>> Dan Turello: Welcome to
Kluge Book Conversations, a series sponsored
by the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. I'm Dan Turello, and I'm here
today with Ainissa Ramirez, and her most recent
book, The Alchemy of Us. How Humans and Matter
Transformed One Another. Dr. Ramirez is an
award-winning scientist and science communicator. She earned a doctorate in
material science and engineering from Stanford and started
her career as a scientist at Bell Laboratories in
Murray Hill, New Jersey. She was an associate professor
of mechanical engineering at Yale, and she also the
author of Save our Science. How to Inspire a New Generation
of Scientists and the co-author of Newton's Football, the
Science Behind America's Game. Ainissa, thanks so much
for being with us today. It's good to see you. >> Ainissa Ramirez:
Good to see you. Thank you so much. >> Dan Turello: Yeah, so, you
worked in several settings in academia and industry in
a variety of different roles. Tell us a little bit about what
inspired this book, and also, what went into the strategy? You tell stories of
technology and innovation, but you also tell a lot
of personal stories. How did you come
to that decision? >> Ainissa Ramirez: Well,
on the material scientist, and it's a little-known field,
but it's really important, because most of the technologies
around it are made of materials. And someone worked really hard
to make those materials work, but it really gets overshadowed. And so, I had been looking
for a long time as a way to show materials and show
the impact of materials on the world, but really
didn't have much luck. I didn't really want
to just do a catalog of different materials. So, it took a little
while before I figured out how I wanted to
really discuss materials, and it actually was by accident. A couple years ago, I was taking
some glassblowing classes. Every year, I try and take
an unusual class like pottery or painting, and this
year was glassblowing, but little did I know that it
would actually get me the idea for the book, because one day, when I was at my
glassblowing class, generally, I had a great time going
to my glassblowing class, but this day, in particular,
I was having a bad workday. So, I was kind of in a really
bad mood, and because of that, I was a little bit more
cavalier with the glass than I should have been. It was really beyond
my skill set. So, I actually took too much
glass, and it fell on the floor. And this is actually really bad, because glass is hot
enough to burn paper. It can burn a hole in your shoe. And so, because of that,
my instructor ran over and he grabbed the glass piece
with heat-resistant gloves. He reattached it to my
pipe, and we were able to salvage some of the glass. >> Dan Turello: That
sounds scary and dramatic. >> Ainissa Ramirez: Oh, man, it
was really scary, and you know, I'm a little on the shy side. So, I really did want to
draw any attention to myself, but here I was with
this huge accident. But after it all, you
know, was set aside and everybody calmed down, I actually started
having some thoughts. First of all, I was in
a pretty decent mood. In fact, I was happy to be
alive, and I started that class in a really foul mood. So, I said, you know what? The glass actually shaped me. I was shaping the
glass, but it shaped me, because of that event. And so, that was what gave me
the lens to look at materials. I said, I wonder
how other materials in history have shaped society. And so, that was the birth
of the book, and in terms of the approach that I took
in looking at materials, I didn't really want
to just discuss fact after fact after fact. What I really wanted to
do is tell people stories. I think that stories
are stickier. You can feel more connected to
the material, and I can share with you these inventions that
maybe you haven't even heard of, and really, get inside
of their life to see what their motivations
are, but more importantly, talk about how those
technologies shaped us. >> Dan Turello: That's great. So, some of the folks
that you're writing about are very well known. You know, this President
Lincoln. There is Morse. There's Edison. Then there's other folks
were relatively obscure, and I think of, for
example, Ruth Belville. I mean, it's this
wonderful name. It sounds Victorian. It sounds like you
could come straight out of his Charles
Dickens novel. Who was Ruth Belville,
and what was her story? >> Ainissa Ramirez: Well,
Ruth Belleville must be one of my favorite characters,
and she's the first person that you meet when you
read The Alchemy of Us. She lived in the in the 1800s
and in the 1900s, and she lived in England, and she
had a very unusual job. She sold time. Now I know that sounds
crazy, but that was her job. You see, she would wake up
early in her home in Maidenhead, which is about 30 miles
outside of London, and she'd make her
way over the London, and then over to Greenwich,
and Greenwich is the home of the Royal Observatory. It's also the home of
GMT, Greenwich Mean Time. And so, she would go up to the
top of the very, very steep hill to the Royal Observatory
to collect the time. Now how did she collect
the time? Well, she did it with one of
these things, a pocket watch. She had a pocket watch which
she had nicknamed Arnold, and she would have Arnold's time
compared to their master clock. And then, they would give
her a certificate noting the difference, and then, she would
make her way down the hill and go to various businesses
that needed to know the time. Train stations, newspapers,
factories. They all needed to
know the time, but they didn't have the
luxury to go all the way up the hill to collect it. So, she provided this service. So, Ruth Belleville was
one of the first characters that you meet in The Alchemy of
Us, and from a writer's point of view, she was a great device, because she really showed
how important timekeeping and keeping time was. So much so, that she could have
a business based on selling it. >> Dan Turello: That's
a wonderful story. So, do we know how far
she walked every day? Is there some way
to estimate that? >> Ainissa Ramirez: Oh, yeah,
there's some really great -- I mean, besides The Alchemy
of Us, there's a lovely book about her, the Greenwich
Time Lady. And she walked all over London,
and what was so interesting is that she touched so many
different parts of society. So, she would go to posh shops
that needed to know the time because they liked having it to
show their customers, but then, she would also go to
pubs, because they needed to know the time, because
they couldn't sell alcohol after certain hours. So, she crisscrossed
all of London, but also crisscrossed all
of society along the way. >> Dan Turello: I love it. So, she's, as you mentioned,
she's in the chapter about time and about the invention of
mechanical timekeeping devices, and you have this wonderful
sentence in that chapter. You write that, "We
grew obsessed with time, with being on time, and
with not wasting time. As such, it was only a matter of time before this compulsion
affected how we sleep." So, I'm intrigued by this, because sleep has become a
multimillion-dollar industry, literally. I mean, people who can't
sleep, trying to treat them. How did our predecessors
do sleep? It was different. And how did technology
change that? >> Ainissa Ramirez: Yeah, we
all feel a little obsessed with time, and we have special
pillows and aromatherapy, and there's all kinds
of products out there to help us sleep. But it ends up that
our ancestors, they actually slept differently. Before the Industrial
Revolution, people went to bed around 9 or 10 o'clock, and they
slept for about 3-1/2 hours. And then, they would wake
up on purpose and stay up for about an hour or so. They would do things around the
house like clean or read or sew, and then, after that hour,
they would go back to sleep for another 3-1/2 hours. These two segments of sleep are
called first and second sleep, and everyone slept that way. So, how did it change? Well, it actually was changed
not because of our physiology, but it was changed
by technology. Two things changed
the way that we sleep. The first was artificial light. We were able to stay up later. So, the first segment of sleep
became shorter, because we went to bed later, and
the other technology that changed it was the clock. The clock allowed us to get
up early, so that we can go to the factory or
make appointments. And so, that second segment
of sleep became truncated. Now, soon it didn't make sense
to sleep for a short amount of time and then wake up
in the middle of the night and then sleep for another
short amount of time. So, those two segments became
consolidated, and that's kind of how we sleep today. So, the way that we sleep
wasn't because of our anatomy, but because of technology. >> Dan Turello: Is
there a sense that -- what was the awareness
like as this transitioning was happening? Was there a sense of we
were losing something? How did that go? >> Ainissa Ramirez: Well,
from old newspapers, I mean, we were so beholden to time that
people actually thought that, well, this is actually way to
save time, because you know, sleeping too much
is a waste of time. So, the thinking was, well,
if we were very timewise, that consolidating our sleep was
considered to be a good thing. But now we live in an age
where, well, we don't feel like we have a very
good quality of sleep. And what has happened is that researchers have
actually done studies on different people, and
they've given them enough time to overcome their sleep debt,
and what they have found is that they actually revert
back to this old way of sleeping, where
they're asleep. And then, they're kind of
in this twilight region for a while, and then,
they kind of go back to a deeper type of sleep. So, some researchers actually
believe that ancient way of sleeping is actually
the preferred way to sleep for our bodies. So, I think at the time
when there was a switch, that people didn't see
it that way, but now, we all kind of live in that
world, and we kind of feel like we're not getting
good quality sleep. >> Dan Turello: That's
interesting. So, one of the themes
in the "History of Technology" is the way
certain technologies either bring us closer together
or further apart, and you explore some of
these themes in your chapter on the history of photography. How did early photographic
technology make some groups of people more visible
and others less so? >> Ainissa Ramirez: You know,
that's a very good question, and I would kind of rephrase it,
particularly for photography, because the country
was already fractured. And so, photography, which
we often use for amusement, was actually used for
a tool in this case. In this particular case, African-Americans were
using photography as a way to dismantle the stereotypes
that were around them. And what I'm talking about, specifically, is
Frederick Douglas. Frederick Douglass was actually
the most photographed man in the 19th century, and
the reason why he did that, some people say he was vain. I don't think that was the case. I think he was using his
photographs as a tool, because he was trying to
combat the negative stereotypes of African-Americans. For those who don't
know Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass was a
famous abolitionist and orator, and he was also a very
stately looking guy. And so, when he was trying
to do is use his image to just combat these really
buffoon-looking images that were out there for African Americans. So, he was using photography
as a tool to combat that. So, they were already
visions, and he was just trying to dismantle some of the negative stereotypes
using his image. >> Dan Turello: Interesting. And then, we get later on
in the story photography, and we get to the, you
know, the 1960s and 1970s, and one of the companies that has become a
household name introduced -- you're right about how
they introduced a way to brighten certain
images, as needed. Now on first appearance,
this might seem like it could have been
a positive development, a good step in the
right direction. And yet, there's this
whole other history behind that that you explore. Can you tell us the story of the
Polaroid Corporation in the 70s? >> Ainissa Ramirez: Well,
let me go back a little bit and talk a little bit
about how film was a tool, because I mentioned, Frederick
Douglass was using it a tool. W. E. B. Du Bois was also using
it as a tool, because he wanted to combat those negative
stereotypes. And then, that tool
kind of got turned around in a negative way
when, as you mentioned, you were talking about film
didn't render us particularly well, and that was found
in the 1960s or so, when African-American
mothers found that the images of their children didn't look
as good as white children, because the film had a
bias kind of built into it. It was specially
tailored for lighter skin. So, here we see a tool
of photography being used to dismantle negative
stereotypes, and then, inadvertently, being
used in a negative way. So, I talk about that
in The Alchemy of Us. But then, I also talk about how
photography was definitely used as a tool of oppression, and
in order to explain that, I want to talk a little bit about the story you
mentioned, of Polaroid. Now Polaroid was a
much-beloved technology. It was the instant cameras. You can get an image like
this in less than a minute. This was an amazing
technology, because before that, it would take a week before
you would get your images. But what I found while I was
writing the alchemy of us is that Polaroid actually
had a hand in something that was far more nefarious. I found out the story
of Caroline Hunter. Caroline Hunter, in the 1970s, was an African-American
chemist working a Polaroid. And one day, she was going
to lunch with her friend, Ken Williams, and they
discover an ID card, a mock-up of her ID card, and it
says, Department of the Minds, Republic of South Africa. Now these two look
at each other, and they're like, South Africa? What does Polaroid got
to do with South Africa? See, at that time, South
Africa was an apartheid system. It was a police state. So, what they found out is that
every black South African had to carry with them a passbook. And the passbook told officials
where this person could go, where they could not go. It was sort of like
a way of monitoring and controlling your whereabouts
before the age of GPS. But at the heart of the passbook
was a picture made by Polaroid. So, here we see this amusement
photography being used in nefarious ways. And so, this is one of
the things that I talk about in The Alchemy of Us. And the chapter that this is all
taking place is called capture, because I really wanted to
show how photography was used to capture our likeness. It also captured our
biases, and in some cases, it actually controlled, or
captured, the whereabouts of certain populations. >> Dan Turello: And how
did Polaroid respond when all this started
coming to light? >> Ainissa Ramirez: Well,
initially, there was denial. And then, they reported out
that if they did have a presence in South Africa, is
very, very small. And this is, legally, true,
because Polaroid wasn't in South Africa, but they
did have a distributor that was well known that
sold their technology. So, that's kind of how they got
around it, but Caroline and Ken, Caroline Hunter and
Ken Williams, had done a tremendous
amount of research and found out that Polaroid had been in
South Africa since 1938 or so. So, they knew that
Polaroid was aware that these cameras were
being used for this reason. So, their response was
negative, but what happened is that Caroline and Ken,
they became activists. They created the Polaroid
Revolutionary Workers Movement and worked really hard to
tell the people of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and
Massachusetts, and the rest of the world, about Polaroid's
involvement in South Africa. And it took about seven years
of hard work and connecting and networking and
spreading the word, but eventually Polaroid
withdrew from South Africa. >> Ainissa Ramirez: Great. We've talked about
unintended consequences. We talked about social
engineering. There is also a more optimistic
thread/storyline in your book. How did the introduction
of steel bring us closer as a nation and create
more cohesion? >> Ainissa Ramirez: Well,
that's a great question. I mean, when we think
about connecting, we think about the Internet,
and we think about telephones and cell phones, but I actually
say that one of the earlier ways that we connected was
through the use of steel. Now most people don't
know about steel, but steel made it
possible for steel rails. Steel is a very,
very hard material. It's better than iron. It's better than some
of the earlier materials that were used for rails. And so, when you
didn't have to worry about building infrastructure
for trains, you can extend it
further and further out. And so, the trains became a huge
connector, because before that, we used to travel by stagecoach,
and it would take days to get short distances. So, the distance from Boston to New York would take
days by stagecoach. Now we can do that in a day, and we can go back
home in the same day. So, what the trains did is
it actually connected us, because it made this huge
country a little bit more unified, because
it made it smaller. Now when I talk about in The
Alchemy of Us is one episode in history that most
people don't know about, which is that after
Abraham Lincoln had died, the population was
grieving tremendously, and they really wanted
to say goodbye to this important leader. Now how do you say goodbye
to someone before the age of television or the Internet? Well, what they did is
actually transported his body across the United States,
and at major cities, they took his body
off the special train, Lincoln's funeral train, and had
huge processions, and by huge, I mean like 12 bodies deep,
to see these processions, so that they can see his
body and say goodbye. And for people who could
make those big cities, what they would do is they would
actually stand by the tracks and wait for the train to pass. So, steel was a great connector. Abraham Lincoln was also a
great connector, and what I do in The Alchemy of
Us is show how both of them connected the country. >> Dan Turello: That's
an amazing story. So, you know, when you talk
about steel and railways, you know, I hear
the descriptions of people being unified and
cross-border commerce and all of those areas, it
sounds a little bit like the Internet today. I mean, those are some of the
descriptions that we hear. This isn't a question
about the Internet, but it's more question
about, you know, in hindsight, everything
is 20/20. And yet, we know the Internet
brings us closer together, but it also does a
lot of other things. I'm wondering, is there a way
for creators of technology to be more aware
and conscientious, as they're developing
technologies, about how that's going to
impact life for the community? Or is it just the nature of
the beast that scientists and creators create, and
then, everybody else has to figure out how to use it? >> Ainissa Ramirez: That's
a very, very good question that you raise, and
that's part of the impetus for writing The Alchemy of Us. That I want people to critique
their creations a little bit more. You know, we have this mantra
going out about, you know, seeking permission
and not forgiveness. And this is a little dangerous,
because we'll launch things into the world, and then, trying
our best to pull them back or cage them in some way
so that they don't have a negative impact. What I believe that we should do
is that we should teach ethics within engineering classes. We should fold it into
engineering classes and not have it as
something as an aside. When I was in school, the
ethics class was an elective, and it was the last year. And so, you know,
that's not the time when we should be teaching
something that's so important. We should be folding in ethics
early on, so that people start to think about their device
or the thing that they want to build, and I think that
people should be excited and have unbridled energy
towards whatever they're making. But I think the next step should
be, okay, now that this would be in the world, how can I best
design it, so it lives well, that it supports humanity? Let me think a little bit about how it will live
before people get it. How it will live
after people use it. So, I think we need to answer
those bigger questions, too, and they're hard. You know, doing science
by itself is hard. So, folding on ethics, a lot of
people are going to say, well, that's a bit of a downer, but
we see that it's this kind of thinking and not
thinking about the output or the long-term impact of
something that's gotten us into a lot of trouble. It's the reason why we have some of the situations
that we have today. So, I think studying how
technologies shape us, as we do in The Alchemy of Us,
will give people a little bit of the notion that they should
consider what are the ethical outputs, and what are
the social implications for what they build? >> Dan Turello: We hear a lot about citizen science
these days. I wonder, what does
that actually look like? Does that fit into
this conversation, and what is it, first of all? And how does it play out? >> Ainissa Ramirez: Well, I don't know how my
book fully aligns with citizen science,
but let me back up. Citizen science is a way for
everyday people to have a hand in doing real science
and not just, you know, making invisible ink as, you
know, I used to do as a kid, but actually doing things
that contribute to the canon of knowledge, and it
can present itself in many different ways where,
you know, use your cell phone, and you go out and you take
pictures of fauna or animals and where they're located. It gets stored in the cloud,
and so scientists are able to learn a little bit more about
migration patterns and the like, and it's manifested in
many different ways. Citizen science has
different flavors. And so, people can enter into
science many different ways. But some people may not want
to do something hands-on. But I do think they still
need to know about science. And so, that's where The
Alchemy of Us comes in. Because here you are, you can
sit and read some stories. You can learn a little bit about
how technologies came to be, and then, learn about
how they impact us. So, citizen science projects are
great, because they allow people to learn about failure
and trial and error, but other people may
not have that kind of patience or that
kind of time. So, here's another
way to explore that, and that's by using stories. So, citizen science
and science stories, they kind of work together,
and they have the same role. >> Dan Turello: So, since
you mentioned trial and error and failure, you know, one
of things that kind of came up in your books,
from your book, was just how challenging
it is to be a scientist. I mean, you have story
after story of individuals and long hours during the
day, during the night, great personal sacrifice,
sometimes financial sacrifice. No clear, you know,
education of -- certainly, no certainty of
success in the short term. With all of these challenges, why would anyone
want to do this? >> Ainissa Ramirez: Well, I don't think scientists
see it that way. I mean, I'm a writer now,
and I'm using the same part of my brain that I
did as a scientist, which is that you're
trying to solve a problem. You're trying to
build something. You don't see it
is a lot of work. You see it as this is
what you need to do to make this thing happen. You're passionate
about something, and that's what pushes
you forward. So, I think that if we,
you know, look at science and we keep saying it's a lot
of hard work, what we're going to do is we're going
to deter a lot of people from doing science. I think if we reframe
it and say, hey, what do you want to solve? And by the way, you're going
to have to sit in the chair for a long time to
figure it out, but it's something
that's important to you. Then people are willing
to do it. If you want to learn
how to play the piano, you have to spend a
lot of time practicing. If you want to learn
how to paint, you have to do a lot
of time practicing. Things are worthwhile
take a lot of time, and it's the same
thing with science. So, I don't think scientists
see it as a lot of hard of work. I see it as this is
what you need to do, in order to learn this new
thing or build this new thing, or in my case as a writer,
to write this new thing. >> Dan Turello: So, we
started talking about glass and your experiment
in the workshop. Let's come full-circle, and glass is just
incredibly intriguing. Right now, we're talking a lot about vaccines, and
rightfully so. And the fact of the matter
is we wouldn't have any of those vaccines if it
weren't for the glass beakers in the labs of scientists. How is it that, as I understand
it, glass comes from sand. How do we get so many
different varietals of glass, everything from stained-glass to laboratory glass
from one material? >> Ainissa Ramirez: Oh,
that's a great question. Well, there aren't a whole
lot of glasses, because it's so hard to make glass. First of all, you have to work
at extremely high temperatures, temperatures that
are hotter than lava, and not many people want
to work at that level. But if you want to make
something like stained glass, well, it's just a matter
of adding some elements that give it the color. But in the sciences, an
important glass is Pyrex. Now we know Pyrex because, you
know, we can make all kinds of, you can bake all kinds of cool
things in it, and Pyrex is great in the sciences because, well,
it kind of keeps to itself. You can put acids in it,
and you don't have to worry about it creating a hole, is
good, because you don't want to have your experiment
fall on your lap. It can handle high temperatures. It doesn't change its shape. So, borosilicate
glasses, or Pyrex, were a tremendous discovery, and
it really helped the discovery of scientific breakthroughs,
because it gave us a way to hold and to see, and seeing and observing is really
part the scientific method. So, glass has been tremendously
important, and in our age today, when we're thinking about
vaccines, glass is important because it holds those vaccines. And so, we want to material
that doesn't do anything to the precious contents inside. And so, people are
working tremendously hard to make very good glass
in medicine, especially, this time we're in now. >> Dan Turello: So,
there's a lot of stories in your book about,
there's personal stories. There's also stories about
people competing with each other to come up with the
breakthrough. When you look at science today,
do the breakthroughs happen as a result of teamwork, or it still the individual
whose coming up with, you know, the leap of genius in
moving the science forward? >> Ainissa Ramirez: Well, it's never been the
independent genus. That's a big, fat myth, and I
don't know why it's out there, and I think that
it's unfortunate, because what it does is it
actually pushes a lot of people out of science, because
they think, well, I'm not a genius this way. So, I can't do it. You know, Edison had
a lot of patents. He had over 1,000 patents. Edison had a lot of people
working for him, too. We don't mention him. Nobel prizes, we usually give
prizes to three top scientists. Well, they had an army of
graduate students and post-docs, and, you know, there are
a whole lot of things that made that happen. So, it's a huge myth. That is not how science is done. Science can be done where small
groups of people work together. Science can be done
where large groups of people can work together,
and science can be done where you are working
independently, but you have collaborators
that are all over the world. But it's never an
independent, sole genius -- well, if that happens,
it's fairly rare. So, I don't think
that myth serves us. Science is really, really collaborative,
and it's iterative. I'll do this little piece, and
then, you do that little piece, and we kind of build this
bit by bit, and then, overall, we gain knowledge. So, I don't think that
myth serves us anymore. >> Dan Turello: So, we have
time for one last question. I'm going to go with
the billboard question. You know, if you could say
anything to the world at large and have it go on a
billboard, what would that be? And then, slightly more, a
slightly narrower version of that, if you could say
anything to the policymakers, to the folks who spend their
time, day in and day out, crafting legislation
and thinking about how to foster scientific
innovation, what would you say to that group of people? >> Ainissa Ramirez: Oh,
wow, that's a good question, and if I had to question
to people, I would say, how is it that you're going to
change the world for the better? And everyone has
some unique gift, and if you haven't found
it, dig and look for it, because you do have one, and
then, see how you're going to apply that to leave this
planet a little bit better. And for the policymakers,
I would just say be brave. You know, we're so
constrained because we're trying to please certain
people, but, you know, in order to do science, in
order to change this world for the better, you have to just
be a little bit more courageous. And so, I would just say to them
that we're really relying on you to just be a little more brave. >> Dan Turello: Ainissa, thanks
so much for being with us today. We really appreciate
your taking the time. That was Dr. Ainissa Ramirez with her book, The
Alchemy of Us. How Humans and Matter
Transformed One Another. It's now out on paperback. Ainissa, again. >> Ainissa Ramirez: Thank you.
