SciencePodcast_220422

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0:00:05.8 Sarah Crespi: This is the Science Podcast for November 22nd, 2022. I'm Sarah Crespi.
Each week we talk about some of the most interesting news and research from Science and the
sister journals. First up, News Contributing Correspondent, Josh Sokol. We talk about the millions
of migrating birds killed every year when they slam into brightly-lit buildings at night, and recent
efforts to prevent these deaths using bird migrations forecast. After that, we hear from researcher
Aaron Pereira about controlling a robot from orbit. In this case, the robot is on Earth, and the
controller was on the ISS. Finally, in a sponsored segment from our custom publishing office,
director of custom publishing, Sean Sanders, talks with professor Alberto Pugliese about the nPOD
program to advance Type 1 Diabetes research.

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0:01:00.9 SC: No one knows why birds are attracted to bright lights at night. Just like we don't
know why moths love a flame. But we do know that tens of millions of birds crash into brightly-lit
buildings every year. Contributing Correspondent, Josh Sokol, wrote this week on efforts to predict
massive bird migrations, and to dim the lights for them before they get to town. Hi, Josh.

0:01:24.8 Josh Sokol: Hi.

0:01:25.6 SC: You have some really striking, sorry, examples of this problem in your story. Let's
start with the 911 Memorial in New York City. This is an annual thing, it's been happening for
years, and the birds really like these bright lights.

0:01:39.4 JS: As a sort of commemoration of 9/11, they have these big pillars of light that go into
the sky, and this is just a beacon for many different bird species. Ornithologists have known this for
a while, birds like to go into the beams and just fly around it in a circle.

0:01:53.8 SC: That's not good.

0:01:56.0 JS: No. They're wasting energy. There are predators like peregrine falcons who will find
other birds caught in that circle and pick them off. So it's just kind of a bad thing environmentally.
The radar estimates of how many birds go to the beam, show that maybe 16,000 individual birds
can be attracted into this memorial within about 20 minutes of it turning on.

0:02:17.9 SC: And by some estimates, in the US anyway, we know birds are on a decline, maybe a
big decline. What are the main threats, besides these brightly-lit buildings at night? What are some
of the other threats to bird populations here?

0:02:32.4 JS: Basically any kind of environmental degradation, from habitat loss to potentially an
effect of pesticide use. A big one is house cats. House cats are killing a lot of birds per year.

0:02:45.3 SC: Yeah, and even during the daytime, buildings can cause bird death just by... If it's
reflective, they just think it's... You can just go ahead, and then you run right into it.

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0:02:55.7 JS: Yeah, big glass buildings really can attract birds during the day too.

0:03:00.7 SC: So how big of a problem overall is birds bashing into buildings?

0:03:04.0 JS: This sort of high-end estimate for how many birds are dying from collisions, in the
continent of the US, is almost a billion per year. That's the high-end estimate.

0:03:12.0 SC: Wow.

0:03:13.7 JS: How much this matters for different bird species, depends on how many of that
species there are, and what fraction of the population this is taking out. But suffice it to say, it is a
big problem.

0:03:22.1 SC: The focus of this story is on this interaction between migrating birds. So big massive
birds on the move, going to different places, getting distracted by bright lights of buildings, and
then may be dying or getting lost. And one of the things we need to know first to solve this problem
is, where are the birds, and where are they going? So what's the best way to track migrating birds?

0:03:44.1 JS: People have been able to collect reports on the ground, in a given place, at what time
of year, what type of birds do you see. With the advent of weather radar, and being able to use
sophisticated machine learnings to look in weather radar for birds, you can study birds more like a
weather phenomenon over the entire continent of the United States. And when you do that, you see
that regularly, every year, there are nights where there are half a billion birds above continent of the
United States, there're more birds in the skies than there are people sleeping in beds below.

0:04:17.4 SC: So using that data, using machine learning, they can now say when birds are likely to
show up en masse?

0:04:23.9 JS: Yeah, a when and where, just like looking at storm systems, or a weather
phenomenon. You have a map of where they tend to go when they're migrating.

0:04:32.9 SC: And this is the BirdCast?

0:04:34.3 JS: That's right. This lab at Cornell calls it a BirdCast. They're able to take the weather
forecast and add in additional information, and predict pretty reliably when and where the birds will
be.

0:04:45.8 SC: How reliable is it? Is it like the weather, like 10 days is kind of good, but as you get
closer like it's the next day, it's better?

0:04:53.5 JS: It's uncertain, just like weather forecasts. And because it depends on the weather
forecast, the birds decide when to fly, or when not to fly, based on the weather conditions that night.
So it's pretty accurate a week out, it's much more accurate one day out.

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0:05:07.8 SC: And what are some of the ways that people are reacting to the BirdCast? What are
they doing to protect the birds, or get ready for them to come to town?

0:05:16.3 JS: The glass buildings are already there, the habitat is already destroyed, but one thing
that conservationists can do, is turn out lights. So there's an enormous interest in trying to get in
different cities. Conservationists are leading campaigns, they're leveraging some of this new data,
and they're trying to get building owners to turn out lights during migration season, and even
individual home owners to do the same.

0:05:39.8 SC: So this could be done building by building, or city by city, or my own personal
house. Which seems to be the popular solution? Are we seeing more regulation, more laws, or more
case-by-case basis?

0:05:52.1 JS: There are some states, like New York State, or like New York City specifically,
where there's some legislation, and city ordinances are now trying to be a little bit stricter about
buildings turning their lights off. For the most part, Lights Out campaigns from this radar data, but
also going back even a few decades, they have been on a voluntary basis. And when
conservationists are leading these Lights Out campaigns, they tend to target iconic skyline
buildings, the big visible, brilliantly lit skyscrapers in a city first, because they want both to get
those buildings to turn the lights off to save birds, but also they want to get other people to see that
those buildings are turning their lights off. So there's kind of an effort to tackle the big bird
magnets, and the big visible buildings first, and get them to voluntarily participate.

0:06:40.0 SC: 'Cause they are attention magnets too, right?

0:06:41.9 JS: That's right.

0:06:42.6 SC: There's a lot of people in your story walking around buildings collecting dead birds.
Is that part of the PR campaign or data collection, or a little bit of both?

0:06:51.3 JS: It's a little bit of both. Historically, walking around buildings in the morning and
picking dead birds up off the sidewalk was one of the only ways people did get to visualize
migration flux of birds, 'cause you would just see what's coming through based on what you pick up
the next morning. Obviously, also that's inspired people who are these volunteers and
conservationists to try to lessen this death toll and try to prevent it. So Lights Out campaigns were
always driven by this volunteer interest in cataloging the dead birds and saving some of them. And
nowadays that there are other ways to predict the worst nights and to understand them, like by using
radar, the bird collision volunteers, the people who go count the dead birds, the people who catalog
them, the people who even try to do rehab for them, they are still participating because they're able
to collect data on which birds are dying, and as these Lights Out campaigns go on, they're able to
provide the ground truth information about whether or not birds are actually being saved.

0:07:52.4 SC: Yeah, that was my next question. Has there been a report or data shared around that
shows that dimming lights on big buildings in cities is having an effect on these bird migrations, are
they saving birds this way?

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0:08:06.8 JS: There's very little direct data so far about a Lights Out campaign over a whole city
that can say how many birds it's saving, but the scientific studies, a lot of them led or participated in
by this BirdCast team, are building up that link. So the study in Manhattan at the Tribute in Light
really showed that one single bright light can attract a lot of birds, and if you turn it off they'll go
away. Another more recent study at the Chicago convention center showed that the number of lit
window bays at this lake side Convention Center really determined how many birds died each night.
And it suggested pretty linearly that if you just had half as many lit window bays, you would have
half as many dead birds.

0:08:48.4 SC: Oh, wow.

0:08:49.5 JS: And the hope of these conservationists and the scientist is that that relationship holds,
that if you can cut down light by half, you can cut down dead birds by half.

0:08:57.6 SC: Why are so many lights on in buildings at night, when no one's there but birds?

0:09:02.4 JS: I think it's complicated, and the answers are cultural and social. People like light,
they feel safe with lights, and there is not... In my mind, this is my judgment, there's not a robust
way of thinking about this as a potential environmental pollutant. It just hasn't crossed a lot of
people's minds. I had a scientist in the story tell me that people don't think that they're... That having
their porch lights on all night is the same as pouring paint down the sewer, but that in his mind,
environmentally, it kind of is. I think that there's also a political sensitivity in this country around
regulation. So there are legislative solutions to get people to turn off the lights, but those won't work
in a lot of places because people will be very upset about the government telling them what they can
and can't do. So there's this kind of a scientific problem of understanding the threat, and there's this
then advocacy and conservation problem of how to reach out. And I think the Lights Out campaigns
are trying to make things voluntary and they're trying to show success and to harness energy in a
positive way around this idea of saving colorful migratory songbirds from light.

0:10:08.3 SC: And there's other good reasons to turn off your lights as well. Save electricity, save
money, you can see the stars better—there's an argument to be made.

0:10:17.0 JS: There's a lot of pre-existing Dark Sky rationale from the environmental harm, like
you said, to energy savings, to being able to see a dark sky. One thing that's interesting about this
whole bird migration approach is it takes the idea of light pollution, which is this diffuse very
difficult problem that's invisible to a lot of people, and it turns it into an acute crisis. Because the
BirdCast team can say, "Hey, tonight, there are half a billion birds flying, and if you can turn the
lights out, you can save them." So it's kind of a different approach in addition to some of the
arguments that have been around for years.

0:10:54.2 SC: Huh? Very interesting. We've been focusing on the US most of this time. I think
that's 'cause the BirdCast originated here, it sounds like, but is there a larger, more international
approach to tracking migration, to doing BirdCast then also to do this kind of dimming?

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0:11:10.6 JS: In my understanding the public availability and compatibility of weather radar
stations throughout the US is kind of unique, so for example, in Mexico and in Europe, you don't
have the ability to knit together a bunch of different radar stations and get a macroscopic picture of
migration. So that's something unique about the science in the US, where we actually understand
more about where the birds are from the top down. But in Europe and North Africa, there are other
ways of tracking bird migration and using that information for conservation, in Europe is pretty
progressive about Dark Sky legislation and policy, probably more progressive in some ways than
the US is, so there are nascent efforts like this elsewhere too.

0:11:56.3 SC: Thank you so much, Josh.

0:11:57.6 JS: You're welcome. Happy to be here.

0:12:00.0 SC: Josh Sokol is a contributing correspondent for Science based in North Carolina. You
could find a link to the story we discussed at science.org/podcast. And if you wanna check out the
BirdCast in your area, go to birdcast.info. Stay tuned for my talk with researcher Aaron Pereira
about orbiting astronauts controlling robots on the surface of planets or moons or other things.

[music]

0:12:27.6 SC: How easy is it to remotely control a robot on the surface of another planet? Not so
easy. How about if you're in orbit around said planet, Aaron Pereira and colleagues tested this idea
using the International Space Station and an Earth-based robot, they wrote about it this week in
Science Robotics. Hi, Aaron.

0:12:52.8 Aaron Pereira: Hello there, Sarah.

0:12:53.4 SC: So what are some of the challenges to controlling a robot or a rover from very, very
far away? Like planetary distances away.

0:13:01.8 AP: I think the biggest challenge is the communication.

0:13:04.9 SC: Yeah.

0:13:05.6 AP: We have to communicate with an object that is flying over our heads, 300 kilometers
up orbiting the Earth every 90 minutes. So that's difficult. On top of that, there's a delay, there's
packet loss which means some of our information doesn't get through, and there's also the operator
in microgravity, which means he's basically weightless.

0:13:28.1 SC: [laughs] I thought this was really interesting. How difficult it is to see what a robot is
seeing when it's not on Earth.

0:13:34.0 AP: Yeah, they only have two views, they have a view in front of the rover and they have
a view of the manipulator arm, what the manipulator arm is directly in front of. It's disorienting
actually if you're not right there with the robot, not to mention there's a delay, so the video they're

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seeing is delayed about a second.

0:13:53.3 SC: From the ISS?

0:13:53.7 AP: Yeah, so the video, the astronaut sees is delayed about a second, in the same way
that we might use our hands to feel our way around a dark room, they can use haptic feedback to
feel more in touch with the environment, no pun intended. What's interesting about this experiment
is the first time to our knowledge that the astronaut has been able to feel force feedback in all
directions when operating a robot on earth, essentially operating the arm as if it were his own arm,
feeling the planet surface, picking up a rock by closing his hand, feeling the weight of that rock, and
so on.

0:14:28.5 SC: Wow. Let's talk a little bit about the set up here, we have an astronaut in space on the
ISS, we have a robot on the surface, is the astronaut looking at a screen wearing a glove, how can
they feel this pressure or force that tells them what the robot is doing. How do they feel that?

0:14:43.6 AP: The astronaut is looking at a screen and Luca Parmitano, in that case, he also had a
joystick and a handle to hold on to, plus another special joy stick, it's a sigma.7 force feedback
device, which means he could move the robot's gripper in all directions. And also rotate it. And also
grip objects. So we have these three things, laptop, joystick and force feedback joystick.

0:15:10.4 SC: And what kind of tasks were the robot trying to do?

0:15:13.2 AP: It was simulating a geology exploration scenarios, so the astronaut had to drive
between three sampling sites, and pick up rocks in those sampling sites in consultation with a team
of geologists on the ground.

0:15:28.5 SC: That delay that you mentioned earlier, is that individuals only or does it also include
the haptic or force feedback.

0:15:34.0 AP: Yeah, it's in everything. And the reason for this is, although the ISS is actually quite
close to the Earth, I think 95 minutes out of its 90 minute orbit, it's under the horizon relative to us,
so we can't contact it directly, what we have to do is contact geostationary satellites, which are in
three clusters floating above the earth, and that introduces a delay of 850 milliseconds, almost a
second.

0:16:02.1 SC: Nothing compared to Mars, but still enough to make it difficult to do this kind of
stuff.

0:16:06.7 AP: Indeed, and the reason why we're doing this is in the future, we imagine that we
gonna have teams of robots exploring and doing things on the surface of Mars or the moon or
further afield, and these robots will need to be controlled, and we imagine that happening by an
astronaut on orbit around Mars or the moon or wherever, what we're interested in testing is how
well the astronaut can operate these robots under these space conditions, since we don't have this
sort of set up yet, we use the next best thing, which is the ISS.

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0:16:33.2 SC: How easy is it to control something that's giving you force feedback when you're in
microgravity, it could push you around basically.

0:16:41.2 AP: Often in ways which are kind of unexpected because of the delay, so if you hit
something with your robot, you're not gonna feel it until much later, what this can lead to is
instability, essentially the robot doesn't stay at the position that it's commanded, but it sort of
hammers on the ground like a crazy woodpecker, this is not good both for the robot, which gets
damaged, and also for the task, because you can't get anything done. For that reason, we have this
approach called Time Domain passivity control, passivity is essentially a property of an
environment that doesn't have an energy source, and what I mean by that is, if I interact with a
spring, and I can push it, I can give energy to the spring, that's potential energy, but it's not more
energy than I gave from my body essentially, so that when the spring then pushes me back, it's less
than or equal to what I put into it, and we call that a passive environment.

0:17:38.6 AP: When you try to do this in tidy operation, you have delays and you have
discretization, and both of these could cause the environment to not be passive anymore, so
essentially give you back more energy than you put in, and that can lead to instability. So what our
system does is it looks at how much energy you are putting in and only allows the robot to exert
that kind of energy on the environment. So for example, I'm moving in space, and my robot is too,
and my robot hits a contact, now if the robot were to press down on that contact and push it for
example, it would be an injection of energy into the environment, but then there's me, I haven't felt
that contact yet, so I'm still moving in free space without any energy, so my tele-operation is saying
to the remote environment, "Hey, the guy hasn't put any energy in yet, he probably doesn't wanna
push this rock. And then it's going to reduce the force or reduce my movement essentially.

0:18:33.6 SC: So it has a buffer that says, "Don't be going and pushing on things until I tell you to
really exert yourself."

0:18:39.9 AP: Exactly, and then when I suddenly feel it, then I can put some energy, and so I'm
now I'm feeling a force after this 850 millisecond delay, and if I continue pushing, then I am putting
some energy in, and then only then can the robot put energy into the environment.

0:18:55.4 SC: So in this set up, you did this from the ISS, did you find that your robot no longer
behave like a crazy woodpecker, what were the results of using this kind of system?

0:19:05.6 AP: Luckily, yes. So it was stable. So that was great, but another thing that we also need
is for it to be transparent, and that means that the operator actually feels immersed in the
environment, 'cause it's useless if it's very, very safe, but it's impossible to operate. Luckily, we got
some good feedback from the astronaut, he was able to do the rock sampling, so in that respect, it's
very much a success. And we can start looking at the next steps.

0:19:32.4 SC: Can you talk a little bit about the immersion experience and why that's important?

0:19:36.4 AP: Important to say it's not always essential to be immersed in the robot you're

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controlling, you'll wanna automate where you can automate, but if autonomy fails, either because
there's a fault or because this kind of task was not predicted by the people who programed the
robots, or because the environment is just too difficult to allow automation then you're gonna wanna
go into the robots and be the robots in the remote situation, this is not just for space, this is also for
terrestrial scenarios, so we have some projects, for example, now, project smile. We're working on
healthcare assistant robots to support vulnerable people from a far, especially for elderly people or
people with a disability, this can be really useful, but if an emergency happens, then what you want
is a doctor or a medical professional to inhabit the robot straight away. Another interesting thing
about testing this out in space is we have two conditions which are pretty unique, the first is micro-
gravity, so weightlessness, and the second is an operating environment, which is high performance,
high workload, high stress.

0:20:45.6 SC: Yeah. And when it comes to immersion is the haptic feedback really important.

0:20:50.4 AP: I've tried out this scenario, and I can honestly say yes, if you've got delayed video or
not great video, then feeling the environment is really gonna help you know when you're picking up
a rock, when you're touching the rock or not.

0:21:03.6 SC: I kinda wanna play this video game whatever it would be like.

0:21:06.6 AP: It's really fun to do, but also important is we don't just do it for fun, haptic feedback
is actually different in space, people feel things differently in space.

0:21:16.6 SC: Can you give an example of that?

0:21:18.1 AP: You have reduced proprioception, which is the feeling of your own body, so you
can't really feel whether your muscles are extended, your hand is stretched out in front of you or
right in front of your face, you can't really feel that, also your vestibular system. So your sense of
balance and orientation, which is in your inner ear, is messed up because it's used to a constant
linear acceleration in one direction that's gravity, and it doesn't have that anymore, so for the first
few weeks or a few days up to weeks of an astronaut being on orbit, they may suffer from what is
called space sickness. Another thing is you underestimate mass, so here on Earth, mass is the same
as weight. In space, these are not the same things. So my colleague was told by a cosmonaut that a
throwing movement can actually dislocated the shoulder.

0:22:05.1 SC: I can't imagine being like, okay, I'm controlling something in space, but the thing
you're controlling is on earth, so it's feeling all the earth forces.

0:22:14.1 AP: Yes, I think that must be weird.

0:22:15.1 SC: Rich, and you have to put your brain in that mode, even though you're on the space
station and you're not feeling gravity, you're not feeling this orientation, but the robot totally is.

0:22:26.6 AP: Yeah, and also, yeah, humans move differently in space, they have a different
motion strategy, they also move slower.

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0:22:33.6 SC: That is very cool. And so now you have to build programs that can adapt what the
astronauts are experiencing to controlling a robot, not just on earth, but maybe the conditions on
Mars or the Moon, so there's gonna have to be some kind of conversion for different places.

0:22:51.0 AP: There's so many things that we need to still test. This is just one experiment, we had
some experiments prior to this, looking at more autonomous tasks, so using what was called
supervised autonomy, where you give more high level commands to the robots, so instead of
immersing yourself in the robot, you tell the robot, pick up the antenna, fetch that battery. And now
what we're doing is we want to allow the astronaut to scale in between autonomy and telepresence
and also command multiple robots.

0:23:21.4 SC: Why would an astronaut stay in orbit instead of just going down to the surface of the
moon or the planet that they're orbiting.

0:23:29.6 AP: It's more difficult to move people down to the surface, 'cause you've also gotta take
them off again and with robots, you could just leave them there.

0:23:36.0 SC: They do that, don't they?

0:23:36.6 AP: Honestly robots, you put the robots down there and it's a lot easier basically.

0:23:43.4 SC: Why don't we just set a robot down and tell it to do things automatically, go find
some rocks, go visit that canyon, why can't we just let it do its own thing?

0:23:52.6 AP: Ideally, we would. There are some scenarios where that would either not work or we
want the intelligence of the human, so space is pretty unstructured, there's not a lot for the robots to
latch on to. Also, the tasks are pretty open-ended, in a warehouse or a factory on Earth, you might
have a repeatable task, parts or an environment which the robot knows and objects that it also
knows or can detect easily. That's not the case in space necessarily, there's also, if you have a very
open-ended task, then it's hard for the operator to conceptualize all automation possibilities for the
robot. Also, automation can break, things cannot work. In which case, we want the operator to be
able to take charge, and we had a previous experiment where we did just that. We imagined a
scenario where there was already some structure on Mars. So the robot was maintaining a solar
panel array and some other stuff. And the astronaut would command with very high-level
commands like, "Pick up that antenna," or, "Grab that battery box."

0:25:00.1 AP: But the astronauts were also saying they would like some more finer-grained control
to be able to control the robots immersively like we are doing in this experiment, Analog-1. And in
the coming work that we're going to do, we plan to do just that. So we'll call it scalable autonomy,
where the astronaut is able to scale up and down the amount of autonomy they use to command the
robots, and also to command multiple robots because when you're immersed in one robot, you can
only command that one. Whereas if you've got the supervised autonomy concept, where the
astronaut operates as essentially the supervisor, then you can control a team of robots, which is
essentially the end goal.

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0:25:38.2 SC: Yeah, I can imagine watching your robot doing something really silly that they don't
need to do between the start and the end of the task, and wanting to just be like, "Okay, let's not do
that part that you decided was important. We just need to do these other steps."

0:25:51.9 AP: Oh, they do that all the time.

0:25:53.8 SC: Thank you so much, Aaron.

0:25:55.0 AP: Thank you, Sarah.

0:25:55.8 SC: Aaron Pereira is a researcher at the German Aerospace Center, DLR, and a guest
researcher at the Human Robot Interaction Lab at ESA. You can find a link to the Science Robotics
paper we discussed at science.org/podcast. Up next, we have a custom segment sponsored by the
Helmsley Charitable Trust and nPOD, the Network for Pancreatic Organ Donors with Diabetes.
Custom Publishing Director Sean Sanders chats with a researcher, Alberto Pugliese, about how the
nPOD program is driving type 1 diabetes research.

[music]

0:26:36.7 Sean Sanders: A very warm hello, and thank you for joining this latest Science Custom
podcast. My name is Sean Sanders, and I'm the Director and Senior Editor for Custom Publishing at
Science. I'm excited to welcome you to this interview from Science Custom Solutions, in which I'll
be talking with Dr. Alberto Pugliese from the University of Miami. Alberto is the J. Enloe and
Eugenia J. Dodson Chair in Diabetes Research, Professor of Medicine, Microbiology and
Immunology, and Deputy Director of Immune Tolerance at the Diabetes Research Institute, a
designated Center of Excellence at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine in Florida.
Alberto has been studying type 1 diabetes for over 30 years, focusing on its pathogenesis,
pathology, and clinical trials to advance new therapies.

0:27:27.9 SS: Our thanks to the Helmsley Charitable Trust for their kind sponsorship of this
podcast interview in support of nPOD, the Network for Pancreatic Organ Donors with Diabetes, of
which Alberto is Co-Executive Director together with colleagues Mark Atkinson and Carmella
Evans-Molina. The goals of the nPOD project are to recover relevant tissue from organ donor
groups, share these gifts with appropriate scientific investigators who seek to prevent, reverse, and
ultimately cure type 1 diabetes, and foster collaboration amongst these investigators. Alberto, thank
you so much for making the time to talk with me today.

0:28:07.3 Alberto Pugliese: Thank you, Sean. And hi, everyone. I'm delighted to be here.

0:28:11.3 SS: Alberto, for those listeners not familiar with type 1 diabetes, could you briefly tell us
a little bit about the disease, what causes it, and how it shows up in the body.

0:28:21.0 AP: So type 1 diabetes is considered a chronic autoimmune disease where your immune
system, over time, attacks the insulin-producing cells, which are pancreatic beta cells, and destroys

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them. As a result, patients can no longer make insulin, and they need to rely on insulin injections
multiple times daily. Unfortunately, insulin is not a cure. And patients with type 1 diabetes still
suffer from much morbidity, and mortality in some cases, from acute chronic complications. There
are about 1.6 million with type 1 diabetes in the United States alone. And of them, about 250,000
are children. But about 50% of those adults that have type 1 diabetes now, actually were diagnosed
when they were children. Overall, in the United States there are over 40 million Americans that
have diabetes, including type 2 diabetes which is the most common form. But nonetheless, type 1
diabetes has major impact on people's lives. Number one because it's much more difficult to treat.
And also because, as I mentioned before, many patients are diagnosed as children so they do have
the whole of their lifetime ahead, and they have to deal with diabetes for the rest of it. Both type 1
and type 2 are major burdens to society, and are becoming more prevalent. So this is a major
problem.

0:29:39.9 SS: How is type 1 diabetes currently studied, and what models are used?

0:29:45.4 AP: So type 1 diabetes is a disease that targets the pancreas, right? The disease
mechanisms occur in the pancreas. And that's a very difficult organ to study because it's not really
easily accessible. So beginning in the 1980s, researchers had come up with some rodent models of
type 1 diabetes. The two more utilized are the NOD mouse and the Bio-Breeding Diabetes-Prone
rat. And both develop a form of diabetes that is very similar to type 1 diabetes. Actually, some
similarities are quite striking, but many other differences exist. And at the end of the day, the mouse
models cannot really tell us everything about the human disease. And there are specific questions
that are unique to the human disease that we could just not ask in a rodent model. And also, in the
rodent models, we can manipulate the disease, test therapies, and very often have a very positive
impact and reverse the disease or prevent the disease. But in reality, very few of those therapies
actually are applicable to people.

0:30:51.0 SS: I wanted to talk a little bit about nPOD. Can you tell us what it is, and how it's an
alternative for mouse and rat models to study type 1 diabetes?

0:31:01.2 AP: There is clearly a need to obtain pancreas from people with type 1 diabetes, or even
type 2 diabetes, that can be studied to advance our understanding of the causes of the disease. To
that end, almost 15 years ago, this was recognized by several of us in the field, and especially by
JDRF and Helmsley, which are funding organizations that support research in the type 1 diabetes
space. And what we did, then, is we established this program with the goal of collecting
systematically pancreas and other tissues from organ donors with type 1 diabetes, so individual who
pass away and their families donate their organs to either transplant or research, and to make those
tissues available to researchers.

0:31:50.5 SS: So can you talk a little bit about how nPOD works exactly?

0:31:54.9 AP: Sure. So nPOD is basically two things. It's a tissue bank which is run by scientists,
and it's an international collaborative study that focuses on understanding the causes of human type
1 diabetes by looking at the pancreas and other disease relevant tissues. To do this, we have
established collaboration with all the major organ procurement organizations in the United States.
NPOD is operational 24/7, 365 days a year, and we're always ready to receive pancreas and other

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tissues from organ donors with type 1 diabetes. Once the tissues are received, they are processed
with rigorous protocols, and then the samples become available to the scientific community.
However, investigators, in order to gain access to the tissues, they need to submit a scientific
project, and it needs to be reviewed with the rigorous review process, and after approval, then they
will receive the tissues. We also, and that's very important, we have established a screening
program where we screen organ donors for the positivity for all autoantibodies that are a very well-
known risk marker for future type 1 diabetes.

0:33:05.3 AP: So in doing so, what we hope to do is identify individuals who were going to
develop type 1 diabetes had they lived, but they didn't know. And so in those organs, perhaps we
can capture the disease in the preclinical stage where certain ecological factors may be more likely
to be present or active, and so that's very important. And since we started about 15 years ago, we
have recovered pancreas from over 500 donors. About 180 have type 1 diabetes, and about 50 are
these donors with autoantibodies. And the other key aspect of nPOD that I wanted to make sure to
mention is their collaboration. We really engage all of our scientists and we bring them together.
We promote interactions and collaborations among them and even outside if needed, and we
establish working groups often internationally. Because we recognize that there are fundamental
questions about type 1 diabetes that a single investigator cannot honestly answer, does not have all
the tools and all the knowledge to do it. I think it takes a village to figure this out, and that's what
we're trying to do. And I would like to invite people who are listening to us to visit our website,
www.jdrfnpod.org, and learn more about nPOD. How it work, who our scientists are, and the
research that we're conducting, and the discoveries that have been made by nPOD investigators
throughout this years.

0:34:31.8 SS: Alberto, I understand that nPOD is looking to expand its focus somewhat to promote
more interdisciplinary research to solve this type 1 diabetes issue. Can you talk a little bit about that
program?

0:34:42.3 AP: Absolutely. We're happy that we have attracted the majority of type 1 diabetes
investigators to our call, but we recognize that there is great potential the investigators from other
areas of research might actually contribute significantly to advance our understanding of type 1
diabetes. So we are really open to new ideas, to new technologies, to out of the box thinking. We'd
like to hear how someone in the cancer space, for example, may think about type 1 diabetes or
certain aspects of the pathogenesis of type 1 diabetes, or somebody who was a basic immunologist
or a basic geneticist, or cell biologist. We do like to attract people and think about the same problem
we're thinking about and help us figure it out.

0:35:27.0 SS: Now, at a very practical level, what can nPOD offer researchers to move their type 1
diabetes research forward?

0:35:34.5 AP: So essentially, we can offer three things. And number one is, of course, access to the
tissues. The other thing that we can absolutely provide is guidance, especially for those who come
from a different field, and also collaboration, because we can identify suitable collaborators, have
them join working groups, and it all becomes very exciting. And finally, the Helmsley Charitable
Trust has actually endowed nPOD with a grant, from which we can make pilot grant awards that we
can use to support their activity when they study tissues from nPOD.

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0:36:10.7 SS: Alberto, final question. In a perfect world, what would the next decade of type 1
diabetes research look like under this nPOD initiative?

0:36:19.2 AP: So my hope is that we would be able to discover all of the key triggers and the
mechanism of disease. It a very complex disease. We understand it's very heterogeneous among
different people, and so we really like to discover all of those variables, and then ideally identify
therapeutic targets that we can test in clinical trials so that we will be able soon to prevent and
reverse type 1 diabetes.

0:36:44.8 SS: Alberto, thank you so much. We're gonna have to leave it there, but I very much
appreciate you being on the line today, and all the best for your future work.

0:36:52.0 AP: Thank you so much, Sean, and thank you to our listeners. And I would like to really
honor the memory of the organ donors and their families who have consented to organ donation to
advance type 1 diabetes research and save lives.

0:37:05.3 SS: Thank you, Alberto, and thank you to our listening audience, as well as our kind
sponsor, the Helmsley Charitable Trust. If you'd like to get in touch with us, please send an email to
custompodcast@aaas.org. I'm Sean Sanders. Thank you for listening.

0:37:24.3 SC: And that concludes this edition of the Science Podcast. If you have any comments or
suggestions, write to us at sciencepodcast@aaas.org. You can listen to the show on the Science
website at science.org/podcast, or you can search for Science Magazine on any podcasting app. This
show was edited and produced by Sarah Crespi with production help from podigy and Megan
Cantwell. Transcripts are by Scribie. Jeffrey Cook composed the music. On behalf of Science
Magazine and its publisher, AAAS, thanks for joining us.

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