Now, continuing our look at the importance of science and our next guest has just written a book explaining how the most curious and they're often silly research can lead to crucial breakthroughs.

"The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog and Other Serious Discoveries of Silly Science" is by Carly Ann York.

Here now with Michelle Martin.

Professor Carly York, thank you so much for joining us.

- Thank you so much for having me.

- So, the focus of your book is stories that I bet a lot of people have actually heard about.

Research studies that they have been told were ridiculous and you pointed out the ways in which they were not or the ways in which basic research has actually yielded some really important discoveries that may not have seemed important at the time, but yielded tremendous benefits.

What gave you the idea for this?

- Well, the idea of this book really stemmed from my own research as a scientist and my experiences in talking with people about the value of my research.

I used to not do a great job of explaining why I did what I did and the value of my work.

And honestly, the reason I sat down to write this book was because I knew I had to get a better answer.

And so this is my thesis to the question of why curiosity-driven research matters.

You almost have too many examples in the book to name and some of them are actually quite hilarious and moving.

I think a lot of people remember the longtime Democratic Senator from Wisconsin, William Proxmire, who started something called the Golden Fleece Awards.

And one of the stories that you tell is about a grant to a Dr. Ronald Hutchinson.

What was Dr. Hutchinson studying and why did William Proxmire think it was ridiculous?

In this particular case, he was looking at monkeys and clenching teeth and that had direct medical implications but it was also the kind of research that is easy to twist around.

If you wanna make it sound silly, you can make it sound really silly and that's what Senator Proxmire did in this situation.

So he was studying aggression, specifically jaw clenching in rats, monkeys, and humans.

And so in 1975, as you write, he used Hutchinson's research in his second example of wasted federal funds.

And he wrote a scathing press release, as you said, the funding of this nonsense makes me almost angry enough to scream and kick or even clench my jaw.

And he said, in fact, the good doctor has made a fortune from his monkeys and in the process made a monkey out of the American taxpayer.

So Hutchinson experienced some really dire consequences from this, what happened to him?

- His research funding was stripped from him.

He had fellowships stripped from him.

It became his personal, like having his fire insurance canceled.

So he took a real personal hit because of this.

And I think it left a really lasting impression on the scientific community.

- Well, he got threats too apparently and all of his staff was laid off and all of his research.

Here's the part that really surprised me.

He actually sued Proxmire and his case went all the way to the Supreme Court and he won.

- He did.

- And what was the relevance of his research?

- This research, this is about tension and aggression and how we deal with emotions.

And we use animal models often to study very human things.

So by looking at things like jaw clenching in monkeys, we can extrapolate that to what we might be seeing in humans as well with both tension and aggression.

So it's not a far step at all to see how this could be really useful research.

- Give us another example.

Maybe you could do the one about, the title of your book is "The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog."

What about the levitating frog?

The levitating frog example, tell us about that.

- So that came from the lab of a Nobel Prize winner, actually, Andre Geim.

And he had what he called Friday night experiments where the goal was to go into the lab on Friday nights and really just like goof off in the lab and try things with zero expectations.

So this levitating frog came from a Friday night experiment.

He was working with these big electromagnets and he poured water into the machine, which he did later say was probably not a great idea, but he saw that there were the water, it levitated, it floated.

So once he saw that, he was like, "Well, what else can we get that we can levitate?"

And they tried a number of different things, including pizza.

And then they went down the hall and they borrowed this little frog from biology and they levitated the frog.

So that was the first time that that had been done.

That's the first time that they had electromagnets that were strong enough to levitate something as large as a frog.

And this can be useful because it provides a microgravity environment without having to leave Earth.

So you can do a whole lot in terms of studying what might be happening in space to different bodies without the expense of actually having to send them space.

- Or the risk, frankly, of sending somebody to space.

So the whole point of all of this is to explain the value of basic research.

So for people who aren't familiar with that term, what does basic research mean?

- Basic research is simply curiosity-driven research.

So it stands opposed to applied research, which has a really specific goal to solve a problem or to create a product of some kind.

Basic research, on the other hand, has no goals whatsoever except to obtain knowledge.

So there will be no product at the end of a curiosity-driven research project, at least not immediately.

Maybe decades down the road, that information will become really useful for something else, but that was never the intention behind the research.

- And has the United States been a mecca for basic research, at least up to this point?

- Yeah, so the NSF was created in 1950.

- The National Science Foundation.

- Yes, and the whole goal of that foundation was to support curiosity-driven research.

And the reason why they wanted to support this kind of research is because it had been underfunded up until that point.

The US hadn't done a whole lot of basic research.

They relied more on European scientists, and they actually thought that that was a national threat to not be doing our own basic research.

So the idea was to create this foundation that would support curiosity-driven research, knowing that there might not be a product at the end of it.

Once we had the National Science Foundation in hand, we became the most innovative country in the world in terms of scientific progress.

We've had more Nobel Prize winners in the past five years than any other country.

So it has worked.

The goal of creating the NSF and supporting this kind of research has absolutely worked, and I hope we can keep funding it.

- Well, you know, your book arrives at an important moment.

As we are speaking, the Trump administration cut off nearly $2.6 billion in federal research grants to Harvard and is proposing to slash the National Science Foundation budget by more than half.

And it's just interesting because the administration is very keen to bring manufacturing back to the United States.

You know, their argument is that this is not just an economic threat to the stability of the country, it's a national security threat.

But if that's the case, it would seem that they would want to invest in basic research.

They would want to invest in education.

And yet, as we see, there's been an aggressive attack on particularly sort of elite universities, but also this funding for basic research.

How do you understand that?

- The only way that I can make it work in my own mind is to say that they must not understand the value of this because the value is huge.

And honestly, we're not even talking about a whole lot of money.

The NSF budget has been like $9 billion, and then compared to like new funds for ICE, which were 45 billion that just came out, it's a really small number.

And the payoff with that small number is huge in terms of innovation and being able to be leaders in science in the world.

So I cannot think of any logical reason why you would want to cut money out of the NSF.

And so I have to just tell myself they must not understand.

- So is this a problem of, that you don't, forgive me, you all as a group, as scientists, just have not done a good job of explaining why your work matters?

- Yes, in a lot of ways, absolutely.

So it's a complicated kind of a problem too.

For a long time, academia really actually frowned upon scientists taking time to talk with the public.

It's called the Carl Sagan effect actually, where the idea is if you spend a lot of time talking to the public and talking to media, then you are no longer a serious scientist.

- Oh, a popularizer, one of those, oh, okay.

I got it.

- Carl Sagan, he was nominated to be part of the National Academy of Sciences and he was ultimately denied it because he clearly could have done more research if he hadn't spent so much time on TV shows and books, et cetera.

So that kind of haunts academia a lot.

And it's changing for sure.

Now people are much more concerned about the broader impacts of their research and how it's affecting communities, but there still isn't really much formal training that's happening and real conversation about how to actually get this information to the public in the best possible ways.

- You know, you've made the point that people don't always make the connection between the research that's done, how the research was done, and the ultimate outcome.

What about drugs that a lot of people know right now, like Ozempic or Wegovy or GLP-1s, and things like that?

What's the origin story of those?

- Ozempic is a great example of this.

Ozempic actually came from studying the proteins within Gila monster venom.

So a Gila monster-- - Gila monster venom, okay, I got it.

- Gila monsters are, they're pretty big lizards.

They live out in the desert and they are venomous, but they also have this pretty cool ecology where they don't need to eat frequently.

And it turns out that one of the peptides in their venom is what allows them to keep their insulin levels nice and stable.

And it turns out that that is very similar to GLP-1, which is a peptide that is being used to help stabilize blood sugar in people.

Ozempic started for diabetes, and now it's being used for weight loss.

But there were decades between the time of identifying this peptide and realizing how it could potentially be useful and figuring out how to actually get it to work well and to get it to be accepted.

- So is that part of the problem here?

Is that people, some of these innovations take years to yield practical or commercial results?

- There was a study that was done that looked at the major drugs that are used in this country.

And the number is something like 80% of them ended up stemming back to some basic research question that had no intention of actually creating a medicine.

And the average time between that discovery and the creation of a drug was like 30 years.

So yeah, it's the long haul.

Support of basic research, it means you're gonna have to use your imagination and trust that this just building of knowledge is gonna ultimately pay off in the long run.

- If the federal government withdraws from basic research, is there any other entity that could fill that void?

- There are some private institutions.

I think that we are going to find a lot more stepping up soon.

The vast majority of basic research in this country is funded by the NSF, but I think scientists are finding now that perhaps we've become a little too reliant on government funding, especially when it is at the whims of political parties.

I think we're gonna have to diversify in order to stay resilient and sustainable as a discipline.

- You know, in the proposed budget, the National Science Foundation support would drop from more than 330,000 scientists, students, and teachers to just under 90,000.

What kind of real world consequences do you think that that might have?

- It's just huge.

It's like, it's immeasurable to think about that drop in the scientific workforce.

It'll affect everything.

It'll affect how innovative we can be with technology, with medicine, with our infrastructure.

I don't think there's any part of our lives that won't ultimately end up getting touched by that big of a hit.

- I wonder whether COVID has something to do with this.

I mean, there was a recent survey by the Pew Research Foundation that found that trust in scientists has fallen from 87% in 2020 to 76% in 2024.

And that is still a higher trust level than a lot of other professions, including journalism and Congress and things of that sort.

I mean, let's just be clear about that.

Nevertheless, that is a significant drop.

And I do wonder whether COVID had something to do with it.

What do you think?

- The way that I sort of saw that unfolding was science was happening in real time before the public's eyes.

And I think that that really pointed to some of our weaknesses in how we teach science.

When you're in high school, you walk into a lab and you're handed a list of instructions and all your materials are laid out there in front of you and you follow the directions.

If you do it right, you get some canned result.

And that's the science that most people know.

And the reality is it's very different from that when you're practicing science.

We don't get a list of instructions or materials.

We're figuring it all out as we go.

And there's a ton of trial and error.

And learning new information, it's part of the process, new information all the time, even if it contradicts former information.

For us, that's just the scientific process at play.

But to the public, it looked like we didn't know what we were doing.

And I understand why, but that's how the scientific process actually unfolds.

We need to just keep going and gaining all the information, even if it is contradictory.

And I think that the confusion comes down to how they think science should go versus how it really does.

- One of the things that I'm curious about is that as you've pointed out, is that the United States in the post-World War II era has led the world in basic research.

And I just wonder though, if the US retreats from basic research, where is that brilliance going to go?

Are they going to go back to Europe?

Are they going to go to Canada?

Are they gonna go to China?

- I think all of those are options.

I've seen a lot of initiatives in Europe calling towards graduate students in the US saying they will happily accept them and support them.

I personally have students who I have encouraged to apply abroad because things are just so tough here right now in graduate school.

So I think, yeah, I think China for sure.

And they're always at our tails when it comes to being the leaders of innovation and Europe as well.

But we're certainly gonna lose a ton of minds.

- Well, Professor Carly New York, thanks so much for talking with us.

- Thanks for having me.