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>> Dan Turello: Welcome to Kluge Book Conversations, a series sponsored by the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. I'm Dan Turello, and I'm here today with Ainissa Ramirez, and her most recent book, The Alchemy of Us. How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another. Dr. Ramirez is an award-winning scientist and science communicator. She earned a doctorate in material science and engineering from Stanford and started her career as a scientist at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. She was an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Yale, and she also the author of Save our Science. How to Inspire a New Generation of Scientists and the co-author of Newton's Football, the Science Behind America's Game. Ainissa, thanks so much for being with us today. It's good to see you.

>> Ainissa Ramirez: Good to see you. Thank you so much.

>> Dan Turello: Yeah, so, you worked in several settings in academia and industry in a variety of different roles. Tell us a little bit about what inspired this book, and also, what went into the strategy? You tell stories of technology and innovation, but you also tell a lot of personal stories. How did you come to that decision?

>> Ainissa Ramirez: Well, on the material scientist, and it's a little-known field, but it's really important, because most of the technologies around it are made of materials. And someone worked really hard to make those materials work, but it really gets overshadowed. And so, I had been looking for a long time as a way to show materials and show the impact of materials on the world, but really didn't have much luck. I didn't really want to just do a catalog of different materials. So, it took a little while before I figured out how I wanted to really discuss materials, and it actually was by accident. A couple years ago, I was taking some glassblowing classes. Every year, I try and take an unusual class like pottery or painting, and this year was glassblowing, but little did I know that it would actually get me the idea for the book, because one day, when I was at my glassblowing class, generally, I had a great time going to my glassblowing class, but this day, in particular, I was having a bad workday. So, I was kind of in a really bad mood, and because of that, I was a little bit more cavalier with the glass than I should have been. It was really beyond my skill set. So, I actually took too much glass, and it fell on the floor. And this is actually really bad, because glass is hot enough to burn paper. It can burn a hole in your shoe. And so, because of that, my instructor ran over and he grabbed the glass piece with heat-resistant gloves. He reattached it to my pipe, and we were able to salvage some of the glass. 

>> Dan Turello: That sounds scary and dramatic. 

>> Ainissa Ramirez: Oh, man, it was really scary, and you know, I'm a little on the shy side. So, I really did want to draw any attention to myself, but here I was with this huge accident. But after it all, you know, was set aside and everybody calmed down, I actually started having some thoughts. First of all, I was in a pretty decent mood. In fact, I was happy to be alive, and I started that class in a really foul mood. So, I said, you know what? The glass actually shaped me. I was shaping the glass, but it shaped me, because of that event. And so, that was what gave me the lens to look at materials. I said, I wonder how other materials in history have shaped society. And so, that was the birth of the book, and in terms of the approach that I took in looking at materials, I didn't really want to just discuss fact after fact after fact. What I really wanted to do is tell people stories. I think that stories are stickier. You can feel more connected to the material, and I can share with you these inventions that maybe you haven't even heard of, and really, get inside of their life to see what their motivations are, but more importantly, talk about how those technologies shaped us. 

>> Dan Turello: That's great. So, some of the folks that you're writing about are very well known. You know, this President Lincoln. There is Morse. There's Edison. Then there's other folks were relatively obscure, and I think of, for example, Ruth Belville. I mean, it's this wonderful name. It sounds Victorian. It sounds like you could come straight out of his Charles Dickens novel. Who was Ruth Belville, and what was her story?

>> Ainissa Ramirez: Well, Ruth Belleville must be one of my favorite characters, and she's the first person that you meet when you read The Alchemy of Us. She lived in the in the 1800s and in the 1900s, and she lived in England, and she had a very unusual job. She sold time. Now I know that sounds crazy, but that was her job. You see, she would wake up early in her home in Maidenhead, which is about 30 miles outside of London, and she'd make her way over the London, and then over to Greenwich, and Greenwich is the home of the Royal Observatory. It's also the home of GMT, Greenwich Mean Time. And so, she would go up to the top of the very, very steep hill to the Royal Observatory to collect the time. Now how did she collect the time? Well, she did it with one of these things, a pocket watch. She had a pocket watch which she had nicknamed Arnold, and she would have Arnold's time compared to their master clock.

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And then, they would give her a certificate noting the difference, and then, she would make her way down the hill and go to various businesses that needed to know the time. Train stations, newspapers, factories. They all needed to know the time, but they didn't have the luxury to go all the way up the hill to collect it. So, she provided this service. So, Ruth Belleville was one of the first characters that you meet in The Alchemy of Us, and from a writer's point of view, she was a great device, because she really showed how important timekeeping and keeping time was. So much so, that she could have a business based on selling it. 

>> Dan Turello: That's a wonderful story. So, do we know how far she walked every day? Is there some way to estimate that?

>> Ainissa Ramirez: Oh, yeah, there's some really great -- I mean, besides The Alchemy of Us, there's a lovely book about her, the Greenwich Time Lady. And she walked all over London, and what was so interesting is that she touched so many different parts of society. So, she would go to posh shops that needed to know the time because they liked having it to show their customers, but then, she would also go to pubs, because they needed to know the time, because they couldn't sell alcohol after certain hours. So, she crisscrossed all of London, but also crisscrossed all of society along the way. 

>> Dan Turello: I love it. So, she's, as you mentioned, she's in the chapter about time and about the invention of mechanical timekeeping devices, and you have this wonderful sentence in that chapter. You write that, "We grew obsessed with time, with being on time, and with not wasting time. As such, it was only a matter of time before this compulsion affected how we sleep." So, I'm intrigued by this, because sleep has become a multimillion-dollar industry, literally. I mean, people who can't sleep, trying to treat them. How did our predecessors do sleep? It was different. And how did technology change that? 

>> Ainissa Ramirez: Yeah, we all feel a little obsessed with time, and we have special pillows and aromatherapy, and there's all kinds of products out there to help us sleep. But it ends up that our ancestors, they actually slept differently. Before the Industrial Revolution, people went to bed around 9 or 10 o'clock, and they slept for about 3-1/2 hours. And then, they would wake up on purpose and stay up for about an hour or so. They would do things around the house like clean or read or sew, and then, after that hour, they would go back to sleep for another 3-1/2 hours. These two segments of sleep are called first and second sleep, and everyone slept that way. So, how did it change? Well, it actually was changed not because of our physiology, but it was changed by technology. Two things changed the way that we sleep. The first was artificial light. We were able to stay up later. So, the first segment of sleep became shorter, because we went to bed later, and the other technology that changed it was the clock. The clock allowed us to get up early, so that we can go to the factory or make appointments. And so, that second segment of sleep became truncated. Now, soon it didn't make sense to sleep for a short amount of time and then wake up in the middle of the night and then sleep for another short amount of time. So, those two segments became consolidated, and that's kind of how we sleep today. So, the way that we sleep wasn't because of our anatomy, but because of technology. 

>> Dan Turello: Is there a sense that -- what was the awareness like as this transitioning was happening? Was there a sense of we were losing something? How did that go?

>> Ainissa Ramirez: Well, from old newspapers, I mean, we were so beholden to time that people actually thought that, well, this is actually way to save time, because you know, sleeping too much is a waste of time. So, the thinking was, well, if we were very timewise, that consolidating our sleep was considered to be a good thing. But now we live in an age where, well, we don't feel like we have a very good quality of sleep. And what has happened is that researchers have actually done studies on different people, and they've given them enough time to overcome their sleep debt, and what they have found is that they actually revert back to this old way of sleeping, where they're asleep. And then, they're kind of in this twilight region for a while, and then, they kind of go back to a deeper type of sleep. So, some researchers actually believe that ancient way of sleeping is actually the preferred way to sleep for our bodies. So, I think at the time when there was a switch, that people didn't see it that way, but now, we all kind of live in that world, and we kind of feel like we're not getting good quality sleep.

>> Dan Turello: That's interesting. So, one of the themes in the "History of Technology" is the way certain technologies either bring us closer together or further apart, and you explore some of these themes in your chapter on the history of photography. How did early photographic technology make some groups of people more visible and others less so? 

>> Ainissa Ramirez: You know, that's a very good question, and I would kind of rephrase it, particularly for photography, because the country was already fractured. And so, photography, which we often use for amusement, was actually used for a tool in this case. In this particular case, African-Americans were using photography as a way to dismantle the stereotypes that were around them.

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And what I'm talking about, specifically, is Frederick Douglas. Frederick Douglass was actually the most photographed man in the 19th century, and the reason why he did that, some people say he was vain. I don't think that was the case. I think he was using his photographs as a tool, because he was trying to combat the negative stereotypes of African-Americans. For those who don't know Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass was a famous abolitionist and orator, and he was also a very stately looking guy. And so, when he was trying to do is use his image to just combat these really buffoon-looking images that were out there for African Americans. So, he was using photography as a tool to combat that. So, they were already visions, and he was just trying to dismantle some of the negative stereotypes using his image.

>> Dan Turello: Interesting. And then, we get later on in the story photography, and we get to the, you know, the 1960s and 1970s, and one of the companies that has become a household name introduced -- you're right about how they introduced a way to brighten certain images, as needed. Now on first appearance, this might seem like it could have been a positive development, a good step in the right direction. And yet, there's this whole other history behind that that you explore. Can you tell us the story of the Polaroid Corporation in the 70s?

>> Ainissa Ramirez: Well, let me go back a little bit and talk a little bit about how film was a tool, because I mentioned, Frederick Douglass was using it a tool. W. E. B. Du Bois was also using it as a tool, because he wanted to combat those negative stereotypes. And then, that tool kind of got turned around in a negative way when, as you mentioned, you were talking about film didn't render us particularly well, and that was found in the 1960s or so, when African-American mothers found that the images of their children didn't look as good as white children, because the film had a bias kind of built into it. It was specially tailored for lighter skin. So, here we see a tool of photography being used to dismantle negative stereotypes, and then, inadvertently, being used in a negative way. So, I talk about that in The Alchemy of Us. But then, I also talk about how photography was definitely used as a tool of oppression, and in order to explain that, I want to talk a little bit about the story you mentioned, of Polaroid. Now Polaroid was a much-beloved technology. It was the instant cameras. You can get an image like this in less than a minute. This was an amazing technology, because before that, it would take a week before you would get your images. But what I found while I was writing the alchemy of us is that Polaroid actually had a hand in something that was far more nefarious. I found out the story of Caroline Hunter. Caroline Hunter, in the 1970s, was an African-American chemist working a Polaroid. And one day, she was going to lunch with her friend, Ken Williams, and they discover an ID card, a mock-up of her ID card, and it says, Department of the Minds, Republic of South Africa. Now these two look at each other, and they're like, South Africa? What does Polaroid got to do with South Africa? See, at that time, South Africa was an apartheid system. It was a police state. So, what they found out is that every black South African had to carry with them a passbook. And the passbook told officials where this person could go, where they could not go. It was sort of like a way of monitoring and controlling your whereabouts before the age of GPS. But at the heart of the passbook was a picture made by Polaroid. So, here we see this amusement photography being used in nefarious ways. And so, this is one of the things that I talk about in The Alchemy of Us. And the chapter that this is all taking place is called capture, because I really wanted to show how photography was used to capture our likeness. It also captured our biases, and in some cases, it actually controlled, or captured, the whereabouts of certain populations. 

>> Dan Turello: And how did Polaroid respond when all this started coming to light?

>> Ainissa Ramirez: Well, initially, there was denial. And then, they reported out that if they did have a presence in South Africa, is very, very small. And this is, legally, true, because Polaroid wasn't in South Africa, but they did have a distributor that was well known that sold their technology. So, that's kind of how they got around it, but Caroline and Ken, Caroline Hunter and Ken Williams, had done a tremendous amount of research and found out that Polaroid had been in South Africa since 1938 or so. So, they knew that Polaroid was aware that these cameras were being used for this reason. So, their response was negative, but what happened is that Caroline and Ken, they became activists. They created the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement and worked really hard to tell the people of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Massachusetts, and the rest of the world, about Polaroid's involvement in South Africa. And it took about seven years of hard work and connecting and networking and spreading the word, but eventually Polaroid withdrew from South Africa. 

>> Ainissa Ramirez: Great. We've talked about unintended consequences. We talked about social engineering. There is also a more optimistic thread/storyline in your book. How did the introduction of steel bring us closer as a nation and create more cohesion?

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>> Ainissa Ramirez: Well, that's a great question. I mean, when we think about connecting, we think about the Internet, and we think about telephones and cell phones, but I actually say that one of the earlier ways that we connected was through the use of steel. Now most people don't know about steel, but steel made it possible for steel rails. Steel is a very, very hard material. It's better than iron. It's better than some of the earlier materials that were used for rails. And so, when you didn't have to worry about building infrastructure for trains, you can extend it further and further out. And so, the trains became a huge connector, because before that, we used to travel by stagecoach, and it would take days to get short distances. So, the distance from Boston to New York would take days by stagecoach. Now we can do that in a day, and we can go back home in the same day. So, what the trains did is it actually connected us, because it made this huge country a little bit more unified, because it made it smaller. Now when I talk about in The Alchemy of Us is one episode in history that most people don't know about, which is that after Abraham Lincoln had died, the population was grieving tremendously, and they really wanted to say goodbye to this important leader. Now how do you say goodbye to someone before the age of television or the Internet? Well, what they did is actually transported his body across the United States, and at major cities, they took his body off the special train, Lincoln's funeral train, and had huge processions, and by huge, I mean like 12 bodies deep, to see these processions, so that they can see his body and say goodbye. And for people who could make those big cities, what they would do is they would actually stand by the tracks and wait for the train to pass. So, steel was a great connector. Abraham Lincoln was also a great connector, and what I do in The Alchemy of Us is show how both of them connected the country.

>> Dan Turello: That's an amazing story. So, you know, when you talk about steel and railways, you know, I hear the descriptions of people being unified and cross-border commerce and all of those areas, it sounds a little bit like the Internet today. I mean, those are some of the descriptions that we hear. This isn't a question about the Internet, but it's more question about, you know, in hindsight, everything is 20/20. And yet, we know the Internet brings us closer together, but it also does a lot of other things. I'm wondering, is there a way for creators of technology to be more aware and conscientious, as they're developing technologies, about how that's going to impact life for the community? Or is it just the nature of the beast that scientists and creators create, and then, everybody else has to figure out how to use it? 

>> Ainissa Ramirez: That's a very, very good question that you raise, and that's part of the impetus for writing The Alchemy of Us. That I want people to critique their creations a little bit more. You know, we have this mantra going out about, you know, seeking permission and not forgiveness. And this is a little dangerous, because we'll launch things into the world, and then, trying our best to pull them back or cage them in some way so that they don't have a negative impact. What I believe that we should do is that we should teach ethics within engineering classes. We should fold it into engineering classes and not have it as something as an aside. When I was in school, the ethics class was an elective, and it was the last year. And so, you know, that's not the time when we should be teaching something that's so important. We should be folding in ethics early on, so that people start to think about their device or the thing that they want to build, and I think that people should be excited and have unbridled energy towards whatever they're making. But I think the next step should be, okay, now that this would be in the world, how can I best design it, so it lives well, that it supports humanity? Let me think a little bit about how it will live before people get it. How it will live after people use it. So, I think we need to answer those bigger questions, too, and they're hard. You know, doing science by itself is hard. So, folding on ethics, a lot of people are going to say, well, that's a bit of a downer, but we see that it's this kind of thinking and not thinking about the output or the long-term impact of something that's gotten us into a lot of trouble. It's the reason why we have some of the situations that we have today.

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So, I think studying how technologies shape us, as we do in The Alchemy of Us, will give people a little bit of the notion that they should consider what are the ethical outputs, and what are the social implications for what they build? 

>> Dan Turello: We hear a lot about citizen science these days. I wonder, what does that actually look like? Does that fit into this conversation, and what is it, first of all? And how does it play out? 

>> Ainissa Ramirez: Well, I don't know how my book fully aligns with citizen science, but let me back up. Citizen science is a way for everyday people to have a hand in doing real science and not just, you know, making invisible ink as, you know, I used to do as a kid, but actually doing things that contribute to the canon of knowledge, and it can present itself in many different ways where, you know, use your cell phone, and you go out and you take pictures of fauna or animals and where they're located. It gets stored in the cloud, and so scientists are able to learn a little bit more about migration patterns and the like, and it's manifested in many different ways. Citizen science has different flavors. And so, people can enter into science many different ways. But some people may not want to do something hands-on. But I do think they still need to know about science. And so, that's where The Alchemy of Us comes in. Because here you are, you can sit and read some stories. You can learn a little bit about how technologies came to be, and then, learn about how they impact us. So, citizen science projects are great, because they allow people to learn about failure and trial and error, but other people may not have that kind of patience or that kind of time. So, here's another way to explore that, and that's by using stories. So, citizen science and science stories, they kind of work together, and they have the same role. 

>> Dan Turello: So, since you mentioned trial and error and failure, you know, one of things that kind of came up in your books, from your book, was just how challenging it is to be a scientist. I mean, you have story after story of individuals and long hours during the day, during the night, great personal sacrifice, sometimes financial sacrifice. No clear, you know, education of -- certainly, no certainty of success in the short term. With all of these challenges, why would anyone want to do this?

>> Ainissa Ramirez: Well, I don't think scientists see it that way. I mean, I'm a writer now, and I'm using the same part of my brain that I did as a scientist, which is that you're trying to solve a problem. You're trying to build something. You don't see it is a lot of work. You see it as this is what you need to do to make this thing happen. You're passionate about something, and that's what pushes you forward. So, I think that if we, you know, look at science and we keep saying it's a lot of hard work, what we're going to do is we're going to deter a lot of people from doing science. I think if we reframe it and say, hey, what do you want to solve? And by the way, you're going to have to sit in the chair for a long time to figure it out, but it's something that's important to you. Then people are willing to do it. If you want to learn how to play the piano, you have to spend a lot of time practicing. If you want to learn how to paint, you have to do a lot of time practicing. Things are worthwhile take a lot of time, and it's the same thing with science. So, I don't think scientists see it as a lot of hard of work. I see it as this is what you need to do, in order to learn this new thing or build this new thing, or in my case as a writer, to write this new thing. 

>> Dan Turello: So, we started talking about glass and your experiment in the workshop. Let's come full-circle, and glass is just incredibly intriguing. Right now, we're talking a lot about vaccines, and rightfully so. And the fact of the matter is we wouldn't have any of those vaccines if it weren't for the glass beakers in the labs of scientists. How is it that, as I understand it, glass comes from sand. How do we get so many different varietals of glass, everything from stained-glass to laboratory glass from one material? 

>> Ainissa Ramirez: Oh, that's a great question. Well, there aren't a whole lot of glasses, because it's so hard to make glass. First of all, you have to work at extremely high temperatures, temperatures that are hotter than lava, and not many people want to work at that level. But if you want to make something like stained glass, well, it's just a matter of adding some elements that give it the color. But in the sciences, an important glass is Pyrex. Now we know Pyrex because, you know, we can make all kinds of, you can bake all kinds of cool things in it, and Pyrex is great in the sciences because, well, it kind of keeps to itself. You can put acids in it, and you don't have to worry about it creating a hole, is good, because you don't want to have your experiment fall on your lap. It can handle high temperatures. It doesn't change its shape. So, borosilicate glasses, or Pyrex, were a tremendous discovery, and it really helped the discovery of scientific breakthroughs, because it gave us a way to hold and to see, and seeing and observing is really part the scientific method. So, glass has been tremendously important, and in our age today, when we're thinking about vaccines, glass is important because it holds those vaccines. And so, we want to material that doesn't do anything to the precious contents inside. And so, people are working tremendously hard to make very good glass in medicine, especially, this time we're in now. 

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>> Dan Turello: So, there's a lot of stories in your book about, there's personal stories. There's also stories about people competing with each other to come up with the breakthrough. When you look at science today, do the breakthroughs happen as a result of teamwork, or it still the individual whose coming up with, you know, the leap of genius in moving the science forward? 

>> Ainissa Ramirez: Well, it's never been the independent genus. That's a big, fat myth, and I don't know why it's out there, and I think that it's unfortunate, because what it does is it actually pushes a lot of people out of science, because they think, well, I'm not a genius this way. So, I can't do it. You know, Edison had a lot of patents. He had over 1,000 patents. Edison had a lot of people working for him, too. We don't mention him. Nobel prizes, we usually give prizes to three top scientists. Well, they had an army of graduate students and post-docs, and, you know, there are a whole lot of things that made that happen. So, it's a huge myth. That is not how science is done. Science can be done where small groups of people work together. Science can be done where large groups of people can work together, and science can be done where you are working independently, but you have collaborators that are all over the world. But it's never an independent, sole genius -- well, if that happens, it's fairly rare. So, I don't think that myth serves us. Science is really, really collaborative, and it's iterative. I'll do this little piece, and then, you do that little piece, and we kind of build this bit by bit, and then, overall, we gain knowledge. So, I don't think that myth serves us anymore. 

>> Dan Turello: So, we have time for one last question. I'm going to go with the billboard question. You know, if you could say anything to the world at large and have it go on a billboard, what would that be? And then, slightly more, a slightly narrower version of that, if you could say anything to the policymakers, to the folks who spend their time, day in and day out, crafting legislation and thinking about how to foster scientific innovation, what would you say to that group of people?

>> Ainissa Ramirez: Oh, wow, that's a good question, and if I had to question to people, I would say, how is it that you're going to change the world for the better? And everyone has some unique gift, and if you haven't found it, dig and look for it, because you do have one, and then, see how you're going to apply that to leave this planet a little bit better. And for the policymakers, I would just say be brave. You know, we're so constrained because we're trying to please certain people, but, you know, in order to do science, in order to change this world for the better, you have to just be a little bit more courageous. And so, I would just say to them that we're really relying on you to just be a little more brave. 

>> Dan Turello: Ainissa, thanks so much for being with us today. We really appreciate your taking the time. That was Dr. Ainissa Ramirez with her book, The Alchemy of Us. How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another. It's now out on paperback. Ainissa, again.

>> Ainissa Ramirez: Thank you.

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