[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LULU MILLER: Hey there. Lulu here. It is the dog days of summer. The—the air is hot, the mosquitoes are biting. And in honor of that, we are gonna play a story about a fly with an even gnarlier bite than the mosquito—the botfly. It's a pretty wild, kind of funny, a little bit gross story, but not that gross. I believe in you. You can handle it. And this was from part of a show that we did just about scientists and how weird and lovely they are, and how they often see the world differently than the rest of us. I have found this to be true. It's why I love to interview scientists. They can see beauty in gross places or fascination in boring places. And so our—for our story today, we're gonna hear two stories, one about a math guy and one about a bug guy. And I hope you enjoy. I'm gonna kick it off to Radiolab hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, who begin with the story of how one of our country's greatest mathematicians first became entranced with math as a kid.

JAD ABUMRAD: For Steve Strogetz, a mathematician who we sometimes have on the show, it all started with a pendulum. He was sitting in math class.

STEVE STROGATZ: Our teacher handed us a little toy pendulum.

JAD: Basically just a little device with a ball on the end of a string.

STEVE STROGATZ: That was retractable. That is, you could ...

JAD: Change the length of the string.

STEVE STROGATZ: Like an old telescope, you know, that the pirate stretches out a spyglass—click, click, click. You could make it longer in discrete clicks. And then the teacher gave us a stopwatch and said, "I want you to time how long it takes for this pendulum to swing back and forth 10 times." Okay, so I do the experiment. Ten swings. I record how many seconds it took. Then he says, "Now make the pendulum a little bit longer. One click longer." Click, do it again.

JAD: And as you might expect, since now the string is longer, takes a bit more time.

STEVE STROGATZ: To make the 10 swings. And I write down the number. Click, do it again. Click, do it again. And I do this five or six times, dutifully plotting the—the results on graph paper, which is what the experiment was really supposed to teach us, how to use graph paper.

JAD: So he's clicking, measuring, making a little dot.

STEVE STROGATZ: Click ...

JAD: Measure, dot.

STEVE STROGATZ: Click ...

JAD: Measure, dot. Soon the thing is filled with dots, and that is when he noticed something.

STEVE STROGATZ: This spooky thing was happening, which is that the dots were falling on an arc, on a curve. They weren't on a straight line. They fell on a particular curve. And I noticed that this curve was a curve I had seen before because I had just learned about it in algebra class. And it's called a parabola. And this really gave me the creeps. I had a sort of feeling of the hairs on the back of my neck standing up, because it was as if this inanimate thing, this pendulum, knew algebra. [laughs] My 13-year-old mind couldn't understand that. How could this thing swinging back and forth know something about parabolas? Or how could that be built in?

JAD: Then an even creepier thought occurred to him. Wait a second, this parabola on my paper, which is the same one as the math book, is also out in the world.

STEVE STROGATZ: It's the shape that water makes coming out of a water fountain.

JAD: It's also the shape of, you know, when you shoot a rocket into the sky and it slowly descends. It's that.

STEVE STROGATZ: It was in that moment that I suddenly understood what people mean when they say there's a law of nature.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Do you remember what it was that made your hair stand on end? Was it that you had peeked in and discovered a secret? Or that you just simply found the right answer?

STEVE STROGATZ: Much closer to the first thing you said, that there was this sort of veil over reality, a hidden universe that you couldn't see unless you knew math. It really felt like being let into some sort of secret society. And that wasn't so much the point. I mean, it's not like I cared about being in this priesthood. It was—it's a very intimate, personal thing, this feeling of wonder, of a sense of living in an incomprehensible and beautiful universe.

STEVE STROGATZ: But partly comprehensible. That's the beauty of it. I mean, if you're a lobster, you don't have this thought, right? A lobster doesn't get to think about the laws of nature. And so I've often thought to myself that it's a blessing that we live in a certain window of intelligence, that if we were infinitely smart, godlike, we'd have such powerful brains, we could see every implication of everything. So math wouldn't be fun for a being that's too smart. And of course, for the lobster, that's not smart enough. Math is no fun for them either. It's in this intermediate window where math and science become something to rejoice in.

JAD: Today's program is about a kind of search—a search for order.

ROBERT: For patterns.

JAD: Hidden truths?

ROBERT: Hidden truths.

JAD: And it's about the scientists who go out looking for those things and sometimes find them. [ARCHIVE CLIP, scientist: Whoa, what's that?]

ROBERT: And sometimes don't.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, scientist: I felt humiliated. I felt stupid.]

JAD: Question is, what makes these people tick? And we're calling this show ...

ROBERT: Why Do I Love the Fly That's Eating My Brain?

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. Okay, you ready?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Off we go.

LULU: Indeed. Going off for a very short break. See you in a moment.

JAD: Hello, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And we're talking about how scientists think about the world.

JAD: And appreciate.

ROBERT: Yeah. Except appreciation, this is something that scientists do differently from the rest of us. And I think this next story is an act of appreciation so different from the rest of us that it makes me want to ...

JAD: Barf?

ROBERT: Gag.

JAD: Bring it!

ROBERT: Once upon a time, in a rainforest in Costa Rica in Central America, there was a little botfly.

JAD: What's a botfly?

ROBERT: Botflies are hairy flies that live in moist tropical areas on Earth.

JAD: So they're not like New York City flies?

ROBERT: No, no, no. What a botfly does is when a botfly is pregnant—and our botfly was a pregnant female botfly—she has her baby, flies up into the air carrying her baby. She sees a nice, hairy mosquito, actually grabs onto the mosquito.

JAD: Mid flight?

ROBERT: Oh, yeah. And drops her baby onto the mosquito.

JAD: Why the mosquito?

ROBERT: Well, because the mosquito's gonna do something very important for the baby. But the mosquito, of course, is a mosquito, so it's looking to bite somebody.

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: When the mosquito lands on a nice, warm, palpitating mammal so she can have some blood, the botfly baby is programmed to fall off into the mosquito bite and make a little home.

JAD: Wow, that's impressive!

ROBERT: Completely. Yeah.

JAD: That mosquito probably has no idea of any of this.

ROBERT: No idea at all. You got all that?

JAD: Got it.

ROBERT: Okay, so now I want to introduce you to a particular palpitating mammal who happened to be in Costa Rica on our very day.

JERRY COYNE: I guess I was about 24. It was 1973.

ROBERT: His name is Jerry Coyne.

JERRY COYNE: 30-some years, I guess. 35 years. But I remember it like it was yesterday. This isn't an experience that you forget easily.

ROBERT: You were working at Harvard as a grad student at the time?

JERRY COYNE: Yeah, I was. I was doing a laboratory experiment on flies, ironically. And there was a program for Harvard graduate students to go to the tropics for two months during the summer so they could get some experience in the field and learn something about the diversity of tropical nature.

ROBERT: So now we've got Jerry Coyne in Costa Rica walking through a forest.

JAD: Doing some research or something?

ROBERT: Doing some research. And through the air, you hear the distant sound of a mosquito getting closer and closer and closer 'til it bites Jerry right on the head.

JERRY COYNE: Not too far from the crown. And I scratched it. But, you know, it didn't go away. When it got to be about the size of a pea, I consulted one of my fellow students.

ROBERT: This friend of his happened to be an entomologist. She climbed up onto a bunk bed.

JERRY COYNE: And she looked in my head, pulled the hairs back, and she said, "Oh my God, there's something moving in there!" That's when I freaked out completely. I started running around the field station, just physically running in circles.

ROBERT: In his mosquito bite, there was a little hose or something protruding ...

JERRY COYNE: Through the top of the mosquito bite. And it was sort of wiggling around.

ROBERT: A breathing tube like a little straw.

JERRY COYNE: I was really completely freaked out. I mean, I had a worm in my body. Nobody knew how to extract it.

ROBERT: Why couldn't you just grab onto the periscope part and pull?

JERRY COYNE: Because like all marvels of evolution, the botfly maggot has devices to keep you from pulling it out because it makes its living in your body. So it has a pair of hooks on the anal end, the other end, that are dug into your flesh. So if you try to pull the thing out, it just digs in and you'll break it in two. That is the thing you want to avoid, because it can cause a serious infection.

ROBERT: Oh!

JAD: No, you don't want to do that.

ROBERT: No, you don't. But what you could do, however, is you could try what they call the "meat cure."

JERRY COYNE: Put a slab of meat over the wound, strap it to you. I would have to have strapped, for example, a steak to my head, which is not practical.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JERRY COYNE: And then the worm thinks that, you know, the worm's breathing tube, which is through the mosquito bite, gets cut off and it's deprived of air. So it thinks that the steak is part of your flesh, and it burrows up through the steak. And when it comes out almost all the way, you can just remove the steak with a worm in it.

ROBERT: What a clever idea!

JERRY COYNE: Yeah. The idea of toiling in the tropical heat every day with a t-bone strapped to my head was not something that I wanted to do.

ROBERT: Meantime, it's causing problems, this thing.

JERRY COYNE: It was a terrible itch. And from time to time, it would, like, move or twitch, and you'd feel this sort of sharp pain in your skull. Or you could feel it grinding up against there. And when I went swimming or took a shower, it would get sort of freaked out because its air hole would be cut off, and then it would really go nuts, you know, make a lot of pain. So I tried to avoid getting my head underwater. Meanwhile, the lump was getting bigger and bigger until it sort of got noticeable.

JAD: Wait, how does it—what is it eating in order to get bigger and bigger?

ROBERT: Well, it's, uh—um ...

JAD: Yes?

ROBERT: Um ...

JERRY COYNE: It's eating my muscles and tissue and my scalp.

ROBERT: It's eating your flesh, then?

JERRY COYNE: Yeah, it is.

JAD: Oh!

JERRY COYNE: It's turning human flesh into fly flesh.

ROBERT: This fly, it's eating Jerry. So it's more and more—well, it is Jerry.

JERRY COYNE: It is. And that's the part that made me like it.

ROBERT: So Jerry and the part of Jerry that is now the botfly leave Costa Rica, and it's time to head back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Harvard University, where Jerry's the grad student. And, you know, he has to check things out.

JERRY COYNE: So I went to the health clinic and, you know, in about 10 minutes, there was 20 doctors around me. Nobody had ever seen anything like this at Harvard. They were all curious and poking and prodding and looking at it and oohing and ah-ing but, of course, none of them knew what to do about it. And I just decided, you know, I'm gonna let it come out, make the best of it, you know, enjoy it as much as I could, and marvel at it. I mean, when you really think about it, it is amazing that an animal can take human flesh and turn it, using its own genes, into a fly. I mean, you have to marvel.

ROBERT: This is so weird of you, actually.

JERRY COYNE: You think this behavior might seem weird to the layperson, but to a biologist, it's sort of absolutely normal to be very curious about something. I make my living on flies. I work with fruit flies. I'm a geneticist. And here was a fly making its living on me. You know, I was getting more and more curious. I wanted to see what it looked like when it came out. I didn't want to kill it.

ROBERT: What about girls? I mean, assuming you're dating. So, like, wasn't this, like, a total turn off to say, "Hi, this is me and my maggot?"

JERRY COYNE: Well, I was—you know, I was dating a nurse at the time, and this is the good thing about it. The nurse was actually quite fascinated with this.

SARAH ROGERSON: I thought it was disgusting. [laughs]

ROBERT: Sarah Rogerson was Jerry's friend. She inspected the fly.

ROBERT: Did you give it a name?

SARAH ROGERSON: No.

ROBERT: [laughs]

SARAH ROGERSON: No. Jerry may have felt that way about it, but no, I didn't. This was more of a scientific experience.

ROBERT: Is this something that was okay with you?

SARAH ROGERSON: Well, I don't remember being informed that there were any other options. I thought, this is just what had to happen.

ROBERT: So a couple of weeks pass, and the botfly is just getting ...

JERRY COYNE: Bigger and bigger and bigger.

ROBERT: It goes from jelly bean size to something like ...

JERRY COYNE: The size of an egg.

JAD: An egg?

SARAH ROGERSON: Yeah, it was pretty big.

ROBERT: Like a quail egg.

JAD: Whoa!

ROBERT: He's covering it now with a baseball cap, which is maybe one reason why they decided to go to Fenway Park one particular evening.

SARAH ROGERSON: That is correct.

JERRY COYNE: Yeah, it was a Red Sox-Yankees game. I wasn't gonna miss that. And every once in a while I would rub my head, I mean, throughout this whole gestation of this thing just to check on it. And during the game, when I rubbed my head, I felt something coming out of the lump.

SARAH ROGERSON: Jerry kept saying, "Oh, my gosh! Oh, my gosh, it's coming out! I can feel it!"

ROBERT: So was this a little distracting?

SARAH ROGERSON: Yeah. A foul ball came up where we were sitting, and it hit in one of those wooden seats at Fenway. And we narrowly escaped getting hit because we really weren't paying much attention to the game at all.

JERRY COYNE: But it took a long time. I mean ...

ROBERT: It started at the game, and then it went on?

JERRY COYNE: It started at the game and then continued on until the evening.

SARAH ROGERSON: We went back to Jerry's apartment, and he kept reaching up and checking to feel the lump. We were just hanging out, and ...

JERRY COYNE: And I said ...

SARAH ROGERSON: ... he reached up and said, "It's gone! It's out."

JERRY COYNE: We gotta find it. [laughs] I turned on the light, and there it was on the pillow. And it was horrifying.

ROBERT: What did it look like? Is it a wiggly little wormy thing?

SARAH ROGERSON: It's sort of bulbous on one end, and then it tapers down to a little tail. It's white.

JERRY COYNE: Big, fat, white grub worm.

SARAH ROGERSON: An inch and a half long.

ROBERT: Wow!

SARAH ROGERSON: And it has little black teeth.

JERRY COYNE: You know, I thought, "Oh, my God. That's what was in my head. Had I known that, I might have been more freaked out."

ROBERT: When you are greeting your baby there, did you have a feeling of pride or just ...?

JERRY COYNE: Well, no. Extreme curiosity. The one thing that was extremely striking to me was that its exit was completely painless. You know, it's painful when it's in there, but when it comes out, it does so very painlessly. And that's another evolutionary phenomenon. Of course, if the worm did it painfully and exited, then the horse or the monkey or whoever it's infecting would just slap it and kill it.

ROBERT: So what did you do once you had the baby there on the pillow?

JERRY COYNE: Well, then I decided I was going to try to rear it into an adult fly. You know, I'm a scientist. That's what you do. So I had prepared a jar of sterile sand, and I took the worm and I dropped it into the sand and put the top on with air holes and hoped that it would pupate, but unfortunately it died.

ROBERT: Did you get sad?

JERRY COYNE: I was extremely sad. You know, in the temperate zone in Boston, a botfly is not gonna make it. It just can't live. And so it was doomed from the start. But I wanted to see it complete its life cycle. And unfortunately, it didn't quite make it. So I did the best I could with what I knew. You know, I think it's—it added some richness to my life. It really did. People still get completely horrified when I tell them the story, even though to me it's—you know, it's sort of a nice story. [laughs]

JAD: Jerry Coyne works at the University of Chicago, and his forthcoming book is called Why Evolution is True.

LULU: That'll do it for today. Thank you so much for listening. More stories about this lumpy old planet of ours coming up in two weeks, with brand new Terrestrials episodes coming in September!

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Message three.]

[JERRY COYNE: Hi, this is Jerry Coyne, the botfly man. Radiolab is produced by Amanda Aronczyk and Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Lulu Miller, Soren Wheeler, Jonathan Mitchell, Ellen Horne, and Jessica Benko, none of whom were afflicted with botflies. Other help from Ike Shruskinderaza, Ji Chang Lin. Special thanks to Pauline Davies and Kate Edgar.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Emma, and I live in Portland, Maine. Here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Valentina Powers, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

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