For science!
Hi I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson and this is "Rising Stars." Today we're
featuring Emily Graslie, who's the chief curiosity correspondent at the Field
Museum in Chicago. She also has one of the most popular science YouTube
channels called The Brain Scoop and we've got her right here. Emily, welcome.
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
You're actually corn-fed from somewhere?
Oh yeah
Free-range farm girl
Yeah, Rapid City, South Dakota and my
family has ranch land near Faith, which is where Sue the T. rex was found.
I remember Sue. Yeah, Sue was up for auction. Were you touched by that?
Oh yeah, my great-great grandfather and my grandfather, they had a shed on the
property where when they were checking on the cows and checking on the pastures
they'd find a fossil and they'd put it in the shed.
You had your own museum!
Yeah!
He donated it to
like the little town of Faith, South Dakota and so their appreciation for
fossils was something I grew up with.
So but again our crack team of
researchers alerted me that that's not what you majored in though.
No I didn't
I studied art
Art? What kind of art?
Landscape painting. It was a way for me
to take my appreciation for natural environments and share it in a medium
that I was good at it. I wasn't good at science but I was good at visuals.
Of course there's a very storied relationship between artists and naturalists
In the day, you didn't have a record of what you saw or analyzed unless there was
an artist who could capture it for you. So you guys were like walking hand
in hand for centuries, but now you just carry a camera. So is there still a
role for artistically minded people?
Oh yeah!
in natural history because as
you know, though I'm director of the Hayden Planetarium, we are part of the
American Museum of Natural History, so I have some sort of osmotic sensitivity to
what you're immersed in.
Well because artists, I mean scientists are
communicators of the natural world but in a very I wouldn't say formulaic but
in a way that doesn't always reach general populace.
Artists are a way of bringing that science and translating it into a
different medium and so I think the idea that art and science are these two
different things is just doing a disservice to both. They're
best when you combine those efforts. What I was trying to do, I started
volunteering in this natural history museum on my campus, as an artist. I
wanted to draw the collection
What campus was that?
University of Montana
- Montana? - Mmmhmm
But the more I did that, the more I
wanted to show what was happening in the museum.
"So where I'm standing right now
is what we refer to as the sheep room because the majority of the things in
here are sheep."
As I understand, it you came to widest attention with a wolf.
Yeah
"I love me a good necropsy. I'm very excited."
Roadkill wolves have to be some of the rarest things out there.
Well the only reason we knew that, to collect that one is it had been radio collared and so Montana
Fish Wildlife and Parks calls me up and they're like 'Hey you're the volunteer at
this museum, we have this roadkill wolf, will you come pick it up?' and I was
like 'Yeah, can I put it on YouTube?' She was like 'I guess so.'
So we documented the process.
OK, so what's the process?
They put it in a deep freeze for a few weeks —
to supposedly kill off all parasites but then when we brought it back to our lab
and let it thaw on the table, fleas started jumping out of the fur.
"Whoa hey, where'd this guy come from? Fleas! Are those fleas? Sick!"
These are badass fleas.
Yeah! Resilient. Will to live!
So you were bitten by wolf fleas?
Hopefully not. 'Cause that, that can, yeah
From there, we skinned it and then
we disarticulated it and removed the limbs and skeletonized it in a colony of
flesh-eating beetles. Yeah 'cause you can't carve the flesh off as effectively as
the beetles can eat it off - Right, yeah
And you YouTube'd this?
We did, yeah. We put
it on YouTube and from there, it got quite a bit of attention. Roadkill
wolf is the reason I have the job I do today.
"Welcome to The Brain Scoop's new office. Isn't it cool?"
Picking up on your life's trajectory, the Field Museum is one of the world's great
collections of natural history artifacts, so your platform is much greater
there, presumably. In terms of funding, resources.
For a creative person like me, it's the best.
So I have my own hypotheses on this but I
like comparing notes — where do kids lose their curiosity? Because we agree all
kids have curiosity and not all adults have curiosity, so somewhere in there
there's like a leaky pipeline.
As soon as they start doing standardized testing
Ohhhh (makes snaps sounds)
Well that's what it was for me!
- Blood drawn! - We stopped doing experiments in class. We stopped
going on field trips and instead you spent your time preparing for a test, for
a test for information that you had that you had no context for and that for me
is like where I lost my interest in biology in the natural world because it
all was distilled to diagrams in terms that I had to memorize
There was no passion.
Right yeah, and it wasn't being fostered by anyone and so in terms of like what
our goal for the program is I just want people to take a longer look at the
world around them. Turn over that rock. See what's living under it. I think
that's just the fascinating thing about curiosity is that it's self-perpetuating
Would you say this is the future of science education?
YouTube?
Well just what you're doing.
The technology has kind of misled people in
terms of what we know and what we don't know. They know that we have a
rover on Mars. They know that we have satellites at the edge of the solar
system so to tell somebody that we only know 15% of all life that has ever lived
on the planet, I think people just don't believe you.
They're like 'No, we know birds. We know mammals. What else is there?'
And so being able to show the kind of work that museums do that
natural history collections do, I do see that as the future for how these
museums will connect with the public. If you want to talk about future and
futuristic things, I think we all think of things like time machines, but museums
serve that purpose. Museums are time machines. Museums and the collections are
the only evidence we have to be able to look and evaluate what a habitat would
have looked like and that is only going to become more important as technology
increases. We didn't know what genomics was 30 years ago. This is a
brand new thing. It didn't even exist. So imagine
what technologies we're gonna have in another 10 or 15 or 500 years and how
you can employ that to look at these specimens in the collection.
Let me hit the tennis ball back to you. You're the one cutting open the wolf, not I. So is it
still working for me watching you do it? Am I still the explorer or has the
technology made only some of us the explorer and the rest of us do it
vicariously and maybe that's not as interesting?
I don't know because I'm not
well one I'm not the audience member on that exchange, but what I hope it does is
OK but should the museum put their collection up on the web and so
that you don't never have to leave your couch or should programs like yours
stimulate people to get off the couch?
I do want people — I want people to get off
the couch. I want them to go to museums.
- I like the couch - The couch is comfy but the
couch will still be there. There's inquiry out there.
There's adventure.
You're hoping that I'm on the couch watching you cut
open a wolf and I say that is awesome so I get off the couch and visit my nearby
museum and not substitute that live experience with technological displays of things.
Yeah we can show you pictures of dioramas. We can show you
videos of lions. We can show you any of these things, but museums are still the
only place you can see that for yourself in person. Their importance only
increases every second of every single day. We have within our collections
specimens and artifacts and recreated habitats that no longer exist anywhere else.
- Because they're gone. - Because they're gone. - We over-ran them.
I didn't appreciate that until my first visit to South Africa and
there's like a watering hole there and I'm looking at this, I'm thinking it
looked exactly like one of the dioramas at the American Musem of Natural
History, but it went directly into my deepest memories as a kid.
Man the details they go to in those dioramas
But I think it's a lost art. I don't know
if they still make dioramas.
We did at the museum. Through The Brain Scoop, we
crowdfunded to build the first full-scale diorama in 60 years.
Right because it's not a thing. OK cool, so a diorama of what?
Striped hyenas. The director of exhibitions told me you know we have one diorama
alcove that was never finished. In the '30s, they just kind of boarded it up and
moved on and so I said we have this program The Brain Scoop which is meant
to get people excited about natural history museums so why don't we get
them to help us build this? Why don't we get our audience to help us finish this?
You didn't even have to write a grant proposal?
No we did, we just had to ask
people and get them excited about it. Think about how cool it would be if all
natural history museums, if the AMNH had a chief curiosity correspondent.
I'm gonna put in a call today.
You are a chief curiosity correspondent!
No but I don't, I don't know
You don't think so?
You know what it is, I think the universe is
inherently a fun place to be curious of and I just sort of point people in that
direction. If I saw a wolf, I would not think to myself 'Gee I wonder what that
looks like without skin.' It's just not a thought that I have, so I need
somebody who's in there to take my brain places I never thought to go so I think
there's no end to this.
Thanks.
- Thank you - Yeah, thank you