580- Mr Yuk

This episode discusses the story of Mister Yuk, a symbol developed to prevent children from ingesting hazardous substances.

1. Mister Yuk was created to help children identify and avoid poisonous substances.
2. It was designed by Dr. Richard Moriarty to be visually unappealing to children and to prompt them to associate the symbol with danger.
3. Despite its local success, Mister Yuk did not become a national symbol partly due to regional variations in poison control promotion.
4. The symbol was part of a larger movement to improve household safety through better packaging and clearer labeling of hazardous materials.
5. Changes in child-resistant packaging laws and the establishment of a national poison control number reduced the relevance of regional symbols like Mister Yuk.

1: The Creation of Mister Yuk

A detailed look at the inception of Mister Yuk, including its design considerations aimed at making hazardous substances repulsive to children. Gillian Jacobs: "Mister Yuk was meant to be repulsive, to keep kids safe from household poisons."

2: Cultural Impact and Recognition

Examines the broader adoption and recognition of Mister Yuk across different states and its mixed success as a national symbol. Roman Mars: "While Mister Yuk became a household name in some areas, it never reached nationwide prominence."

3: Evolution of Poison Control

Discusses the evolution of poison control measures and public safety campaigns, highlighting how changes over time affected Mister Yuk's relevance. Gillian Jacobs: "As safety measures evolved, the need for a symbol like Mister Yuk diminished."

1. Use clear labeling on all hazardous materials in the home.
2. Educate children early about the dangers of certain substances using age-appropriate language and symbols.
3. Keep up-to-date with local poison control resources and ensure all caregivers know how to contact them.
4. Regularly check and child-proof areas where dangerous substances are stored.
5. Promote awareness of poison control resources in your community to enhance safety for all children.

Mr. Yuk is a neon green circular sticker with a cartoon face on it. His face is scrunched up with his eyes squeezed tight and his tongue is sticking out of its mouth. It's the face you make when you taste something disgusting. He's the pictorial embodiment of the sentiment of yuck. Aptly enough: he was designed to be the symbol for hazardous substances, aimed at deterring children from ingesting them. The idea what that if you saw a Mr. Yuk sticker on something around the house, it meant that that something was poison.
Friend of the show, Gillian Jacobs, is a BIG FAN of Mr Yuk, who turns out to be a hometown hero of her beloved Pittsburgh, and talked Roman through the origins of the mean, green face that was meant to save children from their worst impulses.

Plus, we revisit another story about warning symbols from our archive: the quest to find a symbol that would warn future humans of dangerous radiation 10,000 years in the future.

Mr. Yuk

People

Gillian Jacobs, Roman Mars, Dr. Richard Moriarty

Companies

Pittsburgh Poison Center

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

Roman Mars

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This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Every town or city has its own regional celebrity who everyone recognizes. Maybe that person is a high school athlete who made it to the major leagues. Maybe they're a titan of industry.

Maybe they're a flamboyant attorney with an excessive amount of billboard ads. Something wrong? Call Anne Fong. Some of them become so successful that their acclaim spreads around the world, and sometimes not. Here to tell us about one of her own favorite local celebrities is actress, reporter, and friend of the show, Gillian Jacobs.

Hey, Gillian. Hi, Roman. It's so delightful to have you here. I'm delighted as well. It's my favorite place to be.

So, Gillian, you reached out to us because you wanted to talk about a very specific, famous face that you saw all over your hometown. Yes. So I come from the great city of Pittsburgh, also known as Pittsburgh, to locals, and there was a guy who was so famous there that I thought everyone knew his name. And it turns out that's not quite the case. So who is this mysterious local celebrity?

Gillian Jacobs

I'm gonna leave you in suspense for a little bit longer. So just to back up and explain, this guy recently popped into my head, because a few months ago, I was at home watching a football game, which is not common practice for me. Read Taylor Swift. But as I was watching the game, I noticed that one of the players had something on his helmet. It was this little round green sticker.

And I was thinking, why am I drawn to this little green circular sticker on the back of his head? And staring at it, unleashed this voice in my head. Mister Yuk is me. Mister Yuck is green.

Mister Yuck. I thought that the football player was wearing a Mister Yuk sticker, and it turns out I was not even close. That sticker means that a player is allowed to communicate with the sidelines via a radio in his helmet, but it still sent me down this deep rabbit hole of why Mister Yuk was so deeply embedded into my psyche that I was seeing him on the back of a football player's head. Why, indeed? Have you ever heard of Mister Yuk?

Roman Mars

I have. I'm familiar with Mister Yuk because he showed up briefly on this episode that we did years and years ago. But I also recognize him because I was a kid alive in the midwest in the 1980s. Central Ohio for me, but for people who are not midwestern Gen Xers, who is Mister Yuk? Mister Yuk is a neon green circular sticker with a cartoon face on it.

Gillian Jacobs

His face is scrunched up with his eyes squeezed tight, and his tongue is sticking out of its mouth. It's the face you make when you taste something disgusting. Yeah. He's the pictorial embodiment of the sentiment of yuck. Right.

He's a symbol for hazardous substances aimed at deterring children from ingesting them. He was basically created to indicate that if you saw a mister yuck sticker on something, it meant that. That something was poison. Do not ingest. And I grew up thinking he was as famous as smokey bear.

Roman Mars

Right. And if I remember correctly, parents would get these sheets of the Mister Yuk stickers and stick them on dangerous stuff, like drain cleaner or whatever a kid could get his hands on underneath the sink. Exactly. So Mister Yuk was created in 1971 by a physician named doctor Richard Moriarty, who was a pediatrician and the founder of the Pittsburgh Poison center. And as the head of the Pittsburgh Poison center, he wanted to accomplish two different things.

Gillian Jacobs

One, he wanted to prevent kids from ingesting potentially dangerous substances. And two, he wanted to teach parents that when their kids did ingest a potentially dangerous substance, to call a poison control center before rushing them to a hospital because there was a good chance that the kid would be just fine. And calling poison control could save you a lot of time and money. Right, and just generally save taxpayer money, too. Yes.

So, Roman, in your tenure as a parent, have you ever had to call poison control? No. Thankfully, no. No, not with any of my children. But I have always been fascinated by the poison control hotline, because basically, it's this type of very low ambition free healthcare service that you can call anytime for a very specific kind of medical advice.

Roman Mars

So I've always wondered how that came to be. Well, Roman, you are a very lucky man, because I'm here to tell you so. Poison centers are actually a pretty recent phenomenon. Until the 19th century, we mostly had to rely on conspicuous packaging and poison labels for poison prevention. Apothecaries were required to store hazardous substances in irregularly shaped bottles so they wouldn't be mixed up with the other products.

Gillian Jacobs

And also, in the mid 18 hundreds, it became mandated by the American Pharmaceutical association to clearly label a bottle with the word poison or with the medically accepted poison symbol at the time. And that poison symbol being the skull and crossbones. You got it. But by the time we rolled around to the end of the 19th and early 20th century, there actually still wasn't a ton else being done in terms of preventative poison control, which was a huge problem, because around then, a brand new danger was entering american homes. Mister Clean gets rid of dirt and grime and grease.

Matthew Keelty

In just a minute, Mister clean will. Clean your whole house and everything. Floors, doors. Oh, yes, the dastardly Mister clean, the worst of all. Now, I don't want to blame everything on Mister Clean, especially because he actually wasn't invented at this time, but he and other packaged cleaners represented this huge cultural shift taking place.

Gillian Jacobs

In the early 19 hundreds, there was. Really an explosion of consumer product marketing and production, and there were all sorts of products that were coming on the market, like vacuum cleaners, but also household cleaners that were pre prepared and packaged. This is Doctor Marion Moser Jones. She's an associate professor and historian of public health at Ohio State University. She says that at the turn of the 20th century, there was this whole chemical revolution taking place in the United States.

In the early 19 hundreds, Americans developed a kind of obsession with cleanliness and hygiene. There was also a huge rise in mass production and advertising, which meant more of these prepackaged cleaners ended up in homes around the US. So suddenly, whereas before, it might have been that in an average household, there might have been some lye soap or couple of potential poisonous substances, now, there were all of these packaged cleaners. You had a floor cleaner or floor. Polish, but most of these products being marketed were not being labeled correctly.

Marion Moser Jones

So this was very prevalent in turn of the 20th century us society. These substances, these products that were mislabeled, and there wasn't really a requirement to label them. And certainly, if you were manufacturing some kind of product, I mean, why would you put a giant warning sign on it if all of your competitors are not. I can remember, and I lived through a time when there was a wonderful slogan called better living through chemistry. And consumers demanded household conveniences.

Alan Wolf

And at least some of these chemicals and some of these products were toxic. And so who is this? This is Doctor Alan Wolf, and he wears many, many impressive hats. And two of them are pediatrician and the co director of the pediatric Environmental Health center at Boston Children's Hospital. He says that these new cleaning products were made up of incredibly dangerous and toxic chemicals.

Gillian Jacobs

And because chemical companies really resisted proper warning label regulation, it was children in particular who were the big victims of accidental poisonings during this time. Kind of post World War two and the baby boomer generation, a lot of infants and then toddlers came of age in the late 1940s and early 1950s. And the peak age of poisoning is somewhere between one and three years of age. And that rise of dangerous household substances wasn't limited to cleaning products either. Around the 1940s, the pharmaceutical industry came out with a marketing scheme that probably at the time, sounded like a great idea, but was actually terrible in execution.

Candy aspirin. I'm old enough, Gillian, to remember taking candy aspirin. And it was just that it was little. It was orange flavored tablets and very attractive to children. Oh, yes, let's make potentially dangerous medications synonymous with candy.

Roman Mars

What could possibly go wrong? Right? Not so fun fact. Within three years of candy aspirin debuting, preschool aged children represented 80% of aspirin deaths. That is horrifying.

Gillian Jacobs

I know. So there's this influx of dangerous products in homes, most of which are not labeled correctly. And on top of that, if a child got into one of those toxins, many doctors didn't even know what or how much of those products would be lethal if ingested by children. No one could keep all this in their head. You know, what's the toxicity of the little things that you find in new shoe boxes that are supposed to keep the shoes dry?

Alan Wolf

The little silica packets, are they poisonous? Are mothballs poisonous? Nobody could keep that all in their head. So Lewis had the great idea of filling out little three by five cards. So that Lewis was Lewis Godalman, the man who developed the first poison control center.

Gillian Jacobs

He was a pharmacist in Chicago at St. Luke's Hospital, and he saw this issue of a lack of information on poisonings and decided to do something about it. He started collecting information on poisonous substances and filling it on these little index cards. He ended up accumulating information on roughly 9000 different substances. And by the 1950s, he was the go to poison expert.

Alan Wolf

And he sort of organized an informal referral service that people recognized him as an expert who was interested and could talk to these families and talk to healthcare providers about what the poisonings were and how they should be managed. Physicians at St. Luke's Hospital, where he worked, started consulting with Godalmin. And then word spread to other hospitals in Chicago and eventually to other cities. Godalmin would personally answer calls at any time, day or night, from his home.

Gillian Jacobs

But it's really hard to be a one man band slash encyclopedia Brown of poisons. So eventually, Godalman, along with Doctor Edward Press, founded the first poison control center in the United States in 1953. So that was the background for the start of the poison control movement in the United States. After that, poison control centers started taking off like gangbusters. There was a huge number of centers opening up across the country throughout the 1960s.

Alan Wolf

It kind of became a marketing technique for your local hospital. Like, we have such high standards at our hospital, we have a poison control center. So in the 1960s, that really took hold. So that by the mid sixties to late sixties, there were over 600 poison centers in the United States. But see, the problem with this influx of poison control centers was that the quality of care between the poison centers really could be inconsistent.

Some of them covered a neighborhood, a few thousand people. Others covered millions of people. Some of them were staffed by secretaries or pediatric and family practice, healthcare providers or trainees, whoever. So there was a lot of variability, and there were complaints. These were hard to reach.

They weren't adequately staffed, they weren't adequately publicized, and the information they gave was variable. And this disjointed approach to poison centers was a really dangerous problem. Doctor Wolf actually worked as a poison center operator, and he says that it's a really high stress environment. When I was in the poison control center and talking to a parent, and they are saying, my child just swallowed floor wax. And so you had to, you know, I had to juggle the microfish reader and put in what does Florax contain?

And then when you found out the detergents, you had to flip that out and flip in the other kind of management microfiche reader. Meanwhile, the parent is holding online. He told me one story that really illustrated how important it was to have reliable care at these centers. I remember a call I got at 07:00 a.m. One morning of two workers in Massachusetts who were found down at change of shift.

Gillian Jacobs

These two men had been working in a chemical plant and were found unconscious. Their job was to stir this sludge, that was actually toxic discharge, and they weren't wearing protective gear. And unfortunately, this particular sludge contained a substance called propionitrile, which when you inhale it, is turned into cyanide. So they were both suffering from cyanide poisoning. Oh, my God.

I know, it's horrific. But luckily, in this case, Doctor Wolf, who is a trained specialist, was there to answer the call. We recommended giving the cyanide antidote kit very quickly, and they were saved. So in a situation like that, you really need someone who's highly trained to answer your call, which, at the time, I mean, it was kind of a roll of the dice, because there are 600 different call centers with varying degrees of reliability. Yes.

And this was one of the big problems that Doctor Richard Moriarty, the father of Mister Yuk, wanted to solve in 1971. He wanted to find a way to make sure parents had the information of a trusted poison control center if their child ingested anything dangerous. Doctor Moriarty actually passed away in 2023, but this is a clip from an interview he did a few years before he died. We needed to get out the word that there was a for real poison center, for real people that were there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and they sort of knew what they were doing. And if you had a problem, give us a buzz.

Richard Moriarty

So we had to get our phone number out to the world. On top of the lack of knowledge around reliable poison centers like the one he was running, Doctor Moriarty realized that there was a very unique problem that impacted the children of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh specifically. Oh, what is that? So, as you remember, the medically accepted warning symbol for poison since the 18 hundreds was the skull and crossbones.

Gillian Jacobs

Right. Well, in Pittsburgh, that symbol carries a different connotation for kids. The traditional warning symbol was the skull and crossbones, which just happened to be part of the logo for the Pittsburgh Pirates and still is. Okay. And I thought, you know, that doesn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense.

Roman Mars

Oh, my God, that's so true. Yeah. You know, we love our sports in Pittsburgh, you know, so the Pittsburgh Pirates, this is huge for us. And there's a perhaps apocryphal story that the children of Pittsburgh would see a skull and crossbones image, and rather than think, dangerous, poisonous, I must stay away. They would think, oh, my beloved baseball team.

Gillian Jacobs

You know, maybe this bottle of Windex is a Pittsburgh Pirates beverage. Yeah. So doctor Moriarty had the idea to create a brand new symbol that would both spread awareness of the Pittsburgh poison Center. And was original and free from any other associations, one that would only and strictly mean, do not eat. He wanted something akin to Smokey bear or McGruff the crime dog, anthropomorphized PSA.

And doctor Moriarty believed that for this symbol to be effective with children, they needed to engage with them in the design process. And so he worked with a PR firm to pull together a focus group of kids. And we started off basically with sort of preschool age kids and said to them, if you got into a poison, what would happen to you? And the recurring answers were, you die, you get sick. Your mother would yell at you, okay?

Richard Moriarty

And we thought, those are all pretty. Good things, accurate things, good answers. So Maury already worked with a guy named Dick Garber of the PR firm Vic Maitland and Associates. And they interviewed children five and under and used their answers to come up with the design of the face and the color of the sticker. And this is the mister yuck sticker that you thought erroneously was on the back of a football player's helmet.

Roman Mars

The sort of the squinty face, the tongue. And it's like this bright fluorescent green. Exactly. So the thought process behind the color was, which color will children like the least? Which color will they be repelled by?

Gillian Jacobs

Clearly, the color stuck with me. I think I'm seeing it every time I see a green circle. So they presented children with several colors to choose from, and the consensus was that they liked the fluorescent green the least. And while they did use a graphic designer to come up with the initial sketches, when it came to the final design, this is my favorite part. They held a contest for kids via the Pittsburgh Poison control Center, and a fourth grader from West Virginia named Wendy Brown designed the logo and won the contest.

Roman Mars

Oh, go for it, Wendy. Nice. We tried to track her down for this story. We could not find her. But, Wendy, if you're listening, congratulations.

Gillian Jacobs

So they had the design and the color, but they still needed a catchy name. We all know how important names are, right? So they went back to the kids, and they showed them the sick face in fluorescent green. And one kid said, he looks yucky. And that was a mic drop moment.

You got your name, mister Yuck, out. Of the mouth of babes, literally. In the words of Doctor Moriarty, the skull and crossbones were designed by adults. For adults. Mister Yuk is actually the first symbol specifically designed for kids.

Roman Mars

I mean, creating a symbol for young children is really an interesting design challenge, because a good portion of your audience doesn't even know how to read. So it has to be something very literal, very memorable, and very easy to understand. Right. So how popular did the Mister Yuk program end up getting? So the Pittsburgh Poison center mailed many, many sheets of the stickers to households around Pennsylvania and beyond, which definitely got the word out.

Gillian Jacobs

But Mister Yuk really took off in 1975 after a PSA ran during the 1975 Super bowl. Home is full of lots of things that children shouldn't touch. Home is full of bad things that can hurt you very much. Now there's a man whose face is green that you ought to get to know. He'll warn you when danger's coming, fast or slow get to know his face in every single place.

Parents like my mom dutifully slap them onto bottles, spray cans, medications, yada, yada, yada. And for kids like myself, Mister Yuk was a daily household presence. My mom even put one on our home phone. Well, she's, like, contributing to the symbiotic drift here, Gillian. Like, what is that?

No, no. This was actually encouraged by the boys and control center so that you would always have the number at hand at the ready. She wasn't suggesting that the phone was poisonous and that you were gonna eat it or something. Okay. She was worried about a lot of things in my childhood.

I don't think that was one of them. So usage of Mister Yuk actually did spread slightly beyond Pittsburgh, but it never became the ubiquitous national symbol for poison control centers. Why do you think that is? I think one part of it was that initially doctor Moriarty would only send the stickers to hospitals who agreed to participate in his Pittsburgh poison center program. And this required that the Pittsburgh poison center would be the central hub and all the other centers would have to report back to them.

And, you know, I think some other cities and regions want to do their own thing. A lot of hospitals saw it as a way to create attention for their local poison control center, and some of them even created rival mascots. Mister Yuk's biggest competition was Officer Ugg, who was a cartoon cop with his hands over his mouth. He also came with his own theme song. I'll have you know I'm officer and my name is Officer R.

Remember never to touch voices and such when you see Officer rum. What the hell is that? It doesn't even make any sense. It does not. The children aren't officer Ugg.

Why are they saying I'm officer Ugg? I don't get it. I don't get it at all. Too cute. I want my poison control mascot to scare the crap out of me.

That wasn't even the end of it. There were other rival mascots. Like, no psyop the snake. What? Do you get it, Roman?

No Psyop? No the snake. Oh, I'm sorry. No psyop is poison spelled backwards. Thought that would be obvious to you.

There was also pinky the elephant and my favorite, Uncle Barf. Well, Uncle Barf. I could see that one working. That is a good name. Yeah, we all had an uncle Barf.

I know. I actually think that one still has legs. You know, maybe it's not too late. Internet. Do your thing.

So, as you can see, this disjointed, uncoordinated approach meant Mister Yuk wasn't as recognized in most parts of the US. And this war of the poison control mascots kind of illustrated the problem with poison control centers across the country at the time, because there still was no single coordinated poison control agency. So then what happened to Mister Yuk? By the 1980s and nineties, the number of poison control centers started decline. And then in the early two thousands, Congress passed the poison Control Center Enhancement and Awareness act, which allocated support to poison centers.

So now, 100% of the US population is served by just a single toll free phone number from anywhere in the country. Which is great, but it also means that Mister Yuk wasn't relevant anymore because people didn't need to be directed to the Pittsburgh poison Center's number. So basically because we have one single national poison control number, Mister Yuk just wasn't really useful anymore. Exactly. The Pittsburgh Poison center does still distribute stickers for fun, but they now have the national poison control number, which is 1802 221220.

I'll also side note that when the national number was established, there was a push to adopt Mister Yuck as the national symbol, but it was rejected in favor of. Do you know, Roman? I mean, was it the skull and. Crossbones again, close, but no cigar. It's a red pill bottle with a white skull and crossbones.

I mean, it's fine, it's fine, but it's not iconic like Mister Yuck, in my opinion. I mean, well, the problem with skull and crossbones phones is it is iconic, but it's iconic for a lot of different reasons. Like, it's. It's cool looking. It's, like, cool for pirates.

Roman Mars

You know, it's just not all poison anymore. But I guess what I'm curious about is if the Mister Yuk branding really worked. Like, did it actually reduce childhood accidental poisonings in and around the Pittsburgh area at least. So Mister Yuk launched in 1971, and within just a couple of years, rates of childhood poisoning actually began plummeting. Wow.

Gillian Jacobs

Really? Okay. Yeah. But not because of Mister Yuk. Mister Yuk is great for educational purposes and awareness, but you really need to prevent the kid who's really determined to get into that bottle.

Marion Moser Jones

I mean, a three year old or a four year old has little impulse control and a lot of curiosity. And so I've had one three year old and a four year old before. And so I know this, they may not be deterred by any kind of symbol. Deterred by, you know, packaging that prevents them from getting into the actual package. That was Doctor Moser Jones again.

Gillian Jacobs

And she says that in 1970, Congress passed the poison Prevention Packaging act, which mandated child resistant packaging. In the intervening years, child poisoning deaths have fallen by roughly 73%, and they have stayed low ever since. By 1981, childhood poisoning death rates had fallen to 25% of their 1961 levels. And since 1972, childhood poisoning death rates have not gone back up. So this has saved lives, this kind of packaging and this enforcement.

Marion Moser Jones

Although some people may criticize it as being the nanny state, it has saved lives. I mean, children need a nanny, right? They do. They totally do. This is not an example of the nanny state.

Roman Mars

I mean, this is huge. Better packaging, better public awareness, quality access to poison control centers combined to, like, reduce a number in extremely meaningful way, they stop these kids from getting sick or dying from household poisons. It's amazing. Yes. And I also have to mention that some have questioned the effectiveness of Mister Yuk.

Gillian Jacobs

Some studies found that the symbol didn't determine children. And, in fact, some kids were actually drawn to ingesting harmful substances because of Mister Yuk. What's funny is that I do remember the Mister Yuk stickers. So Doctor Moser Jones actually grew up with Mister Yuk as a kid in St. Louis.

Marion Moser Jones

The thing that stuck with me most was that in our basement, my mother had this old bottle. It was actually a jug with a skull and crossbones on it. And that was much more impactful than Mister Yuck stickers. And again, I mean, I grew up in a town where there were these characters, like Oscar the grouch in Sesame street, who was sort of a yucky character. I mean, he lived in the trash.

He sang these songs about being dirty. And so they were kind of these kind of dirty. And, you know, yucky characters were somewhat appealing. And so I do think that there is a problem when you have a sticker that could be appealing to kids as well and not just scary. I mean, this is a problem for all symbols.

Roman Mars

I mean, just like, you know, kids and people just have their own opinions about what a symbol means, and it always shifts. Yes. And you know what? I don't want to sell Mister Yuck short at all. I love the guy.

Gillian Jacobs

You know, it was a campaign that spread a lot of important awareness about the poison control system. So Mister Yuk may not have been the hero of the poison control movement, but he was definitely a hero in Pittsburgh. Indeed. Well, thank you so much, Gillian, for bringing us the complete history of Mister Yuk. I had such a fun time talking with you.

My absolute pleasure. No, no, no. This is serious. We could make you delirious. Delirious.

You should have a healthy fear of us. Fear of us? Too much of us is dangerous.

Roman Mars

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Matthew Keelty

Ever. Since this next story first aired back in 2014, it has been a crowd favorite. We thought wed share it with you again because it features an appearance from a certain mean green pictorial embodiment of the word yuck. Enjoy. I want to start with a letter.

Roman Mars

This is reporter Matthew Keelty. This is a letter that got sent out to a couple hundred people back in 1990. So, Roman, if you have the letter and don't mind. Yeah, sure, okay. Dear so and so, the safe disposal of nuclear waste is one of the most pressing issues facing the United States today.

Matthew Keelty

It totally is. But if you actually, if you skip down past that, there's, I mean, that's just about how there's these people who are planning on burying a bunch of nuclear waste out in the New Mexico desert at this place called the waste isolation pilot plant. But if you go down, like, another. Paragraph, you have been nominated to participate in a study sponsored by Sandia national Laboratories that will identify what kinds of markers should be placed at the Wipper site. Just jump down a little bit further.

Roman Mars

To develop a marker system that will remain operational during the performance period of the site. 10,000 years. There it is. There it is. That is the part that I love.

John Lomberg

I had a moment of wondering if it was a joke. This is John Lomberg. He received one of these letters, which makes sense, given his line of work. I'm an artist and I work on projects involving unusual communication problems. The dude spent time in the seventies working with Carl Sagan and Ann Drewian on the Voyager golden record, one of.

Roman Mars

NASA's attempts at communicating with aliens. So you'd think this sort of thing would be right in his wheelhouse. You know, usually you don't get asked to design something that's going to last 10,000 years. That's twice the span of recorded human history. The federal government really was calling on him to help protect people 10,000 years in the future.

The waste isolation pilot plant, WIPP, or WIP for short, was ordered into existence by Congress in 1979. The thinking was the US ought to have a safe place to put radioactive byproducts from nuclear weapons manufacturing and nuclear power plants. And a quick refresher. Even though you don't see radiation and you might not feel its effects right away, exposure to radioactive materials can destroy your body at a molecular level. It can leave burns, it can cause cancer, it can even mutate your DNA.

Matthew Keelty

And the thing about radioactivity is that it is very spreadable. Say youve got a tool that touched a piece of plutonium. Now, that tool is radioactive. And say a worker was wearing protective gloves while using that tool. Chances are those gloves are radioactive, too.

Roman Mars

The waste isolation pilot plant was designed to store all this stuff and keep us all safe from it. The website is in New Mexico, deep in the desert, about 26 miles east of Carlsbad. It's a really cool place. It reminded me of kind of the headquarters of Spectre or Doctor no in a James Bond novel, because it's this big underground facility filled with technicians in coveralls and it's all color coded, depending on what they did. John saw the website in person when he accepted the invitation from Sandia Labs to go be a part of their big groupthink on designing a 10,000 year warning for the place.

John Lomberg

How could you turn it down? This was in 1991. So the workers took John into an elevator shaft, and they go down about half a mile beneath the surface. And that's where John saw these enormous caverns. They've carved out this repository in basically a salt deposit, salt deposit 200 million years old.

And, you know, we think of salt as white, but this salt, for reasons I don't understand, was kind of a salmon y pink color. So the walls of this place were all crystalline with this sort of shot through with these hues of salmon and pink and orange. So it was actually quite, quite beautiful. All this radioactive stuff will all be loaded into thousands of oil drums and packed into these caverns. And then this underground chamber will be sealed up and left alone.

Matthew Keelty

Years will pass, and those years will become decades, and those decades will become centuries, and centuries will roll into millennia, and people above ground will come and go. Cultures will rise and fall. And all the while, below the surface, the salt will do what salt does. With the right temperature and pressure, it will slowly creep, making that cave full of waste smaller and smaller and smaller, until the salt swallows up all those oil drums, crushing them and tuning them. And so there, solidified in the earth's crust, will be these gloves and these tools and these little bits from bombs that we made, all still radioactive, poisonous for more than 200,000 years, basically forever.

Roman Mars

Storing something dangerous safely forever is a huge design problem. In fact, the jury's still out on whether they solved the basics of the storage problem at all. In February of 2014, a leak was detected that exposed several workers to low levels of radiation. And wipping has been closed since. The Department of Energy now predicts that it could be up to three years before WiPP is fully operational again.

We know these facts because we can look it up and read the news in a shared language. But the problem that John Lomberg was brought out to New Mexico to solve was not about communicating the danger of whip to people today. He wanted to figure out how to tell people millennia from now that this place is dangerous. When John Lomberg arrived in New Mexico, he met the teammates he'd be collaborating with. There were geologists, linguists, astrophysicists.

Matthew Keelty

There was science fiction writer Gregory Benford. And he would be the archaeologist. This is Maureen, Maureen Kaplan, an archaeologist. With the consulting firm ERG. Do you remember what you thought of the people they'd gotten together, like, when you first saw them?

It was like, oh, my goodness, she was kind of starstruck. I went, John Lomberg? Wait a moment. Aren't you the one who did the picture that went off into space in terms of trying to communicate with whoever might find Voyager. So I was impressed.

After hellos and whatnot, the Sandia folks split all these smarties into two different. Groups so they'd have kind of two separate thinking processes. John was in group B. Marine group A, and then they laid down the ground rules. They told us to assume that we're designing a warning marker for humans.

Not aliens, not cyborgs, but for a. Human being biologically identical to us. But who's alive 500 or 5000 or 10,000 years from now. How can you make a message that that human will understand? And why?

Why 10,000 years? As far as I could determine, the logic seemed to be, well, if we told them to design a marker to last 250,000 years, that's clearly a ridiculous and absurd proposition. 10,000 years doesn't sound quite so crazy. So it was just pulled out of the air. In other words, even though this site is going to be radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, this panel was only responsible for keeping this place sufficiently labeled for humans for the next 10,000 years.

Let's get some perspective. Think about where humanity was 10,000 years ago. Back then, there was a hot new technology taking the world by storm. It was called farming. Before the agricultural revolution, humans subsisted as gatherer hunters.

Roman Mars

Biologically, we are the same people we were 10,000 years ago. Actually, that's true going back over 40,000 years, but culturally, we share almost nothing with these people. Definitely not language. Well, no, because the linguists tell us that language changes. Language has a half life, just like radioactive materials have a half life, and.

Matthew Keelty

This half life isn't very long. Think about Shakespeare. My cousin Westmoreland. Nay, my fair cousin, Alack, what poverty my muse brings forth. But this dotage of our general's o'erflows the measure.

John Lomberg

Some of the words are tough, bully. Rook, festinatley, fleshmint, Klinquont. Is that how you say that? But you know, high schoolers can get through it. Although Shakespeare was only 400 years ago, 4% of 10,000 years what?

Matthew Keelty

Go back to Beowulf, written in Old English, basically incomprehensible. El and Fremidon a thraatum. And it's like a different language. And I know you can't see this because this is radio, but trust me, its just as confusing. On the written page, you can recognize most of the letters as being part of the english Alphabet, but they barely correspond with how we use those letters today.

Roman Mars

And thats from year 1010% of 10,000 years. There are some languages that are very resistant to change. That is, languages that get enshrined in. Biblical texts, in religious texts, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic. But those arent sure bets either.

Matthew Keelty

The oldest written texts go back to ancient Samaria about 4600 years ago, and those languages are long since dead. And that's not even the halfway mark of our timeframe. So both team a and team b at the whip brainstorming session realized pretty quickly that every language on the planet today could be gone well before 10,000 years. And how can you start a conversation with somebody that you have no common language with? Both groups werent sure about this, but then they thought theres gotta be something better than language.

Roman Mars

Symbols, symbols, pictures. There are some facial expressions which are pretty universal, like a smiley face, two dots for eyes, half circle for a mouth. Its happy. Yeah, and take another one for like, yuck. Symbol called Mister Yuck.

If you were alive in the eighties, you know this, it's a logo of a green face with squinty eyes and a stuck out tongue. The face looks like it's about to be sick, sick, sick, sick. It was designed to be put on cleaning products and other household poisons to let kids know that whatever's inside is going to be horrible for you. And so thinking along those lines, they considered another logo, which they thought might be universal. Actually, Carl Sagan proposed it.

Matthew Keelty

Sagan couldn't make the panel, but he sent in a letter saying this whole marker problem was easy. You just need the right symbol. And he knew just the one. The skull and crossbones, the jolly roger, death incarnate. Well, do you know where the skull and crossbones came from?

No. No, I don't. The earliest uses of it are in religious paintings and sculptures from the Middle Ages, where at the foot of the cross, where Jesus is crucified, there's a skull with two bones in the shape of a cross, not an x, the shape of a cross. And it's Adam's skull, and the bones are the symbol of the resurrection. So instead of it being a symbol of death, it was a symbol of resurrection and rebirth.

John Lomberg

But fast forward a couple of centuries. There'S a lot of trade going on. Merchant ships traveling to and fro, and. In the ship's log, if a sailor died, the captain would put a little skull and cross bones next to his name. And a lot of the sailors came to associate that symbol with death.

The rebirth part of it was kind of lost. Fast forward another century. You've got pirates out marauding on the high seas, they've plundered other boats and stole their cargo. And along the way, some pirates realized they could use a symbol to let their targets know who they were. A branding campaign to terrify their targets into compliance.

Yeah, to make clear, we're pirates, and if you don't surrender, we're going to kill you. It's your death. But there were actually several different icons that pirates used. For example, a heart with blood dripping out of it. That was a popular pirate flag.

And an even more popular symbol was an hourglass. An hourglass? An hourglass meant if you don't surrender in a certain amount of time, we're gonna kill you all. So the hourglass, for a while, was the most feared pirate symbol. But then one of the logos got famous.

Matthew Keelty

In 1720, a pirate named Calico Jack Rackham was captured and put on trial. In the legal proceedings, it came out that two of the pirates in Calico Jack's crew were women, and that one of them was pregnant with Calico Jack's child. This was the tabloid scandal of the day, and everyone in England was reading about this trial. Anyway, it just so happened that Calico Jack's symbol was the Jolly Roger, though in his case, the bones were replaced with a pair of cross swords. Quick aside, the name Jolly Roger is probably an english corruption of the French Joly rouge, or pretty red, because the original pirate flags were red, not black.

After that trial, the skull and crossbones started showing up on book covers, Treasure. Island kind of novels. The skull and crossbones was permeating culture as a symbol of danger. Jump ahead to the late 18 hundreds. Dye factories in Germany started using the skull and crossbones as a symbol for poison.

Half a century later, the Nazis adopted. It as the symbol for their SS death's head divisions. So the skull and crossbones came to be associated with danger and death around the world. But it didn't become universal, not really. Think about what's happened with the skull and crossbones in the last 2030 years.

It's gone mainstream now. You'll see it on kids book bags, on onesies for infants. You can even buy water bottles with the skull and crossbones. So much for the whole poison thing. And the original meaning as it pertained to Adam and the resurrection is long gone.

John Lomberg

The lesson that we took from this is that symbols can change. Iconographical drift happens, and we haven't even. Touched on cultural interpretation. Like, there's a candy company in Mexico called La Katrina, and their logo, the logo that goes on the packaging for their sweets is a skull. And so, to bring us back to the Wip site in New Mexico, the.

Matthew Keelty

Two teams of smart people at WiPP realized that symbols couldn't be trusted to mean the same things over time. So, next idea, we could tell a. Little story using stick figures, visual storytelling. A stick figure that, like, any five year old could draw. Yeah.

John Lomberg

Circle on top, a trunk, two arms, and two legs. Why? Well, there are two things that seem to be universal in human art. One is a stick figure, and you find them all drawn on the walls of the caves and the cave paintings that are 25,000 years old, which, by the way, may be the only piece of graphic art surviving for more than 10,000 years. That is art from which we can draw meaning.

Matthew Keelty

And John says there's another convention that. Is universal, a sequence of events. First this happened, then this happened, and then this happened. So like a narrative. A story.

John Lomberg

A narrative. A storyboard, a comic strip. You just find it everywhere. And, in fact, you could even define a symbol using stick figures. Check it out.

Matthew Keelty

Let's do a simple comic strip. So, first frame, you put a small. Child, and the child is in front of a small plant, a sapling. Second frame, that child is a little bit bigger now, and the sapling behind him has grown a little bit. And next to the child is a barrel.

And on that barrel is the symbol for radiation, the trefoil symbol. And the child is touching that barrel. Go to the third frame, you got a full grown, big old tree. You got a child that is now an adult, a human being, except the person is lying on the ground, presumably dead, xs over their eyes, frowny mouth. And the barrel, now, with the trefoil symbol is open.

And so, clearly, the idea is, don't touch anything with the trefoil symbol, or at least not a barrel. Of course, if you read it from right to left, then it's a totally different story. The old guy who is sick, discovers the fountain of youth, and he's reborn. Okay, all is not lost. Maybe you could use arrows.

Arrows are universal. Or maybe you could situate the various comic strips in a sequence that you can only see sequentially based on how they're arranged in a space. So I don't know, maybe it's possible to create a universally recognizable warning sign that way. But really, regardless of whatever symbol we're trying to come up with or whatever story that we're trying to tell, you know, can we actually build something, make something like a physical, tangible thing that can last 10,000 years? The brainstormers at WiPP thought about building something from solid gold.

John Lomberg

Well, what's going to happen? They're going to get stolen. Maureen Kaplan, the archaeologist. Her group realized the same thing. Metals were going to get recycled.

Matthew Keelty

So no bronze, no aluminum. That basically leaves you with rocks, and rocks can erode. And who knows? A giant monolith could be useful to some future desert person. You could, you know, just tip it over on its side, and then you have a foundation for your house.

Roman Mars

Here is the critical moment where all the obvious choices have been exhausted. Language, symbols, and storyboards weren't going to cut it. And here's where plans for the website start getting really wacky. There was this one guy in Maureen's group named Mike Brill. Mike Brill was a landscape architect and an artist.

Matthew Keelty

Brill has since passed away. But Maureen remembers, in their group, Brill had this revelation. You don't actually need to transmit information into the future. All you need to do is make somebody scared of being in that place. He was trying to sculpt the landscape such that it in itself gave a warning to people who were coming there.

And he was thinking on a massive scale, on a scale greater than I'd ever imagined. Like one drawing, which Mike called the landscape of thorns. A drawing of these huge needles, sharp pointed, angular, jutting up from the ground. You know, the earth itself became a cactus. Make the land itself ominous and impassable.

John Lomberg

But the last thing you want to do is draw people. To see this incredible work of art, you got to see this thing. It's a half mile of these giant spikes. What the hell is it? So somebody builds a hotel for them to stay in, and they decide to dig a well for water, and there you are.

You've just caused exactly what you're trying to avoid. When all was said and done, both groups submitted their proposals. But Sandia labs found most of the ideas a little too pie in the sky. Here's Roger Nelson, the chief scientist at the Department of Energy's Carlsbad field office, which owns and operates whipp. If we build any markers, they need to be constructed at a reasonable cost, because it's just not right to ask real, current generations of real people today to sacrifice through their tax dollars or whatever to invest in protecting a hypothetical intruder into some very far future from a risk for which there's likely no harm to result.

Roman Mars

In fact, the panel that met to figure out the whipp marker system was actually not the first instance of thinkers being brought together to consider how to communicate the dangers of nuclear waste. Over time, there was one such meeting in 1981 for the Yucca Mountain project, which was eventually scrapped. And the Yucca Mountain project had probably the craziest idea proposed. And even though it was never suggested, for WiP, it's become the 99 PI in house favorite method of communicating with people 10,000 years in the future. In fact, it's probably the reason why we're doing this story at all.

Call it the Raycat solution. My hands down favorite approach came from these two european philosophers, Francois Bastide and Paolo Fabri. It goes like the two of them got thinking that the most durable thing that humanity has ever made is culture, religion, folklore, belief systems. Sure, they morph over time, but an essential message can get pulled through. And so bastide and Fabri said, here's what we're gonna do.

Matthew Keelty

We're gonna genetically engineer a species of cat that changes color in the presence of radiation. Then we'd release them out into the wild to become feline Geiger counters. And that's just step number one. Step number two, we will create an entire system of folklore about these cats. So we will sing songs about them, we will draw pictures of them, we will tell stories about them.

And like any good story, there's a moral that when you see the cats turn color, run far, far away. Don't change color, kitty. Keep your color, kiddie, stay at midnight black. The radiation can change any flies kill, and that's a fact. Radiation, whatever that is, is something we don't want because it withers our crops and it burns our skin and it turns our lives back on.

Gillian Jacobs

So don't change color, kitty. Don't flash your eyes. It won't change color. Once this raycat folklore becomes embedded into our culture, the knowledge it contains can evolve with us, even as our language shifts 10,000 years from now. These songs and these stories may sound incomprehensible to us, but as long as they communicate this idea that it's not safe to be where the cats change colors, we will have done our job.

Matthew Keelty

May the raycats keep us safe. The plan that Sandia labs decided to move forward with does not involve raycats, sadly, or a landscape of thorns. It doesn't even involve the skull and crossbones. The conceptual design includes a big berm, 30ft high earthen construction around the footprint of the repository. That's Roger Nelson again, the chief scientist overseeing whip.

Roman Mars

At the end of the day, the powers that be decided to go with solutions that the panelists had pretty much cast aside. They're marking the area with large granite monuments. Large granite monuments of each corner and in the middle, and several buried libraries. There will be information in seven languages, the six languages of the UN, Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, and also Navajo, because it's the most prevalent indigenous language of the area. The plan is still being finalized, but keep in mind, we are talking about protecting people that our great, great, great great grandkids will never know.

John Lomberg

We have a duty to warn them. We have a responsibility to mark the area. After a certain point, I started wondering, like, isn't this just a bit ridiculous? While I was researching the story, I read about this town called Talavast, a small, predominantly african american community about an hour and a half south of Tampa, Florida. In the 1960s, a beryllium processing plant was set up in the middle of town.

Matthew Keelty

The plant manufactured components for nuclear bombs and also built pieces of the Hubble space telescope. Anyway, it turned out that this plant was never very good about dealing with its waste. Beryllium dust and other toxins made their way into the towns groundwater, and Talavast had always gotten its water from shallow wells. Residents started noticing that a lot of people were getting diagnosed with cancer and other diseases, including berylliosis, which you get from exposure to beryllium. Talavast filed a lawsuit against the company that owns the plant.

Lockheed Martin and Lockheed spent years dragging out the lawsuit. Now, the reason I bring this up is because Lockheed Martin happens to be the parent company of Sandia National Lab, the corporation that runs the whip site over in New Mexico. And this case at Talibas is hardly unique. There are literally thousands of towns across the United States, many of them low income or communities of color, that have become contaminated in similar ways.

Roman Mars

And so the 10,000 year whip marker system feels really noble, but maybe a little misguided. I am all for taking care of people 10,000 years in the future, but I think the best way to do that is to start taking care of people that are alive today. That way there might be humans in 10,000 years and cats.

Gillian Jacobs

Don't change color cause you keep your color cause you stay that pretty gray don't change color keep your color, kitty keep sickness away don't change color, kitty keep your color kitty please cause if you do or glow your luminous eyes. That story was reported by Matt Keelty and produced by Olive Samuel Greenspan back in 2014. Special thanks to Rob Moss, Matt Stroud, Jordan Opponer, Evan Lueck, Steve Lerner and Emperor X, aka Chad Metheny, for composing the original original song don't change Color Kitty. 99% Invisible was reported this week by Gillian Jacobs and produced and edited by Vivian Lay Mix by Martin Gonzalez music by Swan Rial Fact Checking by Graham Haysha Kathy Tu is our executive producer, Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. Delaney hall is our senior editor.

Roman Mars

The rest of team includes Chris Baroube, Jason de Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Lasha Madonn, Joe Rosenberg, Gabriella Gladney Kelly, Prime, Jacob Maldonado Medina, Sarah Bake, Nina Patek and me. Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California, home to the Oakland Roots soccer Club, of which I'm a proud community owner. Other teams may come and go, but the roots are Oakland first, always.

You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our new discord server. It's really great over there. I encourage you to join. There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99 PI at 99 PI.org dot.

Gillian Jacobs

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