How Lucy, Our Famous Ancestor, Runs On A Virtual Treadmill

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And I’m Flora Lichtman. Later in the hour, separating fact from fiction when it comes to health risks of vaping. How does it compare to smoking, and what does the science say about the efficacy of e-cigarettes to help people kick their cigarette habit?

But first, over the past week, the Trump administration has ordered changes at our biggest federal science agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. The news is coming fast and furious, and it can feel hard to keep up.

Our next guest is here to help. Anil Oza is a reporter for STAT at MIT, based in Boston, Massachusetts. Anil has been keeping close tabs on what’s happening at the agencies and is here to explain. Anil, welcome to science Friday.

ANIL OZA: Hi, Flora. Good to be here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, so late last week, we started getting news that data on the CDC’s website was disappearing. First of all, what disappeared?

ANIL OZA: Yeah, that’s right. So late last week on Friday, we were seeing the CDC scrub a lot of the data sets from their website. And so normally, anyone can go to the CDC’s website and download data sets for a whole slew of different health issues. But to sort of comply with some of Trump’s executive orders, by 5:00 PM on Friday, they were trying to scrub a lot of these data sets to comply with two of these executive orders that Trump put in place– one to sort of remove DEI, and so that would remove mentions of race and ethnicity; and another to sort of deal with, I believe, what he calls gender ideology, and so that would remove mentions of sexual orientation, of gender identity.

And so one of the data sets was the youth behavior survey, which measures gender and sexual orientation in teenagers. And a lot of data sets, even if they’re not sort of expressly about racial inequities, they include data about people’s race. And so a lot of these would run afoul of this executive order.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I also saw that there were data sets about things like HIV and sexual health and tuberculosis and, reported just yesterday, bird flu. What are the consequences of this information disappearing?

ANIL OZA: Yeah, so I think it’s going to be hard to see the sort of short-term impacts of this. But, I mean, in the long term, these data are sort of about understanding where the need is the greatest in the US for these different diseases like bird flu or like tuberculosis or other STIs and things like that. And so if you see these data be offline for a long time and future data not collected, it would be much harder to sort of know where we need to dedicate resources and time and attention throughout the country.

And, I mean, I think it’s particularly shocking because, normally, the sort of US federal agencies are the sort of gold-standard data, the sort of envy of the entire world, which is why I think the fact that they were being tampered with/taken down was such shock to researchers and journalists.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I think I read some of the data sets have reappeared. Have you seen that?

ANIL OZA: Yeah, that’s right. So sort of since the outcry about these data sets being removed, some of them have been put up. And even sort of journalists and researchers when they heard that these data sets were about to be taken down, there was sort of a mad dash to sort of download these data sets and to sort of archive them so that they were there in case they weren’t put back up online.

But I think this raises an issue, obviously, about the sort of veracity of the data, that if they were taken down, they may have been tampered with. And so I know that some of these researchers that downloaded the data are now sort of cross comparing their archival data with what’s been put up to see what, if anything, has changed.

FLORA LICHTMAN: This week, the CDC also ordered withdrawals of certain new scientific papers from its researchers. Can you tell me about this?

ANIL OZA: Yeah, that’s right. So also late last week on Friday, the CDC ordered its researchers to sort of withdraw its papers. So these are papers that have not sort of been made public but are going through the scientific review process that have some of these terms that we’ve been talking about, about diversity, equity and inclusion or about gender. The CDC was asking scientists to sort of withdraw papers that they had collaborated on with these terms included in them.

But it may seem like a small issue, but often, any paper that mentions health and wellness will include these data just as a matter of knowing what the sort of makeup of the patient population is. And, I mean, this must be incredibly frustrating, both to the scientists at the CDC and the NIH but also the researchers that collaborated with them because, notoriously, scientific publishing is a very slow-moving process, and so it’s very possible that there are papers that have been in the works for months, if not years, that may have to sort of get pulled at the finish line here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Let’s shift gears to the National Institutes of Health. There’s been some ups and downs there in the last few weeks with communication ban and grant-making operations paused. What’s been happening, and what’s going on now?

ANIL OZA: Yeah, absolutely. So I think one of the really shocking things that rattled the scientific community when Trump first took office was this communication ban from the federal agencies. It meant that researchers at these federal institutions couldn’t collaborate with people that they’ve collaborated with for years. But one of the things that was really shocking and abrupt was they cancelled study sections at the NIH, which is these groups that are formed to review grants for applications to sort of fund research. And so these groups of professors and researchers will meet and sort of determine whether or not research is worth funding, and they completely just stopped those kind of on a dime.

And so my colleague Megan Molteni and I this week reported that some of them are restarting. The first study section to meet in over three weeks was on Tuesday. Which initially it seemed like a good sign, but I think there are still concerns about whether or not the Trump administration is sort of tampering with these processes. So not all study sections have been restarted. Some researchers have said that some have been rescheduled, and other sort of advisory meetings for the NIH have been paused to sort of comply with some of Trump’s other executive orders. So things are not sort of completely as normal at the NIH, but they are slowly starting to come back online.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Anil, Neil, for your reporting on this.

ANIL OZA: Of course. It was a pleasure to be here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Anil Oza is a reporter for STAT and MIT, based in Boston.

Next up, we are leaving the Beltway for a look at other science news of the week. As you know, we have been tracking the bird-flu situation closely here at Science Friday. This week, we got news that dairy cows in Nevada have been infected with a different version of H5N1 bird flu, a form that may put people who work closely with cows at higher risk. Here to give us an update on this and other science stories from the week is Kathleen Davis, SciFri producer, based in New York. Welcome, Kathleen.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Hi, Flora.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, what do we know about this form of bird flu?

KATHLEEN DAVIS: So on Wednesday, the US Department of Agriculture announced that, as you said, a new form of the bird-flu virus was found in Nevada dairy cows. This is still H5N1 bird flu but a different form, and this is called D1.1. And this is actually the predominant form of bird flu that is found in migrating birds, but the thing with this form is that it wasn’t previously known to be able to spread to cows. So the infection that we have seen in dairy cows up until now was another form of bird flu called B3.13.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I mean, we know dozens of dairy workers have been infected with B3.13, and they’ve had relatively mild symptoms. Have any people been infected with this form, D1.1?

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Yes and that is a big part of the concern. So we know that this form of bird flu has killed one person. That was a Louisiana resident over 65 years old. This person died back in January. Also, a 13-year-old Canadian girl was infected by this virus back in November. She had a pre-existing condition and was on life support, but she did recover. So there are new concerns for dairy workers and people who work with cows. And the more that this virus moves around and replicates, the more chances there are for mutations that might make it easier for it to spread to and among humans.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How is the government responding to this development?

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Yeah, so the USDA is testing milk for the bird-flu virus. This is how the strain was detected in the first place. This testing is done before milk is pasteurized. So we know that the virus can be present in unpasteurized raw milk. But if you’re worried about whether or not drinking milk is safe, if you’re drinking good-old pasteurized milk, which is what most of us do drink, this heats the milk for a short amount of time, and that virus is inactivated. So you shouldn’t have anything to worry about.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Let’s move on to some good news about AI detecting breast cancer. Tell me about this.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: So AI is everywhere now, obviously, but one of the things that, years ago, scientists were talking about and were really excited about were the prospects of AI in the medical field. So this is doing things like detecting cancer in X-rays.

The idea here is, for example, you can feed an AI model a ton of images of what breast cancer looks like in a mammogram. The AI then knows what breast cancer looks like, and, in theory, it can pick out cancer more accurately than a person could. It’s also a lot faster than what one radiologist can do.

So now this has been put into practice. We recently got the results of the largest randomized trial for this. More than 100,000 women were part of this study where, in some cases, AI took a look at mammograms, and in other cases, a human radiologist did. And the group that used AI had a 29% higher detection of cancer with no false positives.

FLORA LICHTMAN: The AI beat the doctors?

KATHLEEN DAVIS: It did.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s amazing.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: It is. And a lot of experts are looking at the future of this as like AI and radiologists work together to detect breast cancer. And for breast cancer in particular, this can be huge. Women here in the US have a 13% average risk of getting breast cancer sometime in their life, and so better early detection really could be a lifesaver.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You’ve got one more story for us featuring a charismatic megafossil, one of our favorites, Lucy.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Yes, Lucy is one of the most famous fossils. She was a human ancestor, an Australopithecus afarensis. She lived about 3.2 million years ago. And we do know a lot about Lucy because her skeleton is pretty complete. We have about 40% of it. And now researchers have put her on a virtual treadmill to answer the age-old question, how the heck would Lucy run?

FLORA LICHTMAN: And how would she run?

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Well, these researchers reconstructed what they think her leg and pelvic muscles would look like. Obviously, those aren’t present in the fossils that we do have of Lucy, but they did their best estimate. And they found that Lucy, standing upright, was about 3 and 1/2 feet tall. She weighed somewhere between 29 and 93 pounds, which is obviously a huge spread. And she was capable of standing and walking upright.

So Lucy does have more ape-like characteristics than we do. Her upper body is proportionately larger than ours, for example. She’s got longer arms and shorter legs. So if she did have to run, it was probably just for short bursts. The generous explanation from the researchers is that Lucy was not a natural runner.

FLORA LICHTMAN: They always do these reconstructions. Did they reconstruct her running style, and what did it look like?

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Oh, they sure did. I mean, running is a pretty generous term, but she’s kind of got both legs at, like, 90-degree angles. She’s got this forward lean. They say that she had a max speed of 11 miles per hour. She doesn’t have that springy running gait that modern humans have. So, I mean, no offense to Lucy, but I think you and I, Flora, could really beat her pretty easily on the track, if we wanted to.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Speak for yourself, Kathleen. When you were describing max speed of 11 miles per hour, I was like, that’s me. That’s my running style.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: It’s all relative, Flora.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s all the time we have. Kathleen, thanks so much.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Thank you.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Kathleen Davis, SciFri producer based in New York.

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