How important ideas get reawakened, with David Byrne

[THEME MUSIC] FLORA LICHTMAN: Hey, it’s Flora, and you’re listening to Science Friday. On this show, as you know, we love to talk about ideas, especially ideas that have the power to shape the future. But there are plenty of groundbreaking ideas that almost don’t make it out of the lab or the art studio, ideas that are birthed but then fall into a deep slumber until, years later, they’re resurrected.

Why and how ideas go dormant and then wake up is the subject of a new book, Sleeping Beauties– Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up, written by David Byrne, artist, musician, and lead singer, of course, for the Talking Heads. David, welcome to Science Friday, and thank you so much for coming into studio.

DAVID BYRNE: Thank you. Good to be here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You seem blessed with the freedom to do almost any creative project you want these days– although maybe that’s not true. You can correct me. But I’m curious why you wanted to take this on now and in this format.

DAVID BYRNE: It’s true, I’m very lucky that I could do a book like this, which is, for the most part, outside of the boundaries of what people might expect me to be doing. And the publisher said, OK, OK. And so I’m lucky that way. What was the second part of the question?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Why this? Why did you want to do it?

DAVID BYRNE: Oh, why this– why this. I read the term “sleeping beauties” in a science paper that was about the phenomena of sleeping beauties in science. It was about papers that get a little bit of attention when they come out. And then the citations and references drop off, sometimes to almost nothing. And that can go for some years. It can go for decades. And then somebody stumbles on the paper again, and it’s revived and resurrected. And people go, this is exactly what we’re trying to deal with now, and this person kind of figured it out maybe.

So I thought, I know this phenomena. I know it from music and art, literature. It happens in everything. Why restrict it just to science papers? So I started. I thought, this is such an intriguing idea.

FLORA LICHTMAN: But wait, why does it intrigue you?

DAVID BYRNE: Everybody loves the story of a resurrection, a return, something–

FLORA LICHTMAN: It is age old.

DAVID BYRNE: Yes, something that’s saved, somebody who comes back from the dead, somebody who’s forgotten and then suddenly, we realize, no, this person was a great artist. We love those kind of stories, and I’m no different. So every time I’d be reading an article about some artist or read a review of something about Herman Melville, and it would say, [LAUGHS] Melville was incredibly successful, the most successful author in the United States or in North America. And then Moby Dick, and that was a failure. And he was so forgotten that at one point, somebody wanted to write something, and they said, isn’t he dead now? No, he wasn’t dead. And–

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s how far he fell.

DAVID BYRNE: That’s how far he fell. And then, yeah, it was quite a while later, 50 years, 60 years later, more contemporary writers started checking out this book that he’d written and realized, particularly after World War I, when people started to question, what are we, who are we that we could do something like this? What’s our psychological makeup? What’s our national makeup? All those kinds of questions.

And that book deals with a lot of those kind of questions. It deals with that kind of psychology. It deals with racism. It deals with cultural imperialism. It deals with all colonialism, all sorts of stuff that was on people’s minds at that point. And there weren’t very many other books that touched on those subjects. So, bingo, he’s back.

FLORA LICHTMAN: It was ahead of its time.

DAVID BYRNE: In some ways, yes.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You write a lot about science in the book, and there’s this story about Vera Rubin, who, on this show, is like a household name. She’s an astronomer. She pioneers dark matter. And she has this moment where she puts together her ideas. They crystallize after she takes out a sketch pad. What did you love about this story? Why did you want to include it?

DAVID BYRNE: Well, just the science is interesting, how she realized that there must be forces out there in the universe that are causing the rotation of galaxies and all this to behave in a certain way, that it was a force or something was out there that we didn’t know what it was.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That takes a lot of imagination from the jump, right?

DAVID BYRNE: Yes, from the jump, to make that leap. And she says that, too. She says, I had to make the leap to say, what if it’s something we can’t see? What if not everything emits photons, emits light?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Which is hard for scientists, right?

DAVID BYRNE: Hard for scientists, because everything we know, everything we see emits photons or reflects photons or whatever. And so to say, what if there’s something that doesn’t is just like, yeah, what if the Earth is square? Yes, it seemed like a ridiculous idea. But her dream is to work– I think it was Mount Palomar– the newest, biggest telescope, maybe in the world, at that point.

And so she had an appointment to go and do some of her research there because she needed to actually observe the behavior of these galaxies in order to see if any of her ideas were correct. Of course, everyone in the observatory was men. It was all men. And they said, we work at night, and we have no facilities for women. So she took a piece of paper and some scissors and cut out a little figure of a woman and stuck it on a restroom door and said, now you do.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I wondered, too. I mean, you talk about this a little bit. I know you work across many mediums. So in this story, she writes on a sketchpad and then puts something together that she wasn’t able to before. Do you feel like you’re able to understand things differently when you cross mediums in your work?

DAVID BYRNE: Oh, absolutely. Yes, I didn’t get to that part that she’s got all this data. And she starts plotting it out as drawings. And then suddenly it becomes more apparent to her, this is what’s happening. And I thought, yeah, I know that feeling of when you take a thing and move it into another medium, a astronomical idea, expressing it as a drawing. You suddenly can say, oh, now I see why that happens.

FLORA LICHTMAN: We have to take a break. But when we come back, I want to ask you about how you know when not to give up on an idea.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: So I’ve reported a lot on scientists who are out on a limb with their ideas. I find this to be a very interesting theme. And do you happen to know the story of Katalin Karikó?

DAVID BYRNE: No, I don’t.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Can I tell it to you?

DAVID BYRNE: Sure, sure.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, so she’s a biochemist, and she worked for decades, basically, in obscurity. She never got a professor position. She was demoted, fired from her job. And then she won the Nobel Prize for the basic science that led to the COVID vaccine. And it’s really a remarkable story.

DAVID BYRNE: Is this like the mRNA–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yes.

DAVID BYRNE: –things? Yes, and now there’s going to be more of them.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yes, and one of the things that fascinated me so much about it is that for all those years, when people were saying, this is a fool’s errand, this is a dead end, why are you doing this– we’re literally laughing at her, by her description– she was very confident she was right. And I want to just play you this tape because I think it’s so amazing. This is from an interview I did with her. So she’s getting fired. Her boss is firing her. And this is what she says.

KATALIN KARIKÓ: I literally told the chairman, this place will be a museum.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You told him it’d be a museum?

KATALIN KARIKÓ: Yeah.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s an amazing thing to say when you’re being basically kicked out of your job.

KATALIN KARIKÓ: Yes. Because I believed so much that one day it will be important.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What does that make you think?

DAVID BYRNE: Thank God she was tenacious and held on to her beliefs. There was another scientist in this book, Lynn Margulis, who was also very tenacious. She educated herself in a wide variety of areas– genetics and mathematics and different things– which helped her imagine how things could work in a way that other people could not. She had lots of theories and ideas why her ideas weren’t being accepted, and not just hers, but other ideas. She said that the specialization that happens in science is sometimes detrimental.

And she also talked a lot about the hierarchies and the descriptions and the taxonomies that separate things into different things when, actually, there are connections. But when you put them in these different boxes, those connections are conceptually severed. And she said that makes it hard to think about relations. She said everything is about relations, not about isolated things.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Do you feel like you’re tenacious in the way that Lynn Margulis or Katalin Karikó is tenacious?

DAVID BYRNE: Yeah, I’ve been told that I’m stubborn sometimes, yeah, if that’s tenacious.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I think it’s probably required.

DAVID BYRNE: To some extent, yeah. I mean, but you also have to know when you’re wrong or when, yeah, it’s not the right time to push an idea.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yes, I think that can be hard to know. Do you have an idea or a project that you’re trying to wake up right now that’s been slumbering?

DAVID BYRNE: Yeah, but I don’t want to talk about it. I’m sorry.

FLORA LICHTMAN: [LAUGHS] This is a cliffhanger.

DAVID BYRNE: I know, but yeah, it’s a curse, too.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I understand. Is there something that has woken up recently that you feel excited about?

DAVID BYRNE: Oh, my god. Very recent– the discovery of how Roman concrete worked.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Our favorite topic on Science Friday. A lost recipe.

DAVID BYRNE: A lost recipe. 2023– that’s when it was–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Amazing.

DAVID BYRNE: –announced. Oh, now we see how it works.

FLORA LICHTMAN: [LAUGHS] We covered it, of course.

DAVID BYRNE: Yeah.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What if I have an idea that I think should be woken up? How do you do that? Do you have any advice?

DAVID BYRNE: Is there anyone else who might be a champion or a supporter that would have the ear of– whatever– the public, or whatever? I think that’s important.

FLORA LICHTMAN: We’ll talk offline. Yeah. You’re that person for me.

[LAUGHTER]

DAVID BYRNE: I think, as we’ve mentioned, you have to see if the culture is ready for the idea. And if it’s not totally ready, is there an angle where you can wedge part of the idea in?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Ooh, I like that.

DAVID BYRNE: Do you know what I mean?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yes.

DAVID BYRNE: Maybe the whole thing is too big of a bite.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Too much.

DAVID BYRNE: Yeah.

FLORA LICHTMAN: But there’s some little piece that could fit.

DAVID BYRNE: Yeah, get a foot in the doorway there.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Before we let you go, we’re recording right now on Varick Street in WNYC’s Studios. I know this is a neighborhood, I think, that you spent a lot of time in, in SoHo.

DAVID BYRNE: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I lived in SoHo for a while. I haven’t been in a while, but I used to go to a club called SOB’s, which is about a block north of here. Yeah.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And I wondered, if you look back on that time, one of the things that seemed true, reading through your book, is that some of these ideas, there was a turning point where they could have gone either way. They could have continued to slumber, or they could have woken up, or maybe they never would have gone to sleep if something was different. Do you feel like that’s true for your own career? Like, are there moments like that where if something had gone different–

DAVID BYRNE: Absolutely.

FLORA LICHTMAN: –you would be in a different place?

DAVID BYRNE: Absolutely. I have said to people many times, I said we were in the right place at the right time to get noticed. And we were very lucky. I mean, we can take credit and say, well, what we were doing was really innovative and interesting. That might be the case, but that doesn’t mean that anybody’s going to hear it. We happened to be here when other people were doing things, too. And so there was kind of a attention going towards– and a little handful of musicians and artists and different people who were doing things at that moment, and we happened to be there. So I think, yeah, there’s a lot of luck involved.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So true of most of life. David, thank you so much for talking to me today.

DAVID BYRNE: Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. That was fun.

FLORA LICHTMAN: It was really a pleasure. David Byrne, member of Talking Heads and author of the new book Sleeping Beauties. If you want to see this interview, you can watch it on our YouTube channel. And if you want to check out an excerpt from the book, head to our website, sciencefriday.com/sleepingbeauties.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: This episode was produced by Dee Peterschmidt. Thank you to Wayne Shulmister, Valentina Powers, and the team at WNYC for their help. I’m Flora Lichtman. Thank you for listening.

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