm looking for stories that may be a little more hidden. I'm a little more obscure and I'm not, I mean, I don't, you know, I, I'm not looking for the ones that are going to change people's lives. And today I'm looking for the ones that are going to change culture and make the world a better place, because we're going to have more knowledge. That's a tougher sell, but I I've done it long enough to be able to know people know that I'll deliver the goods. Nobody says, well, that was a really boring story to me usually. So I'm, I'm, I'm satisfied that there's something interesting in each of these stories, but you, the answer, your question, how do you pick which one it's, it's the one I actually, I, I, I shy away from the ones that make the biggest promises because I, I think those, the bigger they come, the harder they fall.

Joe Palca:
So I'm looking for the things that seem odd to me or counter or tardy. I never knew that or that, I didn't know that was a problem. I didn't even know people had that condition. I didn't know how prevalent it was. I mean, do you know the term misophonia? Well, I don't really either, but it's, it's a condition and I only know about it for something else I was working on, but it's a condition where tiny noises make you incredibly uncomfortable. It's like hearing somebody chew a potato chip and know, and instead of just thinking, Oh, well, that's annoying. They go completely bonkers. And the question came up well, is, I mean, I didn't know. There was such a thing. There's a, if you go to the national institutes of health website, they listed under rare diseases. If you go to the misophonia society of America, they say, it's not rare. It's, it's all over the place. They're just under reported. So that's an interesting dichotomy and I'm not going to be able to answer. It's not a dichotomy. It's an interesting spectrum. I'm not going to be able to say who's right and who's wrong, but I never heard of misophonia. So I thought it would be an interesting story to talk about it. I mean, I haven't done it yet.

Joe Palca:
I also have the conceit, which is also just a conceit that if I've never heard of it, there's not a lot of people who've never heard of it. Right. And I don't have any way to measure that because I don't get any feedback. I don't, you know, nobody says, but if I haven't heard of it, I figure I'm, you know, I'm reasonably well plugged in and connected. And I see a lot of stuff. So I figured that's enough to say there are others who are going to go. I didn't know that.

Mark Wood:
I'm curious about your thoughts about sort of scientific literacy in this country. And I mean, I would guess that your, your show is probably probably attracts more scientific, literate, scientifically literate than those who might. Yeah.

Joe Palca:
Well, that's, I think that question is, is is a difficult one. I, I, I have arguments with people who think that the science, that the media have a role in improving science literacy, because I think it's too late. I think by the time they're old enough to listen to NPR they should have learned that the earth goes around the sun and not the other around, cause I don't put it in my pieces. I, I don't. I mean, yeah, there is a certain amount of basic knowledge, but in all of this. Yeah. But there are plenty of molecular geneticists who don't know that much about plate tectonics or certainly don't know about electric dipole moment of the neutron.

Joe Palca:
And I don't consider them scientifically illiterate. I just consider them to some extent uninformed just as we're all uninformed, but I am worried I don't know. I don't know how to, I mean, there's this big push to make school relevant and interesting and informative, but I don't, I there's a few facts along the way that you just have to learn. I'm sorry. I mean, I wish I could tell you why it's important that the earth goes around the sun and not vice versa, but it does. What's interesting is to me, I've thought a lot about it is let's say you didn't know that, okay. The four of us in this room, we, we just get up in the morning and the sun comes up and it goes down, how would we go about proving to our friends without having a textbook and without having a class and without having, how would you go about proving that to, to somebody who didn't believe it?

Joe Palca:
I think that's hard. I I'm an I'm stunned that, you know, the, the, the Greeks 2000 years ago had sort of figured that one out that was pretty phenomenal. And the fact that, you know, by measuring the motion of planets Capernicus, I mean, they, they appear to go backwards in the sky. So how would you, how would you allow, what would allow your brain to think? Well, what would make that back and forth motion? Well, it's not that they're going back and forth. It's just from our perspective, it appears to be going back and forth cause we're passing in them in their orbit, but you have to rethink your entire world to come to that understanding. And so I'm, I'm, I'm thinking we're spared being that intelligent by being a little more scientifically literate. But it's always a question. I mean, you know, do I have to tell people what DNA is?

Joe Palca:
Do I have to tell people what a gene is? Do I have to tell people what Silicon is? Or what, what, what is the low level of what I can assume my audience knows? What's your answer? Have you, I mean, do you assume they do know? Or I don't know. I mean it's it's whatever my editor says is, okay, I seriously, I mean, there's no way, there's no way to really answer that question because I don't know if people, I don't get it. I don't get to quiz them afterwards. I have said through my career, I think when I started out in broadcasting, we still used to say DNA, the blueprint of life. Right. And we don't say that anymore. Yeah. It's become part of common parlance, but when did that happen and do people, I mean, does it matter that they DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid?

Joe Palca:
I bet most people don't know that. Does it matter? Not really. What's special about DNA. I bet most people couldn't answer that, except that it's got something to do with genes. Maybe it has something to do with inheritance. I mean, it depends. It depends on how essential the information is to the story itself. So if I don't have to explain it, I'm not going to, but when I run up to something that you cannot, I mean, like when, when we were talking about the electric dipole moment of the neutron, just to keep coming back to that, the way the theory say that it should have one. Well, why is that? I don't really understand why it is, but it has to do with a violation of symmetry because at the beginning of the universe, there was just energy, but, and there was, and there was matter, but there was matter in positive matter and anti matter. And if they were exactly the same amount of positive matter and anti-matter, they would annihilate each other and all we'd have in the universe is bright light. That's what physics tells us. But obviously we're here, right? We're talking. So something is out of symmetry. How.?

Joe Palca:
And the answer is that there's some little blips, something. Now it's as tiny as if the, if the new China was similar. If there weren't such, if cemetery wasn't violated, the neutron would be a perfect sphere. And if symmetry is violated, it would have a certain, it would look a little bit more like a football, but the difference between that perfect sphere and that football like quality is measured to the limits of ability to detect such things. I mean, smaller than atomic scale. So that's why they keep somebody says the search for the electric dipole moment of the neutron has killed more theories than any other scientific search now. And put that in a piece. But the answer is, well, we didn't find it at this level of accuracy. So maybe if we make our instrument 10 times more accurate, we'll find it. And they make it 10 times more accurate and they don't find it.

Joe Palca:
This next thing they're talking maybe another hundred times more accurate. How many million dollars do you want to spend to make your instrument? How many hundreds of million dollars do you want to spend? I don't know. It's an interesting question. But we were talking about what I think people have to understand. Well, I used sphere and football and I didn't explain what either of them were. Right. But that's what we're talking about. So I'm trying, I don't know. I don't even know if not people don't want a neutron is it's an, it's a particle, what's a fundamental particle. Something made up of a quartz. What's the park you can keep going, but I'm talking all that. The only part that I want people to understand is that there's this little tiny thing. That's either spherical or slightly not spherical. And that could explain why the universe exists.

Joe Palca:
Whoa.

Mark Wood:
Yeah. Have you ever run into a story that, that you thought was, this is a really cool story, but it's just too complicated to explain.

Joe Palca:
Yes. I mean, yes. And they're usually math stories. I was at a, I was at a, I was talking to a mathematician and he was telling me that the, I mean, if you asked mathematicians, what was the most important mathematical study, a discovery in the 20 19th, 19 hundreds or whatever, pick, pick a pick a recent example. They said, Oh, the proof that there's higher order Lee symmetries. I never heard of a Lee symmetry. I don't know what a higher up. So I said, okay, I was sitting at a dinner party and I was sitting around, sitting in a table with all PhDs and one Nobel prize winner. And I said to this mathematician, if you can explain this so that everybody at the table understands it, I'll do a radio story about it.

Joe Palca:
And so he went through this explanation and at the end, I said to all the people at the table signed me, did you guys get this? And they all went. And I said, so how am I going to explain something that PhDs and Nobel scientists don't understand that he's explaining? So I said, I, it may be that important. Now. Then he told me the story that I would have done, which he said, I, so it turns out that there were three collaborators. He was one of them. And then there was another, or maybe he was one of them. And then there was a guy in France and they were, it was a computer based proof. And so they were generating a lot of data to get the final proof lined up and nailed down. And in the process of doing that, one of the collaborators develop ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, amyotrophic, lateral sclerosis.

Joe Palca:
And so he couldn't travel to meet with them anymore. And then he lost the ability to do anything but lie still. So they went over to Paris. And while he was like, in the final stages of his life, they would project the results that they were getting from the computer runs on a screen above his head. So he could just lie in bed and look at them and then blink or whatever his reactions were. And I said, are you kidding me? That's a story I don't need. I don't even know how to say what he's talking about. I mean, just the fact that this weird thing happened and he's doing this and it's this important to him. And, and he said, yeah, it's a great story, but they don't want to talk. They don't want their privacy invaded. Yeah. I said, I understand that. And you know, I feel sad about that.

Joe Palca:
And I, it is abuse. It's, it's a terrible private moment for these people. But if you want to know what the story was, it wasn't about the mathematics. It was about the mathematician. And I did a story this year about mathematicians. And I don't, I don't know any of the science or the mathematics that he was working on, but he himself and the people he tutored were fascinating. And so, but the question you asked, do I do stories I can't do. Yes. Because they, they just, they, they elude me. I can't do quantum physics stories either. Because I, after you've said the cat's in the box and it's not in the box or it's dead, or it's alive, you've done that analogy. It's, it's the one everybody trots out. It's a great analogy. Even the fetus has tried it out. But after you said that, what does that mean? I mean, what, how does that helpful? Why is a quantum computer what's that got to do with a cat in a box? What does quantum entanglement mean? I have, I have a hard time with that one. So, but I try, sometimes I try,

Patty Vest:
When you, when you're doing stories, how often does it happen? Like the example you gave us, where the actual people in the story is, they're probably more interesting than this study or does that you come across?

Joe Palca:
Yeah, that's frequent. I think I mean, okay, so you asked why I picked stories. So what I do now, when I see something that's interesting is I just don't, I just don't say I'm going to do this. I Google the person and I look to see if they've done any videos. And I see if they're an interesting speaker and that's cheating a little bit, because there's plenty of really interesting scientists doing really interesting research, who aren't good speakers and they're a little tongue tied, but I figure, okay, once I'm done interviewing all the interesting scientists who are articulate, then I'll go to work on the ones that aren't articulate and you haven't run out yet, not close. The only other thing I have done, and I made a very conscious effort to do this is if you look back at the last 25 years or 27 years, that I've been at NPR, certainly starting five years ago, almost all the people I interviewed were white guys, white men.

Joe Palca:
And it wasn't exclusively my fault that I was only interviewing white men and not interviewing women or people of color. It's just that they weren't as well represented in science. And they didn't, the white guys tended to be the head of the lab or the more senior person or this. And we tended to gravitate toward them because they were the ones. And then of course, it's a self fulfilling prophecy because they get good at answering your questions. And so, you know, you're going to get a reliable interview, so you go back to them. But now, if, since I've said, I have a lot of latitude about what story I cover. I try to cover stories where the principles are, you know, let Tina, or, or a Hispanic or somebody who you don't usually get as the scientists in the white lab coat, because I'm trying to, I mean, a lot of people said to me, you know, it happened this week.

Joe Palca:
Bunch of young scientists came up to me when I was giving a talk at UC San Diego. And they said, my parents made me listen to you in the rain when I was sitting in the backseat of their car. And you were my introduction to science, and I really got interested in thank you so much. And I'm flattered by that. I don't like being that old, but I'm flattered by that. What, what people have also said now to me is the parents of young girls. Thank you for putting role models for my children on the air. So that they'll know that if they want to grow up to be a scientist, that's fine. There's plenty of them out there. That's pretty powerful. I like that. I like that a lot. So you say you don't get feedback from your stories, but then that's, that's pretty. I get, I get anecdotes. I get anecdotes. I don't, I mean, I don't, I don't have data. I, I have, I have anecdotes that that I can share, but yeah, so I do get, I mean, you know, we hear that occasionally, but that's very, that's very weird and flattering, but yeah. You've mentioned that you know, you, you struggle with where whether to, to define terms I, how do you present complicated things and without, you know, w without you,

Mark Wood:
You look for the little elements, well, you look for the,

Joe Palca:
We look for the, I mean, again, you look for the bigger picture. Why are people doing this? Well it's an important part of the ecosystem. I mean, the really, I mean, I'm sorry, we're stuck on the electric dipole moment of no choice, but just because I'm going to use the term. No,

Patty Vest:
We'll add EDM music later, right? Yeah.

Joe Palca:
Just the beginning. You, you just have to remember how much you can leave out. It really, really think it is the biggest problem. Journalists, young journalists make, or scientists make, as they try to explain everything, they try to make it super clear, very accurate and comprehensive, and it's fine to be clear, and it's fine to be accurate, but forget about comprehensive because you ain't going to do it. That's what you do in classrooms. Designers ever get, get upset because they think you're misrepresenting because oversimplifying no. And that, well, there's another small population. I do get feedback most of the time from the people I interview. That's, I mean, I'm not doing the story to make them happy, so it doesn't really count. But the fact of the matter is they mostly are happy. I mean, I don't necessarily hear back from the ones who aren't happy cause they probably aren't happy, but, but I haven't had a big experience in my career where people said, you completely screwed that up. I've made little mistakes for sure. But I, I think the big picture is that I have been accurate to a level of abstraction. And what I tell people is, look, if I could really tell your research in a comprehensive manner in three and a half minutes, you haven't really accomplished all that much.

Joe Palca:
Because that's ridiculous. How could I do it in three and a half minutes? So, you know, take it, take a chill pill and realize we're talking about a different level of, of presentation. This isn't a journal. This isn't a journal and you're not these aren't your students. And if people show interest and say, and that's what I mean about listening to be a good communicator. If you start explaining something to people and then they say, well, wait a minute, how did that happen? Or why does it go that way? Then they're asking for the information instead of you pushing it onto them. And when they ask for it, then they're going to listen to it. Cause they want, they they're curious. Right? That's the communication part because you have to give something that people want to know. And one of the things that people have said to me is which again, I don't know this for a case, but people say to me, I was confused.

Joe Palca:
You said something, I didn't know what was going to happen. And then the next sentence you answered my question. And so that's what I'm trying to do is take people down to a place where wait a minute, why is that? So bang, I'm giving you the answer now, how can I anticipate that? I can't, I'm sure I can't. A lot of people didn't get it. Don't get it. Don't know what I was talking about. Didn't care about the answer turned the radio off, but for some people it works and I guess that's good. You know, that's why I get a paycheck, but but yeah, it's, it's leaving stuff out. It's really leaving stuff out. And I mean, yeah. It's yeah. It's, it's amazing. In, in, in, in 30 seconds, I can tell you almost everything you need to know about every story I've ever done, but 30 seconds leaves it's it's two goes by too fast. So what you do is you just slow it down so that it does take three and a half minutes.

Joe Palca:
So 30 seconds worth of information in three and a half minutes. Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, I can, I can tell you about I can tell you the, the one finding from my doctoral dissertation that I thought was interesting. So I studied sleep and thermoregulation, which is how do people regulate temperatures? And the reason I was studying this is that my advisor had this idea that sleep and hibernation were similar. Because if you, when you, when you hibernation is a condition where an animal will lower its body temperature, but only so far, they're warm blooded. And so they hibernate or they, they, but, but they, they, they let their core temperature drop too. If it's normally 98, it'll go down to 85 or something like that. But it won't go any lower than that. And so they have various mechanisms, even if it's just getting a blanket to regulate behaviourally or physiologically, they regulate their temperature, 85 degrees.

Joe Palca:
And it turns out that the same thing happens in sleep. When you fall asleep, your thermostat and your brain goes, gets turned down. And so your temperature will drop. But only so far people thought, Oh, it's just a passive drop because you're not moving. No, it's a drop in temperature. That's regulated. So you could down a little bit, and then something happens. You pull the blanket up, you start shivering, whatever, what I found. And I was having people sleep in cold rooms, but mostly they say, I don't like it. It's too cold in here. But the, the key finding was that they maintain their brain temperature. Their core temperature drops more, but their brain temperature stays fairly level. Hey, it makes sense too, because that's for the, you know, that's the big, that's where you want to be alive with your brain, right? So that's it one, one interesting finding that your brain temperature stays more stable when you sleep in a cold room. I led up to it just to give you a little bit of a related, but that's the whole,

Mark Wood:
Do you still Have a particular interest in sleep research or is that no, I asked,

Joe Palca:
Well, I'm interested. I'm interested in sleep research in the sense that I, I I'd love to see the study that helps explain what sleep is all about, but I, I haven't, I mean, I see people nibbling away at the, at the, at the edges. Clearly, it's something that's persisted through evolution, but what is it good for? I don't know. And, and, and I mean, if you want to talk about editors being interested in things, every editor wants you to do a story about sleep because they can't sleep or their friends can sleep, or their husband can sleep where they snore when they sleep. So it's, I mean, it's a huge interest story. You can do it over and over and over and over and over again. But my feeling is that there's not that much to say,

Patty Vest:
Talk about sleep. I'll lead into your days, back at Pomona. I don't know if you got enough sleep, but you were a student.

Joe Palca:
Well, I'll tell you I, I definitely, it's funny, not so now I like to get up at five in the morning and that's something that happens with older people. There there's these circadian clocks that they, they can switch from being not larks to owls or something, you know, larks get up early and I'll stay up late. So when I was at Pomona, like everybody else in my cohort, I stayed up really late. And I was, I came when I came here, I was planning to be a classics major. And I, I found out that Greek was taught at eight in the morning. And that was the end of my classics career. No way I was making eight o'clock. So yeah, I've, I've changed. So you'd be a Greek professor. If that, if that class had been at 10, I went, I was thinking there was a, there was a Latin teacher. I did take some more classes in Latin, and there was a famous site faculty member, Harry Carroll, who taught Latin here for a really long time. And he was legendary and I took a Latin class with him and, but we were reading Livy and I just live, he would write these, these things called Levy's first, treat us on Rome or Olivia's first treat us on something. So I wrote for my essay Palca's First Treatise on Livy. I was, I thought that should be a memorialized someplace.

Patty Vest:
I can ask them more. Yeah. tell me some more about your time at Pomona. Do you remember, do you remember the major science stories from then? Did that science was not well was on your radar then?

Joe Palca:
I just liked all the things I could participate in. I mean, I was on the soccer team and I was in the Gleeclub. I wasn't in the glee club. I didn't get into the club. I was in the choir. I was on the track team as a manager, I was on the school newspaper. I had a show on KSPC. To be honest, I had had a really thorough college prep, high school education, and I was ready to do all the other things that you can do in a college education. I went on the Swarthmore exchange. That was fantastic. Really interesting classes I took at Swarthmore. The one professor who made the biggest difference in my life here was Steve Koblick. He taught I, when I came there were these there were these shreds, they would call them freshmen short courses where you'd get three, six week classes or five week class, something like that, that fit into a semester.

Joe Palca:
And they were like completely random. So the one that Steve taught was, Oh, that wasn't, that wasn't so random, but he taught one on the origins of world war one. And what he had us do was go up to the library where they had just declassified some of the cables. It's kind of interesting because cables are a little bit like Twitter. You know, it used to be the cable traffic from the embassies would, they only had so many lines that they could write. And so it's a little bit like, you know, communicating with Twitter now where you're restricted in the number of characters you can use. Anyway, it was a really interesting view about history. And then I when I had a chance to take a full semester course with him, I took Swedish history and, you know, that's not a subject I would have guessed I would be interested in.

Joe Palca:
And that's how I know more about Sweden than I do about most other countries, but, but he just his delight in the subject and in his enthusiasm for what he did. And we've been friends ever since. And he's moved back to Pomona and we're going to see each other on this visit. He was the president of Reed college for awhile, and he was the president of it in the hunting library. And I was the science writer in residence at the hunting library for six months. So our paths have crossed on purpose a number of times. And he's like he's, but yeah, so everybody has, I think everybody, if they're lucky has one or at least one, I hope professors who made a real big difference. And for me, he was the one that Pomona, what was your residents about at the end and then labor?

Joe Palca:
I, it was well, so the library had just gotten a huge collection of science books from the MIT. It was called the diviner collection and they were, they were trying to do more with science. I, I don't know if, I mean, the, the, the fellowship of the science writer in residence program lasted one year and I had half of it and somebody else had the other half, and that was it. So I don't know if it accomplished what it set out to accomplish, but I had a great time. I just hung around at the Huntington library for a year or six months actually. So you're back for, for this conference on fake news. And you're, I'm saying your keynote addresses title and do facts matter, is that right? Do you, do they, well, we

Mark Wood:
We've been talking about that. Yeah.

Joe Palca:
I mean, yeah. I mean, we're just wanting a preview of your,

Patty Vest:
Well, it'd be a post view for people. That's right. I was going to say if you're, if you've got to be a little late for us. Yeah.

Joe Palca:
But well, I, I think they, I think the, the argument is, well, of course they matter, you know, you get the, you have to get the facts, but in fact, they don't matter as much as people think. I mean, people make decisions based on hunches and intuition and stuff like that. And also a lot of times the facts just kinda of Swizz by. And I mean, if I were now to quiz you on something, I said at the beginning of this session about some factual thing I told you, you might not remember it. So they matter, but I remember the dye polar probably bipolar moment of the, of the neutron hole,

Mark Wood:
Dipole, dipole, dipole. Okay. Now I'll remember now,

Patty Vest:
If you weren't a science write what do you think you would have liked to be?

Joe Palca:
Well, I always wanted to be in the Rockettes.

Patty Vest:
That sounds,

Joe Palca:
I don't know. I just 

Patty Vest:
Did you think you would want it to be when you were in Pomona?

Mark Wood:
Did you think about it at all?

Joe Palca:
I didn't. I don't remember having any ambition at all, except to accept to, to graduate. I graduated in three and a half years. I, I was, so I it's funny. It's a, it's a great question. I don't think that I I just wanted to try everything and I, but I really, I think that's why I really didn't hit my stride professionally until I was 28. And so it took a few years, I think I think Pomona allowed me to, you know, stretch in various directions, but it's not like, Oh, you know, I was in the radio station here and that committed me to be a radio person now. And, you know, I, I knew that I liked soccer, but I was never going to be good enough to do anything with it besides play it for fun. So the things that I spent a lot of time on extracurricularly, didn't turn out to be things that I, I looked at, some of the things I wrote for student life and they weren't horrible. I was, I was the sports editor for awhile. So I guess I had some writing ability, but to tell the truth, I hated writing. And so it wasn't like I developed a lifelong love of writing at Pomona. I didn't. But I, I like to express myself, so I guess,

Patty Vest:
Yeah, I'm good.

Mark Wood:
So on that note, we're going to wrap this up. Okay. our, thanks for Joe Palca. You can listen to Joe's Big Idea @ npr.org. Is there a better place if you, yeah. There's a whole website with Joe's big idea. It's, it's npr.org/joesbigidea, but if you Google it, they'll find it. Yeah.

Patty Vest:
Google can't leave luck of along and all have stuck with us this far. Thanks for listening to Sage cast. The podcast up, went to college on till next time.