The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #227 - Dan Levitt

TRANSCRIPT

Melanie Avalon: Friends, welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited about the conversation that I'm about to have. I feel like today's show, it's going to be a little bit different from the other shows I've had in the past because normally they're super focused on health and wellness and biohacking related topics. 

Melanie Avalon: And the book today, it does relate to that. However, it expands far beyond, I think, anything I've talked about. So basically the backstory is I got approached by, I guess, the PR company for Dan Levitt:'s new book.

Melanie Avalon: It's called What's Gotten Into You, the story of your body's atoms from the Big Bang through last night's dinner. And friends, I saw the title, I saw the cover, I was like, yes, just all the yeses. It just looked like an absolutely fascinating tale.

Melanie Avalon: And actually diving into the book was so fabulous. So this book is, I mean, it's overwhelming in a good way, not in a stressful way, overwhelming in an exciting way, in that it blends history and science and gives you this fascinating overview of, I mean, like the title says, what's happening in the nature of reality from the very beginnings to where we are now.

Melanie Avalon: And along the way, you learn so many cool, mind -blowing facts, so many nuances you didn't realize, so much about all of the different people involved in all of these discoveries and the evolution of science and what we know, and the role of their biases and their personalities.

Melanie Avalon: And it's just really, it is an adventure. So I am so, so excited to be here today with Dan. Thank you so much for being here.

Dan Levitt: Thanks, I'm thrilled to be here.

Melanie Avalon: So like I was just saying, there's so many different directions this could go. But first of all, you as a person. So your background, you've directed many award -winning documentaries actually. So National Geographic, Discovery, Science, History, PBS, on all different topics, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Hawking, Cutler's Last Stand, A New Theory on Dinosaur Evolution, and this one I'm really excited about, The Scientific Search for Alien Life.

Melanie Avalon: So I, okay, all of that stuff, that's like all the stuff I used to watch. When I say growing up, that sounds like I don't watch it now, but it's just, I don't watch it as much now. But that's like, I love the stuff, is my point.

Melanie Avalon: So your story, what got you into that world, that the filmmaking world and all of those topics? And then what made you decide to write, because this is your first book, correct? So what made you decide to write your first book?

Dan Levitt: It is. Well, you know, I've always loved science. And at one point, I was going to go to graduate school in cognitive psychology. And then I ended up getting sidetracked and teaching science for a while.

Dan Levitt: And at a certain point, I just decided that I loved communicating science. And so I ended up doing science documentaries. And, you know, just like writing the book, what I loved about it was learning about new things and then figuring out how to tell really entertaining stories about them that other people would enjoy and also really encapsulate what's most interesting about it.

Dan Levitt: So I did that for many years and absolutely loved it. But at a certain point, I realized that the story of the atoms in our bodies from the Big Bang to now, it's just so epic. And the stories of the scientists behind it and the stories of scientific discovery were just also so enthralling that I at a certain point just decided instead of doing a film which would be, have been tough to do on this, I was just going to write a book.

Dan Levitt: And so that's how it came to be.

Melanie Avalon: Was the experience of writing the book what you thought it was going to be compared to the documentaries or was it different?

Dan Levitt: Well, the book took me a lot longer than I thought it was going to. You know, in many ways it was similar because in my films have been about the same kind of storytelling, which is finding a topic and finding the characters in that topic whose stories help convey the drama and the content.

Dan Levitt: And that's really what I did in this book. And I love researching, I love talking to scientists, and then I love figuring out, you know, what the story is that people are really going to enjoy. But the book did require a lot of research, a lot more than any film.

Dan Levitt: And so, yeah, it took me a lot longer to dive into it than I thought it would at first.

Melanie Avalon: That's something I was wondering, how, how do you find, because you paint such colorful pictures of all of these people, where is that information? Like, how do you find out these personal stories about them?

Melanie Avalon: Where is that written? Like newspaper articles or like their diaries or where do you get this information?

Dan Levitt: Yeah, well, you know, a little bit of everything, you know, it just required a huge amount of googling and scrolling through books. And then also talking to scientists, I interviewed over 60 scientists.

Dan Levitt: Many of them actually were retired because many of the stories that I tell are about how we made discoveries in the past. And of course, you know, younger folks weren't around at the time. But it really was just a process of an iterative process of figuring out for each chapter poses a different mystery.

Dan Levitt: Like, the, you know, the book is about traces the story of the atoms in our body from the Big Bang through the evolution of the elements and then the evolution of the solar system and how Earth formed and then how life formed and how those atoms and molecules then found their way to us.

Dan Levitt: And so each chapter posed a different mystery, right? The first chapter is how did we learn when the stuff in our body arose, which is essentially how did we learn about the Big Bang? And then how did we learn what the smallest particles in our body were?

Dan Levitt: And then how did we learn how the elements, the other elements were created, all the, all the different elements in our body and so on. And so within each chapter, I had to start from scratch and Google, talk to people and just winnow it down.

Dan Levitt: And, you know, it was just so gratifying to find that in so many cases, the people who made so many of the key discoveries also were absolutely fascinating personalities. And of course, part of it is that often they made great breakthroughs that, you know, were not intuitive at all.

Dan Levitt: And so it took a certain kind of person as well to make those kind of breakthroughs. And so it really was just a lot of elbow work in the end.

Melanie Avalon: I probably should have mentioned this to you. I actually went to film school at USC. So I like love this whole world as well as far as like learning and finding these stories and telling them creatively, be it through film or writing or whatever it may be.

Melanie Avalon: That's why I'm asking so many questions about the creation process because I'm just so, so, I just love it. This is a question that's haunted me about documentaries specifically for a while and also applies to a book like yours.

Melanie Avalon: And now, and I hope I can express it, it's basically whenever I watch a documentary or read a book like your book, I often think not only are you telling the events of what happened, which I technically, I guess, are objective like this happened this way.

Melanie Avalon: Even then it's like, how do we really know actually what happened? But then on top of that, you are creating, and by you, I mean, I do mean you, but I also mean like people who do this type of work at large, you are creating a story of these people.

Melanie Avalon: And even if somebody's best friend told a story about their best friend, it would probably be their perspective of that friend and it wouldn't completely capture that whole person. So the question I have here is, when people watch documentaries, read books like this, they walk away with a very intense image of these people.

Melanie Avalon: How much do you think that actually lines up to the truth of what happened and who they were, and how much does that even matter?

Dan Levitt: Well, when we tell stories like this, even if there's stories about science, they are stories. And so, you know, we do, all of us want them to be dramatic. But that's, you know, to me, I think that's a good thing because, you know, one of the problems with communicating science or understanding science is when scientists talk about their work, it's just the facts, ma 'am, right?

Dan Levitt: When they make discoveries, they say, you know, they write a paper and it's, you know, on the, you know, on the determination that the C4 molecule in the dot -a -dah, you know, influences dot -a -dah, right?

Dan Levitt: And there's no real, there's no revelation of the difficult work, often the heartbreaks, the great surprises that they found. They don't talk about that in scientific papers. And often, you know, scientists come to their subject matter and to science itself through all kinds of different roundabout ways, like, you know, some of the famous biochemists in the 19th century who made some of the greatest discoveries about our bodies, they were kids, I'm thinking of Liebig in Germany and Bussalt in France, and this is in the 17 and 1800s, they both were high school dropouts and they basically got books, read them on their own, went to university and basically, you know, kind of without the benefit of much formal education, dove into the material much more deeply than most other people alive and came out with remarkable results.

Dan Levitt: And so, you know, anytime you read a newspaper article or see a documentary, you're always seeing something from a point of view. And that's to be acknowledged and it's a good thing. But, you know, the kind of storytelling that I do, which is to really try to tell the drama of the people and their discoveries and then in kind of an intuitive way that even people who don't know a lot about science will understand to really capture the essence of, you know, what is it that they really did and why is that really interesting?

Dan Levitt: Of course, it's my take on it and that's what makes any work fun is the author's particular way of telling the story and their take. But, you know, it didn't come from nowhere, it came from a tremendous amount of research and reading other accounts and where I could, even people's own accounts of their work, like Boussingault, who was this French biochemist, you know, he wrote a long detailed diary that I ended up dipping into in order to find details to tell his story.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, so there were diaries. I love it. Okay. Awesome. Well, actually, so maybe an example, because like I said, there's so many topics in this book, but an example of what we're just talking about with the drama and it's at the beginning, so that's a good place to start.

Melanie Avalon: What happened with the drama surrounding the creation of the universe and the Big Bang, especially the pre -existing notions of religion and science and how creationism came into play and certain scientists just couldn't really accept this idea of a Big Bang.

Melanie Avalon: And I actually find it really, really interesting personally because I was raised super Christian, like Bible Belt, Christian South. So when I was raised, it was like creationism. Big Bang was like the devil.

Melanie Avalon: I was like, it was like an idea we should not entertain. So I've been there as well with having me and then like the world and reality and then this lens that's in between me and the reality, which is my cognitive biases, like you talk about my religion, my upbringing, like what I see.

Melanie Avalon: I don't believe that now, by the way, I'm team Big Bang now. But could you just tell listeners a little bit about that story with the Big Bang and the different, you know, Einstein and Lometra and all the people?

Dan Levitt: Well, that's one of my favorite stories, and it's the story that I start the book with because the question is, how do we know when the particles in our bodies first arose in the universe? The answer is we discovered the Big Bang, but ironically, it took a Catholic priest of all people to convince Einstein of the implications of his own theory, which was that the universe and the particles within us actually had an origin.

Dan Levitt: The story is wonderful. This was in the 1920s. LaMaitre was a very devout Catholic priest who was split in his own mind between becoming a priest and becoming a scientist. He studied physics, then went to cemetery school, and was ordained.

Dan Levitt: Then, with the blessing of his cardinal, went to Cambridge University to study relativity, which was very new at the time. LaMaitre heard of very hazy observations at the time, that the particles that are, that the galaxies that are furthest away from Earth were moving away from Earth faster than galaxies closer to us.

Dan Levitt: From that, LaMaitre deduced that the universe was expanding in part because he looked in Einstein's equations of relativity, of general relativity, and found the prediction that the universe could be expanding.

Dan Levitt: He brought it to Einstein. Actually, he published a paper which was completely ignored. He finally tracked down Einstein in a conference and presented his idea to him. And Einstein hated it. Einstein hated it for a number of reasons.

Dan Levitt: One of them is that, I mean, it's just, now we say, oh yeah, sure, the big bang. But in fact, when you think about it, it is totally crazy. If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into? It just seems so counterintuitive on so many different levels.

Dan Levitt: Einstein was against it until it turned out that Hubble, not too long afterwards, came up with more evidence that suggested that, in fact, that was the case and Einstein came around to that. But LaMaitre, meanwhile, dipped further into Einstein's theories, any reason that if the universe is expanding, at one time it was smaller, at one time it was smaller still, and at one time it was smaller still.

Dan Levitt: And if you carry that back far enough, at certain point, the entire universe, everything within you and me and everything else, was contained in an almost infinitesimal point of time and space.

Melanie Avalon: which is really insane to think about.

Dan Levitt: which is just insane, right?

Melanie Avalon: I'm just like thinking about it right now.

Dan Levitt: It's absolutely insane. So, LaMaitre brought that to Einstein, and Einstein hated that too and rejected it. He said, no way. And now part of the reason, and this gets back to your question about religion, is part of the reason is here's a priest who's coming to Einstein and saying the universe began essentially with the Big Bang.

Dan Levitt: They didn't call it that at the time, but with an explosion, which was to Einstein is a reeked of religiosity. It was too close to the idea that from Genesis, that the universe began with light.

Melanie Avalon: Yep.

Dan Levitt: So Einstein was not the only one. There were a great many physicists. Initially, almost everybody rejected it. But ultimately, Einstein and many people finally looked at the evidence and came around.

Dan Levitt: In fact, Einstein and LaMaitre actually lectured together and were interviewed by newspapers reporters together. And one of the questions that you might be wondering is how LaMaitre, who has remained a very devout priest for his entire life, he was part of a Catholic fraternity that met for retreats every year for a couple of weeks.

Dan Levitt: How he could reconcile that with his deep belief in God. And what he said to a newspaper reporter is he said that there are two paths to truth, that science tells you about how the world operates and religion offers the path to salvation.

Dan Levitt: And that the big bang, which we call the origin, the universe provides a veil beyond which we can't see. We can't see, we don't know for sure what happened before the big bang. And for LaMaitre, that reserved the possibility that God in a way created all the conditions that ultimately led to the world as we know it coming to be from the big bang.

Melanie Avalon: It's so interesting. And I had that moment actually reading the book and I'm having it again now. I find it ironic that So originally when LaMettra is proposing this Big Bang that that was too much insupportive of, quote, creationism, even though at least when I grew up, you know, like I said, in the Bible Belt Christian South, it was, it flipped.

Melanie Avalon: Like now, now they're saying that the Big Bang, I don't know if there still are, but when I was there, they were saying that the Big Bang was, you know, anti God religion. And I think because of the insinuations of evolution, that's why it doesn't seem to like quite match up with creationism, even though, like you said, it does wreak of like the, you know, let God said, let there be light and there was light, like it really kind of matches that up pretty well.

Melanie Avalon: So some more questions. But actually, so within that story, because when you start off the book, you talk about these different cognitive biases that scientists have. And I'll just say them because I think they're a I think they're funny.

Melanie Avalon: And B, we see them so much all throughout the book and probably in life. So you have the two weird to be true bias, the if our current tools haven't detected it, it doesn't exist bias. The as an expert, I've lost sight of how much is still unknown bias, the you look for and see the evidence that matches your existing theory bias, the world's greatest expert must be correct bias.

Melanie Avalon: And because it seems most likely it must be true bias. And then you carry those biases throughout the book and point them out when they're happening. And did you come up with those for this book? Or did you already have those?

Melanie Avalon: Or how did you come up with those?

Dan Levitt: The funny thing is, when I wrote the book, I was trying to get in the heads of the scientists who were making these discoveries and the reception to those great discoveries at the time, discoveries like the Big Bang.

Dan Levitt: And over and over and over again, when someone came up with a brilliant discovery about the Big Bang or about how the stars form elements or the immediate scientific reception was very often skepticism even scorn for the scientists who brought up these wacky ideas like the Big Bang was, it was too weird to be true, right?

Dan Levitt: I mean, how could you even think that? So when I got to the end of the first draft of writing the book, I was really scratching my head and just trying to understand why that might be. And so I went back and I started to analyze for the key discoveries where I saw this happen.

Dan Levitt: And I started to try to understand why it was happening. And so these cognitive biases, which have delayed, which delayed at the time for a certain amount of time, the progress of science, these really are particular ones that came out of the discoveries that I was writing about in my book.

Melanie Avalon: find them so interesting. And there's so many of them. And some of them are more vague, like more just a reaction to how the information is presented from the scientists about their new discoveries. But some of them are quite literal, like Einstein's fudge factor, I would consider that.

Melanie Avalon: What, wasn't he basically just creating something to explain what he was hoping to have?

Dan Levitt: Yes, well, that's exactly right because when Lemaitre, even before Lemaitre had come up with the big bang with the suggestion that the universe expanded, Einstein was aware of that possibility in his equations.

Dan Levitt: And in order to keep that from happening, he had introduced his equations, something called the cosmological constant, which was essentially a fudge factor to keep the universe from expanding. And Einstein later called it his greatest mistake.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, here's just a little fun fact for listeners. You talk about how, since we're talking about the Big Bang, that we can still see radiation from the Big Bang literally. Where can we see it?

Dan Levitt: Well, it's a little harder now, but in the days when we had the televisions where you would switch the dial and you would see the white noise patterns on your screen when you flicked from one channel to another.

Melanie Avalon: It's so cool.

Dan Levitt: Yeah, that is electromagnetic radiation from the Big Bang 13 .8 billion years ago. So, yeah, you'd probably have to get an old really old television and turn it on. But then I'm sure you'd get it almost immediately.

Melanie Avalon: Is it like when it's on the channels and there's nothing, it's just like all those lines?

Dan Levitt: That's it. Yeah.

Melanie Avalon: crazy. Can we pick it up any other way? Like with our cell phones or I don't know?

Dan Levitt: I don't think with cell phones it really was. So the idea is that when the Big Bang occurred, there was a certain amount of energy that was created, and some of that energy has remained, and its wavelengths have lengthened such that they can actually be detected.

Dan Levitt: If you point a microwave telescope anywhere in space in any direction, you'll detect a certain frequency of wavelength of energy. That is remnant energy from the Big Bang. It was discovered in the 1960s, and once it was discovered, many scientists who were skeptical all of a sudden turned around because that is among the most powerful proofs of the Big Bang.

Dan Levitt: So scientists with their telescopes have detected it many, many times. I don't know if any other easy ways for you and I to detect it.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, this is super random. I saw in your bio that your dog is Maxwell smart. Guessing you're a Get Smart fan.

Dan Levitt: Yes.

Melanie Avalon: Have you heard about that? I don't know how accurate this would be. And I guess how would we even know? Because we don't know how far away other living things would be. But I've heard that if there were aliens out there receiving broadcasts from us, they would be receiving presumably like older stuff.

Melanie Avalon: And so if they came here, I don't know if this is true, but I was like, I heard if they came here, they might think it's like the wrong decade because of. Receiving these old transmissions from like old radio and old TV.

Melanie Avalon: Have you heard that?

Dan Levitt: that's absolutely right because when you see light from a star, the light has to travel from the star to us over a long distance. And so by the time it reaches us, it's millions or billions of years later.

Dan Levitt: And so the same thing is true of if you have aliens depending upon how far away they're, if they're cruising around in their solar system, they're going to get it pretty quickly, right? But if they are in other galaxies far away, it's going to take a long time for the message to reach them.

Dan Levitt: So by the time they reach that, we reach us, then things will have changed. It's just like when we used to communicate by letters. And so if you were on the East Coast and you sent a letter to someone during the Gold Rush, you know, on the West Coast, by the time they read the letter, it might have been months later.

Dan Levitt: And, you know, all kinds of things could have happened to you in the interim.

Melanie Avalon: I stress out about when I think about that, like love letters back in the day and like how long. Yeah, it's like completely, completely probably irrelevant information by the time you receive it. Speaking of other galaxies, I thought about this in the chapter when you were talking about and might have been a similar chapter, but when you were talking about the moon rocks and NASA and water and the role of water in the history of the universe.

Melanie Avalon: You talk about how NASA says follow the water and basically that water is what we would be looking forward to find evidence of life. A huge question I've had for a long time and I had it even more reading your book is we're looking at the entire universe of what we know for how we are here.

Melanie Avalon: How do we know kind of like the cause was it the cosmological constant kind of like that idea? How do we know that it would be the same setup somewhere else? Like couldn't it be completely different?

Melanie Avalon: Like couldn't even math be different maybe?

Dan Levitt: So, yeah. So, the bottom line is that nobody knows for sure. There are a lot of scientists who think that water is the element that makes chemically most sense. It's easiest for us to conceive of how life could form in water.

Dan Levitt: And we understand many ways in which water helps create life. And likewise, life here is carbon -based. It's based on carbon and oxygen and hydrogen chains. And it's easy for us to understand why that is and how that is.

Dan Levitt: So, there are lots of scientists who think that if we want to find another planet somewhere that's got life, it most likely has water and it most likely is carbon -based. But having said that, there are other scientists who say, we'll say, well, hold on, not so fast.

Dan Levitt: There are all kinds of things that we might not have conceived of. And it's possible that maybe there would be some kind of methane liquid on some other moon somewhere where a completely different chemistry could create life.

Dan Levitt: And so, there certainly are a lot of scientists who think that as well. But there are many who think that because of what we know about the chemistry of life here, it does seem to many that it is the most likely kind of chemistry that we would find elsewhere.

Dan Levitt: Does that make sense?

Melanie Avalon: It does. It has been stressing me out for so long because I just feel like we see the whole galaxy and universe based on how we understand it for us. But maybe, you know, maybe that is the way it is everywhere.

Dan Levitt: Yeah, well, you know, there are there, but there are reasons for that. Carbon is a small molecule, and it's easy for it to create long chains of all kinds of sizes and shapes. And that's how we get, you know, most of the molecules in our body are organic.

Dan Levitt: And that means they are carbon based in a different in one form or another. And people say, well, it could be silicon based instead, because silicon also still has the same kinds of of electron configuration around it.

Dan Levitt: But the thing is that silicon is larger. So, you know, there's there's the argument that because it's larger, it will be chemically harder for it to create this all the same kinds of variations that the smaller carbon does, even though theoretically, it should be able to bind in these ways.

Dan Levitt: So, so there are reasons for, you know, their arguments one way or the other.

Melanie Avalon: Well, and to that point, it was a really fascinating journey reading about the role of the researchers and scientists trying to find the existence of these different elements and particles. And like the story about the people who go up in the high in the balloons, hydrogen balloons, to study the upper atmosphere, it's kind of a shocking story.

Melanie Avalon: What would happen with that?

Dan Levitt: Well, this was in the early 1900s. Around the turn of the century, people were puzzled because they had these incredibly sensitive instruments to detect electricity, electric charge, that is. And when the instruments were at rest, they were still detecting charges.

Dan Levitt: And they would put them in water, they would put them in lead boxes, and the instruments were driving them nuts because they were detecting charges. And so this was a fundamental challenge for chemists, which was what's going on, why is this?

Dan Levitt: And so people started taking these instruments down into caves and elsewhere to try to figure out whether the charges were created by, perhaps by something in the earth. And Victor Hess, who was an Austrian scientist, became convinced that, no, they didn't come from the earth, but these charges came from something in space that was raining down on the earth.

Dan Levitt: And the only way to test that was to see whether the instrument which on earth detected electric charges would also detect charges high in space. Well, at the time there were no airplanes and there were no rockets.

Dan Levitt: So the only way to do this was to get in a balloon and fly as high as you could, which in his case was over a mile up, it was absolutely freezing. They risked succumbing to oxygen deprivation and they brought oxygen tanks with them, but people in the past had not taken enough oxygen and had quickly gone into delirium and died, but he went over a mile high.

Dan Levitt: And when he came back down and analyzed his data, he realized that he actually detected more electric charges the higher he went in the atmosphere. And that was a suggestion that something from space that we couldn't see was actually creating electric charge.

Dan Levitt: That turned out to be what we now call cosmic rays. These are rays of all kinds of tiny, tiny subatomic particles that are raining down on the earth. And it was the detection of cosmic rays that allowed us to ultimately learn about all kinds of subatomic particles, the existence of all kinds of subatomic particles, including ones in our atoms.

Melanie Avalon: just my, I say it a lot, just mind blowing, we've are able to even have come to the point of detecting all of this and finding all this. Speaking of like the rays and the radioactive material and all of that, you even talk about how this was a cool fact, how Madam Curie, well, it's not super cool for her, but I guess she died of radiation and her papers today are even so radioactive that you can't touch them like you have to be protected to even look at her papers.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah.

Dan Levitt: That's unfortunately true. And that was true of a lot of people who studied radiation around the turn of the century, is people just had no idea about the dangers. And so they would take a little cube of a radioactive substance like uranium and bring it into their lab and experiment with it and then bring it back and lock it up in a little wooden drawer somewhere.

Dan Levitt: And so Madam Curie died from, I believe it was probably cancer from radiation. A lot of people did in the early days of studying radiation. Edison was thrilled by uranium because it seemed like a limitless energy substance that could maybe power all kinds of things.

Dan Levitt: But then he stopped working on it when his assistant, one of his chief assistants who was experimenting with it, suffered gruesome radiation damage and then died within a number of years. And so Edison stopped working on it.

Dan Levitt: But that was true of a lot of people.

Melanie Avalon: Do they have any of these papers and museums behind protective enclosures?

Dan Levitt: You know, I didn't go to see Madam Curie's papers, but I do understand that either they're off limits or you have to wear certain gloves. I'm not sure what the precautions are, but I know that there are some.

Melanie Avalon: Crazy. Well, before leaving the water aspect, I will comment on one thing. I got very excited because there was a topic related to the water that I actually have talked about very extensively on this show, but not for the reasons that you talked about in the book, but deuterium.

Melanie Avalon: Are you aware of the whole deuterium depletion protocols that people do, especially in the biohacking world?

Dan Levitt: No, I'm not.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, okay. So when you started talking about deuterium, I got so excited. I was like, yes. I've actually had two episodes all on deuterium depletion. Basically, it's the idea that deuterium, which is a form of hydrogen with an isotope, they call it heavy water.

Melanie Avalon: And in the book, the role of deuterium is more for figuring out what's... What was its role in the book? Was it about dating, like figuring out the dating of things for the deuterium content?

Dan Levitt: Well, in the one chapter, scientists were trying to figure out why Earth has water, because when the Earth formed the region around where Earth formed was too hot for water to be here. So how did it get here?

Dan Levitt: And people at one time suggested that comets have water and maybe comets brought it. And another time they realized, oh, they wanted to test that. And it turns out that our oceans have a certain concentration of deuterium in it.

Dan Levitt: And so they wanted to analyze the water that was in comets. And comets have a lot of ice in them to see if it had the same relative concentration of deuterium, which would suggest that in fact our oceans came from a rain of comets at some point when the Earth was forming.

Dan Levitt: And they were shocked to find that in fact the ratio of deuterium to rate to normal water was different in comets than it was in the oceans. And so that in fact led them to try to find other ways of explaining how we got water here on Earth.

Melanie Avalon: That was all really fascinating as well in the book, the whole debates about what comets are made of and the role of asteroids. The reason we talked about deuterium on the show today, so I'm actually drinking right now, I'm looking at it, it's deuterium depleted water.

Melanie Avalon: So the idea is that deuterium is not the type of water that our cells best use and function with, especially the mitochondria. And that if you have a higher concentration of deuterium, it basically, and this is super casual terminology, but basically gunks up or slows down the mitochondria in the body.

Melanie Avalon: And that deuterium levels have increased with time in our water supply and our bodies. And so you can drink deuterium depleted water, you can actually change the level of deuterium in your body. So like when I started this, I got tested, it's a saliva test, and I got my deuterium levels in my body.

Melanie Avalon: And then I drank only deuterium depleted water for a couple of months, and then I retested my deuterium levels and they had substantially dropped. And then I stopped drinking it and I tested to see if they went back up and I basically was able to verify it correlated to the water.

Melanie Avalon: The studies on it scientifically in the papers and the research is mostly for its role in cancer patients. So they'll find better outcomes with cancer patients on deuterium depletion protocols. But the quote biohacking world sees it as something that is probably beneficial for all health conditions.

Melanie Avalon: So that's a tangent, but I'm really fascinated by it.

Dan Levitt: That's fascinating, yeah.

Melanie Avalon: Okay, so something else that completely blew my mind, and this was one of my favorites of the biases that appeared in the book. I actually thought this was really funny too. And it also relates to the creation of the universe and life and evolution.

Melanie Avalon: You talk about the response to the discovery, basically the discovery of the mitochondria and the jump in evolution that seemed like it made evolution lazy. Was it Margot or Marriott? Thank you.

Dan Levitt: It was Lynn Margulis, yes.

Melanie Avalon: Okay, yes, marvelous. Can you tell listeners a little bit about that? I've just found this so, so fascinating. And that is something we talk about a lot in the show as well, the role of the mitochondria and how I've talked before about how the theory is that they were bacteria involved.

Dan Levitt: Yeah, and that is fascinating. And one reason is, you know, one of the things that I learned in writing the book is we have an incredible number of mitochondria. And our body mitochondria, as I'm sure everyone knows, those are the small organelles in our cells that create energy.

Dan Levitt: They create ATP, which is an energy currency for us. And we have, I forget the numbers now, but is it octillions of mitochondria? So we have enough that if you took all the mitochondria in your body and laid them out, they would cover two basketball courts.

Melanie Avalon: Wow.

Dan Levitt: Yeah, it's just and and the reason why we have them is because that's how we get our energy. And this is just a fascinating story because, you know, the question was, mitochondria are quite complex and quite interesting.

Dan Levitt: And the question is, how do they evolve? Lin -Margulis, who was at the time Carl Sagan's wife when she first studied this, in the in the 50s and then the early 60s, she came up with the idea, actually, she heard about it from one of her professors, but she really pushed it, that mitochondria looked an awful lot like bacteria.

Dan Levitt: And she ended up also latching on to the idea that had just been proposed in the early 60s, that there was a tremendous amount that that our earth, when it was formed, didn't have oxygen in it. The atmosphere now has about 21% oxygen.

Dan Levitt: When the earth was formed, it has none. So, so where did that oxygen come from? Photosynthesis. But in order to have that photosynthesis, you needed to have creatures that could photosynthesize. And the theory that Margulis came up with was that that those creatures really started proliferating hugely when we also had the rise of mitochondria.

Dan Levitt: Actually, I take that back, that's not quite true. Mitochondria came came a bit after photosynthesis, but but mitochondria, rather, let me say this again, they mitochondria could only exist when you had oxygen in the atmosphere, because what mitochondria do is they take sugars and they combine it with oxygen to create energy.

Dan Levitt: And so she wove this theory from from geologists, essentially, that in the ancient earth, you had the evolution of photosynthesis, which put oxygen in the atmosphere. And sometime after that, once the oxygen was in the atmosphere, then you could have mitochondria, which use that oxygen evolve to create it, create energy.

Dan Levitt: But the question was, how did a mitochondria evolve? And Margulis's theory was very simple. Essentially, there were bacteria that were very, that became very, very good at taking oxygen and using sugar and creating energy.

Dan Levitt: And one of those that's at over a billion years ago was eaten by another cell. And instead of being digested, they came to a accommodation and its descendants evolved into mitochondria.

Melanie Avalon: I love what you said in the book that basically one of the reasons that was rejected was it seemed like cheating. It seemed like evolution needed to go through a much more arduous, steady step, slow process.

Melanie Avalon: But with this, it was just like two things came together and then fix that issue.

Dan Levitt: Absolutely, because I mean, this is another example of kind of the two weird to be true bias. I mean, who would think that evolution would take a giant leap? Because literally one time, one single celled organism ate another one, right?

Dan Levitt: Now, there's a lot more to it. You know, there was kind of the doctrine among geneticists that the evolution of every single structure in the bod in living things came from very slow, gradual, tiny little changes in DNA.

Dan Levitt: And here Margulis was saying, no, evolution took a shortcut, right? There was something that already did that created energy efficiently in another cell just ate it. And symbiotically, they came to an accommodation.

Dan Levitt: The interesting thing is that when Margulis proposed this theory, people thought she was nuts. I mean, she was really, she was treated as a crank. She was treated as a marginal figure. So she was basically out into the wilderness for over a decade.

Dan Levitt: But she was lucky because she happened to live in the time in the early 70s when we started being able to sequence genes. And so there came a time when somebody said, okay, let's mitochondria as it turns out, have their own genes outside of the nucleus of the cell.

Dan Levitt: And someone said, all right, let's look at the genes in mitochondria and let's compare them to the genes in bacteria. And when they did that, they discovered that there were great similarities. And that almost immediately changed people's minds because all of a sudden they realized, oh, it actually is possible.

Melanie Avalon: So was that the jump from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells?

Dan Levitt: That's part of the jump from poke. Yes, that is part of it. Absolutely.

Melanie Avalon: Okay, yeah, because you make the comment in the book about how it was a quote, I think you said like a stupefying jump in evolution because it would be the equivalent of going from, I think you said like a tricycle to like the space shuttle with no in between steps.

Dan Levitt: That's right. And that's why it's so... That particular step is so critical to the evolution of life in so many ways because for billions of years, there was life on Earth, but it was all single -celled life.

Dan Levitt: And when you had mitochondria in what are called eukaryotic cells, which and the mitochondria are structures in those cells that create energy more efficiently than most bacteria can, and with that energy essentially allowed cells to develop all kinds of other complexity.

Dan Levitt: So once you had mitochondria, you had the possibility of animal cells and you had the possibility of plant cells. And so it's likely that if we find intelligent life elsewhere, it's very likely that life probably will need something like a mitochondria in order to generate enough energy for those creatures, at least to be...

Dan Levitt: If they're anywhere near as active and energy consuming as we are, and you and I are like... We burn about as much energy as 100 watt light bulb, they're going to need something like mitochondria in order to do it.

Melanie Avalon: So interesting. And I don't think you talked about this in the book. Do you know who did research or did she do research about how the mitochondria, so within humans, we inherit it from our mother? Yeah.

Melanie Avalon: Does she research that as well?

Dan Levitt: I don't think that she researched that. I think that was known probably long before she did her research in the 50s, although I'm honestly not sure when we discovered that. But that is absolutely fascinating.

Melanie Avalon: So interesting. And then speaking of the oxygen in the world, in the early atmosphere, this is actually something I have, I've also talked about at length in another episode because I did an episode on iron regulation in the body and how it internally kind of rusts us and the role of copper versus iron in our bodies.

Melanie Avalon: And the way we started the conversation was talking about the great oxygen event. So what happened with the great oxygen event to the world?

Dan Levitt: Well, I alluded to that later and it's really insane because, you know, as I mentioned, when the earth formed, it had no oxygen. And for billions of years, until about roughly 2 .4 billion years ago, and the earth is about 4 .5 billion years old, it had virtually no oxygen.

Dan Levitt: The only reason we have oxygen is because bacteria learned how to photosynthesize. Now, one of the crazy things is that when they began photosynthesizing and photosynthesis is taking carbon dioxide from the air, taking hydrogen from water, using energy from the sun, 91 billion miles away, and making sugar out of that.

Dan Levitt: And the waste product of that is oxygen. So, you make your sugar and you get rid of the oxygen. So, when that oxygen began drifting up into the atmosphere, it really had amazingly profound effects on our planet.

Dan Levitt: The first one, which is just insane, is that our planet at the time had an awful lot of methane, which was very highly insulating. And the oxygen combined with the methane and got rid of much of the methane.

Dan Levitt: And so, the planet became much, much colder, so much colder. It had glaciers that encased probably the entire globe. So, imagine if the equator glaciers that were a mile thick. It's called snowball earth, and it happened about 2 .4 billion years ago.

Dan Levitt: The reason why it happened was because bacteria put oxygen into the atmosphere. Ultimately, carbon dioxide from volcanoes in the earth spewed up enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And carbon dioxide, as we know, is also insulating.

Dan Levitt: And so, that began to insulate earth's atmosphere again. And so, earth warmed up enough that the glaciers retreated. It was at that point that we had enough oxygen in the atmosphere for mitochondria to evolve.

Dan Levitt: But that completely transformed earth. And, you know, this is one of the strange things about, amazing things about our history is that there are some people who think that if the earth had been a bit further from the sun than it was, that it would have remained cold, and we would not have escaped from this snowball earth condition, and the earth

Melanie Avalon: Wow. So this rise of photosynthesis first kind of like halted everything, but then ultimately was the thing that allowed us to be where we are today.

Dan Levitt: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it almost killed all of life. But then it made possible for eukaryotic cells and more complex life forms that are more active in energy consuming to evolve, which would not have happened elsewhere.

Dan Levitt: So this is another interesting thing, is that there are astrobiologists who think that if we find a planet somewhere off in space, and we're looking for not just bacteria, but active intelligent life there, it might only exist if that planet also has oxygen created by photosynthesis and bacteria in order to use that oxygen to generate energy like our bacteria, like our mitochondria do.

Dan Levitt: So that reduces tremendously the number of places that could have life if they don't also have photosynthesis.

Melanie Avalon: I just wonder, are there other ways we didn't think of?

Dan Levitt: Absolutely. I mean, it's an argument. It's a strong argument, but there are many astrobiologists who also think that it's possible that there could be completely different kinds of chemistry that might potentially create intelligent life.

Dan Levitt: And we just don't know.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, it's like the quote, it's something about like, how do you find what you don't know you're looking for? You know, it's kind of like we find things and then we realize, oh, that's what we were looking for.

Melanie Avalon: But we had no idea until we already find it.

Dan Levitt: That's right, that's right. I mean, we have a sample of one for what life should look like.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. Yeah. Also something I found really fascinating about photosynthesis and you have so much information on plants. And I love how you talk about how scientists have plant blindness, like they don't really consider plants maybe as much as they should.

Melanie Avalon: We talked about the enzymes involved in photosynthesis and how I think you use words like how it's like a silly enzyme like like basically it misfires. I think he said 30% of the time like basically it doesn't really actually work that well but it works well enough.

Melanie Avalon: Like keep working. Yeah. So what's happening with that?

Dan Levitt: Well, that's fascinating. So photosynthesis is a very complex reaction and the chloroplasts that carry out photosynthesis are extremely complex. But at their core, at the very center, is an enzyme called rubisco.

Dan Levitt: And what rubisco does is it's the first molecule there, the first part of the chloroplast to grab the carbon dioxide, which came from the air and then attach it to hydrogen to create some kind of sugar.

Dan Levitt: It's one of the biochemists that I talked to referred to it as a silly enzyme because it's so inefficient. And the reason why it's so inefficient is because when photosynthesis first evolved, as we were just talking about, there was no oxygen in the air.

Dan Levitt: And so oxygen and carbon dioxide for the purposes of this molecule have somewhat similar shapes. It's probably oversimplifying it, but that's the general idea. And so rubisco, which is this enzyme that evolved to grab carbon dioxide of the air, now is existing in conditions where carbon dioxide, where our atmosphere has 21% of oxygen.

Dan Levitt: So now there's all this oxygen as well floating around. And so mistakenly, sometimes it grabs an oxygen instead of a carbon dioxide. So it's terribly inefficient, but apparently it works well enough to get the job done.

Melanie Avalon: I find that really interesting it did not evolve to adapt. That's really interesting to me.

Dan Levitt: Yeah, to me, I mean, I think it's one of those if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. Wow, that's so funny. Also just a question for you. So speaking about how photosynthesis almost wiped out everything but then didn't, there are theories that there have been other mass extinctions throughout history and that maybe there were more advanced civilizations that got wiped out by various events.

Melanie Avalon: Do you have thoughts on that? I know that's not in the book. I'm just super curious your thoughts on past extinctions.

Dan Levitt: I've not heard any thoughts and any scientific proposals that there were advanced civilizations. As far as we know, life evolved only once on Earth, but there are many scientists who think that it's possible that there were, you know, when the Earth first, after the Earth first formed 4 .5 billion years ago, it was still being often struck by massive asteroids and comets, you know, some of which could potentially vaporize half of the Earth's oceans or the entire Earth's ocean.

Dan Levitt: And so there are people who suggest it may be that life could have evolved multiple times early, early on and that those impacts could have wiped out that more ancient life. And so the only life that we have evidence now for is the one that survived.

Melanie Avalon: There's a whole fascinating rabbit hole with some researchers making cases about the technology with the pyramids and things like that, that that was from ancient civilizations that got wiped out. I'm fascinated by all of this.

Melanie Avalon: Another huge topic I would love to get your thoughts on, and we talked about it a little bit with the different biases and personalities and struggles of these characters. In particular, women, you talk about quite a few different, we just mentioned one with Margolis, women in the history of all these discoveries.

Melanie Avalon: What was the role of women making these discoveries and any patriarchy and everything that happened with that? Was there a theme there that you found with women researchers?

Dan Levitt: There was, and it was not one that I was looking for. As I was looking at the story, the mystery posed in each chapter and trying to figure out who were the people who made the most important advances, I discovered quite a number of women that I'd never heard of who made incredible, incredible advances.

Dan Levitt: Lynn Margulis is certainly one of them. Another wonderful example was in the 1920s, there was a physicist by the name of Cecilia Payne.

Melanie Avalon: Was she the one who did the prayer experiment?

Dan Levitt: That's right.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, that was, I think that was my favorite part of the book.

Dan Levitt: Yes. Cecilia Payne completely changed our understanding of what stars are made of. But she started out, she was from a middle class, upper middle class family in England in the 1920s. And she went to a, I believe it was a Catholic school, it was certainly a religious school.

Dan Levitt: She knew that a lot of her classmates would pray for good grades. And she decided to see whether that really made a difference. So she did a little pool where she divided part of her classmates into those who would pray for good grades and part of them would not pray for good grades.

Dan Levitt: And she discovered that as far as she could see, it didn't make any difference. And after that, she was no longer sure that praying for particular changes in her life was going to make any difference whatsoever.

Melanie Avalon: That is so funny. Just really quickly, I had a really similar experience growing up in middle school or high school. And it was, I was thinking, like I remember I had a friend who was having some sort of surgery or something, and I was gonna pray for her.

Melanie Avalon: And then I didn't know the outcome, and I forgot to pray for her. And then I realized I didn't know the outcome. So I was thinking if God is outside of time, technically I should be able to pray for her now, even though it already happened and affect the outcome.

Melanie Avalon: I asked my teacher that and they were like, no, it doesn't work that way. And that's when I was like, okay, something's not tracking here.

Dan Levitt: Oh wow, that's amazing.

Melanie Avalon: So I think Cecil and I would have gone along pretty well.

Dan Levitt: That is amazing. She was fascinating. In high school, she was very good in music, and the classical composer Gustav Holtz was her teacher and wanted her to go into music. But instead, she went to University of Cambridge to study science.

Dan Levitt: She fell in love with physics, in part because Einstein's theories had just come out about general relativity. She was fascinated by it, and she was really there when so many critical discoveries were being made.

Dan Levitt: But it was really tough for her. She was, at the time, women. A lot of professors did not like women, and so she had to sit alone in the first row of her classes. And Rutherford, who is one of the most famous physicists of all time, in fact was one of her professors, and he would make a big deal of that and say, lady and gentleman at the beginning of each class.

Dan Levitt: And she wrote that she just wanted to, and here was another diary on autobiography, actually. She wrote that she just wanted to sink into the floor whenever she heard that. He was unhappy about having women in his classes, but she was lucky because there were some other people there who were quite supportive of her research career.

Dan Levitt: But then, when she was about to graduate, she realized that she was in trouble. Payne loved research. She was interested in stars, and she had dreams of being in the center of stars and finding answers to some of the mysteries that she was interested in.

Dan Levitt: But she realized that at the time, women could not become professors. The only thing that she could do if she wanted to teach science was to teach science in a secondary school. That was it. She couldn't do any research.

Dan Levitt: Research was really what she wanted to do. She wrote that being a headmistress, for instance, in secondary school, it would be like hell for her. She was very smart in the way she arranged things, and she managed to get a scholarship to go to Harvard University.

Dan Levitt: Because, surprisingly, at the time, Harvard had just been given a fellowship for a woman to do research. There were no research positions in England. So she came to Harvard. She took on the mystery Harvard had at the time, and still has.

Dan Levitt: They're still there, and I went and looked at them. They still have a collection of, at one point, it was like a half a million plates, which are these photographic records of stars. She decided that she wanted to use those records and new advances in quantum physics to try to analyze them, to, among other things, try to understand what elements are in stars.

Dan Levitt: The interesting thing is that at the time, people thought that the sun, for instance, was made up of the same thing as Earth. So, you know, so the sun probably had like a big iron core in the middle, just like Earth did.

Dan Levitt: And they had a lot of reasons for thinking that. And pain happened to be pretty much the only one at Harvard who knew enough about quantum mechanics because it was so new and she had just studied it in Cambridge where it was just cutting edge to apply those theories and equations to the plates to see if she could figure out what stars were actually made of.

Dan Levitt: And what she proposed from a year of incredibly arduous taxing research was that stars don't have the same elements that we have. Their composition is completely different because stars are 98% hydrogen and helium, which obviously, you know, her teachers at Cambridge and elsewhere were kind of shocked by this.

Dan Levitt: And so, Payne's advisor sent her a draft of her thesis to one of the greatest astrophysicists, Henry Norris Russell, who was at Princeton, I think, at the time. And he loved her thesis because it had a lot of other questions that she was looking at, but she said that conclusion must certainly be wrong.

Dan Levitt: And so, Payne, in her thesis, wrote something that she regretted for the rest of her life. She wrote, this part of my conclusion must certainly be wrong. Oh, man. Yeah. So it turned out that like four or so years later, Norris himself, using other kinds of theory and evidence from quantum physics, came around to the same conclusion and wrote a paper about it and said, oh, by the way, this matches with what Cecilia Payne said.

Dan Levitt: So isn't that nice? And so people did come around. But to a certain extent, she was robbed of glory. Now, mind you, I could go on about Payne for a long time because she lived a fascinating life. Her contributions were recognized by many astronomers, but at Harvard, she still faced tremendous obstacles among them.

Dan Levitt: The president of Harvard at the time was absolutely opposed to having women on the faculty. So she was one of the brightest minds in the department, and she was allowed to teach courses, but they weren't listed in the catalog.

Dan Levitt: And the president of Harvard said, she will be given an appointment as a professor over my dead body. So she did eventually become chair of the Department of Astronomy, but it was after he left.

Melanie Avalon: and her courses that were not listed. So she had to, it was like on the black market, she had to like list people.

Dan Levitt: You know, I think I'm not exactly sure how it worked, but I'm sure she didn't have difficulty finding people for them. But she did not have the title and she did not have the official, you know, designation to do that.

Dan Levitt: You know, it was only much, much later that she got the recognition that she deserved.

Melanie Avalon: Was it after her death, some of that recognition?

Dan Levitt: after the former president of Harvard left, then because she ultimately became chairman of the Harvard's Astronomy Department.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, right, right, yeah.

Dan Levitt: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, I interviewed Owen Gingrich, who was a brilliant, wonderful historian of science and an astronomer himself. And he was one of her graduate students, and he had wonderful stories about her.

Melanie Avalon: Oh man, that's amazing. Yeah, because that seemed like a theme. I feel like there were a few people who weren't even recognized until after their deaths.

Dan Levitt: Yes, yes, there certainly were. And going back to the role of women, I was surprised by how many women there were that made really important contributions. One of the other ones was Marietta Blau, who developed a technique that allowed scientists to analyze what was in the cosmic rays raining down those from space.

Dan Levitt: And eventually that tool helped us discover the existence of subatomic particles. But she developed a theory in the 1930s just as Hitler was coming to power. And she ended up being an emigre who had to flee from Austria, where she did a research and never got the recognition that she deserved.

Dan Levitt: She ended up doing lesser research in the United States because she never had the resources again to do the research that she was capable of. And she was a good example of someone who was really not recognized widely until long after she died in the 1970s.

Dan Levitt: And of course, the same was true of Rosalind Franklin.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, yeah, that's what I was thinking of.

Dan Levitt: Yup, whose work was really not recognized for being as important as it was till long after she died. Of course, she died prematurely of, I think it was ovarian cancer, of cancer, and so at a quite young age.

Dan Levitt: Both of them actually should have been given Nobel Prizes and were not.

Melanie Avalon: They don't give post humanist Nobel Prizes?

Dan Levitt: Yes, that's one of the rules that you have to be living.

Melanie Avalon: That's interesting. Yeah, I feel like I can never look at the Nobel Prize the same way again. It seems very dramatic. I feel like there are multiple stories of people getting Nobel prizes and not mentioning, you know, other people who are involved or it just seems, it seems very dramatic.

Dan Levitt: It is. There are many, many stories of people who are deprived of prizes for many, many different reasons, but who should have gotten them? That's right.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, because Franklin was involved with analyzing with DNA and RNA, right? Or what was her role?

Dan Levitt: Yes, so Rosalind Franklin made very, very important contributions to discovering the structure of DNA, which of course created the entire genetic revolution.

Melanie Avalon: And also in that world, I loved the idea of junk DNA and ghost genes and things like that. So basically, yeah, how do you feel about junk DNA? Because even now, I have recently, sort of recently, I had David Sinclair on the show who's at Harvard.

Melanie Avalon: And we talked about this and how like even now they still think junk DNA is junk, but that it possibly does have other purposes. Yeah, what are your thoughts on that?

Dan Levitt: Yeah, it's a fascinating question because, you know, as you know, each of our chromosomes has on the order of two billion base pairs. And we have something like 20 ,000 genes that we've discovered that we understand the purposes for.

Dan Levitt: And that's, but those occupy only a small percentage of the base pairs that we know about in DNA. So the rest of it was at one time considered junk DNA because the idea was that it has no function at all.

Dan Levitt: It's just junk, right? It's kind of useless stuff and all the useful parts are scattered in between. But there is a very lively discussion about how much of the quote -unquote junk DNA actually is junk.

Dan Levitt: And there are some people who say that, you know, 80% of our genome is junk DNA. And there are many other people who say, no, it might only be 20%. And that a lot of the things that we think are junk actually have roles that we just don't know about.

Dan Levitt: And you know, what I know is that there's a tremendous amount of disagreement about it. And there are people who, you know, quite often, I think, are finding pieces of DNA that we might have considered junk that turn out to have roles that we didn't understand.

Melanie Avalon: That's fascinating and also just historically the role of genes and how we thought that humans would have way more genes than we do. And probably thought plants would have way less genes than they do.

Dan Levitt: Yes. That's really kind of insane because when gene sequencing first came around, there were actually betting pools. You would think that the more complex, more intelligent creatures like us would have a lot more genes than simple creatures, right?

Dan Levitt: And certainly a lot more genes than plants, which are kind of like dumb, right? And so there were betting pools on how who would have thought that how many genes would you think it would take to create someone who's as complex and as smart as you are, right?

Dan Levitt: So a lot of people thought hundreds of thousands or a hundred thousand. So people were absolutely shocked when the number turned out at the time it was estimated to be around 20, 23, 24 ,000. It was a huge shock for people.

Dan Levitt: And likewise, it turns out the plants have many plants have as many, if not more genes, than we do. But when we've learned more about it, it does make sense because first of all, plants and we came from simpler bacteria and single cell organisms.

Dan Levitt: And so many of our genes came from them, which is why we share, like this is a great factor, right? We share about 40% of genes with bananas. It's like, because we have those common origins. And many of the tremendous changes and leaps in evolution came not from developed, sometimes they came from developing new genes, but they also came from how those genes are used, how the timing and the regulation of when they're deployed and how they're deployed, that has made so many great differences.

Melanie Avalon: I don't know if this analogy is correct at all. This just came to me. This might be far off, but it's kind of like if you were writing an instruction manual for somebody very intelligent and smart, you might not have to write as extensive of an instruction manual compared to somebody who needs every single instruction.

Melanie Avalon: Like you would have to write like really intense instructions and like very, you know, to do the things because they couldn't make the assumptions beyond that, which the assumptions analogy would be like the epigenetics for me and humans.

Dan Levitt: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do think that makes sense. It's kind of incredible the way scientists have discovered that small changes in timing can have tremendous ripple effects down the line.

Melanie Avalon: And you mentioned like we think of plants being dumb. What are your thoughts on plant intelligence? What you do talk about in the book?

Dan Levitt: That was one of the things that honestly kind of blew my mind. I didn't know anything about this at all, but because plants are so essential, plants create all the nutrients that we're made of. So I wanted to understand, well, how was it that plants took over the continents and created the ecosystem that we are now a part of or piggybacking on in a sense?

Dan Levitt: Part of the reason it turns out is that plants are incredibly resilient. And I discovered part of the reason may be that plants do have a kind of intelligence. Now, there are a lot of scientists who say, who poo poo with that and say, well, you can't call plants intelligence.

Dan Levitt: They don't have a nervous system. And that's true. But what all botanists really do agree on is that whether or not you call them intelligent, they are remarkably resilient. They are constantly monitoring many, many different kinds of senses from touch to vibration to sounds and to water levels and to environmental conditions.

Dan Levitt: They're constantly monitoring them. And different parts of the plants, from the roots to the tips and so on, are in communication with each other to adapt to them. When you think about it, plants are kind of amazing because if you think about a seed, it's going to take one, it's going to pick one place on earth and no matter what happens around it, hurricanes, floods, whatever, it's going to survive there.

Dan Levitt: So the weather's changing, the sun's changing, there are animals that are approaching. So it's got to be, when you think about it, remarkably adaptive in how it reacts and adjusts to all of the changes around it.

Dan Levitt: And whether you want to call it intelligence or not is debatable, but certainly, plants are reacting to the things that happen to them.

Melanie Avalon: I have to apologize to listeners because I share this story all the time, but I just challenge any scientists who are skeptical about plant intelligence to grow cucumbers in their home because I grow cucumbers.

Melanie Avalon: Listeners know I'm obsessed with my cucumber plants. It has been a mind -blowing experience because I have them in these big air gardens that allow them to like the plants grow and I have them up against the window.

Melanie Avalon: I mean, they seem very intelligent. They like grow up the windows. They like send out little tendrils and like reach for things and like they have a mind of their own. Like when I first started doing it, I was like, oh no, don't grow there and I would like move the plant and then I mean, but it would just go back and they send out little like little arms and they like feel for things and they grab them.

Melanie Avalon: And so now I feel like they're very intelligent.

Dan Levitt: Absolutely. I mean, I don't know whether I want to call them intelligent, but they're extremely adaptable and extremely complex in their behavior. Absolutely.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, they're aware of their environment. So, well, since we are talking about the human body, when you started this book, so was the arc of the story that you were looking for, you know, Adams in the beginning of time and creation to our bodies?

Melanie Avalon: Like, was that the trajectory that you were looking for, or did that grow more organically while you were researching?

Dan Levitt: So the idea came from a question. Yeah. And my, my teenage daughter was at the time considering becoming a vegetarian. You know, like any good parent, I started to wonder, okay, well, what is she going to have to eat in order to remain healthy?

Dan Levitt: And I pretty quickly realized that I have no idea what my body, her body, or my body is made of, much less where any of that stuff came from. So I started Googling and scratching my head. And, and it was only then that I realized, oh my God, every single particle in our bodies ultimately came from the Big Bang, which was 13 .8 billion years ago.

Dan Levitt: And, you know, what an epic journey through stars and the creation of elements and the creation of the solar system and the, and the creation of life and snowball earth. And then, you know, the plants conquest of the continents, the intelligent plants concept, cost quest of the continents and, and then how they found their way to us.

Dan Levitt: So, so that was part of what I was just fascinated by. And then the other thing that just really blew me away was to realize that, oh my God, you know, you and I are, so the smallest particles that visible matter made of our, our quarks, they're smaller than atoms and electrons and neutrons and protons.

Dan Levitt: And you and I are something like, I forget the number, but like 30, you know, you are made of like 30 billion quarks and scores more gluons, which are these subatomic particles that glue quarks together and electrons.

Dan Levitt: And that's it. That's, you know, in some sense, that's what, you know, you are made of. And all of those sprang out of the big bang. And then here we are 13 .8 billion years later, and they've kind of reunited, reunited to make you and another collection has reunited to make me.

Dan Levitt: And those collections that make us up are now looking back in time to retrace our journeys. I mean, how incredible is that? You know, so there's a wonderful quote that I came across, which is, the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.

Dan Levitt: And that, and so that was the other thing that I wanted to understand. How is it possible for us to retrace the journey of our atoms over all that time? How do we do it? And so between the two of those, those threads, I was just totally hooked.

Melanie Avalon: that latter part of the journey. And again, for listeners, there's so much in the book that we didn't even remotely touch on. But when it actually does come to the human body, I mean, who knew that there was so much even debate about that, like what, you know, what we're fueled on and what we're, it actually reminded me, I thought this was really interesting because you talk about the role of the scientists studying protein and carbs and fats and like the scientists who thought it was basically all protein that we were using.

Melanie Avalon: I did an episode all on the history of fasting. It was a really similar book to yours in that it told the, like the characters involved in the history of fasting, more so than the way it's normally approached today with like intermittent fasting and all the things.

Melanie Avalon: But one of the things he talked about in that book, it was Steve Hendricks. I think it's called the art and science of fasting. I need to double check that title. But he talks about how, and this was like relatively recent when people are fasted and we're running off a body fat, it wasn't known what we were running off of for like a really long time.

Melanie Avalon: They didn't realize that we were running off of our body fat stores. Like there were theories that it was like taking energy from the air. There was theories that like for women, it was from their menses because they would stop menstruating while fasting.

Melanie Avalon: Like it's just really interesting that things that seem so obvious to us today were just not obvious. And it's hard to like get out of your own cognitive bias and realize why it wasn't obvious because it seems so obvious.

Melanie Avalon: Just so many different things in the history of all of this. Even like how you talk about not the same thing, but you talk about how some of the scientists thought the spontaneous generation of, was it like rats?

Melanie Avalon: Mice. Yeah, mice. Yeah, what was that? Well.

Dan Levitt: You have to put yourself in the position of scientists 300 years ago or 600 years ago. And if you don't have microscopes and you didn't know really either that there were cells or what cells were made of and you knew nothing about biochemistry and you're trying to explain the mystery of life, I mean, think about it, a seed develops into an oak tree, right?

Dan Levitt: Or you can take a planaria with those tiny little worms and cut it in half and each one regenerates, right? So how does that happen? So it's understandable that people thought that there was some kind of vital force and many of them thought that it was some kind of God -given vital force that was inaccessible to science that must be responsible for life.

Dan Levitt: And a tremendous amount of science was making discoveries that gradually made it possible for us to understand how life can exist in our cells. But there were just so many questions that were unknown.

Dan Levitt: So I think I tell the story about Von Helmhund who was an alchemist and actually a brilliant proto -scientist who did subscribe to the idea of spontaneous generation that is that life just spontaneously came into the world from who knows what.

Dan Levitt: And I don't remember the exact quote, but it was something like the recipe was if you take dirty underwear and you weed or something in and you leave it for a certain amount of time, a mouse will crawl out.

Dan Levitt: But the point was that spontaneous generation until a couple hundred years ago was and even later than that made sense because we just didn't have the foundations of science that we have now to be able to begin to explain it in any other way.

Melanie Avalon: It seems so obvious, but then it makes you wonder, what will we look back on now? What we're thinking, you know, and we're just going to be completely off base. That's really scary to think about.

Dan Levitt: Absolutely. That is a great question. I will say that a lot of scientific discoveries, breakthroughs, don't necessarily completely change things, but rather they include what we've known and expand on them, like Einstein's discoveries of how space and time work.

Dan Levitt: Works didn't make Newton's understanding of how the world works wrong. It just made it an approximation that wasn't completely accurate. There's a lot of that that's going to go on, but it is amazing that 150 years ago, we didn't know what the earth was made of.

Dan Levitt: We didn't know that there was a big bang. We had no idea. 150 years ago, we had no idea how the

Melanie Avalon: I'm trying to fit. That's crazy. That's like not that long ago. If you think about it.

Dan Levitt: Now, we didn't know how the elements were made. We had no idea what was inside our cells. A hundred years ago, we had no idea what was inside our cells, except we thought that there were a lot of enzymes and a nucleus.

Dan Levitt: That's a wonderful story of how we learned that. But now we know that it's chock -a -block of all kinds of unbelievably complicated structures. But at one time, people thought, no, it was just a whole lot of enzymes, which are the molecules that accelerate chemical reactions.

Dan Levitt: And so it does make you think, you know, 150 years over now, how much more will we learn that we have no idea about?

Melanie Avalon: Do you think scientists will be replaced by AI making these discoveries?

Dan Levitt: Oh boy. I don't think they'll be replaced by AI, but I do think that AI will come more and more to be a very useful tools to scientists. And I won't be surprised if some very interesting theories if not breakthroughs, scientific breakthroughs in the long run come from AI.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, I'll be really curious. This is just a quick tangent question. I have to ask you, because I'm so fascinated by it. You hinted at it in the book. Do you have any thoughts on CERN? I'm so fascinated.

Melanie Avalon: I know that's like a very big question. So I'm actually launching a third podcast, and it's gonna be my first non -health related podcast. We're calling it the Mindblown Podcast. And each episode, kind of like what you do, each episode, we want to just find these different topics and stories and just tell them and then just talk about them.

Melanie Avalon: Like one of the episodes we're gonna do in the beginning is like the Dancing Plague of 1518. I don't know if you've heard of that. Just like really fascinating things and not like conspiracy theories or anything like that, just talking about these things.

Melanie Avalon: But the reason we're doing this is because I'm really fascinated by the Mandela effect. Are you familiar with the Mandela effect?

Dan Levitt: No, what is that?

Melanie Avalon: Oh, okay. So, oh man. Okay. It's called the Mandela Effect because a lot of people have a memory of Mandela dying in jail in the 1980s when he did not. But the way it manifests, and there's like a lot of Mandela effects.

Melanie Avalon: So people will remember things differently than the way they are. Okay, we'll find one that works for you. Do you like Chick -fil -A?

Dan Levitt: Not bad, yeah?

Melanie Avalon: How is it spelled?

Dan Levitt: C -H -I -C -K dash L -F -I -L -E -T.

Melanie Avalon: A lot of people think it's like CHIC or CHIK, but it's actually, you got it right, it's CHIK. There's a lot of them. There's like Fruit of the Loom logo. People remember it having a cornucopia in the logo.

Melanie Avalon: There's not a cornucopia in that logo. Like it doesn't exist, but like thousands of people remember it. Like in the opening of Disney movies with like the blue castle with the Disney logo. People remember Tinkerbell coming out and dotting the I.

Melanie Avalon: Do you have that memory of

Dan Levitt: Well, now that you've suggested it and placed that idea in my brain, yes.

Melanie Avalon: I know. So that's why I'm trying to do one. That's why I'm trying to do one that you haven't.

Dan Levitt: Absolutely. I would subscribe to that one. Yes.

Melanie Avalon: That one, well, that one doesn't exist either. There's a lot. But what's interesting is they've done studies on it or they've done a study in like 2020 or 2021. They gave people all these different examples and they had them pick what was the correct logo or what was the correct thing.

Melanie Avalon: And the majority of the time or a majority of the time people would pick the wrong logo, but they would all pick the same logo, like the same wrong one. And they would have people freeze style logos without feeding them preexisting information and they would draw the same thing or say the same thing.

Melanie Avalon: So it's like these collective false memories or are they false? I don't know. But the reason we're coming up with this podcast is because we realized this first started being noticed in 2009 when, sorry, this is a tangent, but it relates to Sir and I promise in 2009, somebody blogged about this.

Melanie Avalon: And that's when people all started realizing that this was happening everywhere. And the first experiment or the only experiment, I think when they actually for CERN did the particle generator experiment was in 2008.

Melanie Avalon: And so we were like, whoa, like CERN happened. And then people started noticing that there seems to be like glitches in reality or like something changed. So that was a really long build up to you do talk about CERN a little bit in the book.

Melanie Avalon: I was just wondering if you had any thoughts about CERN because they're doing a lot with or they do a lot with particle stuff. Oh, and on their website, they talk about potentially opening up multiple dimensions with their work, which is crazy.

Dan Levitt: Yeah. Well, CERN is interesting. And I did touch on it slightly in my book because the particle accelerator, which CERN is, was born at Berkeley in the 1930s. And it turned out that particle accelerators were extremely important for creating radioactive isotopes.

Dan Levitt: And one of the only reasons that we know how photosynthesis works chemically is because some of those early particle accelerators were used to create radioactive isotopes that were used in experiments to understand the chemical reactions in photosynthesis.

Dan Levitt: But it's fascinating to think that those particle accelerators, for instance, the one that was used in the 1930s at Berkeley, it was like three feet in diameter. And what does a particle accelerator do?

Dan Levitt: It's got these magnets and it fires these streams of electrons or protons, and it just whizzes them around faster and faster and faster. And so they get incredibly fast and they can make those particles crash against each other.

Dan Levitt: When they got larger, they could make those particles accelerate to almost the speed of light. So fast forward now, you know, in the 1930s, a particle accelerator, which was this round thing that had electrons or other particles whizzing around, was like three feet in diameter.

Dan Levitt: Now CERN is, I don't remember the dimensions, but, you know, something like a quarter of a mile or maybe even a mile in diameter. And so those particles are going faster and faster and faster. And the faster you can get them to go when they collide with others, the more varieties of subatomic particles that you can get to come out of them, and the more you can learn about the fundamental nature of matter.

Dan Levitt: And so that's what they're doing. And because the big bang was, you know, particles moving around, subatomic particles moving around incredibly fast with amazing energies, you know, you get, there are ways in which, you know, you're able to understand more about particles at the beginning of time.

Melanie Avalon: It is so fascinating. I'll put a link in the show notes because their website, it's home .cern. But this is like, it's an international organization. They have an article called extra dimensions, gravitons and tiny black holes.

Melanie Avalon: And they literally talk about how their particle generator could potentially reveal extra dimensions through their production of microscopic black holes.

Dan Levitt: Yeah, it's mind -blowing. Absolutely.

Melanie Avalon: which is crazy, thus why I'm creating the Mind Blowing podcast. And just while we're talking about mind blowing and what's out there and possibilities, do you have the documentary now about the scientific search for alien life or is that something...

Dan Levitt: No, we did that years ago, some years ago, for National Geographic Channel.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, I gotta go watch that. What was the conclusion at the time?

Dan Levitt: Well, the documentary really looked at why there are a lot of scientists who actually believe that it's very likely that there is alien life, an intelligent alien life out there somewhere in the universe, and then the ways in which they're thinking about looking for it.

Dan Levitt: So, you know what, I like many, many people think that it's very likely that the universe is so vast, the number of stars are so great, right, that it's very likely that there is intelligence life out there.

Dan Levitt: Now, you know, whether it's close enough that those aliens could actually communicate with us or come visit us, I'm a lot more skeptical about that. But that it's out there somewhere, I think it's no one knows, right?

Dan Levitt: But I think it's very likely.

Melanie Avalon: I agree. And that's why I feel really validated today with, with everything, with like the government UAP reports and everything, because I feel like for the longest time, because that's what I always thought growing up.

Melanie Avalon: I was like, the universe is massive. Like, I feel like it's way less of a chance that there's not other, you know, life forms out there than that there is. If you thought that that was like, Oh, you believe in UFOs, like that's crazy.

Melanie Avalon: So now it's just nice to see the tides turned a little bit with all of that. So maybe to wrap things up, ending the book, you kind of end with this contemplation of immortality. Was that the natural progression of writing the book, you know, coming to that question?

Dan Levitt: I'm not sure that I would say immortality. I mean, I appreciated the world that we live on on so many levels that I never have never had before. You know, I mean, I've piked down the Grand Canyon and I've piked in the Himalayas and I've seen beautiful sites that have given me a feeling of awe and wonder about the world.

Dan Levitt: And looking back at the history of our atoms and our particles from the Big Bang, really has given me the same kind of awe. It's just amazing that when you understand how it is that we came to be here and all the things that happened along the way and had to happen along the way that made it possible for us to be here.

Dan Levitt: It's really incredible. And then when you think about what we are, I came to a much different appreciation of that too. You know, your body and mine are we're each made of about 30 trillion cells. That's like enough cells if you lined them up to go to the moon like 27 times back, right?

Dan Levitt: And each of those cells is made of about a hundred, each one is made of like a hundred trillion atoms. And if you look in one of those cells, it's chocoblock with all kinds of incredible, not just mitochondria, but all kinds of incredible nanomachines, including my favorite is ATP synthesis, synthase rather, which is an enzyme that's like a little rotary motor that creates ATP that can revolve forward and back at about 300 times a second.

Dan Levitt: And it's got parts that move, interlocking parts that move. But we're filled with all kinds of remarkable molecular mechanisms. And all that stuff came from those particles, those gluons and those quarks and electrons that came in the big bang.

Dan Levitt: And it was really brought home for me most literally when I was finishing the book. And this was during COVID and my mom passed away. You know, we cremated her. And so there was a point at which, you know, I was holding the box that had her remains.

Dan Levitt: Many of the atoms that were in her body that came from the big bang. And I was just filled with gratitude for, you know, the fact that we're here and that we live in a universe in which, you know, those atoms from so far back, you know, created such a wonderful, loving, caring person.

Dan Levitt: And all of us, you know, in some way are just amazing creatures. And so I would say that the thing that's most powerful for me that came from right in the book, and I hope people will from reading it too, is just in addition to everything else, in addition to understanding just a feeling of gratitude for being here and all, you know, that we're here.

Dan Levitt: That's really what stuck with me the most.

Melanie Avalon: I loved that part so much. I actually got excited because you answered actually the last question that I ask on this show every single time. And it's just because I'm so passionate about the topic you just spoke about as I ask the guest what is something they're grateful for.

Melanie Avalon: And so reading that at the end of the book, and I'm so sorry about your mom by the way, and reading that at the end of the book about the gratitude for these particles and bacteria and everything was just, it was such a moment.

Melanie Avalon: I've never had, definitely not on this show had anybody expressed that before. So what is something that you're grateful for?

Dan Levitt: Well, you know, I think I'm grateful for being in a world that's so endlessly fascinating and complex and, you know, in a world that created caring, loving, intelligent people, you know, from essentially from single -celled organisms, from colonies of bacteria and others, and other single -celled organisms, we create, you know, people who are so curious and so creative in so many ways.

Dan Levitt: You know, I don't think we realize how unbelievably complex we actually are and how unlikely and amazing it is that we are here. I'm just grateful for all of that.

Melanie Avalon: I love that so much. Well, thank you so much, Dan. Thank you for your time during this interview and thank you for the book. It was such an adventure and such a journey and so mind -blowing, like I've said multiple times in the show, reading it.

Melanie Avalon: I sort of wish that in high school, when you got to learn science and stuff, that you could learn it through reading books like this, because it really makes things stick with you when it's told the way you tell it through the narrative and with these personalities and these people.

Melanie Avalon: And it's just so engaging. And I cannot recommend enough that listeners get the book. So again, it's what's gotten into you, the story of your body's atoms from the Big Bang through last night's dinner.

Melanie Avalon: And I cannot recommend it enough. How can people best follow your work?

Dan Levitt: They can look at my website, which is danlevich .com. That's probably the best way. And they can read the book because there's a lot of my work in there.

Melanie Avalon: Yes, so like we didn't even remotely touch on all of it. What are you working on now? Are you gonna do another book?

Dan Levitt: I am going to do another book and I'm trying to figure out what it's going to be about and I'm not having quite decided yet, but it will also be about science and probably how we know what we know.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, I love that. Oh, great. Well, if you'd like to come back in the future, that would be amazing. And yeah, I can't wait to read your books and all of your future work. So thank you so much for everything that you're doing.

Melanie Avalon: I'm so, so grateful for everything that you're doing. So thank you.

Dan Levitt: This has been really fun. Thank you so much.

Melanie Avalon: I agree. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Dan Levitt: I will you too.