The Volcano Whisperer

[INSPIRATIONAL MUSIC] FLORA LICHTMAN: Hey, it’s Flora Lichtman, and this is Science Friday. Today in the podcast, we have the next episode in The Leap. This is a series I made with the Hypothesis Fund. And we’re taking you to an erupting volcano where a scientist faced some tough choices.

SPEAKER: People of St. Vincent and the Grenadines and residents in our blessed land, I hereby order the evacuation of all premises in the areas designated as the–

SPEAKER: Let’s deal with the elderly, those with children at the front, please.

FLORA LICHTMAN: In April 2021, La Soufriere volcano, on the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent, started exploding.

SPEAKER 3: The long-dormant La Soufriere volcano erupting Friday.

SPEAKER: Oh, it really erupt. My god.

SPEAKER: Thousands evacuating as ash rains down on the island of Saint Vincent.

SPEAKER: If you’re listening to this or if they’re not listening, get the message to them.

FLORA LICHTMAN: The volcano had been rumbling for months. But to get people evacuated in time, one scientist was tasked with predicting exactly when the volcano was going to blow–

SPEAKER: Good morning, Professor.

SPEAKER: Professor Robertson, if you could go ahead–

SPEAKER: Professor Robertson–

SPEAKER: –who’s one of the foremost authorities in the Caribbean.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Professor Richie Robertson. He’s a volcanologist, the former director of the University of the West Indies Seismic Research Center, and a world authority on La Soufriere volcano. He’s got an important job and a fancy title. But this is how the people on Saint Vincent see him.

STACEY EDWARDS: Richie’s a real Caribbean boy. He feels like one of us.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s Stacey Edwards, Richie’s colleague. They’ve known each other for a long time.

STACEY EDWARDS: There are no airs about him. He’s– we would say very rootsy. He struggles to put on ties. I mean, he’s just very rooted in the Caribbean, in terms of his personality, his style, and his heart.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And when his island needed someone the most, he was the one who stepped up, a born-and-bred Vincentian who struggles to put on ties but was willing to put everything on the line to keep his community safe.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: There is no way you could monitor a volcano without a certain element of risk.

FLORA LICHTMAN: It’s just part of the job.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: Yes it is.

[INTRIGUING MUSIC]

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is The Leap, a new series about gutsy scientists who are risking their reputations, their careers, and even their lives to uncover something new.

[INTRIGUING MUSIC]

When you think about the occupational hazards of science, stuff comes to mind– toxic boss, difficulties raising money, running a lab, getting tenure. But the list typically doesn’t include getting burned up in a pyroclastic flow or whether your interpretation of data could mean life or death for thousands of people in your community. But that is Richie Robertson’s brand of science. So how did he find himself here in this perilous, high-stakes job?

RICHIE ROBERTSON: This is an amazing story, really, given what I end up actually doing.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Richie’s career traces back to one formative moment in his life– another eruption of the same La Soufriere volcano. It was 1979. Richie was 18 years old, in school in the art track. He had no plan to go into science. He’d barely taken a science class when La Soufriere started exploding.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: A volcanic eruption is really a big deal on a small island. It’s a big deal, full stop. Because if you see a volcano erupting– and when I say an eruption, our volcanoes erupt explosively. So when they erupt, you can’t help but see them.

FLORA LICHTMAN: La Soufriere volcano looms large on Saint Vincent. I mean, it’s literally the highest peak in the island. But it’s also a central character in the island’s story, like a sleeping giant that occasionally wakes up and kills scores of people and destroys their homes. But in 1979, most people on the island had never witnessed an eruption firsthand, including Richie.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: So the day of the eruption was a religious holiday. It was Good Friday, and so it was a public holiday. But that Good Friday, you woke up, and what got you awake was the sound of the roaring mountain. And as you went outside, what you saw was a mushrooming cloud that just kept rising. And it appeared like if it was alive. It looked like a cauliflower shape that constantly expanded. I mean, that itself was impressive.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Richie lived far enough away to be safe, but his grandmother lived in the north, much closer to the explosion. So Richie and his dad hopped in the car to bring her to safety.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: And, of course, you went towards this thing, which is frightening and also exciting. You’re a young person. It’s exciting. It’s amazing. But as you move towards the north, what you saw was the whole country was on the move. There were people who were walking. There were people with a little bundle, people on the back of donkeys, people who are in cars. And they were all heading away from you. So you’re heading towards this plume, and people are moving away– so, again, extremely exciting.

FLORA LICHTMAN: The town where Richie’s grandmother lived, Rose Hall, was pretty close to the volcano.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: Close enough that by the time you get to Rose Hall, you almost feel like you could touch the plume now. And it’s still expanding. And the whole village is in uproar. People are trying to get out. So we went to collect one person. It was an open vehicle. We went to collect one person. And when we went out, the entire back of the vehicle filled with people and whatever belongings they had. The vehicle was rammed, packed with people. You could barely– there were almost people jumping onto it I couldn’t hold.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Richie also volunteered in the evacuation shelters. He was a member of the cadets, a kind of youth national guard, and was dispatched to help. At one point, 18-year-old Richie was running a makeshift church shelter in charge of dozens of adults– adults who were stressed, displaced, and arguing over their cramped living quarters.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: All of those kinds of issues, never haven’t dealt with them before, OK? So I then had another experience. Now I saw what a volcano– the effect it was having on people.

FLORA LICHTMAN: At the same time, the cadets were called in to help the scientists monitoring the volcano. The instruments needed to be watched every minute of the day. And Richie volunteered to take some shifts.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: I was then at the Belmont Observatory, looking at the drums. They had showed us certain things that, if we saw, we had to wake them up and that kind of thing. So I then had that to see. As a young person, if you wanted to get an introduction to how things operate when a volcano goes boom, that was it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: While Richie was getting this intensive education in disaster response, he discovered that the people at the center of it were scientists. They held the knowledge that all Vincentians were desperate to know– what was happening with the volcano? What might happen next?

RICHIE ROBERTSON: And in fact, because they became so important, we all in Saint Vincent got to hang on the words of the scientists. We call them all kinds of things. And we used to call them ologists. Everybody was an ologist. Because we’ve heard for the first time about these people that we call volcanologists and seismologists and geologists. These were people that we had never heard about before. And I was amazed. When they speak, they just seemed to have so much knowledge. They just seemed to know everything about the volcano.

FLORA LICHTMAN: But there was something else Richie noticed.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: What I noted was that all the scientists and all the professionals who were advising us were from outside of Saint Vincent. I didn’t see anybody who was a Vincentian who was advising the government, who was advising them, telling them. And for some crazy reason, I decided that I would become that person.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Why did it feel so important to have a Vincentian doing the advising? Why were you like, yeah, that needs to change?

RICHIE ROBERTSON: At the time, I was a young person. To a large extent, given what I was doing at the time, I was very patriotic. I was in cadets. I was in all these organization, these youth organizations. So I always had that very nationalistic mindset. And I’m still, to a large extent, very patriotic. I’ve traveled all over the world, and I tend to relish in saying that the only passport I have is a Vincentian passport.

FLORA LICHTMAN: 1979 was historic for Saint Vincent, politically too. A few months after the volcano erupted, Saint Vincent gained independence after nearly 200 years of British colonial rule. It was a time when a lot of Vincentians felt patriotic. And Richie did too.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: As a young Vincentian, I felt that if we had this system that was having such a big effect that we obviously would have to deal with, that we really needed to have the capacity to deal with it locally.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Richie decided in that moment to make a complete left turn in his life.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: And so I decided then that I would switch from being essentially an art student to becoming a scientist who was a professional that understood volcanoes. Because I needed to help people in Saint Vincent deal with the future ones.

FLORA LICHTMAN: But unlike 99.9% of 18-year-olds who wake up one day with a random career idea, Richie actually did it. He switched to the science track. He got a PhD in geology. And in a twist of fate beyond his control, when La Soufriere volcano woke up again, he was the scientist in charge. Almost exactly 42 years after that audacious decision to switch paths, he was exactly where he dreamed he’d be.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: I don’t think I thought that I would actually end up being exactly in the position that you thought that you should be. It’s surreal in a sense. I mean, you can’t write that script.

FLORA LICHTMAN: If you were writing the script, the next act would start in the year 2020. It was December. By then, Richie was the director of the Seismic Research Center and was in charge of monitoring the volcano when, suddenly, it puffed back to life.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: There was an observation by a guy who lived in the same Rose Hall where my grandmother lived– in fact, a guy who’s actually a distant relative of mine. He woke up in the morning, and he started to see white steam emitted from the volcano. And usually, you should not see steam from the volcano.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So Richie dispatched a local team to look into it. And that team climbs up the volcano.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: And while they are at the summit, they call me, and they tell me what they were seeing. And immediately, as soon as they told me what they were seeing, I realized what was happening. The volcano was in fact erupting.

FLORA LICHTMAN: La Soufriere volcano was slowly oozing out new magma, creating a kind of pancake or dome in the crater. It was in a gentle phase of its eruption, but Richie knew that could change.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: Soufriere is one of the, one of the volcanoes that ramps up very fast. So I told them, get off the volcano as quickly as you can. If the volcano is erupting, you should not be where you are. And we then mobilize a team to go to the island as quickly as possible.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So Richie, who was based in Trinidad at this point, is dispatched to Saint Vincent with a small team. It’s peak COVID, so there’s all these complicated restrictions. And in fact, he quarantines at the very observatory he volunteered at 42 years earlier. This time, his scientific objective is predicting the future. He needs to figure out exactly when the volcano is going to transition from this gentle dome-building stage, where the magma is confined to the crater, to the explosive stage where it starts shooting magma out onto the flanks of the volcano–

RICHIE ROBERTSON: –where people are living. So it’s key, once the explosions happen, you need to physically get people away. Because if they stay there, they more than likely going to die.

FLORA LICHTMAN: The trickiest part was getting the timing right. Richie had to give the government 24 to 48 hours of notice. That was the sweet spot.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: Because if you said it was going to explode and it doesn’t explode within a certain time and you have moved people, what will happen is that the people will go back. And it’s a chance that when they go back is when it will actually explode.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Predicting something’s going to happen in 24 hours seems difficult to me. Do you check a bunch of boxes? Or how do you do that?

RICHIE ROBERTSON: There’s not a fixed set of boxes that you tick. But there are a set of signals that you would expect to see, certainly in terms of the seismic instruments, in terms of the gas. There are a set of things that would indicate to you that fresh magma is getting close to the surface. And once you get to that stage, you get a good estimation of what is likely to happen in the short term.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Which is what scientists do all the time– capture data, integrate that data, draw a conclusion. It’s just that in Richie’s case, that science meant life or death for 20,000 people.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: I remember there was a little bit more pressure on me personally. Because I’m not just any scientist, I’m a Vincentian scientist. And I think the Vincentians would not have been very impressed if we had gotten it wrong. So there was a lot of pressure to basically make the right call.

[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]

FLORA LICHTMAN: There was also a lot of pressure to make sure Vincentians heeded the call when it came. And while that wasn’t strictly Richie’s job as a scientist, he and his collaborators at the Seismic Research Center made it their mission to build trust before the volcano blew.

STACEY EDWARDS: Trust is critical.

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is Stacey Edwards again. She’s the manager of education and outreach at the Seismic Research Center.

STACEY EDWARDS: If the public does not trust you as the agency or the entity giving that information, then they’re going to do their own thing. And it’s even more doubly, triply– I don’t know– quadruply important in these social media times when everybody is an expert.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Making sure Richie became the expert that people trusted was a big focus for Richie and Stacey. And the fact that Richie was a local with only a Vincentian passport cut both ways. On the upside–

RICHIE ROBERTSON: I sounded like them. So you tend to have a certain affinity to people that sound like you. It’s a natural human thing. You hear an accent, they sound like where you come from, you hear them even more. So I think that helped.

FLORA LICHTMAN: But it also wasn’t that simple.

STACEY EDWARDS: They still have to prove themselves. Many in the context in these Global South countries where some people may have a perception option that if it’s outside of the Caribbean, it has to be better. If it was made outside of the Caribbean, if the person was trained outside, it must be better. And I think that’s all part of a kind of colonial legacy and mindset. In the Caribbean, our countries are relatively new.

And I think coming out of that kind of legacy, it means that you have to work extra hard to ensure that you’re maintaining that trust, that we are the authority, we know what we’re doing, you need to listen to us. Because it’s easy to pay attention to voices from outside.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So while Richie was monitoring the volcano for signs that it was going to start exploding, he was also doing regular public dispatches–

STACEY EDWARDS: Hi, Richie. How are you doing?

RICHIE ROBERTSON: Hi. Good morning, Stacey. I’m fine.

FLORA LICHTMAN: –keeping the public informed.

STACEY EDWARDS: –the latest updates with La Soufriere?

RICHIE ROBERTSON: Well, it’s continue to do what it has been doing since it started for the last week.

FLORA LICHTMAN: For many months, the volcano didn’t do much. And then in early April, things started to change.

SPEAKER: Professor Robertson, we’ve had some increase in activity, particularly this afternoon. And–

FLORA LICHTMAN: There was a series of earthquakes, a seismic swarm. And that can be a key indicator that the volcano is going to go explosive. Richie knew he was going to have to make this call soon. And he felt he needed one more instrument on the volcano to get the data he needed.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: –what was called a multi-gas meter that detects different kinds of gases coming out from the volcano. Because we were concerned about whether sulfur dioxide, which is one of the things that we expected to come out just before an explosion happens.

FLORA LICHTMAN: It was a key piece of data. But to get that meter in place, Richie and a team had to go onto the volcano, a volcano that was in transition, a volcano that could start exploding anytime.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: So, yes, we were on the volcano because we took a calculated risk that we needed to get additional information to tell us when the explosion was going to happen.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Talk me through the risks of going onto an erupting volcano? What are the risks of that?

RICHIE ROBERTSON: [LAUGHS] Apart from dying?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, how could you die? Tell me all the ways.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: Well, it’s a really, really bad way. There are number of ways. If the volcano is exploding, what, essentially, it does, it’s breaking up masses of hard rock and pelting it, ejecting it into the atmosphere. If you’re on the volcano itself, at the summit, the fragments of rock, that could fall on you, on your head. The very least it will do is give you a serious headache. The worst thing they could do is, they could basically squash you into the ground. So you have problems with falling rocks.

You have problems with the fact that you’re also going closer to where the gas concentrations are, such that you could actually be harmed by gas. So those are the falling rocks, the gases. But one of the most dangerous things from exploding volcanoes is the things that they call pyroclastic density currents. Another name for them is a glowing avalanche. It’s like a hot, rapidly moving– and when I say rapidly moving, moving faster than 100, 200 kilometer per hour, shooting down the mountainside. It strips everything off the mountainside– all the trees, all the grass.

So say if you’re on the volcano at the time when it explodes and one of those things comes down it, you would end up in the sea as a charred remains. So–

[LAUGHTER]

–yeah, it’s not for the weak hearted.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Do you have do you have family, kids? Were there people who were like–

RICHIE ROBERTSON: Yes.

FLORA LICHTMAN: –please do not do this?

RICHIE ROBERTSON: Yeah. Well, hopefully, they don’t listen to this podcast so they don’t hear the things that I get up to. No, I try to minimize the extent to which they are aware of–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Really?

RICHIE ROBERTSON: –some of the risk it is. Yeah. I don’t think my daughters will like the fact that I take so much risk. Yeah. They don’t need to have the details. I take calculated risk. And they don’t need to worry about that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That day in early April, Richie and crew got dropped on the volcano via helicopter. They’ve got thermal suits on and gas masks, and they’re lugging a bunch of heavy gear– a couple 12-volt batteries like you have in your car, solar panels, pipes. They’d have to make a couple trips from the landing spot to the top of the volcano when, suddenly, they got a call from the observatory.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: We got the call that something was happening and that they had told the helicopter to come back for us.

FLORA LICHTMAN: The observatory registered more earthquakes. It was another seismic swarm. Remember, this is a key indicator that the volcano could start exploding at any second.

What were you thinking when you heard that?

RICHIE ROBERTSON: That we need to get off the mountain as quickly as possible. [LAUGHS]

FLORA LICHTMAN: They jumped in the helicopter and got off safely. But Richie was determined to get this instrument on the volcano. When the earthquake stopped, he went back to put the meter in place. After he got off the volcano, the earthquakes picked back up, and things didn’t quiet down again.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: Anything that we didn’t finish, that was it. We didn’t go back after that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That was it. That was your last window.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: That was the last window, yes.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You snuck it in.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: Yes, we did. We did, just barely.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Just barely.

At this point, things were getting tense. It was crunch time for Richie. And you can hear the urgency in his voice in his dispatches to the public.

STACEY EDWARDS: What should people be doing now?

RICHIE ROBERTSON: They should really make sure that they exactly where they are. You’re in the orange zone, red zone. What’s your plan? What’s the community plan? What’s your–

FLORA LICHTMAN: A few days later, he’d seen enough. He told the government he thought the eruption would happen soon.

SPEAKER: I hereby order the evacuation of all premises in the areas designated as the red zone.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And then Richie had to wait. And that was agonizing.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: Because once you had made the call, the then challenge comes is that questioning whether or not it’s the right call or not. It’s kind of a funny thing. You don’t really want it to go explosive because you know what’s going to happen when it goes explosive. It’s going to damage things. It’s going to mess up the country. It’s going to cause a lot of harm, make life difficult for a lot of people, which is what it did. But you want it to happen also because if it happens, scientifically, it’s interesting to look at. But also, it justifies your existence, in a sense.

FLORA LICHTMAN: All these emotions were swirled up– the dread of the destruction coming, the thrill of seeing it erupt. And scientifically, it’s kind of what you live for as a volcanologist. And then the overwhelming worry– was the evacuation call correct?

RICHIE ROBERTSON: For me, personally, I think that was some of the most difficult time in the entire eruption, actually.

FLORA LICHTMAN: But it didn’t last long.

[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]

SPEAKER: The volcano has spoken.

SPEAKER: The volcano is erupting. There is another explosive eruption ongoing.

SPEAKER: A big ball of smoke–

SPEAKER: I don’t know if [? all ?] could hear the rumbling, but you’re actually hearing the volcano rumbling.

SPEAKER: Look at that.

SPEAKER: And what we’re seeing there is a huge plume of ash.

SPEAKER: Wow. Wow.

FLORA LICHTMAN: La Soufriere volcano exploded the day after Richie called it. He got it right. Many people had already been evacuated by the time it started spewing lava. The rest were on their way. No one died. But there wasn’t time for a victory lap. Because even though 20,000 people were evacuated from immediate harm, there was other fallout from the eruption.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: You just had tons of ash being ejected. After a while, we couldn’t see anything.

SPEAKER: There’s a lot of ash everywhere.

SPEAKER: It’s like snow. Car got stuck here, trying to get the car out.

SPEAKER: My feet were literally sinking inches.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: The entire landscape was bathed in white-gray ash.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

You’re basically living through this doomsday kind of landscape, fire-and-brimstone kind of thing.

FLORA LICHTMAN: At one point during the eruption, rocks started dropping from the sky.

SPEAKER: Stones dropping off, stones dropping, bigger stones dropping off, bigger stones–

RICHIE ROBERTSON: The ash was so bad that the power system shut down. So on midnight on Saturday, the entire island went black– no power. And, of course, the entire country is in panic mode.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You can hear it in people’s voices from interviews during this time, including Richie’s.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: You see films of people in war zones. This being a war zone right now with the volcano– so we shouldn’t be here. But yeah–

SPEAKER: Yo, this is like a Twilight Zone. It is very, very scary, yo.

[SOLEMN MUSIC]

RICHIE ROBERTSON: I can’t believe this is my beautiful hometown.

STACEY EDWARDS: It’s a very emotional time. There’s uncertainty. You’re not sure when the eruption is going to end. Many people had to leave their homes. And all of this is happening within the background of the pandemic.

FLORA LICHTMAN: The volcano spewed ash for days. People were sequestered in their homes. And just like in 1979, people in Saint Vincent were hanging on the ologists’ words.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: We started to go on every morning. So every morning at a particular time, people would tune in live, and they will get an update about what is happening.

SPEAKER: This is NBC from studios at Richmond Hill in capital Kingstown.

FLORA LICHTMAN: But this time, the experts weren’t from somewhere else.

SPEAKER: –of the Coast Guard boat to–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Richie and many members of his scientific team were local to the Caribbean. And Vincentians all over the country shouted them out for what was a relatively smooth response to a huge disaster.

SPEAKER: I’ve seen some comments on social media. People are commending the team in terms of the evacuation order. They say the team did a good work. So it seems that people are giving you all good props.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: We thank people for that. It’s hard. It’s the hardest thing, to make interpretations of what’s happening.

In terms of responding to the crisis, managing the people, managing the situation, which was really, really hard, it didn’t overwhelm the system. It was done like if– OK. Oh, we have volcanic eruptions every day.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And by making something so dangerous feel manageable and under control, Richie didn’t just earn the public’s trust, he earned their pride.

STACEY EDWARDS: He really became a rock star for a little while.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: I got kind of famous. In fact, it got to the stage where people would– like a celebrity, they would ask me for a picture with them, a selfie and an autograph. And yeah, I used to run from people after a while.

[INSPIRATIONAL MUSIC]

FLORA LICHTMAN: It’s pretty rare for a scientist to become a national treasure. But in Richie’s case, it makes sense. Because it wasn’t just about him. He became a symbol for something bigger.

STACEY EDWARDS: I think it is super important for people– for us, I should say, because I’m from here– for us to see models where we are solving our own problems, and we don’t need to depend on somebody who’s from a bigger country, or somebody who is white, or somebody who has more money or whatever, to solve our problems.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Richie proved what he felt was true all along, that Vincentians could handle it. They could take care of themselves. The risks he took along the way weren’t just in service of people, but this idea. Because on a small Caribbean island, this version of self-determination, handling hazards, is especially meaningful.

RICHIE ROBERTSON: As we speak now, a hurricane has just passed through my homeland, and that’s a routine thing. We are small islands over a large area of space, and we’re impacted by lots of hazards. We have a lot of issues to deal with. And really, we have to find a way in which we could live sustainably here. And the only way we could do it is trying to find ways of solving our own problems in our own ways.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What did it feel like for you to sort of be fulfilling your destiny?

RICHIE ROBERTSON: Well, I still pinching myself. Yeah. I keep saying I could have died the next day, and I could feel that I lived a– I fulfilled my destiny in life, career.

[INSPIRATIONAL MUSIC]

[LIVELY MUSIC]

FLORA LICHTMAN: The Leap is a production of the Hypothesis Fund. The show is hosted by me, Flora Lichtman and produced by Annette Heist, editing by Saidu Tejan-Thomas Jr., Pajau Vangay, and David Sanford, fact checking by Nicole Pasulka, mixing and scoring by Emma Munger, music by Joshua Budo Karp. Thanks to Rod Stewart. And thank you to you for listening.

[LIVELY MUSIC]

Ira’s was back tomorrow on the podcast with a story about using CRISPR gene editing to speed up the process of breeding some of our favorite foods. Like, think moving genes from the eggplant to the tomato.

SPEAKER: The modern tomatoes took hundreds of years to develop from the wild species. And now, we can do it basically in one generation.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s tomorrow on the podcast.

[INTRIGUING MUSIC]