[music] I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome our guest today, Jo Handelsman.

She is a respected microbiologist, a science advisor to a past White House, and an author of multiple studies on science.

Her book came to my attention, A World Without Soil The Past, Present and Precarious Future of the Earth beneath our feet.

I urge our listeners and viewers to check it out.

Jo, a pleasure to meet you today.

Great to meet you, Alexander.

Thanks so much for having me.

Of course.

And you are in Madison, Wisconsin, right?

Where you lead the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery?

That's correct.

You know, we're entering a year where there, is already cuts to, scientific and medical research.

We're anticipating that even, federally appropriated moneys, might be cut, in addition to a whole new, administration that, for the next four years, might cut scientific research.

What's been your reaction so far to the way that the new administration, has embarked on, this process, what they've threatened to cut what they seem to be cutting already.

Well, I've been, frankly dismayed.

We all knew there were going to be lots of changes.

And, of course, new policies, new president, new leadership that's expected.

But the way that the changes are being implemented is really unexpected.

Partly because they're so extreme and some of them seem so indiscriminate.

It's, you know, it's like going after science with a meat cleaver instead of a scalpel.

And that doesn't really meet any definition of efficiency, in my mind is just chopping things off.

And then, partly because the separation of powers is supposed to dictate that Congress, appropriates the funds and the White House does not interfere with that.

And so I don't understand what they're trying to do.

I mean, there's certainly ways science could be more efficient.

Every agency could run better.

I think that's true probably in any large organization.

But I don't understand what they're trying to accomplish.

And some of the effects are just going to be devastating to our universities, to the scientific enterprise, and particularly what concerns me the most is to our young people, the young scientists who are so dispirited by this.

So it seems like to demystify or understand their aims.

First we have to say what is giving, Elon Musk and President Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency, the platform.

And they say mandate.

But we know statistically based on the election results, it wasn't a mandate, but their argument, is that they want to cut anything that has anything to do with diversity, equity and inclusion.

That may include grant applications, and grants that as a requirement by a department, had to state that they would engage in fair hiring practices and that they would consider, any merit based applications of, you know, women, men, and so you would think that just the restriction on, DEI programs would not wreak havoc, would not cause, unjustified suspension or termination of programs to study soil, to study cancer, to study genetics.

But to your mind, what you're seeing is something that is canceling, a majority of scientific inquiry, or like a majority of projects, not projects that are about increasing diversity, equity, inclusion in scientific ranks.

So it's changing so fast.

It's hard to answer, at the very beginning, most universities just put a halt on spending because that's what it sounded like, the executive order was telling us to do is stop spending, stop doing research.

Then it became more specific to certain projects.

And so they sent stop work orders to particular projects that either had climate change in them or something about diversity, I guess.

And that narrowed it down.

And then most universities relaxed the rule and let people continue to spend.

But there's also, you know, still considerable nervousness about what is this going to mean?

And are we going to be able to pay these bills?

If there isn't either more money forthcoming, if we're promised five years of funding and we end up only getting one, then, you know, how do we keep jobs going?

How do we keep projects going?

But also what it means to say DEI, the list of words that they seem to be searching for.

And there is a list online with like three columns in a page.

There were a lot of words there, and many of them are just basic scientific words that could be used in a lot of different contexts.

And so one of the threats was that anything that contained one of those words would be, you know, pulled out as one for further scrutiny and perhaps be stopped from working.

And we just don't know what what it's going to mean.

You know, at one point there was a program that was slated for either being halted or cut.

I'm not sure which that was about, rodents and sex differences in responsiveness to a particular treatment.

Well, that's you know, it's not gender of rodents, that's sex.

It's asking do male rats behave differently from female rats in a particular treatment?

And so, you know, if that's the kind of thing that's being pulled out, we're in major trouble, across the board.

You know, I have to admit, [laughs] I don't know if this is an admission or confession to you, because I know this isn't the opinion of the faculty Senate, if you will, necessarily, but maybe it is now, you can tell me.

That I understand, where this came from and you know, people want to call it wokeness.

And I think that's the wrong idea, or term here.

Because wokeness has had a lot of different meanings in American cultural and political life.

But, the reason that you could argue Musk and co are empowered to do what they're doing now is a backlash against the trans movement.

I mean, it's a backlash against some thinking women are men, and men are women, and I just I can't help but say that, that the sort of the, the origin of this idea, was concerned that we were not calling a genetic spade a spade anymore.

And there was some confusion about basic science when we learned about X and Y chromosomes a long time ago.

Do you appreciate, you know, that idea that you know, we are where we are because of, a social movement that actually betrayed some science in the way that at least has been, perceived.

Yeah, it's a really, it's a good point.

And, I think that's a common misconception.

Science changes and when I learned biology, sure, it was the X and Y chromosome story.

Probably the same one that you learned.

But it turns out that there is an entire continuum of different sexes.

And at the extremes, yes.

And the majority probably are what we would think of as biologically male and biologically female.

But in between, there are all sorts of biological variations that have to do with things that happened to a fetus in utero, or happens to have something to do with, the particular gene complement that that particular person has.

Some of it is also societal and I agree there are things there that maybe go beyond the science, but those are also legitimate, real differences between people.

So, I understand that the public and the government don't understand the science that has changed.

And that's a problem that we face as scientists all the time.

We heard it in the Kennedy hearings for confirmation.

There was one senator who said, oh, science is always changing its mind.

You know, one day they say, take aspirin, and the next day they say, don't.

One day they say, you should be doing something like wine, taking wine every day.

And then next.

Well, that's that's the nature of science is it progresses and it changes and we get more information and we refine our recommendations.

So now, yeah, some people should be taking aspirin because we know more than we have much more refined analysis that say don't prescribe it across the board.

These are the people who will benefit.

And otherwise you might be wasting it.

And so that's unfortunately one of the things that people don't appreciate is, you know, most of us learn science out of a textbook.

And we thought the textbook sort of is immutable.

It's, you know, this body of data and information that never changes.

And that's just not how science is.

And some of these rapidly changing fields.

The textbook is out of date by the time you finished teaching the course.

And so that's one of the real problems.

So I do think it's a reaction to several things, but also some pretty serious misconceptions.

And the other part of it that I can't help but mention is that it's not just having to do with DEI.

The most recent, mandate on Friday was to cap overhead or, what we call F&A costs, facilities and administration at 15% for all universities, for all grants from NIH.

And that is a very carefully calculated and worked on, equation.

How we develop the F&A cost.

And it has to do with the real costs of research people have is this notion, and I think this was said when the mandate was issued, that somehow universities are getting rich on the F&A costs.

All F&A is, is some of the costs of research are calculated at an entire university or institute level.

And so, for example, you know, I need somebody to make sure that we're in compliance with, you know, biosafety or animal safety or something like that or human safety.

Well, I don't pay, you know, 0.1% of one person's salary.

And that's the purpose of the F&A, that's something that's accommodated by the calculation of what the F&A should cover.

And that's part of how they set the rate.

So I mean, these are really necessary things in research.

There now something like 260 regulations that we have to adhere to for compliance in research.

At the beginning of this century there were four.

So that's you know, you need more staff to keep us in compliance.

Our budgets have gotten more complicated.

We need people to do the budgets.

We have, security and safety for the researchers and for the equipment that they're using.

We need power, electricity, for running some of the big equipment that science, relies on.

These are costs that universities wouldn't incur if they weren't doing that research funded by the federal government, and they can't afford to pay that part of it.

And so, unfortunately, it's been presented as this kind of big administrative bloat thing, and in fact, these are necessary parts of the research process.

And I want to give you an opportunity, to talk about what you're discovering at your institute.

I love the name of your institute.

Because it really gets it, the active, action, you know, the active verb of what it means to do research, and I'd love to just give you a platform to talk about, you know, some of the discoveries that you have made are making hope to make in the future.

Well, the original concept of the Wisconsin Institute for discovery was really broad.

It was a mandate to do an experiment in interdisciplinary research.

So the idea was figure out why people do good interdisciplinary research?

How do you foster it?

How do you, you know, increase the rate which people have these collisions, the intellectual collisions that bring different fields together?

And we've always done interdisciplinary research as a community.

But how do you in an era where we're bringing to bear, you know, AI on fundamental biology and you have to bring together people who are experts in both fields, how do we do that more effectively?

And so the institute is now 15 years old, and I've been director for eight years.

And what we've learned is the factors that really affect people's ability to work together.

And so we've been able to implement some really basic things like training people and how to communicate outside their field just with other scientists.

And it's kind of a different skill than we typically train people in.

And figuring out other ways to help people learn about each other's research.

And so it's been just a really exciting process.

And some of the outcomes are quite stunning.

When one group in the institute is using gene editing to fix eye diseases.

Those are these are genetic eye diseases.

And they have some really promising results there.

Another one has developed nanotechnology that allows us to deliver tiny amounts of drugs in a nanoparticle, tiny little particle to particular tissues or to, in one case, bacteria.

And so she's found that you can drop the concentration of the antibiotic by a factor of ten and still get the same effect on the bacteria, because you're delivering it in this very precise way.

Another one is developed, new materials for heart stents.

Another group, figured out how there's an interaction between the microbiome and aging, and the microbiome and Alzheimer's disease, which is a whole fascinating area of what we're learning about the gut microbiome and how it influences the brain and other aspects of human health.

So, I don't know if that's what you're looking for.

But just a few examples of the kind of exciting things that people do when interdisciplinary and collaborative research is facilitated.

Absolutely.

Well, those are certainly, relevant on a wide and in practical scale, for people to appreciate, the scientific explorations that you're doing.

One of the focus points of your research has been, the soil, the book you wrote, A World Without Soil, studied something we don't really think about that often.

Maybe when we're putting the mulch down or thinking about how we're going to, beautify our backyard this summer.

But, this is a tangible thing that has a lot of applicability to, our overall health.

What would you say to, the incoming administration now serving, administration about soil?

And, you know, what kind of commerce, impacts that soil?

In thinking through, regulation and deregulation and its impact on soil.

Well, I think that's a great question.

Is, what could the new administration be doing to benefit soil and to look at it, I think you have to look at the risks to soil.

We have been losing our soil at a tremendous rate that, by some calculations, looks like it's about ten times or even 100 times faster than the soil is being made.

And so that's just not sustainable, right?

It's washing away.

It's going into, waterways, into the Gulf of Mexico.

In some cases, the organic material and soil is going off as gases.

There's a tremendous variety of ways that we lose soil.

And so topsoil that was once, you know, many feet deep, has now shrunk to a much, much shallower soil.

And there are areas where you can actually see the subsoil, which is not a very rich substrate for, growing crops.

You can just see it poking through that there's no more topsoil.

You know what we think of as good, healthy, productive soil, the brown, dark, rich, crumbly kind of soil.

It's just kind of a rocky substrate, that's beginning to show through.

And we're not going to be able to keep up the crop production that we've always enjoyed.

And that's happening across the world.

It's not just the United States.

It's all over there are places, mountainous countries that are losing their soil way faster than we are.

There are areas, of course, within the United States that are losing it faster than others.

So there's a lot of variety.

You have to really look at the region and the practices.

But the beautiful thing about it is that we know how to save soil.

There's some basic farming practices that will protect the soil and build the soil.

But farmers need incentives, financial incentives and some financial support to change their practices because invariably change costs money, at least initially.

Once the change is made, then it's sustainable.

But farmers work at such a small margin of profit that they can't just say, yeah, you know, I'm going to go out and buy a drill for planting instead of plowing every year.

You know, that's hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment that's just not going to work.

Our average farm across the country.

So we need some new financial models.

And unfortunately, we've been really slow to develop those, in the United States.

And it's not that hard to develop incentives.

We have a lot of disincentives for the good practices, which is really sad.

But, you know, we could just use crop insurance, for example, as a way to incentivize farmers to do the right thing and build their soil.

And it would be good for them in the long run because their soil would be more productive.

They need less fertilizer.

Their plants would be and crops would be less vulnerable to drought and flooding.

But it would also be good for the Earth's health.

This is just a basic, factual question that I'm curious what percent of the world's surfaces non-ocean surfaces in 2025, have the potential for, nutrient rich soil or have nutrient rich soil?

I'm just thinking about the entirety of the globe.

So, of the land, Mm hmm.

that we have here on Earth, what percent of it has that kind of rudimentary soil that you would need to grow crops.

Probably most of it.

I mean, some land is not arable, or tillable, or it's just not good for growing crops for a variety of reasons.

But there is some sort of soil on almost all of the land, of the globe, with the exception, some people would say, of the deserts, which are pretty massive amount of land area, but the deserts have very poor soils.

I mean, the sand has very little organic matter.

It's not the equivalent of a fertile soil, but the deserts serve their own purposes, and they're an incredibly important source of sand, which is used in all sorts of processes on Earth.

And the deserts of the, Eastern Hemisphere have a big effect on the Western Hemisphere because, their sand is blown into clouds and above into the stratosphere.

And then they travel in big clouds of soil across the earth, and they get deposited on the Americas.

And so we all benefit from the nutrients and the minerals that were in those sands.

Nobody's started charging us yet, which is kind of nice.

That's one of the freebies of agriculture.

It sounds like you're particularly concerned with the depletion of nutrients in places where there is a heavy, possibility or active, crop making, function that you're saying that the capacity for that land to continue to be nutrient rich is diminished by some of these bad practices.

It's true, both forest soil and agricultural, I should say.

You know, if you clear cut a forest that's going to do damage to the soil.

If it's on a hillside or a mountain, it's going to do even more damage because the soil is just going to wash away because the trees won't be there to anchor it.

And so it actually goes for a lot of land that isn't even in agriculture, but it's in forestry.

And you're one of the foremost, science communicators.

And so, I would ask you to close you know, when you hear people talk about soil, for example, or climate in this context of, you know, this is not a concern for today.

I mean, that just seems to be the aura in which, you know, the new administration operates.

I wouldn't say the way the Republican Party and conservatives necessarily historically have operated.

I mean, Richard Nixon was the father of the, Yeah.

the modern environmental protection movement.

What do you say to this kind of, reactive posture that is always, that is not a concern for today.

There will always be clean air.

There will always be clean water.

There will always be soil.

Have you figured out a way to respond to such claims?

Effectively or that is going to, you know, inspire some reaction from those people other than, you know, I'm in the right.

Well, one argument that makes it very immediate is that crop production has leveled off across the world.

We used to be for many decades, we were sort of increasing our crop yields.

And we've topped it off for many different species of crops.

Some of that is because the genetics might not be there to increase yield, but some of it is because of soil that we just don't have the soil support to get the maximum out of those crops.

And that's a pretty immediate thing.

If our crops aren't producing, then we are definitely in an immediate crisis.

So that's one.

I mean, that's a boogeyman.

-I mean, that could be that.

-Yeah.

And I'm not suggesting that they're, you know, a demigod be born out of this issue.

But I'm saying, like, when you talk about the practical consequence of crimes by, you know, undocumented immigrants, for example, I mean, like, you know, that was, it strikes me that the work you're doing is not politicized enough.

Like the point you made just now could have been in every political ad this cycle and it would have scared the bejesus out of people.

-But, it wasn't.

-Yeah, to look back over the last, say, 170 years of agriculture in the United States.

And see the amount of soil that we have lost is really frightening.

We've lost at least half of our soil.

And that is an average across the United States.

And some areas have lost much more.

And all you need to do is look over the last hundred years even, pretty recent disasters, for example, the Piedmont area in the southeast.

People farmed there for, I think, as little as 20 years.

And the soil gave out and they had to move on.

So they moved further west.

And this is a fairly hilly and mountainous region.

And so they continued to move on this hilly terrain where when they clear cut it and took the trees away, there was nothing left to hold the soil.

And it took only 20 years after being a stable ecosystem for, you know, probably centuries.

It only took 20 years for it to run out.

And to this day they have not reestablished agriculture in that region.

So that could happen again any place, because we're just working through or eliminating the soil at such a high rate and we can't recover it.

You know, if it goes into the Mississippi River and ends up in the Gulf of Mexico, where it does damage in its own way to the Gulf, destroying fishing and other things, it's gone.

And building it back up from nothing is much harder than building it from something.

Chemical engineering is not a substitute, realistically, in your mind for, losses in soil quantity.

In other words, you can't, deploy, artificial intelligence or chemical engineering to work your way out of this problem.

Not that we know of.

And that's true particularly for the big field crops that nourish most of the world.

And that would be wheat and corn and rice and a couple of others that are right up there because you need such enormous amounts of plant matter generated in those fields that people have argued, well, couldn't we grow them hydroponically?

And the answer is no.

We would never have enough greenhouse space or glasshouse space to generate the kinds of yields that we need to feed, the human population.

So it's about volume.

-Like with the tomato... -Part of it, yeah.

-chemical engineering, a tomato.

-Right.

You know, you have one tomato you're working with, and you can try to make it more succulent if you want.

Forgive me.

We're out of time.

I want to thank you for your insight.

Really illuminating today.

Appreciate it very much.

Thanks so much, Alexander.

I really enjoyed it, great questions.

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