The science of loneliness, making one of organic chemistry's oldest reactions safer, and a new book series

Sarah Krespe
This podcast is supported by the Icon School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, one of America's leading research medical schools. Icon Mount Sinai is the academic arm of the eight hospital Mount Sinai Health System in New York City. It's consistently among the top recipients of NIH funding. Researchers at Icon Mount Sinai have made breakthrough discoveries in many fields vital to advancing the health of patients, including cancer, COVID and long COVID, cardiology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai we find a way this week's episode is brought to you in part by the Eppendorf and Science Prize for Neurobiology.

Are you or one of your colleagues doing great neuroscience? If so, then we encourage you to apply for the prestigious Eppendorf and Science Prize for Neurobiology, an international prize which honors young scientists for outstanding neurobiological research based on methods of molecular cellular systems or organismic biology.

Submissions are due June 15. Visit science.org eppendorf to apply today.

This is the science podcast for April 26, 2024. I'm Sarah Krespe. First on the show, staff editor Kelly Cervic explores the science of loneliness.

Is loneliness on the rise or just our awareness of it? How do we deal with the stigma of being lonely? How do we treat it? Next, producer Ariana Remel talks with researcher Tim Scholte about making one of organic chemistry's oldest reaction, the Sand Meyer reaction, safer and more versatile. Finally, we kick off our 2024 book series with books editor Valerie Thompson and books host Angela Sainy. They discuss this year's theme, a future to look forward to, and discuss some of the books that we'll be reading.

Kelly Cervic
I am unhappy doing so many things alone. I have nobody to talk to. I feel as if nobody really understands me.

These are items on a questionnaire that researchers use to formally measure loneliness.

Its a complicated experience and it can be hard to study, but its increasingly being recognized as a public health issue. Loneliness and social isolation have been linked to all kinds of health problems, and recently the World Health Organization even launched a commission that will look at the evidence on how to build social connection.

Governments around the world are paying a lot of attention to loneliness.

I'm Kelly Cervic. I'm a writer and editor at Science magazine, and I wrote an article in this week's issue about researchers trying to understand and alleviate loneliness and isolation.

It might be in the spotlight now, but the study of loneliness is not new. So I asked some of the experts that I spoke to for this story about the moment that we're in as the public starts paying more attention. Are there misconceptions that need clearing up? And what they told me was, yes, there are. And those start with basic definitions like, what exactly does the word loneliness mean?

Julianne Holt Lunstad
The conversations I have, people are using the term loneliness as this catch all term for all forms of lacking social connection. But from a scientific standpoint, it means something a bit more narrow.

My name is Julianne Holt Lunstad and I'm a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University.

Kelly Cervic
Julianne has been studying the role of social connection in health for more than two decades. Loneliness is one piece of that I.

Julianne Holt Lunstad
Find it often easiest to define by distinguishing it from social isolation.

Social isolation is more objectively being alone, having few relationships or infrequent social contact, whereas loneliness is more subjectively feeling alone, and it's a distressing feeling. So while, of course, being objectively alone can increase our risk for feeling alone, they don't always go together.

Kelly Cervic
But loneliness seems to be the word that politicians and journalists often choose as a shortcut for various issues around our social lives. And that makes sense, because loneliness is something that we can acutely feel. And in fact, there's a good reason we feel it. As other researchers pointed out to me, loneliness has a purpose.

Laura Koi Planas
It has been defined as a social pain that help us to react. So if I need more connection, then I look for more connection. So it belongs to this reaction that we need to be more adapted.

Kelly Cervic
Laura Koi Planas is a medical doctor and public health researcher at the University of Vic Central University of Catalonia. She describes loneliness as a useful signal if we feel tired, we rest. If we feel physical pain, we might seek medical help, and if we feel lonely, we might seek out other people for support.

Laura Koi Planas
It's a natural, unavoidable aspect of all our lives. That's how I see it. The tricky thing is when to understand that loneliness has to be alleviated, because.

Kelly Cervic
There is some point where loneliness is not helping anymore, where it becomes chronic and harmful. Julianne Holt Lunstad has studied this harm, including in a meta analysis of mortality data from more than 3.4 million people.

Her group found that loneliness was linked with a 26% increased risk of earlier death and social isolation, with a 29% increased risk.

Julianne Holt Lunstad
Data on mortality is consistent with a large and growing body of evidence on chronic health conditions, including increased risk for cardiovascular disease, stroke, type two diabetes, depression, anxiety, addiction, suicidality, cognitive decline and dementia.

Kelly Cervic
All these risks are definitely alarming. But are they new? Are we getting more isolated? Are we getting more lonely?

This is another place where the evidence is more complicated than some of the headlines in the US. Long running surveys do show some clear trends.

Julianne Holt Lunstad
Americans over the past two decades are spending significantly more time alone, significantly less time with family, both household and non household family. We see declines in time spent with friends and time spent in companionship.

This has been been a pattern, right? First off, while of course it was exacerbated by the pandemic, but because these data started in 2003, we can see it did not begin there and certainly that, you know, getting back to normal, the normal wasn't necessarily good to begin with.

Kelly Cervic
Those data tell us isolation has increased when it comes to the subjective feeling of loneliness, though it's not so clear.

Some experts told me the evidence for a new epidemic of loneliness is just not there.

Samiya Agta Kahn
Headlines such as we are lonelier than ever do not really represent findings from longitudinal cohort studies that we see where loneliness actually doesn't increase over time. Hi, I'm Samiya Agta Kahn. I work at Kings Koeniglanten as a PhD candidate. It's probably been like five or six years that I've been working on the topic of loneliness.

Kelly Cervic
Samia has been studying loneliness outside of the wealthy western countries where a lot of the research data have been collected. She moved to Myanmar during her master's degree to study loneliness in older adults.

Samiya Agta Kahn
There I think I was a bit naive in the sense that I expected a very socially embedded and close knit society where people didn't feel lonely because they didn't live alone or were socially isolated. But then when I started doing research on this, we actually found with the Myanmar Aging survey that had over 4000 respondents from all over the country that 32% of older adults felt lonely in the past month.

Kelly Cervic
Thats roughly on par with the rates found in some surveys of older adults in the US, for example.

Samiya Agta Kahn
So its quite surprising. But now im a wiser person now.

Kelly Cervic
After doing this research, interviews in Myanmar helped Samia and her colleagues develop a theory about the underlying causes of loneliness. A list of expectations that if theyre not met, can lead to loneliness. One of those expectations she calls generativity.

Samiya Agta Kahn
So contributing meaningfully to society or leaving a legacy. Another is respect, so feeling valued and appreciated. Maybe also for the care you provide.

Kelly Cervic
Those ideas informed a loneliness intervention that Samia and her colleagues tested in a small feasibility study. It included nine older adults from Myanmar who had migrated to northern Thailand. The team used a research method called photovoice, where participants learned photography to capture their everyday experiences and highlight problems their communities face.

Samiya Agta Kahn
So I remember one photo of a woman it was a self portrait, actually.

She asked her grandchild to take a photo of herself cooking. So she's sitting on the floor squatting. And yeah, she's an older woman, so it's obviously not as comfortable for her anymore to squat on the floor and cook for her grandchildren. But she just says how she provides this kind of care every day and it's really hard work, but she doesn't feel appreciated and people don't really see how she's contributing.

Kelly Cervic
Participants in that small study did report reduced feelings of loneliness, and they decided to have an exhibition with their photos and messages.

Samiya Agta Kahn
When the grandchildren, for example, saw this photo addressing them, they were pretty surprised, but also in awe of older people. And I interviewed them as well. So people who came to the exhibition and they just said they completely changed how, the way they saw older people in their community as really meaningful contributors to their lives and what kind of value they provide.

Kelly Cervic
Another thing that has emerged from Samia's work with older adults in Southeast Asia is a sense of how big structural factors can drive loneliness.

Samiya Agta Kahn
Older people list reasons for feeling lonely that were related to a financial situation, such as food insecurity, not being able to buy medicine, or not being able to contribute to community activities as a result of poverty. These factors, such as poverty, stigma, financial stress, are definitely risk factors for loneliness anywhere. It's just that maybe that the focus is not so much on these social determinants in research in higher income countries because poverty is just so much more prevalent in low and middle income countries.

Kelly Cervic
By definition, this is another place where the public conversation about loneliness might be missing something.

Samiya Agta Kahn
Some government initiatives sometimes position loneliness as the failure of an individual or community without considering the wider contextual factors.

Kelly Cervic
I heard that from multiple researchers I talked to. Loneliness is being treated like a personal problem, which contributes to stigma, as in, if you're lonely, this is a defect with you. You need to get out more, you need to socialize better. Julianne Holt Lunstad told me we lack evidence on how policies might address loneliness at the level of communities or societies. She recently helped develop a map of the evidence we have so far for different interventions.

Julianne Holt Lunstad
The majority of these interventions are individually based. They are targeted to affect change at the individual level.

Kelly Cervic
That might mean organized social activities that a person can opt into, or a program where a volunteer provides companionship to someone who's isolated, or cognitive behavioral therapy to help someone who's lonely change their outlook.

According to reviews of the evidence, Juliane says one approach doesn't seem to be way better than another.

Julianne Holt Lunstad
One doesn't rise to the surface as like this is the go to gold standard in what we should be doing. Rather, we see success across many different types. But I will caveat that with the evidence also shows that the success is somewhat limited. These effect sizes are small to moderate. And these reviews and meta analyses have shown that in many cases, the quality of the evidence is quite low.

Kelly Cervic
Laura Koiplanas and her colleagues are trying to build strong evidence for one loneliness intervention. It involves weekly group activities in urban green spaces to support people who may have been cut off from social connection for various reasons, like unemployment, disability, chronic illness, discrimination.

Laura Koi Planas
For some people can be unfair to be lonely. They can have more access to social support and social connection than they have.

We can build social opportunities for people that can help people to feel better. So we should do that.

Kelly Cervic
In the study, which is taking place in six different countries, groups of participants do outdoor activities accompanied by trained facilitators.

Laura Koi Planas
We build a group, build a sense of belonging to the group, the commitment to the group. And the group choose which activities they would like to discover through a map that has been co created, where all these natural resources are identified and they know what's around me.

Kelly Cervic
Laura acted as one of the facilitators in Barcelona. And one group meeting stands out in her mind.

Laura Koi Planas
That day we were going for a walk in one of the parks nearby, and it was a very sunny day. And we thought about sitting in a cafe altogether. And we started talking there about the very deep things about house life and which is the meaning of life. And that day, instead of 2 hours, we were like 3 hours together. Because it was such a deep conversation that we couldn't really, like, stand up and say, I have to go back to my work. These are conversations that are sometimes very hard to have or impossible to have with your best friends. Sometimes so deep.

Kelly Cervic
Laura has been thinking about the consequences of all these public health campaigns against loneliness.

Laura Koi Planas
We're in a very interesting moment globally with who creating this commission on social connection to tackle loneliness. It's good. There is this awareness on loneliness, the social awareness, political awareness.

There's more money now to research on loneliness. But loneliness is not an epidemic. Loneliness is not an illness. I think the majority of the society is understanding this message of loneliness skills. We have to end loneliness.

So we have to make sure how this interesting moment doesn't go against us and simplifies too much and medicalize too much.

Kelly Cervic
That was Laura koi planas. Also in this story were Julianne Holt Lunstad and Semia Achter. Khan. I'm Kelly Cervic, and you can read the full article@science.org. Dot.

Sarah Krespe
This week's episode is brought to you in part by the Nomis and Science Young Explorer Award. Are you doing excellent research that deserves recognition? The Nomis and Science Young Explorer Award recognizes bold young researchers who ask fundamental questions at the intersection of the life and social sciences, researchers who take risks to address relevant and exciting questions with creative approaches, regardless of the research outcome. Submissions are due May 15. Visit science.org nomis. That's Nomis to apply today, this week's episode is brought to you in part by the Eppendorf and Science Prize for Neurobiology.

Are you or one of your colleagues doing great neuroscience? If so, then we encourage you to apply for the prestigious Eppendorf and Science Prize for Neurobiology, an international prize which honors young scientists for outstanding neurobiological research based on methods of molecular cellular systems or organismic biology.

Submissions are due June 15. Visit science.org eppendorf to apply today.

Stay tuned for a chat with producer Ariana Remel and researcher Tim Scholte about making the sand Meyer reaction safer.

Ariana Remel
When it comes to making complex carbon based compounds from simple building blocks, chemists have an extensive toolkit of trusted reactions at their disposal. In fact, some of the most widely used reactions for synthesizing sophisticated molecules like pharmaceuticals and fluorescent probes trace their origins back to the 19th century.

These methods have proved tried and true for more than 100 years, but some still come with the risk of explosive consequences.

This week in science, Tim Schulta and colleagues wrote about a new way to make one of organic chemistry's oldest reactions both safer and more versatile. Welcome to the science podcast, Tim.

Tim Scholte
Hey, thank you very much.

Ariana Remel
We are so excited to have you here talking with our listeners about this new chemistry that your team has developed. So your research focused on a chemical reaction that's commonly called the sand Meyer reaction. What does this reaction do and how is it used today?

Tim Scholte
The Saint Meyer reaction is a very useful reaction in organic chemistry. It's based on diazonium salts. There's a very specific group of molecules that have dinitrogen as a leaving group attached to the molecule, which makes these molecules so useful because you can just substitute that dinitrogen with a different functioning group, which means you can make a lot of different other molecules. And to understand that a bit better, I think it's nice to think about organic molecules in general as something that we want to assemble. Now, when you want to assemble a very specific molecule, not all of these building blocks fit together super perfectly. So we have to try to find new ways to take a building block and basically change it or manipulate it into something that we can use in a more efficient way. And the sand Meyer reaction basically takes one building block, that's an aniline, and transforms it into a building block, which is actually much more useful, called a diazonium salt. And it takes these diazonium salts and converts them into our halides.

Ariana Remel
So, just to be clear, an aniline is a kind of carbon ring that has a nitrogen substituent, an amine associated with it, right?

Tim Scholte
Yeah, exactly. So you basically have a derivative of benzene, which is the six member carbon ring, which is aromatic. This is usually the flagship structure of organic chemistry. So when you google organic chemistry, the picture that comes up probably is a picture of benzene, of an arene, and it's basically just an arene connected to a nitrogen containing, functioning group.

Ariana Remel
Okay, so the sand Meyer reaction, it's using these diazonium salts as kind of an intermediate to make the original building block a little bit easier to stick onto the molecules that you're interested in building. Diazonium salts are highly reactive, which I guess makes sense for why they're making these initial compounds easier to work with in terms of forming chemical bonds. Diazonium salts are also notoriously dangerous to work with. Can you tell me a little bit more about the safety concerns that chemists face when they're performing a sand Meyer reaction or something else that's using diazonium compounds?

Tim Scholte
So, diazonium salts are actually compounds that are prepared quite routinely in labs. And every chemist in their career probably makes them a couple of times, but it's definitely not a reaction that you just do on the side while thinking about something else. And this sat me a reaction. The conversion of these anilines to the Ari halides, which we do in this paper, is actually only one kind of reaction of what you can do with diazonium salts. The diazonium compounds, as you already said, are super useful because they have a part in their molecule that can leave the molecule very easily. And in the case of diazonium salts, this is actually dinitrogen. So dinitrogen, as probably most of the people know, makes up 80% of the air that we breathe. And since this dinitrogen leaving group is so prone to leave the molecule, it's very easy to substitute it with something else, which makes these compounds so useful. But as you can imagine, if there is dinitrogen in the molecule and just wants to go out of the molecule. Sometimes this nitrogen release happens very, very fast, and sometimes it happens so fast that this happens in an explosive fashion. So you can say that these diazonium salts get their properties from dinitrogen leaving the molecule, but this also makes them very explosive and very dangerous. So usually you take a lot of precautions before you set up these reactions. So you wear your personal protective equipment. You probably also set up a blast shield. You always keep your fume hood sash down.

So it's just not something that you do while you're not concentrated. And actually, there are some reports about people actually dying because of explosions that happen during the synthesis of diazonium salts. And when I started working on the project, I was actually quite surprised on how many publications there are out there that report explosions of diazonium salts. And then you're even more surprised that people actually keep preparing them.

Ariana Remel
Then this gets to your new work. Here you describe a new way of doing this kind of sand Meyer type chemistry. What makes your protocol different?

Tim Scholte
So what you usually do with diazonium chemistry is you make a two step reaction. So you always have the first preparation step of the diazonium salt. So you start from an aniline, you have to put in reagents, and then you isolate, or at least you accumulate. So you prepare a large quantity and solution of a diazonium salt. Then in the second step, you put your second part of reagents that then form your valuable product.

You always have to do that in two steps, because usually the reagents that you use for the second step are not compatible with the reagents that you use in the first step. So for the synthesis of diazonium salts are usually quite harsh reagents. This always forces you to make quite a large quantity of diazonium salt if you want to make a valuable product out of it. And what we are doing conceptually different is we can do everything in one step. So we start from the aniline, which is the precursor for the diazonium salt, and we go in one step directly to the valuable product without making large quantities of the diazonium salt in the middle.

And that means now, at no point, you have a large quantity of the diazonium salt in your flask, in your reaction mixture. So therefore, your reaction is much safer.

Ariana Remel
So in the previous traditional way of doing this reaction that probably chemists who have done this are more familiar with, you've got two steps. The first step is to basically make a large enough quantity of the diazonium salt and then react that with the second thing that you're trying to bond together. But this version, you're still making the diazonium salt in the process, but it's a fleeting intermediate that's getting used up really quickly. Is that right?

Tim Scholte
Yeah, that's exactly correct. We never actually observe a large quantity of the diazonium salts. So the quantity of diazonium salt that's formed at a time is lower than our detection limit, which basically means it's very, very low. So this was also part of the analysis of our work, is to actually understand if we even go through this diazonium salt, because if you cannot observe it, then the question is, do you even form it? We have some really cool experiments in the work that prove that the diazonium salt is formed, but as it gets converted so fast to the valuable product, you never actually see it.

Ariana Remel
So why does this reaction work?

Tim Scholte
This is a process that's called nitrate reduction. That changes the oxidation state of our reagent. And the reagent that we are using is called nitrate. That's a very common reagent that's also used in the fertilizer industry. And the process we are doing is therefore called nitrate reduction. Nitrate reduction is a process that's very common in nature. So plants use nitrate production in their metabolism. So we take our starting material, we do the reaction that we know from nature. Now, our starting materials and reagent fit together, so we can form the diazonium salt and then directly convert them into the valuable product that we want to have. So we are coupling nitrate reduction to the diazonium chemistry.

Ariana Remel
So we talked about before with risks of exploding reactions. In the traditional method, you're using blast shields, face guards. What does it look like to do this reaction that y'all have developed now?

Tim Scholte
So the setup is actually quite easy. The reagents, you can all wait. Under normal atmosphere. You don't have to take any precautions of getting a protective atmosphere over your reaction or in the reaction flask. That means you can just sit on the balance. You wait in all the reactions, because by themselves, they are not dangerous at all, and then you can just take them to your fumot. So we still take a lot of precautions and we still put the blast here, but it doesn't mean that you would actually need to be required to do that. It's just something that chemists are prone to do because you want to take every safety precaution you can, not the ones that you must.

Ariana Remel
Yes. Again, a solid message to our listeners. Please always wear your personal protective equipment in the lab.

Tim Scholte
It's definitely important.

Ariana Remel
So there's clearly some safety benefits that have come from this new protocol. But how does its performance actually compare to the original sand Meyer reaction protocols?

Tim Scholte
So, for a couple of molecules, and actually our reaction at least performs the same, but then, in some cases, actually also performs better. So it seems like that this reaction is not only safer, but sometimes even more efficient. There might be some substrates out there where the conventional reaction still works much better than ours, which was not the case for the ones that we've tried, but you never know.

Ariana Remel
You had also mentioned before that because the initial reaction conditions are not so harsh, that you can also use different starting materials to begin with. So does that mean that this reaction is also allowing you to work with a broader set of materials than you could before?

Tim Scholte
Yeah, exactly. We can now use drug molecules, which you can usually not easily functionalize. With the diazoniums, for example, if it's a drug, a pharmaceutical molecule, it usually contains many different functional groups. And if you have that, then each of these groups of molecules usually is sensitive to something else. And as I said, for the diazonium reaction, you use harsh conditions. So if you take these complex molecules with a lot of sensitive functional groups, it's very easy that you decompose that molecule, which means you break it. And we've shown now that you can actually use a few, actually quite a few of these pharmaceutical molecules and do that chemistry with them without seeing decomposition. So we get a high yield, a high efficiency of converting them into even more valuable products. So, yeah, this is something that you cannot do with conventional biozonium chemistry.

Ariana Remel
The sand Meyer reaction is, like 140 years old. Why did it take so long to come up with this new and improved protocol to do this kind of chemistry?

Tim Scholte
Yeah, that's actually a great question, and that's also a question that we ask ourselves while we worked on this.

So the reagents and the complete conditions that we use to do this reaction, that's not something that you would usually come up with when you just think about how you would design this reaction. Some of the reagents actually completely orthogonal to each other. So you would actually think when you put these reagents together in one pot, they would directly react to each other so that you don't have a productive diazonium formation. So we didn't actually design this reaction. I was working on a completely different topic during my PhD, so I actually managed to develop a new kind of catalysts that were able to functionalize arenes. And then I was lucky enough that a postdoc from our group who's called Javier, he's also a good friend, and he's the other equal, contributing first author on that paper. He had very cool ideas. And one idea was to use these catalysts that usually functionalize arenes to functionalize anilines. So together, we came up with some experiments, but none of the ideas actually worked. So all of the ideas that we had were completely useless. The catalyst was not doing anything, but we found that something is happening to the aniline, which was completely unexpected. And then we thought a bit about, and luckily, we asked the questions at that time, what happens to the aniline? We did a control experiment without the catalysts, and the reaction was still working, which means it had nothing to do with the catalytic reactions that we originally had in mind. But still, we found that it goes through diazonium salt.

And then we actually found that you can also do the sand Meyer reaction with this protocol. Yeah. So it was an accidental discovery while working on a different project.

And I think this is why probably no one has discovered that before. Yeah, because the reagents that you're mixing are not reagents that I would have designed on the whiteboard if I wanted to make this reaction work. You just have to find this kind.

Ariana Remel
Of reaction that is so interesting. And another great example of serendipitous discoveries as you're investigating these mechanisms. We love to see it. Diazonium salts, of course, they show up in reactions far beyond just the sand Meyer reaction. I'm wondering if you can say anything about potential broader applications of this method that you've developed and the mechanisms that you were able to uncover and how they might be applied to other kinds of diazonium chemistry.

Tim Scholte
Yeah. So diazonium chemistry in general is incredibly useful. These diazonium salts are intermediates that you can actually use for a lot of different reactions. And this sat MeR reaction, the conversion of these anilines to the ary halides, which we do in this paper, is actually only one kind of reaction of what you can do with diazonium salts. So what we also hope is that other people take our paper as an inspiration to develop other chemistry that you can do in one step from anilines that would usually rely on diazonium salts. And maybe, yeah, there's a lot more stuff that you can now do in this one step protocol if you apply this strategy that we describe in our paper.

Ariana Remel
This is such a fascinating story. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.

Tim Scholte
Tim, no worries. It was super cool talking to you, and thank you very much for inviting me and having me here.

Ariana Remel
Tim Schulte is a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in RWTH Aachen University.

Be sure to read the paper from Sholta and his colleagues in science this week. It's titled Nitrate Reduction enables safer aryl diazonium chemistry. You can find a link@science.org podcast don't touch that dial.

Sarah Krespe
Up next, we hear about books that look to the future and don't see doom and gloom. And this year we have all of our books already confirmed, so you can go to the episode page and read along with us month to month.

We're about to kick off the 2024 book series for the year. The theme can be summarized in a number of different ways. A future to look forward to the optimist how to have the best apocalypse for you we have our book's host, Angela Sainy, and our book's editor, Valerie Thompson. They're going to talk about the theme. Let's go with a future to look forward to and some of the books we're going to hear about for the rest of the year. Here's Angela and Valerie.

Angela Sainy
This was a tricky year, I think.

So the theme for everyone was kind of looking forward to the future, or a future to look forward to utopian writing, which was far trickier than you would think. Yeah. Yeah.

Valerie Thompson
I mean, you know, we've done some heavy topics in the past.

We wanted to present some perspectives that are counter to the increasingly dystopian views of the future that are out there. Not to say that the concerns that people are raising about various subjects are not true concerns or that we shouldn't be worried about them, but just that there are some reasons for cautious optimism.

Angela Sainy
Yeah. And it is very difficult, I think, particularly this year, with so many elections happening, the rise of authoritarianism, these threats to democracy, the climate change threat, just feels terrible to be bearing down on us in ways that it didn't feel quite as. I mean, it always felt urgent. It almost feels that we're at kind of doomsday now in so many different areas, AI everything. And it is quite difficult, I think, with the literature, when you survey it, to find hopeful looks forward or hopeful scientific ideas that could get us out of this. And sometimes it feels almost too optimistic that these are unrealistic. Almost.

Valerie Thompson
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. There is that type of science writing that I think of more as science cheerleading. That was a trend in writing for a while, but I feel like there's this new trend in media right now that I'm noticing with a lot of books and films that are trying to emphasize that in all these situations that are very difficult dealing with climate change, ensuring that artificial intelligence is deployed properly, all these arenas where we feel out of control or we feel like it's happening without our agency, that we actually do have agency, and that there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic about the future. And so that was something that we really wanted to make sure came through.

Angela Sainy
Yeah. One of my favorite books, and I think it's from the 1960s by Alvin Weinberg, looks at the technological fix. So, you know, that was an age in which everybody thought that technology could solve all our social problems, that if we just threw enough money at research and development that somehow we could science our way towards a better world. This was the age of the Jetsons and these very optimistic ideas about the future. And I think we've evolved out of that. I don't think that we take that approach anymore. But I have to say, with the list that we have, I do feel that there is a recognition that in certain disciplines, there are little tweaks and things that we can do to realign the way that societies work in such a way as to drive us through into a more optimistic future. So one of the books, for example, that we have on our list is tokens by Rachel O'Dwyer, which looks at the future of money. And this may feel like a red flag to many people because you think of bitcoin and crypto, that can't be good. But our relationship with money is quite strained in capitalist democracies, we are struggling. So maybe there are more radical ways of thinking about how we organize financial systems and money that can at least start to push us out of that.

Valerie Thompson
Yeah, I really like this one, too, because she's looking at this idea of how these new forms of currency are changing the balance of power between digital platforms and the state. And in some cases, that's really good, and in some ways, it's concerning. And so balancing those two ideas and thinking about what this means moving forward is going to be something really interesting. And I'm really looking forward to that discussion.

Angela Sainy
And I think climate capitalism by Akshat Rashi, which is one of our books, which is going to be appearing in the summer, fits into that same vein, which is, how do we get capitalism to work for us? How can we use it to our advantage, rather than it exacerbating inequality and environmental degradation? So he looks at all these different mechanisms and schemes out there that can harness the capitalist power that we have in order to improve the environment rather than destroy it.

Valerie Thompson
Another area that we're interested in and that we're planning to look at is how these things are going to intersect with medicine. And in particular, one of the books we're going to look at is looking at the future of reproductive technology. So, Eve, the disobedient future of birth, is the name of the book, and this is written by illegal scholar Claire Horne. It's kind of predicting this future where artificial wombs are going to be a viable alternative to maternal gestation, which she's not wrong. To extrapolate this, like, this is something that is, the work is progressing in animals. It's important to have these conversations now before the technology is a reality. But I'm really looking forward to her perspective on this as a legal scholar because she's not really talking about how is this technology going to work. It's more about how it's going to be deployed. There's the potential for this to be a real game changer in terms of reducing gender inequality, but then there's also these questions of access and how it's going to affect things like reproductive rights that we also have to think about.

Angela Sainy
And it's long been this feminist dream. I think Andrea Dworkin wrote about this many years ago, this idea that we can, as a species, get to a point where the burden of reproduction doesn't fall on women anymore, that it is evenly distributed in some way, and that possibly technology could provide an avenue towards that. We're very far away from it. But Eve does explore that possibility, that we could one day have a world in which it's not women's job to think about reproduction and birth and childcare anymore. I do think we're getting there slowly. I mean, there's another book coming out this year. It's not part of our lineup, but fatherhood by Sarah Bluffer Hurdy, which looks at how much fatherhood has been underplayed as a really important evolutionary mechanism. Fathers are actually hugely important, but socially, we've moved towards that much more. And I do feel that so many things are happening at once. So not just reproductive technology, but also social change in the way that we parent, that could create this revolution that feminists for a long time have dreamed of.

Valerie Thompson
Right. That book is not appearing in this series, but we do. We will have a review of that in the magazine.

Angela Sainy
Right. That's good to hear. Yeah, we have a great lineup. I'm so excited about it. And it is very diverse.

There is medical stuff in here. There is technology. There's, like I said, stuff about capitalism. And then at the very end of the series, we have this wonderful interview with Ruha Benjamin, who's a scholar who is very kind of visionary in the way that she imagines what the world could be like. And her latest book, imagination, takes that a step further by asking, how much different could life be if it wasn't just rich tech billionaires imagining these huge, big, radical futures and everybody got to do it. If it wasn't just Peter Thiel and Elon Musk dreaming that we might settle on the moon or on Mars or live forever, but that all of us got to have these radical visions about the kind of future we might want.

Valerie Thompson
I feel like what she does really well is to ask, whose vision of the future are we currently living in, whose imagination should inform our next steps?

Angela Sainy
Yeah, it is a really exciting book. I did actually reach out to a few friends of mine who either are scholars in this area or write Sci-Fi and they all struggled with finding a science fiction book that was genuinely utopian. So there's quite a few books that start off utopian and then disintegrate into dystopias or, you know, dystopias, in which there are a few utopian believers who then disappear or something terrible happens to them. There just genuinely isn't that much real utopian science fiction out there right now. And maybe that's a reflection of the time that we're in, that it's very hard to be hopeful in an era in which things are as bleak as they are. In fact, this year I was asked to write a piece of speculative nonfiction. So this is kind of imagining that you're a few decades in the future, and I couldn't come up with anything utopian. The thing that I wrote was actually quite depressing by the end. It was just worse than what we have now.

Valerie Thompson
Oh, dear.

Angela Sainy
It's just not out there. But I can understand why fully.

Valerie Thompson
I mean, I think some ways, too. It's just like, unfortunately, a dystopian story is just often just a better story. The utopian narrative is wonderful, and I wish that we could all live that. But maybe we like to read about people that are undergoing struggles. Like, we undergo struggles we don't want to read about someone who just has a perfect life. It's not very interesting.

Angela Sainy
No, I know. Yeah, you're absolutely right. We want to see our experience reflected back at us. And things are hard. I mean, frankly, they are hard for still, for so many billions of people around the world.

Valerie Thompson
Right.

Angela Sainy
And that's the way life is. But I do hope with the books that we have that we can at least see the possibility of people being able to dream of something better.

Valerie Thompson
Yes. And I think a nice thing, too, is that all of these authors are very cognizant of the perils of these technologies that they're talking about, thinking about how this is going to affect other social systems.

Angela Sainy
Yeah, you're right. I mean, none of this is blind optimism. It's definitely tempered with reality, and they're very much rooted in the real world. Each of these authors.

Valerie Thompson
Okay, well, we talked about most of the books here, but there are a few more that we haven't been able to talk about. So you're going to hear about them in the upcoming series, and there will be a blog post that is accompanying this intro as well that will go into more detail. So we look forward to bringing you these stories.

Sarah Krespe
That was editor Valerie Thompson and host Angela Saini taking us through some of the 2024 books. We're going to see six over the course of the year that come out the last episode of each month, starting with the kickoff in April. The first book will be May. You can check them out on the site science.org podcast and actually see the full list and read along. This year we have every book confirmed and the dates are set. So yeah, go to science.org podcasts and look at this episode page and you will see a full list of what we're reading for the year.

And that concludes this edition of the Science Podcast. If you have any comments or suggestions, write to us@sciencepodcast.org to find us on podcasting apps, search for Science magazine or you can listen on our website, science.org podcast podcast. This show was edited by me, Sarah Crespi, and Kevin McLean. Special thanks to Kelly Cervic and Ariana Remel for all their work on some fantastic stories. And a big welcome back to Angela Sany. As we kick off the 2024 book series, we also had production help from Megan Tuck at Pottigy. Jeffrey Cook composed the music on behalf of science and its publisher, AAA's. Thanks for joining us. You listen to us to hear about new discoveries in science, but did you know we're a part of the American association for the Advancement of Science? AAA's is a nonprofit publisher and a science society. When you join AAA's, you help support our mission to advance science for the benefit of all.

Become a AAA's member at the silver level or above. To receive a year's subscription to science and an exclusive gift, join today by visiting AAA's dot join. That's aaas.org join.

The science of loneliness, making one of organic chemistry's oldest reactions safer, and a new book series

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1: Loneliness Explored

2: Safer Organic Reactions

3: Utopian Book Series

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