There are two ways to grow a diamond. You can dig one up from the Earth—a product of billions of years of pressure and heat placed on carbon. Or you can make one in a lab—by applying lots of that same heat and pressure to tiny starter crystals—and get it made much faster. 

Put these two objects under a microscope and they look exactly the same. But is the lab-grown diamond real or fake?

The answer lies somewhere in between. The same goes for many other things, like artificial flavors that have the same chemical structure as the real thing. Or our favorite nature documentaries that put a sensational spin on an otherwise unvarnished look at wildlife. So when science gets a boost from the “not real,” what do we call it? 

Writer and historian Lydia Pyne would call them “genuine fakes” and she explores some of them in her latest book Genuine Fakes: How Phony Things Teach Us About Real Stuff. She joins Ira to talk about the vast gray area between real and fake when it comes to science.

Read an excerpt from Pyne’s new book, Genuine Fakes: How Phony Things Teach Us About Real Stuff.