Brigid Bergin: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Brigid Bergin, filling in for Brian today. Fans of Public Radio will probably recognize the voice of our next guest. For nearly three decades, Nell Greenfieldboyce has been NPR's science desk correspondent. During that time, she's reported from inside a space shuttle, the bottom of a coal mine, and the control room of a particle collider, and her topics are pretty much what you'd expect from an excellent science journalist.

She reported news on the color of dinosaur eggs, ice worms that live on mountaintop glaciers, and signs of life on Venus. Now, she's reporting on some things you might not expect, her personal life. In her new book, Transient and Strange: Notes on the Science of Life, she shares intimate essays of her life and how reporting on science helps her navigate it. Nell Greenfieldboyce joins us now. Welcome to WNYC.

Nell Greenfieldboyce: Oh, thanks for having me on the show. I'm so excited to do this.

Brigid Bergin: We are so excited to have you. Listeners, we know there are fans of Nell Greenfieldboyce out there listening. We invite you. Give us a call. Share what you like about her work or anyone else. Maybe there is a science story that you've heard that's helped shape your understanding of your own personal experiences or maybe giving you a different perspective. Maybe you've gone down a rabbit hole on this subject that you realized helped you during a challenging time or maybe like now what you do for work helps the way you approach life events.

Share your story with us. Give us a call now. The number, 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. You can also tweet us at that number. Again, 212-433-9692. Now, your book is a collection of essays that are a combination of your personal life events and kind of what you do for work, extended metaphors about natural phenomena that are woven throughout each chapter. In one chapter, you write about the end of your aging father's life and about meteorites, and you tell the story of the NASA scientist who had the idea to put a piece of the moon in a museum and let everyone touch it. Can you tell us about how that happened?

Nell Greenfieldboyce: Sure. That was an unusual situation. That was a geologist who worked with the Apollo program, later became involved with the creation of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. While they were working on that, he thought about this stone, this sacred stone in Mecca called the Black Stone, which is venerated by pilgrims who point to it or try to touch it. It's associated with Mohammed, and so it's very sacred.

As he was thinking about this from something in his own life, he got the idea that maybe one of NASA's moon rocks should be put on display and people could touch it, and this proved to be super popular. I thought a lot about the fact that people would line up to touch this gray rock that had this sign on top of it that says, "Moon Rock," but honestly, it just looks like a gray rock. [laughter] If you looked at it, [unintelligible 00:03:26] you didn't know it was from the moon, you might think it was from somebody's driveway or something.

That essay is about meteorites and it's about aging and falling. Meteorites fall but also people fall as they get older. It's just about trying to understand what the relationship is between something that's otherworldly and something that's more mundane and does it really make a difference. It's just like one of these examples in these essays of how I try to take personal things that I've experienced that are in some ways pretty ordinary things, like comforting a child or a parent getting older, and combining them with different kinds of science that you might not think are relevant but actually are metaphorically resonant or interesting.

There's stuff in the book about tornadoes and about fleas and about black holes, and it's all mixed in with personal narrative.

Brigid Bergin: Well, I want to stay on the topic of these meteorites for a moment to touch on a story about your father. You write about how you gave a piece of a lunar meteorite to your father, but you're not really sure if he or your mother appreciated it. Can you tell us a bit about the gift and why meteorites in particular are important to you?

Nell Greenfieldboyce: I'm wearing a meteorite right now.

Brigid Bergin: Oh, wow.

Nell Greenfieldboyce: I have a necklace made of a meteorite, and I love them because they're just rocks. They look like any rock you could pick up, but they're special because they came from somewhere else. Yes, I did give my dad a lunar meteorite. There's some meteorites or pieces of the moon that got knocked off the moon and ended up on Earth. He's hard to shop for. [laughter] Like many people [crosstalk]--

Brigid Bergin: Sounds like my dad.

Nell Greenfieldboyce: Exactly. I think people have had that experience. It was funny later that piece of moon rock ended up in a kitchen drawer just with like the scissors and the pens and my mother was completely perplexed by it. She showed it to me and she's like, "Do you have any idea what this is?" I was like, "It's a piece of the moon. It's literally a piece of the moon." That essay is about -- It's about falling. It's about getting older and falling. As people get older, they start to fall and so do meteorites.

The title of the book, Transient and Strange, actually comes from a Walt Whitman poem, his Leaves of Grass, where he's writing about meteorites and he's saying, "Year of comets and meteors transient and strange," but then he says, "Look here, there's someone equally transient and strange. As I flit through you hastily, soon to fall and be gone, what is this book? What am I myself but one of your meteors?"

It's just like in these essays, I tried to mix a whole bunch of stuff, almost like an experiment. You've got a laboratory beaker and you throw in poetry and personal experience and history of science, and it bubbles up and interesting things come out.

Brigid Bergin: I love this idea of the experiment. I want to tease out some of the other stories from the memoir. Speaking of your kids, I understand when you told your daughter that she was part of the universe, she didn't really buy it. Did she?

Nell Greenfieldboyce: No, no. She just told me flatly, "You're wrong. I'm not part of the universe." She said, "I'm in the universe. I'm not part of the universe." I told her feeling all-wise, I was like, "Well, you can be in it and part of it, just like your heart is inside of you and it's also part of you." She was three years old and she was just like, "No, you're wrong. That's not how it is." I think a lot of us have this feeling that we are somehow separate and we move through the universe observing it, and we are not part of it.

That feeling of separation from the natural world and also from other people and even sometimes from yourself is something that I explore a lot in this book. It's hard to understand that we are just as magical as a black hole, but we truly are. I love science and I love learning about science, but to me, it's not something distant or removed. To me, it's very personal and it's very intertwined with the rest of life because scientists are just trying to figure out the universe just like a little kid is and just like we are and just like poets are and it's all part of one big human project.

Brigid Bergin: Now, in that same chapter, you write about this concept of uniformitarianism?

Nell Greenfieldboyce: Yes. It's a fun word to say. [laughs]

Brigid Bergin: It is a fun word. I even broke it up for myself so I wouldn't butcher it the way I just did, but it means the notion that natural laws and processes at work today are at work everywhere in the universe and that they have operated in the past the same way they do today and will in the future. Can you explain that a bit more? How do you see the history of science resonating in your life?

Nell Greenfieldboyce: That idea that the universal laws were acting now the way they had in the past and the way they would continue to act and that they act here on Earth just as they do everywhere else, whether it's Mars or Pluto or whatever, that was a really radical idea fairly recently. When people believed in-- or many people still do, but back when even scientists took the biblical story of creation to be the literal truth, the idea that the world has been unchanging and that everything's been acting in the same way everywhere for all time that geology is without a beginning and without an end, that was a really, really radical idea, but to me, it's a really powerful idea because it suggests that the same stuff working on us is working on everything.

It's just part of us being right there with it, right there in the mix, not in a remove, not in a distance, but very closely, closely related. I see a lot of the things scientists do as a very human activity and I love reading about the history of science because so many of the people in it are so relatable and they're funny and they have weird interests that they pursue, and as a result, they find out things that are beautiful.

Brigid Bergin: Listeners, we would love to hear some of your stories about how science has informed some of the stories of your life. What have you experienced through learning about science? How has it shaped how you experience the world? Maybe you've gone down some black holes on certain scientific topics during challenging times. Maybe you've been confronted, I know I have, by questions from your children about certain scientific concepts and perhaps realized the limit of your scientific knowledge. Give us a call. The number, 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. You can also tweet at that number.

Now, I want to talk about this idea that your son was obsessed with tornadoes and how the more he learned, the more scared he got, but that you also dug into the history of tornado science at the same time. Can you tell us a little bit more about that history and how you and your kids were learning about it at the same time?

Nell Greenfieldboyce: Sure. My kids, when they were about six and three, asked me what a tornado was. Foolishly, I was excited to show them what a tornado was because I think tornadoes are really cool, but I blanked on the most important part about a tornado, which is that it devastates everything in its path. My children became very scared and quite obsessed with tornadoes and began to be afraid every night before they went to sleep that they would be blown apart by a tornado.

Now, we live in Washington, DC, which is not a very tornado-prone part of the country. Nonetheless, it was a big issue in our family for quite a while and so we learned so much about tornadoes. So much about tornado science is fascinating. I learned all sorts of weird facts, and our whole family did, but to me, none of it was reassuring because what was happening is that they were children learning that the threat of your life being transformed and things just going seriously wrong is ever-present.

Young children haven't quite learned that that's the case, and they haven't learned that somehow you just have to go on with life, with that knowledge, and pretend it's not there and somehow live your life like that. To me, it's just an example of how children sometimes force you to confront some of the questions that you as an adult can pretend aren't out there. Also, you have to try to figure out what-- I'm middle-aged, and I don't think I've really dealt with this issue. [laughs]

Through tornadoes, together, we were trying to navigate it and trying to figure out a way like, "What am I going to say to them about how to live like this?" That's just another example of how personal things got mixed in with poetry and history. There's a lot of very interesting history of tornado science, and there's still so many mysteries about tornadoes that scientists don't understand.

Brigid Bergin: Well, I want to bring a caller, Ellen in Manhattan, on the air. Ellen, I believe you are a poet. Is that right?

Ellen: Yes, I write poetry. [chuckles] I guess that qualifies me. I just wanted to say that I write a lot about the universe. I think about it a lot. The realities that we have encountered through the telescopes that we sent out into space have really brought reality closer to home and made me rethink how I want to view the universe. Do I want to really see it as like the moon is blue cheese and write poetry about how nice the blue is, or do I want to try to combine the fact that we're learning so much about the universe in a scientific way in my poems?

I tend to be a realist, so that latter is the one that appeals to me. It really has changed some of the poems themselves and how I view writing about the universe.

Brigid Bergin: That's so interesting. Ellen, thank you so much for that call. Now, any reaction to that? It feels like your kindred spirit is there.

Nell Greenfieldboyce: Well, I think that the reality of the universe is plenty beautiful right on its own. It is truly remarkable. Scientists think it's beautiful. I've talked to scientists who told me that some of the things they've seen through the new James Webb Space Telescope, for example, made them cry. They'll say to me, "It's so beautiful. It's so beautiful." It's that kind of emotional connection that I feel very deeply.

A lot of the stuff in this memoir is very ordinary stuff, stuff that people have experienced, whether it's comforting a child or getting hit on by some older guy or whatever, but for me, I just experienced it as someone who thinks a lot about science and who spent a lot of time reading about science. The metaphors that I reach for are scientific, but that doesn't mean that they're somehow boring or empty or spare or whatever. It's just full of human experience and joy.

Brigid Bergin: Let's go to Terry in Northern Westchester. Terry, you're on WNYC.

Terry: Good morning. I was saying that in the late '70s to early and mid-'80s I was a graduate student in psychobiology, specifically in animal behavior. In the summer seasons, I was doing fieldwork initially on bird behavior and then on fiddler crabs. Originally, my husband was interested in having children. I was very much on the fence about it, but after all those seasons of my fieldwork and watching all the difficult things that various species of animals had to do to attract a mate and then bring up their offspring, I looked at myself and said, "After all this, I'm not even going to try to have children?" so I changed my mind and ended up having a child.

It happened a little earlier than I anticipated. I got pregnant pretty quickly. All that happening, I got derailed from my dissertation, but I looked at it as intensive fieldwork in human maternal behavior.

Brigid Bergin: [laughs] Terry, thank you so much for that story. Nell, any reaction to that?

Nell Greenfieldboyce: I think that's lovely. I think that children, it's a cliché to say it, but children are amazing scientists. They're absolutely fearless. They have no preconceptions. They'll just take something apart, and they'll get all down into the muck to try to understand how things work. I do think that observing the natural world can be very revealing. One of the essays is about fleas. Before I wrote this book, if you told me if I had any feelings about fleas, I would have said no, but I was addressing something that Herman Melville said in Moby-Dick.

He was saying that to write a mighty book, you have to have a mighty theme. He said, "No one could ever write a great and enduring volume on the flea." I thought, "Well, that's awfully mean because fleas are quite interesting." The more I learned about them, the more I learned that they have inspired people for all kinds of things, for thinking about infinity and thinking about romance. There was this whole line of love poetry that involved fleas.

People look at the natural world and they see themselves, but they also see new ways of being. I think that's really beautiful. It's something that people have done for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years if not thousands of years, and it's just like we're part of it. We're part of the history of science, and in our lone lives, we live it out.

Brigid Bergin: Now, we have a question that came from a listener via text. The listener writes, "I'm an English professor. A few semesters ago, I was teaching Darwin for a class and literature and nature. I had a student who refused to read him because he, the student, believed in creationism. I couldn't get through with any arguments like, 'Just read it as literature.' How do you deal with this?"

Nell Greenfieldboyce: It's an interesting question, and I think it's one that people have dealt with for a long time. I often get asked about how to handle disbelief in science, how to handle misinformation. All I can say is that the whole time I've been a science reporter, this has been around. I don't know how to answer that. I read the Bible and I derive a lot from it, and I find it to be a beautiful, beautiful work that has all kinds of meaning and significance. I can't understand why somebody wouldn't want to even read. Although, perhaps their deeply-held beliefs lead them in that direction and I have to respect that.

People are trying to make sense of the world, and they're doing it in all kinds of ways. I feel like all we can do is try to meet people where they are and share our point of view and try to understand where they're coming from as well.

Brigid Bergin: We're going to go to Peter in Tampa Bay, Florida before we move off of the tornado topic. Peter, you're on WNYC.

Peter: Oh, sure. I was going to say, go to my website and buy anti-gravity boots. That person who doesn't believe in science, I got a great buy on anti-gravity boots. Anyway, I highly recommend science. This is something, Nell, that I thought is a great way to teaching to kids. You're looking at tornadoes in the Northern Hemisphere, they always go counterclockwise. Southern Hemisphere, clockwise. You can explain it's the rotation of the Earth, and because it's wider and it spins faster at the equator, you can understand it.

What also I think is cool to observe is that that water going down your bathtub and the drain, it goes in the same direction in the Northern Hemisphere and in the Southern Hemisphere because the same forces that act on the tornado are acting on that water going down your bathtub drain. Do you ever point out things like that when you want to teach things to kids or have just have a, "Oh my God, I never noticed that. That makes sense"?

Nell Greenfieldboyce: Yes. My kids are not very impressed with my scientific knowledge. [laughter] Mostly around my children, I try to keep my mouth shut, to be honest, because, to me, it seems unfair. I'm 50 years old and I've been accumulating facts. I could spout off facts on almost anything. I mostly try to let my children approach things just on their own and then I love seeing how they react to things because it's quite different.

I do think that lots of parents will take their kids to natural history museums or to zoos and stuff like that. Supposedly, it's for the edification of children, but my experience is the adults are right there in there. [laughs] They love to see it.

Brigid Bergin: Absolutely.

Nell Greenfieldboyce: They love to see leafcutter ants at work or whatever. People are just curious. People are curious about the world. I find that NPR listeners especially, they're quite happy to learn about stuff that has no applicable use in their lives. It's just like something interesting about the world, and I'm extremely grateful for that and feel honored that I get the chance to find out some of this stuff and share it with them.

Brigid Bergin: Now, I want to dive back into some of what you share in this memoir. In one essay, you write about a pretty shocking memory from your childhood. You talk about how when you were a girl, you picked up a phone call from a man who told you he kidnapped your mother and then made you say sexually explicit things to him. You later described that experience as "a natural disaster." What did you mean by that?

Nell Greenfieldboyce: I included that in the tornado essay because my kids were worried about tornadoes, and I was thinking about the way that you can just be in your house, living your life, and then something will happen that just blows normal life away. That was a very strange phone call back in the 1980s. It was very hard for me to explain to other people the effect that that had on me because it was just a phone call. There wasn't anybody there in the house, but it was quite terrifying because I believed it. It had a long-term effect on me, I would say.

These days, sometimes I read about people being hoaxed, social media things, people will get information off Facebook about college students and call their parents and claim to have kidnapped them and stuff. These days when I read about that, I'm like, I totally understand how they feel. For me, at the time, as an adolescent kid, it was just unbelievable. It just had such an effect on me. To me, that is why I put it in the tornado essay.

Some people would say it's not as bad as a tornado coming. People die from tornadoes, and I totally get that. I understand that and respect that, but to me, it was just an example of how the reality of the world is that things can happen that you are not anticipating that can totally transform your life in an instant. As a parent, you try to protect your child, but you can't protect your child from everything. At a certain point, they have to figure out how to live. All you can do is try to help them the best you can and be an example of how to live despite all that uncertainty.

In the book, I talk a lot about personal, personal things like my husband and I deciding to have children and events that are kind of unseemly. Some people ask me, "Aren't you uncomfortable being this open about this stuff?" I have been a reporter for a long time, and I've remained pretty anonymous. Reporters generally try not to talk about themselves, but for me, it was interesting to explore all this. I hope that some people find it relatable.

Brigid Bergin: In another chapter, you write, "My childhood happened just as the science of black holes began to grow and mature. By coming of age, it was entangled with its coming of age." I love that, but what did it mean for you?

Nell Greenfieldboyce: That essay is called A Very Charming Young Black Hole. When I was 12, I had this weird flirtation with a much older man [chuckles] that was based around science. We talked about black holes and that's where it came from. I was using black holes as a metaphor there but also talking about the history of the term black hole and where it comes from and some of the things that are around the origin of that that are a little strange that people may not be familiar with.

When I [inaudible 00:23:54] up, black holes-- We all assume black holes exist now. Even school children understand what a black hole is, but in the 1960s, that was not true. It was just a theory spun by pure math, and nobody had any examples of a black hole. Some people didn't take it very seriously. They thought it was not real physics. That essay, I explore the development of black holes and the history of black holes, but I also talk about this strange interaction with this man.

As a young child, a young girl, there is this bewildering attraction that you have to men that is unexpected and can be disturbing. To me, the black hole was a way of exploring all that, that I think-- I don't know if it worked or not. People have to make up their own minds, but to me, I found it resonant.

Brigid Bergin: I want to read a text we received, Nell. The listener writes, "Right on, Nell Greenfieldboyce. As a college student, I spent summers teaching physics and how airplanes fly to middle school students from underserved urban areas on the West Coast, an awesome experience that made real for me the importance of making complex science understandable in a relatable way that anybody can get. Ms. Boyce nails that, communicating science in a very human way that shows how it's a wondrous and tangible part of everyday life, all while elevating our grasp of nature and its beauty. Thank you for educating and making us better humans and keep on." A little fan letter via text for you now.

Nell Greenfieldboyce: That's very kind.

Brigid Bergin: [chuckles] I want to go next to Anne in Staten Island. Anne, you're on WNYC.

Anne: Good morning. I'm so happy to hear this fascinating conversation because I call myself a serious amateur geologist although my career was 35 years in the New York City Public Schools as an English teacher, but I always managed to integrate some aspects of this world we lived in because that was a book my parents gave me when I was a child. When I opened it up as a Christmas present, it had a timeline, which was one of the most amazing things. There was no contradiction at all from my parents teaching me in terms of biblical stories and creation.

My suggestion, I'm 76 now, and my suggestion is to parents. Just teach your children to look [unintelligible 00:26:35] you're walking, for example. The ferry, that's a magnificent canyon that we cross. What is it? 5 miles, I think, across to south--

Brigid Bergin: Manhattan to Staten Island.

Anne: I'm sorry from Manhattan. Yes, and so many things are right here. I went to the Grand Canyon years ago for my 60th birthday, that was my celebration, and I cried. I was on the North Rim because the South Rim has a lot more tourists. I was on the North Rim with my son, and one of the docents came over and said, "Is this lady all right? Does she need medical help?" He said, "No, she's emotional." I was sobbing at the beauty of the Grand Canyon. I think this can be inculcated in young people if they're taught to look.

I live on Staten Island. This was formed when Africa crashed millions of years ago. We have serpentinite on Staten Island. I have it in my yard. It's not the ones that-- It's anhydrous. It doesn't have all these dangerous things, but I recommend it. There are great, great-- I have a minor in geology but--

Brigid Bergin: Anne, I love your enthusiasm and we so appreciate it. I want to give Nell a chance to respond to our serious amateur geologist who spent her time teaching English in the New York City Public Schools. Certainly someone who is passionate about observing the world around her.

Nell Greenfieldboyce: I also love geology, and I think rocks don't get their due. [laughs] People think they're boring, but I also agree that there's tons of stuff to look at. There's exciting stuff that-- like the total solar eclipse that's coming up on April 8th. I think if people are able to travel to see that they totally should. Also, just everyday stuff. You don't have to be fancy. Like some of the building materials, sometimes you can see little fossils in the stones on the side of buildings. Just even the stuff growing in sidewalk cracks can be really interesting.

Brigid Bergin: Now, I have a few more questions about the memoir. Your final essay in the book, My Eugenics Project, is about how you and your husband arrived at the decision to have your children, trying it first through IVF, but even having kids was complicated by the fact that your husband has a genetic condition. Can you tell us a bit of that story and how it informed your thoughts on medicine?

Nell Greenfieldboyce: Sure. My husband has a hereditary kidney disease called polycystic kidney disease. It basically makes your kidneys form cysts until they stop working, and so my husband had a kidney transplant. It's a genetic disease, and so the chance of passing it on is like 50-50. When we were having children, we were discussing whether we were going to try to do various kinds of testing to try to avoid passing on the disease. This became a big issue in our marriage.

My husband who lived with the disease didn't see any reason to do anything dramatic to avoid it. I did not live my life counting down the days till total kidney failure, and to me, it seemed like something we should try to avoid if we could. The essay is a pretty detailed description of our discussions about that and what we did and the twists and turns it took. The whole thing is informed by what I know about the history of human genetics in this country and the birth of genetic counseling and the links that it all has to eugenics.

Eugenics, obviously, people associate it with the Nazis, but eugenics was very much a dark chapter in American history, and tens of thousands of people were forcibly sterilized and the so-called science of eugenics was used to discriminate against poor people and people who were not white. As I personally went through this personal experience, I was reflecting a lot on the ties to this history. For me, it was a very fraught time in my life, but for me, I couldn't take it in isolation. It was very much tied to these other things that had happened.

I felt like by writing about this, I could maybe shed some light on some of these conversations that are often happening very privately. People often don't talk about this stuff, and if they do talk about it, maybe they either are very against it or very for it. I wanted to explore a lot of the ambiguities because I went through a lot of different ways of looking at things.

Maybe in that essay, I don't always come out looking so great, I got to be honest, but I tried to remember it as clearly as I could and just recount everything as clearly as I could and think hard about in what ways it was and wasn't connected to this really awful history, which I think more Americans should know about. It was a really ugly chapter.

Brigid Bergin: Absolutely. Nell, in our final question, you mentioned this, that the title of your book comes from a Walt Whitman poem. You want to tell us a little bit more about what you think of poetry and this poem in particular and what it has in common with the scientific method, which is something you often report on?

Nell Greenfieldboyce: I think poetry is related to the scientific method in that both are experimental, both are probing at the world, and they're often operating within constraints, whether it's a poetic form in poetry or whether it's an experimental setup with controls in science. Even though they seem quite different, they arise from the same human urge to try to understand, to try to grasp something that might otherwise go unobserved or unremarked on.

For me, as a person and as a writer, poetry and literature and universal themes always informs what I do, not just in these essays, but even in the short news pieces I do for All Things Considered and Morning Edition, I'm always trying to think about what is the universal theme that might draw someone to this, even if they're not necessarily interested in science per se, but they're interested in people and they're interested in trying to make sense of it all. In that, we're all together, regardless of whether you think you like science or not.

Brigid Bergin: Well, we're going to leave it there for now. Thank you so much for your work, for your new memoir. My guest has been NPR science correspondent, Nell Greenfieldboyce. Her new book is titled Transient and Strange: Notes on the Science of Life. Thanks so much for coming on.

Nell Greenfieldboyce: It's been such a pleasure. Thank you.

 

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