Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Speaker 1: Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Back in June of
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, doctor Rachel Lance was on the show to
Speaker 1: talk about her book In the Waves, detailing the HL
Speaker 1: Hunley disaster, and today she is back to Grace's again,
Speaker 1: this time talking about her new book, Chamber Divers. Chamber
Speaker 1: Divers is about World War Two and the team of
Speaker 1: British geneticists that was tasked with solving the problem of
Speaker 1: how to get military personnel to survive underwater. It is
Speaker 1: a roller coaster of a story that was classified for
Speaker 1: a very long time, so it was an absolute delight
Speaker 1: for me to pepper her with questions about this team
Speaker 1: of very unique and daring scientists and how their work
Speaker 1: has informed entire fields of science. So here is that conversation,
Speaker 1: all right. Today, I am lucky enough to be joined
Speaker 1: by doctor Rachel Lance, who has been on the show before.
Speaker 1: But last time Tracy got to poured you all to herself,
Speaker 1: and now I get my chance.
Speaker 2: We've made our purple hair connection.
Speaker 1: We have so welcome.
Speaker 2: Thank you for having me back.
Speaker 1: Oh, I'm so.
Speaker 2: Glad because you have a new and.
Speaker 1: Quite impressive book out, Chamber Divers, which is we'll get
Speaker 1: into it, but some of this is a very harrowing
Speaker 1: read in the best way. But the first thing I
Speaker 1: want to talk to you about is that, even more
Speaker 1: than your first book, which was In the Waves, this
Speaker 1: book seems to me knowing you a bit, to be
Speaker 1: so deeply in your wheelhouse and sort of where you
Speaker 1: might have been headed before you started researching the sinking
Speaker 1: of the Hunley in the Civil War and what informed
Speaker 1: that first book. Does this feel like the inevitable book
Speaker 1: that you were going to eventually write.
Speaker 2: It feels like another story that was weirdly just waiting
Speaker 2: for me. That was how I felt with the Hunley.
Speaker 2: I was like, who who arranged this? This feels like
Speaker 2: a conspiracy? And I feel like this one was true too.
Speaker 2: And what I decided is that that's what I think
Speaker 2: makes engaging books is when people write what they know,
Speaker 2: and they write the stories that they're the best person
Speaker 2: to tell. And so this book came out of a
Speaker 2: paper that I read during the course of my Honley research,
Speaker 2: and it was this group of researchers who were doing
Speaker 2: some stuff with carbon dioxide, And the date bothered me.
Speaker 2: It was nineteen forty one. That it was published in
Speaker 2: nineteen forty one, and they were in England. So in research,
Speaker 2: papers take a long time to come out, so it
Speaker 2: usually means that you've done the work the year before,
Speaker 2: and that means that they were doing research on carbon
Speaker 2: dioxide during the Blitz in nineteen forty And I could
Speaker 2: not figure out white people who were literally being bonded
Speaker 2: in their homes would care about carbon dioxide. It just
Speaker 2: it seemed really irrelevant at that time period. So I
Speaker 2: just couldn't stop thinking about it, and I kept digging
Speaker 2: and digging, and so this was the story that I
Speaker 2: eventually uncovered, and it was too good not to write.
Speaker 2: It was too good.
Speaker 1: The other thing that I want to talk to you
Speaker 1: about a little bit is your research and writing process,
Speaker 1: but specifically because this book, your work on it straddled
Speaker 1: the pandemic. Some of it happened before we knew that
Speaker 1: the world was going to fall apart for a little while,
Speaker 1: and some of it happened after. And there are some
Speaker 1: pretty interesting moments in the text where you include comparisons
Speaker 1: of things like medical issues and people's behavior during World
Speaker 1: War Two to what we have just experienced with COVID. Right,
Speaker 1: So aside from the obvious impediments to research that came
Speaker 1: up while we all had to sit in our homes,
Speaker 1: how much did the Code nineteen pandemic informed the way
Speaker 1: that you processed the information that you were researching as
Speaker 1: you were prepping and writing Chamber divers.
Speaker 2: It was really important to me personally because I was
Speaker 2: a high risk person. I'm a high risk medical person,
Speaker 2: and I had made the decision to have a really
Speaker 2: critical knee surgery in January twenty twenty. My logic was, Okay,
Speaker 2: I've got a head to London. I've got to do
Speaker 2: all this research, but London is a walking city. I'll
Speaker 2: get this knee surgery done first and then I'll be
Speaker 2: more comfortable walking. Because that didn't work out great for me,
Speaker 2: so I was trying to write whatever other bits and
Speaker 2: pieces I could do. It meant that I had to
Speaker 2: reconfigure the organization in timeline of how I wrote the
Speaker 2: whole book, and it also meant that since someone who
Speaker 2: is not only high risk but works at a hospital
Speaker 2: in restratory physiology research, I was going through my personal
Speaker 2: experiences as well. So I'm a PhD. I don't treat
Speaker 2: medical patients. All of research was shut down, but this
Speaker 2: is still my crew at work, right, Like, these are
Speaker 2: still my people there, and this is a respiratory disease
Speaker 2: and so that and at the time, I was married
Speaker 2: to a firefighter who was doing a lot of CPR
Speaker 2: on people with respiratory failure and coming home at the
Speaker 2: end of that, and so that was a really big
Speaker 2: part of my life for at least the first full year,
Speaker 2: for sure longer than that reality. And one of the
Speaker 2: chapters that I wrote during this because I could do
Speaker 2: a lot of the research using digitized sources, was the
Speaker 2: BLOODZ chapter. That chapter, which I believe is chapter five.
Speaker 2: It might have gotten renumbered, but it kind of became
Speaker 2: a form of therapy for me as I was writing it.
Speaker 2: There was a lot that got caught out of there
Speaker 2: because I would read all these diaries where people were
Speaker 2: acting exactly like they were in the pandemic, and I
Speaker 2: was just sitting there like, oh my god, there's nothing
Speaker 2: we could do. There's nothing we could do to inform
Speaker 2: people and like educate them properly in a way that
Speaker 2: everyone is feeling comfortable with the actions we need to
Speaker 2: take together, and it really hammered home for me in
Speaker 2: kind of a depressing way how much we're restricted by
Speaker 2: our nature and the weans where our brains process information.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, like I said, a lot of that ended up
Speaker 2: getting cut out, but writing it and at least putting
Speaker 2: it down was a big way that I was processing
Speaker 2: what was happening in our world at the time.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I was so struck by the segments in that
Speaker 1: chapter where you're talking about how people living outside of
Speaker 1: London are sort of like la la la la la.
Speaker 1: It feels very distant to them, right that their countrymen
Speaker 1: are literally living through hell and the people leaving London
Speaker 1: for respite are like almost in a different flavor of
Speaker 1: like cultural shell shock because no one understands where they're
Speaker 1: at mentally. That to me was super fascinating.
Speaker 2: That I absolutely that's exactly why I put that in there.
Speaker 2: I'm glad you picked up on that, because that was
Speaker 2: the experience that I was having, even with some family members,
Speaker 2: where they were living a life that felt completely disconnected
Speaker 2: from what was happening, and that made it easier for
Speaker 2: them to fail to process the severity of what the
Speaker 2: rest of us were going through so wild. Yeah, it's
Speaker 2: really interesting how many parallels there were. I went through
Speaker 2: a lot of diaries for that chapter, a lot of
Speaker 2: Blitz diaries.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So this is also an interesting tale because it
Speaker 1: involves a lot of information that was classified for a
Speaker 1: very long time. Yes, so you mentioned that it came
Speaker 1: to your attention because you read a paper, But how
Speaker 1: did you actually get to the point where you were
Speaker 1: getting the real information you needed to put this story together? Like,
Speaker 1: at what point were you like, is this hidden information?
Speaker 1: Can I have this?
Speaker 2: That's you kind of just have to play stupid with
Speaker 2: the government. That's the best way you kinda have to No,
Speaker 2: it's exactly like you said, you kinda just have to
Speaker 2: be like can I have it? If they'll give it
Speaker 2: to you, they'll give it to you. So classified documents,
Speaker 2: you're either going to get everything you want with no fight,
Speaker 2: or there is no negotiation and you will never see it.
Speaker 2: Those are the two extremes. So with these sense that
Speaker 2: relates to World War Two, what these researchers were working
Speaker 2: on ultimately ended up being the landings at D Day.
Speaker 2: The landings at D Day were highly classified for a
Speaker 2: really long time, even after they were successful, because the
Speaker 2: techniques that were developed were so new. So what had
Speaker 2: to happen in order for these documents to be declassified
Speaker 2: is the governments involved. The governments of all the Allied
Speaker 2: countries had to go through and be like, yes, we
Speaker 2: the public knowledge. This is public knowledge. It's public knowledge
Speaker 2: that we do this. So it not only had to
Speaker 2: be no longer relevant to the landings themselves, but it
Speaker 2: had to be that the techniques that had been created
Speaker 2: specifically for D Day were now considered public information. Gotcha,
Speaker 2: a lot of those had not been declassified by the
Speaker 2: British until the late nineteen seventies. In America, some women
Speaker 2: were classified until the early two thousands, and then there
Speaker 2: were others still that I had to request the release for,
Speaker 2: and I had to when I requested them, I sort
Speaker 2: of made the argument of like, everyone knows you're doing
Speaker 2: this anyway, But also there's a guessing game involved as
Speaker 2: well because it's classified, so you can't justify why you
Speaker 2: need the thing because you can't read the thing in
Speaker 2: order to know that it says what you needed to say,
Speaker 2: so you kind of you kind of have to play
Speaker 2: this game where you're like, this is just titled report
Speaker 2: nineteen forty three. Might it contain the solution to all
Speaker 2: of my problems? I don't know what I'm going to
Speaker 2: try and rate it, and so a lot of this
Speaker 2: is a brute force method. There's very much this brute
Speaker 2: force methodology of setting aside hours, days, preferably a couple
Speaker 2: of weeks for each archive, and then just committing yourself
Speaker 2: to the fact that you live there for a little
Speaker 2: while and may not may not. Yeah, Like, I get
Speaker 2: so invested in these documents when I'm finally able to
Speaker 2: access them because they're all physical, they're not these are
Speaker 2: not digitized, that I'm like actively annoyed by my need
Speaker 2: to use the restrooms, just like damn it, lad or
Speaker 2: not again. So yeah, and then you got to just
Speaker 2: power through. That's what that process looks like.
Speaker 1: So what is the hit rate? Like how what percentage
Speaker 1: of stuff are you? Like this actually is not relevant
Speaker 1: to my deal at all, versus the amount where you're like, Eureka,
Speaker 1: I've got something really cool.
Speaker 2: I do have an archives dance. It's very quiet, and
Speaker 2: so I don't get kicked out that I do it.
Speaker 2: The hit rate is pretty low. But what's interesting is
Speaker 2: that the best jewels are the ones you don't expect
Speaker 2: to find. The best jewels are the ones where you
Speaker 2: go in and you're saying, Okay, I don't know exactly
Speaker 2: what this story is. And that's very much how Chamber
Speaker 2: Divers came together. It started with that on paper, and
Speaker 2: I was like, I don't know what this story is,
Speaker 2: but something was going on, and so I created. What
Speaker 2: I do is I create a master timeline document. So
Speaker 2: by the end of writing this book, my master timeline
Speaker 2: document was over eighty pages long. And as I'm doing that,
Speaker 2: I kind of just fill in the key events as
Speaker 2: I'm finding them. Because when you're reading these papers, you're
Speaker 2: also not necessarily getting them in chronological order, right. You
Speaker 2: don't know what you're going to find when you ask
Speaker 2: for it. So I create this document and I keep
Speaker 2: citations to where I found each fact and what data
Speaker 2: occurred on and by the end, I've got the story.
Speaker 2: And so the hit rate seems like it's really low,
Speaker 2: but there's a high rate of finding things that are
Speaker 2: really cool that you don't expect, like the admission that
Speaker 2: the divers used to just pee in their suits because
Speaker 2: they found them annoying to take off. I was like yeah.
Speaker 2: I was like, yeah, this is a book, so.
Speaker 1: This is so fascinating to me. But I want to
Speaker 1: get to the actual meat of the book and what
Speaker 1: it contains. Because you open with a very detailed description
Speaker 1: of what we now know today as Operation Jubilee, which
Speaker 1: is the landing at Diepp that took place in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty two. Will you talk a little bit about why
Speaker 1: that event is so important to setting up the story
Speaker 1: of the Chamber Divers.
Speaker 2: I wanted to start with that event because I think
Speaker 2: we tend to focus on D Day without necessarily looking
Speaker 2: at the planning that went into it. We talk a
Speaker 2: lot about Omaha Beach, what went wrong on Omaha Beach,
Speaker 2: and we do a good job as a society of
Speaker 2: honoring those who gave up their lives. What I really
Speaker 2: wanted to do with this book was tell the story
Speaker 2: of what went right and how lives were saved, and
Speaker 2: so the information to do that requires first setting up
Speaker 2: what happens if there isn't planning, What happens if there
Speaker 2: isn't beach scouting, What happens if we don't know how
Speaker 2: to send divers, which is what the Chamber Divers were
Speaker 2: eventually working on. So I wanted to start with DP
Speaker 2: in nineteen forty two because that was an example of
Speaker 2: a kind of comparable beach landing to Normandy, and it
Speaker 2: was one where they didn't have these scouting methods in advance.
Speaker 2: They didn't have these tools like the mini subs and
Speaker 2: the rebreathers that these experimentalists were working on, and it
Speaker 2: was an absolute bloodbath. On Blue Beach alone, which is
Speaker 2: one of the beaches. The casualty rates were at ninety
Speaker 2: seven percent, so basically no one made it off that beach,
Speaker 2: and that was a direct result of the lack of
Speaker 2: advanced information. So I wanted to use that. The book
Speaker 2: starts with DAP and it ends with dday, and the
Speaker 2: goal there was to kind of bracket this lack of
Speaker 2: planning and lack of detailed scouting information versus what can
Speaker 2: happen when you have that, when you've done your scientific
Speaker 2: background research.
Speaker 1: Then the book jumps back in time a little bit
Speaker 1: because you start to introduce your cast of characters that
Speaker 1: emerged throughout the early chapters, which is like, I really
Speaker 1: want this to be made into a movie just so
Speaker 1: that I can see the Ocean's eleven style accumulation of
Speaker 1: brains and really eccentric characters, et cetera. And I know
Speaker 1: that you have also said in interviews and even on
Speaker 1: our show when we had you on before that when
Speaker 1: people talk about any kind of scientific or research work,
Speaker 1: there is always a team, and this team was really extraordinary.
Speaker 1: Will you talk a little bit about some of the
Speaker 1: members of this incredible pros and cons great team of people.
Speaker 2: Yes, pros and cons. That's a good way to put it.
Speaker 2: I think the way you're referring to is the fact
Speaker 2: that I just tried to be really honest about everyone.
Speaker 2: We're entering a new age of history where we're no
Speaker 2: longer just looking at people as like bronze figures up
Speaker 2: on weird horse statues. We're trying to like talk about
Speaker 2: people as more complete human beings. And none of us
Speaker 2: are perfect, ourselves ourselves included, but like so I wanted
Speaker 2: to present these characters as like complete and well rounded,
Speaker 2: including their flaws.
Speaker 1: People.
Speaker 2: So, one of my favorite people in the book is
Speaker 2: this woman, doctor Helen Spurway, and she was this known
Speaker 2: for being socially awkward PhD geneticist who really loved nuts
Speaker 2: and salamanders, and so she she shows up to class
Speaker 2: on the first day at University College London, and she
Speaker 2: just like casually announces to everyone that she's going to
Speaker 2: marry the professor, who, by the way, is already married.
Speaker 2: So this is a daring. This is not the way
Speaker 2: to make friends. But the room read the room palette exactly.
Speaker 2: She turns out to be like a really good scientist.
Speaker 2: This woman can do anything with statistics and math. And
Speaker 2: she's also like so invested in using statistics and math
Speaker 2: attracting genetics that she'll just like go up to random
Speaker 2: people's houses if they have a pawn in their backyard
Speaker 2: and knock on their door and be like, Hi, my
Speaker 2: names Helen. Can I look in your pond for salamanders?
Speaker 2: And like this is how she got her data. She
Speaker 2: was she was tracking the characteristics of salamander's and newts
Speaker 2: across her area of England. And this is her academic
Speaker 2: papers because that is actually how genetics was studied at
Speaker 2: the time. So this is a group of people who,
Speaker 2: because of their field, are inherently used to bucking a
Speaker 2: little bit of authority. They're used to being considered a
Speaker 2: little bit odd. And I use that word lovingly because
Speaker 2: I myself as a minorly odd scientist. So and then
Speaker 2: you also have a lot of them who came over
Speaker 2: from Germany. Ye the lad leader JBS how Dane. He
Speaker 2: is an ancestrally wealthy, privileged white man, but because he
Speaker 2: went through a lot of extreme bullying when he was younger,
Speaker 2: he always considers himself kind of an underdog, and he
Speaker 2: always fights for other underdogs, and he he has this
Speaker 2: incredible temper that he becomes infamous for. But he's also
Speaker 2: just sitting there like, why is racism a thing? This
Speaker 2: doesn't make any sense. It's just genetic variation and skin pigment.
Speaker 2: So like, he's got this mixture of being incredibly egalitarian
Speaker 2: that I think is to his credit. And so when
Speaker 2: refugee start coming out of Germany, he starts saying like,
Speaker 2: oh my gosh, I'm gonna fund as many as possible.
Speaker 2: This is dumb Judaism is not a genetic flaw. This
Speaker 2: doesn't make scientific sense. So he starts trying to fund them,
Speaker 2: and that becomes a huge component of his lab. One
Speaker 2: of the other people that I really loved was Ursula Philip.
Speaker 2: I related to her because one of the first things
Speaker 2: that her daughter told me when I interviewed her, is
Speaker 2: that she STI always spilled food on herself and I
Speaker 2: was like, me too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, me too, I see you girl.
Speaker 2: So yeah, she was also spectacular geneticist, ends up being
Speaker 2: a key part of this research, puts herself in these experiments,
Speaker 2: puts herself at incredible risk for this country where she's
Speaker 2: a refugee.
Speaker 1: I love it. Listen later on maybe offline, we can
Speaker 1: talk about how Martin Case is my new history crush.
Speaker 1: But that's a different matter.
Speaker 2: Ah, you'll have to fight me for him.
Speaker 1: I mean, he's so my flavor. He's a little bit wacky,
Speaker 1: devil may care, cute as pie, super smart, come on
Speaker 1: the dream.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh. I interviewed his niece, and the first
Speaker 2: time I interviewed his niece on the zoom because England
Speaker 2: is six hours ahead. She just like chimes in and
Speaker 2: then raises up her cocktail. I was like, oh.
Speaker 1: God, it's.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 1: Because there's a lot of drinking in this book as well.
Speaker 1: But I'm glad that you mentioned the sort of egalitarian
Speaker 1: approach to bringing on team members, particularly people that had fled,
Speaker 1: because you mentioned in the book that several of these
Speaker 1: scientists were people that were eventually going to be targeted
Speaker 1: if they weren't already when they left, you know. And
Speaker 1: this is of course when the eugenics movement has its
Speaker 1: own balloon of support.
Speaker 2: Dark festivities.
Speaker 1: Right. There's also a great moment where you're talking about
Speaker 1: Ursula and sort of the legend of her fleeing Germany
Speaker 1: versus the reality not really quite so dramatic. So one,
Speaker 1: I would love for you to talk about that correction
Speaker 1: in particular because it's so charming to me. And two,
Speaker 1: I also like would love to hear more about kind
Speaker 1: of the outsider's status, even in Britain where that's theoretically
Speaker 1: not playing out, but it is impacting how they're accepted
Speaker 1: and how they're perceived.
Speaker 2: Oh gosh, yeah again, Ursula, I just want to be
Speaker 2: her friend. There's very there. Before this book, there is
Speaker 2: very little note about her. She wasn't given credit for
Speaker 2: a lot of her achievements. A lot of what she
Speaker 2: had achieved in Germany before she fled was then destroyed
Speaker 2: and tried to cover by the Nazis because they didn't
Speaker 2: like that a woman did it. Not great inequality those Nazis,
Speaker 2: And so one of the stories about her that has
Speaker 2: been repeated in secondary tertiary sources, is that she graduated
Speaker 2: and defended her PhD and then had to flee like imediately,
Speaker 2: as in, she basically defended her PhD on the run
Speaker 2: and then had to flee, and she didn't get a
Speaker 2: chance to get her physical doctorate paper, which, of course
Speaker 2: in the nineteen thirties is a lot more important because
Speaker 2: there's no digital verification of degrees.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So I tried to track this. I tried to track
Speaker 2: this back to its original source, and I couldn't find it.
Speaker 2: So when I was talking to her daughter, I kind
Speaker 2: of bring this out and her daughter just starts laughing.
Speaker 2: She goes, that wasn't true. I was like, what really happened?
Speaker 2: She goes, she forgot it again, girl, I see you.
Speaker 2: This is what I relate to you so hard.
Speaker 1: It's super important.
Speaker 2: Happened spectacular in science, not amazing at life logistics, and
Speaker 2: this is me. This is so I really wanted to
Speaker 2: include that as another example, right, Like we don't have
Speaker 2: to talk about people as if they're perfect, shiny emblems.
Speaker 2: We can talk about people as if they're realistic, and
Speaker 2: that also makes science more accessible in my opinion. If
Speaker 2: you're someone who Yeah, in your regular life, you occasionally
Speaker 2: leave your doctorate behind because you've forgotten it, like you
Speaker 2: could still be amazing at science. So when Ursula Philip
Speaker 2: and the other Jewish refugee scientists came over, the two
Speaker 2: of whom who are in the book are Hans Kamus
Speaker 2: and Hans Gruneberg, they came over to this UCL lab.
Speaker 2: They were given refuge there, and they were given a salary,
Speaker 2: and their families were brought over. So all of them
Speaker 2: were saved, and most of their relatives ended up being
Speaker 2: murdered in the Holocaust. So they were very clearly saved
Speaker 2: by this, and they were experiencing this in a lab
Speaker 2: where within the internal lab walls they seem to have
Speaker 2: been treated as equals, at least as far as I
Speaker 2: can tell, and their communications from the time period are
Speaker 2: very honest, so they seem to have been treated as equals.
Speaker 2: But outside the rest of the world was still kind
Speaker 2: of brewing with anti Semitism. One of the things I
Speaker 2: really tried to do when I wrote this book was
Speaker 2: to give every action a context, because I think that's
Speaker 2: the true story of science. It's why did people work
Speaker 2: on this?
Speaker 1: Now?
Speaker 2: Why did people care about this? Now what was it
Speaker 2: like for the individuals doing it, And so I dedicated
Speaker 2: some time in one of the earlier chapters to after
Speaker 2: they come through and they're in London, there are riots
Speaker 2: in this street. There were literal physical riots in the
Speaker 2: streets of London outside the campus walls over judaism, communism, fascism,
Speaker 2: kind of all of these ideas that we know in
Speaker 2: a couple of years will turn into literal war. During
Speaker 2: World War two, and so they were kind of in
Speaker 2: this little bubble where they'd been getting an opportunity to
Speaker 2: get out of the most extreme anti semitism, but we're
Speaker 2: still in a context where they were fighting for a
Speaker 2: country where there were layers of discrimination.
Speaker 1: This makes it so fascinating because they go through so
Speaker 1: much in the service of creating this really doing all
Speaker 1: this research on this project and creating solutions to problems
Speaker 1: that help everyone, even though everyone has not been cool
Speaker 1: to them. One of the sort of two of the
Speaker 1: things that you mentioned early on as the top of
Speaker 1: those lists of problems that this assembled team worked on
Speaker 1: were carbon dioxide and decompression sickness. And one of the
Speaker 1: things that I really enjoy about your writing is that
Speaker 1: you and I've told you this before, and I think
Speaker 1: it embarrassed you. Is that you parse science in a
Speaker 1: way that normies like myself who love science but sometimes
Speaker 1: grapple with understanding it, will get it and it opens
Speaker 1: these doors. So I would love for you to explain
Speaker 1: in layman's terms why it is so critical to understand
Speaker 1: these things in a wartime situation or any underwater situation
Speaker 1: and other situations, so that it makes a little a
Speaker 1: little easier sense. And some of it, I think is
Speaker 1: stuff that doesn't make it to layman because frankly, the
Speaker 1: times it has gone wrong have been horrific and nobody
Speaker 1: wants to really get into it.
Speaker 2: Right. Okay, so you didn't embarrass me. I appreciated the comment,
Speaker 2: but I think what I took opposition to is the
Speaker 2: word normis, because.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, no, but in.
Speaker 2: My opinion, science is for everyone, and if you are
Speaker 2: not a professional scientist, the the only thing that's usually
Speaker 2: missing is the daily vocabulary. Every profession has their daily
Speaker 2: vocabulary of terms, and just because you don't know all
Speaker 2: of those doesn't mean you're stupid like it's or it
Speaker 2: doesn't mean you're less intelligent or whatever. So yeah, that's
Speaker 2: I try to. One of my major goals is to
Speaker 2: just be like, listen, you just you don't know the word,
Speaker 2: and that's that's fine. This isn't your daily job. I
Speaker 2: don't know the daily words and terminology of your job
Speaker 2: either either. That's a separate versation, right. So one of
Speaker 2: the things that I really try to do is emphasize
Speaker 2: not only what these people were doing, who they are,
Speaker 2: but also why this problem is important and why it's
Speaker 2: so challenging. This is something that I began to appreciate
Speaker 2: as a scientist myself, because I get a lot of
Speaker 2: questions about, well, why can't they do this, why can't
Speaker 2: they do that, or why can't they just make a thing? Now,
Speaker 2: first of all, who is they?
Speaker 1: So be more specific the grand poop of science?
Speaker 2: Yeah, because we can. The question is how much money
Speaker 2: are you willing to contribute to our salaries? Unfortunately, at
Speaker 2: this point in my life, no one has yet given
Speaker 2: me the vast sums of money it would require for
Speaker 2: me to do science for free. So because I do
Speaker 2: have a mortgage, I do have to buy food, and
Speaker 2: that's just yeah, it's one of the sad limitations of
Speaker 2: my life situation.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So, like most other scientists. We have to have funding
Speaker 2: just because as much as we love this stuff, like,
Speaker 2: we still have to survive, and so we have to
Speaker 2: have funding to pay salaries, buy equipment, and buy lab
Speaker 2: space and things like that. So if someone is not
Speaker 2: willing to invest in a thing, then we really have
Speaker 2: a hard time achieving it for those practical life limitations. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so I wanted to emphasize not only what the people
Speaker 2: were doing, but how complex some of these problems are.
Speaker 1: So will you explain, though, why carbon dioxide and decompression
Speaker 1: sickness are such huge issues and why at this point
Speaker 1: in time people were like, I don't know what's going on.
Speaker 1: These guys did not make it. We're trying to figure
Speaker 1: it out.
Speaker 2: Okay, So the big question is the ending of what
Speaker 2: you just said, Why people are like, I don't know.
Speaker 2: We all experience this. This ties back in the pandemic.
Speaker 2: Everyone experience this in the non scientific world real time
Speaker 2: during the pandemic. In science, if you're talking about sickness,
Speaker 2: you're talking about death, you're talking about injury, anything that
Speaker 2: happens to human beings, we don't know anything until it
Speaker 2: starts happening to someone. We can do tests for years
Speaker 2: in petrie dishes or whatever, and it's still not going
Speaker 2: to be the same as putting a person through it.
Speaker 2: I can put a Patriot dish in a car seat
Speaker 2: all you want, but it's not going to tell me
Speaker 2: when someone's going to die in a car crash. So unfortunately,
Speaker 2: a lot of the data that we get in all
Speaker 2: these scenarios comes because someone got hurt, or someone got sick,
Speaker 2: or someone died, and we're not going to do that
Speaker 2: on purpose. I'm never going to blow some up on purpose.
Speaker 2: So my data from BLAS, for example, comes from when
Speaker 2: people have gotten blown up by accident. So what we
Speaker 2: saw in the pandemic was that being worked out real
Speaker 2: time with in illness, where we're like, we don't know yet,
Speaker 2: we're waiting for this to spread. We have to see
Speaker 2: how this happens naturally because we can't ethically do this
Speaker 2: on purpose. And that was the same thing that was
Speaker 2: happening with diving in DCS. So with diving in decompression
Speaker 2: sickness DCS, otherwise known as the bends, this just started happening.
Speaker 2: It was a thing happening to bridge construction workers and
Speaker 2: people were like, we don't know, we're going to try
Speaker 2: a couple things. Most of those things are not going
Speaker 2: to work. Eventually one will and eventually the one that
Speaker 2: really did work was invented or thought up by JBS
Speaker 2: Haldane's father, John Scott Haldane, which is how JBS kind
Speaker 2: of got into diving. So he looked at the idea
Speaker 2: of decompression. So he looked at the idea of how
Speaker 2: to plan your decompression so that you can avoid the
Speaker 2: disease in the first place. And he kind of was
Speaker 2: one of the first pioneers of the field to understand
Speaker 2: that the human body needs time to process that's happening
Speaker 2: to it underwater.
Speaker 1: I'm going to come back to science in a little bit,
Speaker 1: but first I I kind of want to talk about
Speaker 1: Haldane because he's a doozy of a character. One of
Speaker 1: the issues that comes up in the book is communism
Speaker 1: because he was very bought into that movement for a
Speaker 1: long time.
Speaker 2: He was bought into everything whatever he liked. He was
Speaker 2: like hunter present this, yes, you know, no happening.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like the propaganda that was coming out of Communist
Speaker 1: Russia convinced him. Will you talk a little bit about
Speaker 1: the part that affiliation with communism plays in his life story.
Speaker 2: Yes, so he bought into communism, and this was really
Speaker 2: common in the nineteen thirties, So I tried to be
Speaker 2: clear about that in the book, like now it's considered
Speaker 2: a bit of a fringe and extremist belief. That's because
Speaker 2: now we have the example of what really happened in communism.
Speaker 2: They did not have that yet. It was still pretty theoretical,
Speaker 2: and the Russians, this early Soviet experiment, was essentially lying
Speaker 2: to the rest of the world, and they were lying well,
Speaker 2: they convinced a lot of people. So for Jamie as
Speaker 2: Hell Dane, he looked at communism as a way to
Speaker 2: fight fascism. You have this fascist idea that one person
Speaker 2: should really be in charge, and then you have this
Speaker 2: communist idea that the people should be in charge. And
Speaker 2: because he really opposed fascism, he had been in World
Speaker 2: War One, he'd been in the trenches in World War One,
Speaker 2: and he had seen what happens when essentially monarchs are
Speaker 2: able to pit their people against each other at will.
Speaker 2: He became very anti individualistic government control. And then he
Speaker 2: ends up going to the Spanish Civil War voluntarily, and
Speaker 2: that's where I think he really got radicalized because he
Speaker 2: was fighting with the communists against the fascist regimes. So
Speaker 2: when World War two starts to break out and everything
Speaker 2: starts to wremble, this is all coming in the context
Speaker 2: of right after the Great Depression. So you have this
Speaker 2: guy who's not only been in these wars led by
Speaker 2: these monarchical and fascist dictators, you have this world that's
Speaker 2: going through this massive depression where there are food riots
Speaker 2: and starvation and lots of problems that people are saying, oh, well,
Speaker 2: theoretically this could be fixed by communism, which we now
Speaker 2: know it doesn't, but at that time very appealing. So
Speaker 2: he kind of becomes a big part of this and
Speaker 2: that really starts to inform his perspective in terms of science.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of evidence that he did this in
Speaker 2: part because the communists were saying, oh, well, this is
Speaker 2: the application of science to help people, and that was
Speaker 2: a thing he really cared about. Like he really cared
Speaker 2: about using science to help people. That was one of
Speaker 2: his major goals. And so that's how communism and science
Speaker 2: really tied together for him. And that's a big part
Speaker 2: of I think what motivated the Lab to do this stuff.
Speaker 2: He knew what war was like, and he wanted to
Speaker 2: help end it.
Speaker 1: So I'm still gonna want to talk about Haldane because
Speaker 1: he was I don't know if rebellious is the right
Speaker 1: word or just he saw his path and he knew
Speaker 1: what he believed was right and what wasn't and a
Speaker 1: lot of that led to things like clashes with his
Speaker 1: bosses and the leadership at University College London. Well you
Speaker 1: talk a little bit, because there are some very funny
Speaker 1: stories about like the ways he got around wartime regulations
Speaker 1: and how he would have visitors get onto campus and
Speaker 1: into the lab like that cracked me up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh my gosh, I love those stories too. Right,
Speaker 2: so when the war starts really brewing, the leadership of
Speaker 2: University College London U Seel starts to say, okay, we
Speaker 2: gotta shut this down, we gotta get people out. We're downtown.
Speaker 2: They do turn out to be right, they're a little
Speaker 2: bit early. But how Dane is like, nah, no thanks,
Speaker 2: I've been bombed several times before. I want to keep researching.
Speaker 2: So that's how much this guy cares about genetics. He's like, no,
Speaker 2: bombs are cool, I'm gonna keep We're gonna and he
Speaker 2: essentially whenever he has visitors, he tells them to lie
Speaker 2: and pretend they're from the government to how to get
Speaker 2: around the guards at the gates. And he's like developed
Speaker 2: secret passageways in things like this. So this is what
Speaker 2: he's doing along with his fellow rebellious lab mates, in
Speaker 2: order to keep the research going. Part of the reason
Speaker 2: I wanted to include that was because that actually doesn't
Speaker 2: seem that unusual to me. You you would be surprised
Speaker 2: how many scientists I've seen with similar behaviors, where they
Speaker 2: they really care about their research to the point where
Speaker 2: they're like, no, I'll evacuate when the fire gets to me,
Speaker 2: right right. So I thought that that was maybe unusual
Speaker 2: for most people, but very classic scientists.
Speaker 1: I sort of love it. I think one of them
Speaker 1: was that he told friends to say they were from
Speaker 1: the Ministry of Food, which Judy is just the nuttiest
Speaker 1: and best. That's a great restaurant name. If anybody wants
Speaker 1: to take it.
Speaker 2: I will go, I will go to that.
Speaker 1: This is interesting, right because he's doing he's running this lab.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of genetics research going on, but then
Speaker 1: they are also being tasked by the government to figure
Speaker 1: out these issues that are going on with military operations,
Speaker 1: and then the blitz is happening in London where all
Speaker 1: of this research is underway. So will you talk about
Speaker 1: sort of the immediacy of the military research at that
Speaker 1: point and how they stayed focused on things as bombings
Speaker 1: are literally happening in the city, and then of course
Speaker 1: they eventually had to move and thank goodness they did.
Speaker 2: Oh finally, Oh my gosh, So okay, this was so crazy.
Speaker 2: I can't even imagine what this would have been like.
Speaker 2: The know that war is coming, and the Allied military
Speaker 2: have this collective gut clenching moment in the summer of
Speaker 2: nineteen thirty nine where they know that Hitler is bad
Speaker 2: and they're like, we're gonna start preparing for that. We
Speaker 2: think this is gonna get worse, and they start building
Speaker 2: more submarines. What starts happening is they have three sinkings
Speaker 2: in a row within three weeks of each other. US
Speaker 2: the Squaliss goes down during a training accident, HMS Thetis
Speaker 2: goes down during a training accident, and the French Fany,
Speaker 2: which actually still has lost off the Coasta Vietnam that's
Speaker 2: a whole side story, goes down during a training accident,
Speaker 2: but collectively these countries must have been panicking and they
Speaker 2: kept it out of the news. So this context has
Speaker 2: been left out of a lot of World War two histories.
Speaker 2: But I can only imagine the panic when they realize
Speaker 2: that they don't actually know what they're doing underwater. They
Speaker 2: have no idea how to actually keep people alive in submarines,
Speaker 2: much less get them out. How Dane and the UCL
Speaker 2: group are geneticis by training, and they start working on
Speaker 2: this problem immediately, and they start doing it on themselves.
Speaker 2: Of course, because they're there. They're human beings, they're handy.
Speaker 2: This makes sense to a scientist. So as soon as
Speaker 2: how Dane testifies in the hearing about what happened with
Speaker 2: the HMS Thetis he shows up there. He's literally there
Speaker 2: the day after he's done this trial on himself, so
Speaker 2: he's still got a migraine from all the co two.
Speaker 2: He's just spent the previous night projectile vomiting through the evening.
Speaker 2: And he gets up there and they ask him to
Speaker 2: do math, and he does math in front of everyone
Speaker 2: on the stand to tell him how much carbon dioxide
Speaker 2: absorb it They would have needed to save their separators
Speaker 2: at that point the admiral t goes and you can
Speaker 2: feel it in the documents. They don't say it this way,
Speaker 2: but this is how I mentioned it. They're like, this
Speaker 2: is the guy. They basically just start piling it on him.
Speaker 2: So like, here's our list of questions. I've read these
Speaker 2: list of questions. Some of them were still working on
Speaker 2: a scientist, So eighty years later, we're still working on these.
Speaker 2: What the UCL lab does is basically find this lab
Speaker 2: with chambers. They go to the hyperbaric chambers, which are
Speaker 2: large metal tubes that can hold in pressure so they
Speaker 2: can simulate diving. And they say, okay, this is an emergency.
Speaker 2: We're being told to evacuate. People are leaving the city,
Speaker 2: We're expecting bombings any day. This is part of the
Speaker 2: war we are about to be in. And so they
Speaker 2: start putting their own bodies in the tubes to test
Speaker 2: this admiralties list of questions. Now, of course we already
Speaker 2: talked about up nineteen forty two, dup happens that list
Speaker 2: of questions kind of morphs a little bit. Before it
Speaker 2: had been focused a lot on submarines and maybe making
Speaker 2: many submarines, and how Dane himself had been pushing this
Speaker 2: idea of free swimming divers, but he didn't really get
Speaker 2: the admiralties full attention until dup in nineteen forty two
Speaker 2: when they were like, oh man, we need we need
Speaker 2: people underwater. At the time, HEREOD diving really meant surface
Speaker 2: applied diving. So I think Cuba getting Junior Men of Honor.
Speaker 2: That's what it looked like. Giant ship over you people
Speaker 2: who would be shooting at that. So if you tried
Speaker 2: scout a peach with it, it's pretty obvious. So what
Speaker 2: they were doing was really working on the first scouting divers,
Speaker 2: and they were just in a frenzy for the next
Speaker 2: several years trying to come up with the safety limits
Speaker 2: for how people could do this without dying.
Speaker 1: Astonishing, it just kept getting piled on. You mentioned that
Speaker 1: they were themselves test subjects. These are to me some
Speaker 1: of the most terrifying passages of the book, because I'm
Speaker 1: a wuss and I don't enjoy discomfort of any flavor.
Speaker 1: But it's one of those things where I'm like, I
Speaker 1: understand that this approach led to a much deeper understanding
Speaker 1: of all of this science and asphyxiation, and specifically what
Speaker 1: could happen in summaris is this really a good way
Speaker 1: to do experiments?
Speaker 2: What's the alternative?
Speaker 1: Right now?
Speaker 2: Seriously, what's the alternative?
Speaker 1: I mean, that's the thing. It's like you can't ask
Speaker 1: a mouse how it felt.
Speaker 2: Right, exactly exactly.
Speaker 1: But I do wonder because I know you do lots
Speaker 1: of testing, and it's very careful and regulated and obviously
Speaker 1: like there's no way, as you said, to do the
Speaker 1: things they were doing without putting themselves through it. But
Speaker 1: were there any instances of this approach where you were like,
Speaker 1: they have gone too far? This was Nope, nope, nope,
Speaker 1: you should not have done that, sir. I mean, we'll
Speaker 1: talk more about all of the injuries.
Speaker 2: But knowing what I know now, it's impossible for me
Speaker 2: to evaluate their experiences because my knowledge is based on
Speaker 2: what they did. Our entire field, my entire professional field,
Speaker 2: is based on what this group did during World War Two,
Speaker 2: but it was so classified. My entire professional field is
Speaker 2: going to be finding out this story from this book too.
Speaker 2: None of us knew. I had to dig it out
Speaker 2: so I can look back now and say, yes, if
Speaker 2: someone today did that, I would punch them in the face,
Speaker 2: because that's insane. But I know that because this group
Speaker 2: did it. When I was writing it, I'm I'm very
Speaker 2: flattered you found it terrifying because what I'm glad I
Speaker 2: could chill you to your core, because what I wanted
Speaker 2: to do was convey what they would have experienced. They
Speaker 2: were getting in this too. It was tiny, it was
Speaker 2: thick metal. They had no real way of communicating with
Speaker 2: the outside except for scribbling notes and holding them up
Speaker 2: to the very small window. There was no lighting inside.
Speaker 2: It would have been dark, it would have been loud,
Speaker 2: and they had no way to get out in case
Speaker 2: of an emergency. Because you're under pressure. You can't just
Speaker 2: come back up. You're gonna I'll get DCS. So I
Speaker 2: really wanted to convey how terrifying that would have been
Speaker 2: as an exploration. Now, when we do it, we have
Speaker 2: prescribed guidelines. I can do things safely because of this group.
Speaker 2: When they were doing that, every single time they closed
Speaker 2: out chamber door, they had no idea what was about
Speaker 2: to happen to their bodies. And I really tried to
Speaker 2: convey that through putting in a sampling of the experiments. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: there are some experiments in there where everything is fine.
Speaker 2: Everyone comes out and they have a nice afternoon and
Speaker 2: then they eat sandwiches. And there are other experiments in
Speaker 2: there where like it's really bad, people could have died,
Speaker 2: so they had no idea going in.
Speaker 1: There are very real negative repercussions to their work. Will
Speaker 1: you talk about some of the physical damage that some
Speaker 1: of these researchers ended up with. I was so squinked
Speaker 1: out by the lit cigarette test that was done. I
Speaker 1: don't even know how to discribe the contortions my body
Speaker 1: went through, which was Jim Rendall, right.
Speaker 2: Yes, would you like me to talk about that one?
Speaker 1: Sure? Okay, you could use a couple if you have
Speaker 1: two that are you know, too horrifyingly graphic.
Speaker 2: Yesterday I spent a lengthy amount of time explaining the
Speaker 2: concept of lung butter to someone.
Speaker 1: So I have a problem.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you have to. You'll have to tell me what
Speaker 2: your limit is. Jim Roundell full name James, but went
Speaker 2: by Jim. He was a PhD geneticist. And I love
Speaker 2: this guy because he's a tall person like me, And
Speaker 2: so he curls up in the chamber one day and
Speaker 2: he's going down there and everything seems fine. So he
Speaker 2: has a successful test he's a little bit of trouble
Speaker 2: clearing his ears, meaning equalizing with the pressure changes, just
Speaker 2: like on an airplane. That everything seems okay. So he
Speaker 2: comes up and he just has this weird chest paint,
Speaker 2: like it's really small. It's just bothering him. He assumes
Speaker 2: that someone gave him a problematic meat pie, which just
Speaker 2: laughed that he blamed the meat pie is like, no,
Speaker 2: I just ate a weird thing. It keeps getting worse,
Speaker 2: So eventually he goes to the doctor. The doctor just
Speaker 2: slices him open between his ribs and he notices that
Speaker 2: Jim Rendell's entire lung has collapsed. So what's occurred is
Speaker 2: there was some pocket of gas in his lung and
Speaker 2: as they were coming up from depth, the gas was
Speaker 2: trapped and it couldn't fully expand. Now this doesn't usually happen.
Speaker 2: This is not a normal thing, but some people have
Speaker 2: flukes of physiology. If he maybe had tuberculosis or another
Speaker 2: major respiratory disease where there was scarring in his lung,
Speaker 2: that could happen. It's not extremely common, but it is
Speaker 2: a thing that exists. And so as he was going
Speaker 2: up that gas couldn't expand. He couldn't exhale it, and
Speaker 2: it ruptured into his chest instead, It'll go somewhere. The
Speaker 2: laws of physics always win, and so every time he
Speaker 2: breathed in a little bit of his breath would go
Speaker 2: out through that same rupture and go more into his
Speaker 2: chest cavity. Eventually, the bubble in his chest cavity grew
Speaker 2: bigger than his lungs. It collapsed his lungs, and it
Speaker 2: started shoving his heart to the side. So if he'd
Speaker 2: kept breathing that way, his heart would have pushed been
Speaker 2: pushed so far to the side that it could have
Speaker 2: ruptured one of the major blood vessels and he would
Speaker 2: have bled to death internally. Thankfully, he went to the
Speaker 2: doctor before he reached that part. They made a small
Speaker 2: incision in his back, looked around, said hey, this is
Speaker 2: a problem, but to test it and make sure that
Speaker 2: the lung was closed before they sewed him back up.
Speaker 2: The doctor hands him a lit cigarette and says, hey, kids, smoke.
Speaker 2: This not the actual dialogue, but definitely how I meatione it.
Speaker 3: So this is this is a leak test, right, you
Speaker 3: can see smoke. So if he a haales on this
Speaker 3: cigarette and smoke comes into this hole in his chest wall.
Speaker 3: Now we know that the how lung isn't sealed. Thankfully
Speaker 3: for Jim Rendell, no smoke entered his chast cavity.
Speaker 2: It turned out the lung was fully sealed, and they
Speaker 2: could just kind of purge that gas that was in there,
Speaker 2: let the lung reinflate, and then sew im back up.
Speaker 2: But this would keep being a problem for him for
Speaker 2: the rest of his life. Now, this is a fixable problem.
Speaker 2: There are aboutter ways to attach the lung to the chesswall,
Speaker 2: but those are more modern inventions than his time period.
Speaker 2: So this is a thing he struggled with for the
Speaker 2: rest of his life. He was permanently disabled by this injury.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's one of the more minor injuries that
Speaker 1: you Yeah. Yeah, there are ways in which this obviously
Speaker 1: risk embracing team's personalities, particularly Haldane's. From my perception and
Speaker 1: correct me if I'm wrong, seemed like they had the
Speaker 1: potential to really mess with data, because there's that There's
Speaker 1: one story where you note that after Haldane was obviously
Speaker 1: incapacitated during a test in which he also became violent,
Speaker 1: he insisted after it was all over that he had
Speaker 1: never lost consciousness, even though they were like, yes you did,
Speaker 1: we watched you. This to me is so fascinating in
Speaker 1: a scientist, like there's some weird hubris in the mix,
Speaker 1: and your depiction of him is really unflinching because you
Speaker 1: do show both his positive and negative traits. We talked
Speaker 1: about that a little bit earlier. But did any of
Speaker 1: his behaviors kind of come as a surprise to you
Speaker 1: where you're like, dude, you are a mess.
Speaker 4: Honestly, not really like scientists are quirky group. Man, We're
Speaker 4: just We're just a quirky group.
Speaker 2: And I love us. This is I'm a scientist. But
Speaker 2: I found his behavior to be both problematic in the
Speaker 2: way that he would have explosions, but in that sense
Speaker 2: endearing because I really related to what I assume. And
Speaker 2: again this is this is an assumption on my part,
Speaker 2: but why I assume were blow ups by inability to
Speaker 2: connect and communicate with other people in what's considered a
Speaker 2: normal fashion. And so when he had these moments, they
Speaker 2: were usually moments of extreme frustration over something. And I
Speaker 2: think that that's a reaction that some people have when
Speaker 2: they're finding they're not being understood, and so that his
Speaker 2: reaction was not appropriate. All adults should be able to
Speaker 2: control their behavior, but nobody can control their feelings, right,
Speaker 2: So I just saw this as a man who had
Speaker 2: never had to control his behavior, but was having feelings
Speaker 2: born of being othered. And that made me sympathize and
Speaker 2: maybe even a little bit empathy. I don't have a
Speaker 2: temper at all, but maybe even a little empathized with
Speaker 2: some of his difficulty communicating in those moments, with regard
Speaker 2: to the ones where he was denying being unconscious. To me,
Speaker 2: that's so fascinating that you took it that way, because
Speaker 2: this I would report everything. He was super honest. He
Speaker 2: even had one lab record and I couldn't find a
Speaker 2: way to squeeze it. In the book where he was
Speaker 2: calling himself fat, that was his word for himself, and
Speaker 2: he was describing how he had to run for the train,
Speaker 2: and he describes again his words, his left breast flapping
Speaker 2: and how there was pain under it, and so he
Speaker 2: was like honorly um flitching and describing his own bodily
Speaker 2: functions as well. So to me, my conclusion from that
Speaker 2: experiment was that he had severe neurological trauma, not that
Speaker 2: he was in denial. But that's interesting that that's how
Speaker 2: that came across.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that you have the most compassionate reads
Speaker 1: of him. I might not be as nice a person
Speaker 1: because sometimes I'm like, you danged all, would you stop
Speaker 1: being so weird? But like we all are.
Speaker 2: That's kind of my general reaction of people in life always,
Speaker 2: Like my general reaction is to try and find the compassionate,
Speaker 2: like what do we have in common? And why is
Speaker 2: this difficult? But yeah, I think it also may have
Speaker 2: bit different if I had to deal with him in
Speaker 2: real life.
Speaker 1: Right, he seems a little like a pill. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: loved There was one line in the book where I
Speaker 1: was like, I am in love with this sentence. You
Speaker 1: describe Haldane and Helen Spurway as the Bonnie and Clyde
Speaker 1: of clandestine genetics.
Speaker 2: I'm glad you love that sentence, because yes, that's in
Speaker 2: my head. They're like fully outfitted, like perfection. Yeah again,
Speaker 2: you see all it is closed down and they're like
Speaker 2: breaking into their experimental rooms. I loved to research with flies.
Speaker 1: I love it so awesome, And obviously like their work
Speaker 1: together bonded them so deeply because their relationship evolves from
Speaker 1: a professional one and a working relationship to a personal one.
Speaker 1: Will you talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel like they were just a really unique
Speaker 2: couple in the sense that they both had difficulty processing
Speaker 2: social regular like social mandates and social norms, and I
Speaker 2: think that was a big part of why they were
Speaker 2: such a tightly knit couple almost from the moment they met.
Speaker 2: So I mentioned earlier that JBS Haldane had been married
Speaker 2: when they met, but his marriage had already been a
Speaker 2: bit sour, and they didn't have a conventional marriage to
Speaker 2: begin with. There's some indication that they were openly polyamorous
Speaker 2: even at that time, but in the nineteen thirties, obviously
Speaker 2: this was not socially acceptable. So when he met Helen
Speaker 2: Spurway and they had this incredible bond over genetics, I
Speaker 2: kind of loved that for them. I was cheering them
Speaker 2: on because as someone who has like delighted in having
Speaker 2: conversations at three am about inflammatory pathways in the liver, like,
Speaker 2: I just really wanted that experience for somebody else, and
Speaker 2: that that, plus they're their slight disconnect from society and
Speaker 2: the way to communicate, made me feel like the two
Speaker 2: of them really connected with things that were fundamentally important
Speaker 2: to the both of them.
Speaker 1: I also couldn't help out wondering if there's like a
Speaker 1: degree of almost trauma bond with them at that point,
Speaker 1: Like they have been through like secret science during the Blitz,
Speaker 1: they are part of a really groundbreaking thing that they
Speaker 1: never get to talk about. You know, they just have
Speaker 1: like a unique thing where no one on earth understands
Speaker 1: me but you, and you understand all of it.
Speaker 2: They both went through their entire lives just like being
Speaker 2: really really OTHEREDJBS hall Day because of his temper, so
Speaker 2: that that part is slightly deserved, But his temper, in
Speaker 2: my opinion, was from difficulty communicating with other people and
Speaker 2: then held spur away. A lot of it was really
Speaker 2: gendered a lot of the comments and reactions to her
Speaker 2: were very very gendered. And she similarly just has this
Speaker 2: passion where all they ever wanted to do was go
Speaker 2: to lab and statistics on fruit flies, study genetics, and
Speaker 2: they both are just like, I don't understand why there's
Speaker 2: so many obstacles. But yeah, they both had their works
Speaker 2: stolen from them because people didn't like them things like that,
Speaker 2: So yeah, I would I would completely agree with you.
Speaker 2: I think there's elements of trauma bonding, both from surviving
Speaker 2: the war and also from the way that they interacted
Speaker 2: with the rest of humanity.
Speaker 1: Here's a million other question. If you could choose just
Speaker 1: one thing for readers to take away from this book,
Speaker 1: what would it be. I know it's hard because this
Speaker 1: is a book dense with information and cool stories.
Speaker 2: It's actually not that hard. I was taking a deep
Speaker 2: breath because I have thoughts.
Speaker 1: You're like, I'm just shifting gears.
Speaker 2: Baby, Yeah, no, I know. This book started because I
Speaker 2: wanted to write a book about scientistics fermenting on themselves.
Speaker 2: So my original idea was a compilation of a multiple
Speaker 2: multiple stories, and my agent, Lorie Apkmeyer, who's amazing and
Speaker 2: always right, she was like, no, no, no, people will
Speaker 2: lose track one story to the other. Pick one. Focus
Speaker 2: on that. So that's what happened here. And the reason
Speaker 2: that I wanted to write that book which didn't happen,
Speaker 2: and this book, which did, is because I wanted to
Speaker 2: give people a window into the humanity behind scientific results.
Speaker 2: That's what I want people to take away. We're people,
Speaker 2: were imperfect, We're genuinely doing our best. We're moving things forward.
Speaker 2: Whenever we can. Sometimes we get bombed, sometimes we get
Speaker 2: run out of funding. That all impacts research. So every
Speaker 2: piece of scientific data, every recommendation that comes out, like
Speaker 2: there's a story of humanity behind it. That's what I want.
Speaker 1: We'd love it. Was there anything else you wanted to
Speaker 1: share or talk about related to this that we haven't
Speaker 1: touched on.
Speaker 2: I can't think of anything, really. I think you've done
Speaker 2: a really good job of letting me prattle on about
Speaker 2: these people and how awesome they were.
Speaker 1: Kidding, that's not prattling, that's like, you know.
Speaker 2: I just want to emphasize again, like this book was
Speaker 2: important to me because as Americans, we think about World
Speaker 2: War Two as Pearl Harbor December seventh, nineteen forty one,
Speaker 2: and then a time work occurs d Day, June sixth,
Speaker 2: nineteen forty four. I'm like, that's kind of I'm guilty
Speaker 2: of this too. I'm guilty of this too, But that's
Speaker 2: that's sort of the history version we always get. And
Speaker 2: so this book is kind of my answer to what
Speaker 2: happened in between? Why did it take three years? Why
Speaker 2: did what happened in between? What was life like? What
Speaker 2: were people working on? How did what did we do
Speaker 2: with that time to make D Day possible and save
Speaker 2: as many lives as we could.
Speaker 1: It's such a good read I highly recommend for anybody.
Speaker 1: Chamber divers is out now pretty much wherever you can
Speaker 1: get a book there it is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, please support local bookstores if you're able, if you're
Speaker 2: not able, libraries are great too. Libraries actually are a
Speaker 2: way to support authors. There is a system there, yes,
Speaker 2: And we just love a library, so yes.
Speaker 1: Also, there are cool, great people at the library, so
Speaker 1: go there. Doctor Rachel. Just seems like a funny way
Speaker 1: to call you. Rachel. Thank you so much for spending
Speaker 1: this time with us. I feel spoiled a whole hour
Speaker 1: of science and science gossip with you.
Speaker 2: Well, I'll be really honest, Holly, I'll talk about science
Speaker 2: for hours to the wall. You know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks again to doctor Rachel Lance. And that book
Speaker 1: once again is called Chamber divers If any of the
Speaker 1: things that she talked about in today's episode piqued your interest,
Speaker 1: there's so much more of it in the book and
Speaker 1: that's available now. Yeah, and be ready to read some
Speaker 1: things that may or may not make you a little
Speaker 1: bit squeamish but also impressed, terrified, and way more informed
Speaker 1: about how we have learned about pressure and the human body.
Speaker 1: I have some listener mail that I don't think will
Speaker 1: scare anybody. This is about our Margaret Night episode and
Speaker 1: it is from a listener also named Margaret, who writes
Speaker 1: I often listen to the podcast while I work on
Speaker 1: craft projects, and I just happen to be listening to
Speaker 1: the Margaret Night episode while I was threading my loom. Yes,
Speaker 1: as you said in the podcast, people do still hand
Speaker 1: weave on looms, including myself. I have a smallish for
Speaker 1: shaft loom that I make towels, scarves and fabrics for sewing.
Speaker 1: The shuttles I use are pointed and would probably be
Speaker 1: a bit painful if you got hit by one flying
Speaker 1: toward you, but you would have to be extremely unlucky
Speaker 1: to be hit hard enough for an injury. I do
Speaker 1: throw the shuttle with some vigor. My weaving instructor said,
Speaker 1: if your shuttle never comes flying out the end, you're
Speaker 1: not throwing it hard enough. The worst that has ever
Speaker 1: happened with my loom is this show goes clattering to
Speaker 1: the floor. I really enjoy the podcast and look forward
Speaker 1: to it every week. For pet tax I'm attaching pictures
Speaker 1: of my pups. Buzz and May both are named after astronauts. Okay,
Speaker 1: first of all, astronaut dogs. I'm here for all of it.
Speaker 1: Second of all, these puppies are so cute. They are
Speaker 1: little cobby angels and I want to kiss their faces.
Speaker 1: It just both looks so hilarious and adorable, and they're
Speaker 1: clearly like these are some good pet portraits that maybe
Speaker 1: we're taken at like an easter situation or a springtime thing.
Speaker 1: They're surrounded by flowers. They look like such good babies. Oh,
Speaker 1: Buzz and May you need some hugs and kisses, so
Speaker 1: hopefully Margaret will give you some pets and loves from us.
Speaker 1: Thank you for that. I you know, it's one of
Speaker 1: those things. I have known people that loom their own stuff,
Speaker 1: but I don't know very much about the process, and
Speaker 1: I have never heard about like, no, you have to
Speaker 1: throw your shut It can't be a long way to
Speaker 1: get it from one side to the other. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I done like teeny tiny little projects on like baby
Speaker 1: versions of looms that are they're real in the sense
Speaker 1: that they're physical things that exist in the world, but
Speaker 1: they're not real looms. So that's a good bit of
Speaker 1: insight and also, you know, obviously safer than the automated
Speaker 1: ones that caused Margaret Knight to have to figure out
Speaker 1: a way to make a safety mechanism to prevent her
Speaker 1: coworkers from getting horribly injured. So, Margaret who wrote us,
Speaker 1: thank you for your email. If you would like to
Speaker 1: write us, you can do so at History Podcast at
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us on social
Speaker 1: media as missed in History And if you have not
Speaker 1: subscribed to the show yet, that is easy as pie
Speaker 1: to do. You can do that on the iHeartRadio app
Speaker 1: or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you
Speaker 1: Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app podcasts, or
Speaker 1: wherever you listen to your favorite shows.