Smart Tea
Who are the people behind the discoveries that have changed our lives? Join Aarati as she spills the tea on scientists and inventors throughout history!
Smart Tea
Dr. Thomas Brock: The Extreme Microbiologist
Can you handle the heat? Aarati tells the story of the nature-loving scientist whose discovery of Thermus aquaticus, a microbe living in the hot waters of Yellowstone Park, helped make PCR one of the fundamental tools of biotech.
For more information and sources for this episode, visit https://www.smartteapodcast.com.
Aarati Asundi (00:12)
Hi everyone and welcome back to the Smart Tea Podcast where we talk about the lives of scientists and innovators who shape the world. I'm Aarati.
Jyoti Asundi (00:21)
And I'm Jyoti, her mom.
Aarati Asundi (00:23)
Mom, I don't think a lot of people are too familiar with you yet. You're still fairly new to the podcast. But one thing that maybe people don't know is that you did your master's degree in microbiology, correct?
Jyoti Asundi (00:36)
Yes, I completed my master's in microbiology in India. And then I came to the U.S. with my husband, Aarati's dad. ⁓ And then I worked in various academic institutions and I started working in biotech companies in the Bay Area, where I have acquired a lot of skills like molecular biology, protein chemistry, cell biology. Basically, I'm a biotechie at this point. Yes.
Aarati Asundi (01:08)
But your very original classes that you took...
Jyoti Asundi (01:11)
Yeah, my roots are rooted in microbiology, so to speak.
Aarati Asundi (01:19)
Any particular reason why you chose microbiology as your field?
Jyoti Asundi (01:23)
I initially thought that I wanted to be a doctor, in practicing had all these beautiful visions of myself being part of Doctors Without Borders and...
Aarati Asundi (01:35)
Oh wow.
Jyoti Asundi (01:35)
Lots of noble thoughts there. However, the field is extremely competitive in India. It was, it was very, even now it is, but I did not get admission into a medical school. And so I was ⁓ heartbroken, really, literally I was heartbroken. I did not know what to choose. then ⁓ talking to other doctors, talking to many, many people around me, they said to me, microbiology will allow you to become more like a pathologist. You can still be on the clinical side of things So I thought. That sounds right. I would still be helping people. I would still be fighting diseases. I would still be bringing medicine to the people in one way or the other, maybe not as the primary doctor, but something else. So that is how I went into microbiology.
Aarati Asundi (02:30)
Oh nice. That is a lot more noble and a much better reason than why I did biochemistry as my major, which was simply because my dad had done it. So I was like,
Jyoti Asundi (02:42)
No, but were inspired by people close to you. That is a ⁓ good thought as well.
Aarati Asundi (02:49)
Yes. So anyway, the reason I was asking about your roots in microbiology is because today we will be talking about an extreme microbiologist. His name is Thomas Brock.
Jyoti Asundi (03:02)
OK.
Aarati Asundi (03:03)
I don't know if you've heard of him.
Jyoti Asundi (03:02)
I don't think I've heard the name.
Aarati Asundi (03:07)
Well, you've definitely heard of the microbe that he is most famous for discovering, which is Thermus aquaticus or Taq... of course you know.
Jyoti Asundi (03:17)
Of course, legendary microbium that is. Oh my goodness, changed the entire field. You can call Thermus Aquaticus as the mother of biotech basically or the organism that gave birth to the biotech industry.
I would not have a job without Thermus Aquaticus today.
Aarati Asundi (03:41)
Or you would have a job, but it would be very tedious as we will get into. So.
Jyoti Asundi (03:46)
Yes. Oh, this is going to be such a fun story!
Aarati Asundi (03:46)
Yeah. It's a really good story. So I'm excited to tell you about him and what led him to his discovery.
Jyoti Asundi (03:56)
Nice.
Aarati Asundi (03:57)
Thomas Dale Brock went by Tom and he was born in Cleveland, Ohio on September 10th, 1926. He was the only child to his parents. His father was also named Thomas and his mother was named Helen. So obviously since he's named after his father as we go through his childhood, I'm going to be calling him Tom and his father Thomas just to keep them straight.
So Cleveland at this time was a major industrial city in the 1920s. But Tom's home was far away from the main city, sitting on top of a hill where they had a distant view of Lake Erie, and they had fields of cows and woods all around them. So he's not in the city proper. He said, quote, "I did have a stable home life and a pleasant neighborhood with lots of friendly playmates."
Jyoti Asundi (04:49)
Sounds idyllic. Idyllic childhood.
Aarati Asundi (04:53)
So Thomas, his father worked as an electrical engineer and his mother was a registered nurse, but for most of his childhood, his mom was a stay at home parent. So they were very much part of the working class And then once the great depression hit, they only managed to get by because Thomas was luckily able to hold on to his job at boiler room of St. Luke's Hospital. So they're getting by, but you know, by no means do they have a ton of money to spend.
Jyoti Asundi (05:22)
Yes, mm-hmmm.
Aarati Asundi (05:23)
But Thomas did recognize that part of the reason his career potential was limited was because he didn't have a formal education. So he couldn't climb very high up the corporate ladder. So he encouraged his son, young Tom, to pursue an education. He would bring home discarded electrical equipment and show Tom how to build radios and electromagnets. And when he was 10 years old, he got a chemistry set as a Christmas present. And he and his dad set up a little laboratory in the basement and would do little experiments together.
Jyoti Asundi (05:58)
Nice. That is so nice. It sounds like the dad did everything he could to foster a love for learning in his son.
Aarati Asundi (06:07)
Yes.
Jyoti Asundi (06:07)
That kind of good encouragement. I like to hear stories like that.
Aarati Asundi (06:12)
But unfortunately, when Tom was 14 years old, his father became extremely ill and passed away.
Jyoti Asundi (06:19)
So sad.
Aarati Asundi (06:20)
Yeah. So this left Tom and his mother basically in poverty. So they moved back to the mother's hometown of... ⁓ my God, I looked this up. Chillicothe, Ohio.
Jyoti Asundi (06:36)
Okay.
Aarati Asundi (06:36)
I believe that's how you say it. Chillicothe, Ohio.
Jyoti Asundi (06:38)
Okay, hopefully somebody will correct us if we are wrong.
Aarati Asundi (06:41)
Yes. pretty sure that's how you say it. So they moved back to his mother's hometown of Chillicothe, Ohio. His mom was able to get a job as a nurse, but Tom had to help out too by getting jobs at the grocery stores, drug stores, like just little jobs here and there. They didn't pay much, but right now we're in World War II, so there's a lot of labor shortages in the US...
Jyoti Asundi (07:04)
Yes, yes.
Aarati Asundi (07:05)
...and so Tom never really had a problem finding little odd jobs to do.
Jyoti Asundi (07:08)
finding a job. Yes.
Aarati Asundi (07:11)
He also continued his interest in science now with a friend named David Thornburg, who was also interested in chemistry.
Jyoti Asundi (07:20)
Okay.
Aarati Asundi (07:21)
So a lot of the information, I should say, for this episode came straight from an article that Tom Brock wrote about his own life, a short autobiography, like a 30-page article. But he said very nonchalantly that he and David set up a small laboratory in the loft of a barn behind Tom's house where they, quote, "did a lot of crazy experiments, (explosives, toxic gas), and parentheses.
Jyoti Asundi (07:50)
Oh my God, this is... just a couple of boys dinking around with little, we'll play with a little bit of gunpowder today and tomorrow we'll play with that gas and see if it is poisonous after all.
Aarati Asundi (08:05)
It's fine. I got my hand on some nitrous and some sulfuric acid. Let's just see what happens.
Jyoti Asundi (08:12)
But if you think about it in retrospect, that kind of childhood is really fun. I imagine it to be a lot of fun. I was pretty nerdy and straight-laced myself. So I have to just imagine these kind of really fun childhoods but still. This this sounds like a good amount of fun.
Aarati Asundi (08:27)
Yeah, it's very nostalgic to even think about just like two boys in a barn loft having fun, messing around. I have to say I was quite disappointed that this was such a throwaway one line in his autobiography. I was like, what? Tell me more. Tell me more.
Jyoti Asundi (08:41)
Tell me more, tell me more, tell me more.
Aarati Asundi (08:46)
Yes. So also his friend David Thornburg had heard about penicillin.
Jyoti Asundi (08:54)
Yes. Alexander Fleming. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. That's a very interesting story as well, actually. ⁓
Aarati Asundi (09:02)
I know I kind of want to cover him at some point on the podcast, but I think his...
Jyoti Asundi (09:05)
Okay, so I won't go into that at this point.
Aarati Asundi (09:06)
No, no, but his, his story is famous. So you can,
Jyoti Asundi (09:11)
Yeah, the way he discovered penicillin was simply fantastic. He was working on something else entirely. And he having bacteria on little plates. You have agar plates on which you grow bacteria. And he was a messy guy. Like he did not clean up the plates from his experiment on a daily basis. He would leave them around for weeks at a time. And after some time, he noticed that there was this ring of area on the plate where the bacteria were not growing.
Aarati Asundi (09:45)
Yep.
Jyoti Asundi (09:46)
And in the center of the ring was this, mold...
Aarati Asundi (09:49)
Like this moldy spore. Yeah.
Jyoti Asundi (09:50)
The mold that was making penicillin. And that is how.... he was very smart, obviously, and he connected the dots.
Aarati Asundi (09:58)
Put it together that there's this mold that is obviously producing this chemical that is killing the bacteria. Yeah.
Jyoti Asundi (10:04)
that is preventing the bacteria and he saw the implications immediately in terms of you know how we can use that for ourselves. And the story that what I was trying to remember was that ⁓ later on he got a he of course he became very famous, etc., etc. and he was offered a brilliant beautiful new lab all spick and span and clean. And his first comment was that he said, my God, if I had been working in such a beautiful, clean environment, I would never have discovered penicillin.
Aarati Asundi (10:35)
Yeah.
Jyoti Asundi (10:36)
Yes, sorry, I took this off on a big tangent, but ⁓
Aarati Asundi (10:37)
No, but this exact story I think is what really captured the imagination of young Tom and his friend David. And they also were this guy has made such a great discovery from mold growing on some plates. Maybe we also can do something to our soil and enrich it to grow microorganisms that will produce antibiotics like right here in our own backyard.
Jyoti Asundi (11:05)
So that kind of a story was such an inspiration. Some boys dream of killing dragons. But they were dreaming of finding molds that could make...
Aarati Asundi (11:14)
Yeah, find the next big penicillin.
Jyoti Asundi (11:16)
find the next big penicillin.
Aarati Asundi (11:17)
We'll probably get rich! Yeah!
Jyoti Asundi (11:18)
Yeah, or even save mankind.
Aarati Asundi (11:21)
Yeah. Yeah, that too. That too.
Jyoti Asundi (11:23)
I mean, penicillin was game changing for mankind too.
Aarati Asundi (11:26)
Yes. What does it say about me that I was like, "Get rich!"? Yeah.
So after high school, Tom really wanted to go to college and study chemistry, but due to the ongoing war and their financial constraints, he couldn't really pay for a tuition. So he decided to enlist in the Navy and get an education in electronics through their educational programs.
Jyoti Asundi (11:52)
Okay.
Aarati Asundi (11:53)
Which makes sense.
Jyoti Asundi (11:54)
Yes. Yes.
Aarati Asundi (11:54)
His father taught him about electronics and...
Jyoti Asundi (11:56)
All those broken radios that his father brought home.
Aarati Asundi (12:00)
Yeah. But it turns out the Navy was a huge culture shock for him after his quiet, idyllic childhood.
Jyoti Asundi (12:06)
Yeah.
Aarati Asundi (12:07)
He spent about 18 months going to Navy schools in Chicago. And for the final few months, he was sent to Kodiak, Alaska as part of the shore patrol, where his job was to make sure that when curfew came around, none of the soldiers were hanging around in bars or brothels. So he had to go kick them out.
Jyoti Asundi (12:28)
Oh my god, that's a hard one. You know, it's almost like being a class monitor and being the person who gets to spoil everybody else's fun. That's not a good position to be in.
Aarati Asundi (12:39)
And especially after his quiet childhood where he's playing in the barn and the farm and everything and he's like...
Jyoti Asundi (12:45)
Yeah, the tedious enforcer of law. Aw.
Aarati Asundi (12:49)
But the Navy also gave him access to a ton of books. And so he was able to start reading all of this great literature that he had never had access to before. And by the time his Navy career was over, he had changed his mind and he decided he wanted to become a writer.
Jyoti Asundi (13:07)
Oh wow.
Aarati Asundi (13:08)
By 1946, the war is over. And now Tom is considered to be a military veteran. So he's able to take advantage of the GI Bill...
Jyoti Asundi (13:17)
Awesome.
Aarati Asundi (13:18)
...which provided education and other benefits to veterans. So he goes back to Ohio, and he enrolls at Ohio State University to study literature and writing.
Jyoti Asundi (13:28)
Oh okay.
Aarati Asundi (13:29)
But very soon, he changes his mind again. He says that for one of his literature courses, he had to read a book called Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis. So it's Arrow as in A-R-R-O-W, not Aerosmith like the band, you know.
Jyoti Asundi (13:46)
Oh I did think of Aerosmith the band. Okay, I was getting...
Aarati Asundi (13:48)
Did you?
Jyoti Asundi (13:49)
Yes I did actually and I was getting very confused. That sounds like it must have been after his time. How did that happen?
Aarati Asundi (13:57)
Yeah, I also did some research to see if Aerosmith the band got their name from this book, but apparently not. But the protagonist in the book is a bacteriologist. And he says that's probably what pushed him back towards science.
So he goes back to biology, and he ends up finishing a degree in botany, of all things.
Jyoti Asundi (14:18)
Okay. Okay.
Aarati Asundi (14:19)
He was then offered a graduate position also at Ohio State University, but he soon got bored of studying plants. So he switched again to mycology, which is the study of fungi, which, again, makes a lot of sense.
Jyoti Asundi (14:33)
Okay. Yes, again, it's going back to that same thought process. Yeah, I want to be the next Alexander Fleming. Yes.
Aarati Asundi (14:40)
Yes. He ended up doing both his master's and PhD in mycology, He also got married towards the end of his PhD to another scientist, Mary Louise Louden who had her master's in microbiology.
Jyoti Asundi (14:53)
Okay.
Aarati Asundi (14:54)
After his PhD, he was having a tough time finding a job in academia. He got a temporary position as a research associate at the Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station working on soil fungi. And he was able to pivot that into a full-time job at the Upjohn company in their antibiotics research department in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Jyoti Asundi (15:15)
Yes, so he is coming to where he wants to be with the...
Aarati Asundi (15:20)
Kind of, yes.
Jyoti Asundi (15:21)
Yeah. Getting, getting there he's getting there. Yeah.
Aarati Asundi (15:23)
He's getting there.
So this is where he was truly introduced to bacteria and the wider world of microbes. He spent five years there studying the relationship between microbes and antibiotics, and he was publishing papers. And he also found that because he was working for a company, it was an eight to five job, and so he had a lot of free time.
So he started exploring his local area. He found an abandoned railroad that captured his interest. So he did a deep dive into the local history of that railroad and the surrounding area and published articles about it. So he's getting his like writing bug out too, cause he had wanted to be an author.
Jyoti Asundi (16:02)
Yes, that's right. That's right. He's a man of many interests. He would have been such a fun person to talk to and get to know. His neurons are firing all the time. Anything you tell sparks his interest and he's off chasing that. can, I can.
Aarati Asundi (16:17)
Yeah, it definitely seemed like that.
Jyoti Asundi (16:19)
Yeah! They're brimming with life and vitality, these kind of people.
Aarati Asundi (16:22)
Yeah.
Jyoti Asundi (16:23)
Yeah, they have so many good ideas. It's like, one lifetime is not enough. I need to do this and this and this and this and time is too short.
Aarati Asundi (16:31)
Yeah. Speaking of exactly that, he also started teaching himself German and he got really good at it and even able to translate scientific papers about m46icrobiology from German into English.
Jyoti Asundi (16:46)
Okay, out of this world.
Aarati Asundi (16:47)
Yep. But as seems to be kind of the running theme here in his life, he soon got bored of this. The corporate world was very routine and he wasn't on the cutting edge of science and discovery at all. And he had no control over what he got to study. So he quit his job and moved back to Cleveland get back into academia. But this was really tough because he had been out of the academic world for like five years now.
Jyoti Asundi (17:14)
Okay.
Aarati Asundi (17:15)
But finally, he got a position as an assistant professor at the Western Reserve University's biology department.
Jyoti Asundi (17:23)
Okay.
Aarati Asundi (17:24)
The pay was about half of what he got at the Upjohn company, but he was much happier because he was teaching microbiology and mycology and genetics. And while he's teaching, they say teaching is the best way to learn, right? So he's also learning about the subjects that he's teaching in the process.
Jyoti Asundi (17:41)
yes, yes.
Aarati Asundi (17:43)
He also was able to pursue some research projects of his own. And from that, he was able to publish 13 papers related to the mode of action of antibiotics and yeast mating. He even wrote a book called Milestones in Microbiology that largely was helped by him being able to translate German papers because a lot of early work in the field was deeply tied to Robert Koch, who is a German, you know, scientist.
Jyoti Asundi (18:08)
Yes, that's right. Tuberculosis, right? Isn't he the tuberculosis guy?
Aarati Asundi (18:12)
Yes, tuberculosis. Yes, cholera, anthrax. Yeah.
Jyoti Asundi (18:20)
But that is again fantastic communication. Like he's being a science communicator again.
Aarati Asundi (18:26)
Yes, I love it!
Jyoti Asundi (18:26)
Because he's.... yes, bringing science from another language to scientists in America. And now there is a transfer information, which is...always creates synergy.
Aarati Asundi (18:41)
Yes. So I loved that he did that.
The academic world was also a lot more flexible in terms of days off and vacation time. So he spent many weeks with Louise's father in northern Ontario and developed a great appreciation for exploring the outdoors. He especially loved anything to do with spending time near water, so fishing, boating, kayaking, all of that.
Jyoti Asundi (19:05)
Yes.
Aarati Asundi (19:09)
And he felt that as an academic now he finally had the freedom to study things that caught his attention while he was out in nature so he could see something and be like, "Ooh what is that?" and go and figure it out.
Jyoti Asundi (19:18)
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Aarati Asundi (19:23)
In his second year at WRU, the chairman of the Department of Microbiology, Dr. Lester O. Crampitz, offered him a postdoc position in his lab. While I was reading this, I was like, oh my gosh, it almost seems like he's going a step back. Like he graduated, he got a job, he had an assistant professorship, and now he's going back to doing a postdoc.
Jyoti Asundi (19:46)
But maybe it looks backwards, but maybe that's the right path. Let us not...
Aarati Asundi (19:51)
Yeah, no, it was. Yeah.
Jyoti Asundi (19:52)
let's hold judgment. Let us hold judgment.
Aarati Asundi (19:54)
Well, he certainly thought it was the right path because he was like...
Jyoti Asundi (19:56)
Absolutely. Yeah he's smart I trust his judgement.
Aarati Asundi (20:00)
Yes. So he resigned his job as an assistant professor because he wanted to be able to do more research and less lecturing.
Jyoti Asundi (20:06)
Yes.
Aarati Asundi (20:08)
After a year there as a postdoc, he finally felt like he could legitimately call himself a microbiologist. And so now in 1960, eight years after getting his PhD, he was finally ready to settle down, quote unquote.
Jyoti Asundi (20:23)
Okay, yes, yes, yes.
Aarati Asundi (20:24)
Yes, he's like gone from electrician to writer to botanist to finally...
Jyoti Asundi (20:31)
Mycologist and then teaching here and there. But that kind of interdisciplinary knowledge is extremely valuable.
Aarati Asundi (20:41)
Yes. So position for an assistant professor of bacteriology opened up at Indiana University in Bloomington, which was a small university town. And that kind of life seemed like a great change for him from the city life of Cleveland.
Jyoti Asundi (20:57)
His childhood was like that, very idyllic and you know...
Aarati Asundi (21:00)
And I think that's what he was kind of going back to, because Cleveland is this big city. And so he's like, yeah, let's go back to something a little more charming, a little bit more, like slow pace. Yeah.
Jyoti Asundi (21:08)
Yeah, a bit more rural. Yeah, rid of this hustle and bustle life. Yeah.
Aarati Asundi (21:14)
Yeah, so Tom and Louise make the move to Indiana, where his focus now became medical microbiology, because that's the position he took, basically.
Jyoti Asundi (21:25)
Yes.
Aarati Asundi (21:26)
But Tom never really could let go of his background in ecology, especially now, because after spending so much time with his father-in-law out on the lakes of Ontario, he had become very outdoorsy. And so now, in 1962, we get to a big turning point in his career. He travels to San Francisco to attend a conference for the American Society for Cell Biology. And during his time here, he visits the Hopkins Marine Station and sees the lab research going on there. And it's the first time that he's really seen a marine biology research lab. And he becomes absolutely fascinated by this.
Jyoti Asundi (22:07)
Oh how, okay.
Aarati Asundi (22:08)
And pretty much immediately he starts making plans to kind of do his own research the following summer at the marine lab.
Jyoti Asundi (22:18)
Okay, it just caught him. It just caught his fancy.
Aarati Asundi (22:23)
Yeah, so a visiting scientist from the University of Washington told him about a research facility called Friday Harbor Laboratories. So he contacted the director and said he wanted to spend the following summer of 1963 there to study the presence of certain types of bacteria in marine animals.
Jyoti Asundi (22:42)
Bacteria in animals. Okay, okay.
Aarati Asundi (22:45)
Yeah so he wants to study microbiology... marine microbiology, basically. Yeah.
Jyoti Asundi (22:49)
Yes, yes, yes.
Aarati Asundi (22:52)
So he does that. He goes there in the summer of 63. And he studies a microbe called leucothrix mucor, which is a long filamentous bacteria that is found in a lot of marine species and can cause disease and impact animal development. But the really cool thing that Tom observed was that when he grew these bacteria, mucor, in the lab, when the bacterial culture became overcrowded, the bacteria would literally tie itself into knots.
Jyoti Asundi (23:26)
Wow!
Aarati Asundi (23:28)
And over time, the knots became tighter and tighter until the cells that were in the knot would fuse together and they would make a bulb that would break off into two filaments.
Jyoti Asundi (23:41)
Oh wow.
Aarati Asundi (23:42)
And this was a new way that the bacteria was able to reproduce essentially.
Jyoti Asundi (23:46)
Oh it's a new propagatory mechanism. And so the more constricted its space, it leads to more and more this tightening and then it tightens itself into a ball, and....
Aarati Asundi (24:01)
So I think it was like if you imagine like a piece of string and you tie a knot in the middle of the string That knot in the center of the string would become so tight that it would break. And now you have two bacteria instead of the one long one.
Jyoti Asundi (24:13)
Yes. Yes.
Aarati Asundi (24:15)
This was a new way that the bacteria was able to reproduce that had never been observed before. So he had made all these sketches to show what he was seeing. And that figure from his paper made it onto the cover of Science Magazine and was also featured in the New York Times, because it's such a cool thing.
Jyoti Asundi (24:37)
Oh wow! Yes.
Aarati Asundi (24:39)
I mean, for me, that would be my crowning achievement. I would be like, look at this thing that I discovered. Heck yeah.
Jyoti Asundi (24:44)
Absolutely and I ⁓ am featured in one of the... two of the most famous magazines of the world, That's it, I'm done. I'm done, I can retire now. I'm retired. Yes, yes.
Aarati Asundi (24:51)
Yeah. I'd be like, I'm done. But for him, this just blew open the field of microbiology for him. Because he was like, if the world didn't know about this behavior of leucothrix mucor tying itself into knots, which is so cool, what else is out there waiting to be discovered?
Jyoti Asundi (25:13)
Yes, the possibilities are endless.
Aarati Asundi (25:15)
Yeah, we know so little about microbiology.
Jyoti Asundi (25:18)
It takes a genius to understand that also. It takes a genius to understand how ignorant we are. It's only the very foolish who think that we know everything.
Aarati Asundi (25:29)
Yes. So his work on leucothrix mucor got him interested in another filamentous bacteria called theothrix...
Jyoti Asundi (25:37)
Okay.
Aarati Asundi (25:37)
...which grows in sulfur springs, which is a very unique environment for anything to be growing.
Jyoti Asundi (25:44)
⁓ Yes, an extreme.
Aarati Asundi (25:45)
Yes.
Jyoti Asundi (25:46)
So that's where... when you introduced him, you said something about extreme bacteria and this is what he's doing.
Aarati Asundi (25:51)
Yes, he's an extreme microbiologist.
Jyoti Asundi (25:54)
So he's an extreme microbiologist. I get it. I get it. So he's looking at things that grow in extremely weird situations.
Aarati Asundi (26:03)
Yeah, because Leucothrix mucor only exhibited this behavior when it was extremely overcrowded. If the culture was kept at sort of a normal concentration, everything was fine. And they just reproduced however they normally reproduced. But if you let them overgrow and you let them get crowded, then they started exhibiting this different way of reproducing.
Jyoti Asundi (26:27)
Yes.
Aarati Asundi (26:28)
And so that's what he's like, okay, they get extremely crowded, they behave in a different way. Then he learns about theothrix, which can survive in this extreme condition of having, high concentrations of sulfur. And the concentration of those minerals is normally prohibitive to growth and this bacteria can survive there.
Jyoti Asundi (26:38)
Correct.
Aarati Asundi (26:49)
So he was really excited by this and how much there was to learn and discover. And so he starts planning another book Principles of Microbial Biology that would go into this unknown world of microbes in nature.
Jyoti Asundi (27:04)
Yeah!
Aarati Asundi (27:04)
And so in the name of research, he starts traveling around trying to get his hands on microbes that live in these kind of unique ecosystems.
Jyoti Asundi (27:13)
Yeah, niche environments.
Aarati Asundi (27:16)
So that Christmas, he took a solo trip to South Florida driving a VW minibus that he and his wife had converted into a camper van.
Jyoti Asundi (27:26)
Sounds like, again, he is a fun guy to be around. Look at the kind of fun ideas he has.
Aarati Asundi (27:33)
And in Florida, he visited a large sulfur spring in the Caribbean gardens and he got his hands on some theothrix for the first time. Then the following summer, he headed back to Friday Harbor Laboratories, which was in Seattle, Washington, but he and Louise made kind of a road trip out of it. So they first stopped at Grand Teton National Park for a backpacking trip.
Jyoti Asundi (27:58)
Yes.
Aarati Asundi (27:59)
And then they went on to Yellowstone Park.
Jyoti Asundi (28:02)
Yes.
Aarati Asundi (28:03)
So funnily enough, he hadn't really been interested in going to Yellowstone because he thought it was more of like a tourist attraction rather than place where you could kind of discover nature or be at peace or observe anything of interest.
Jyoti Asundi (28:18)
Yes.
Aarati Asundi (28:19)
But you know, there are hot springs there. So he was like, I should go and see what I can see. Yeah.
Jyoti Asundi (28:23)
Sure, let's do it. Yeah. Uh-huh.
Aarati Asundi (28:26)
When he got there, he was completely blown away. In his book called A Scientist in Yellowstone Park, he wrote, quote, I was stunned by the colors and the abundance of phototropes the thermal waters flowing across the sinter into the lake, end quote.
Jyoti Asundi (28:45)
Hmm, nice. So the... Yellowstone had become such a big attraction that he's not for a person like me.
Aarati Asundi (28:51)
Yeah, no, I don't want to.
Jyoti Asundi (28:54)
⁓ I don't do things like that. I don't do touristy things.
Aarati Asundi (28:56)
And he probably thought like, "Oh it's not natural anymore."
Jyoti Asundi (29:00)
Yeah, they must have trampled all over nature. There's nothing good to see And then he goes there and he's stunned by the beauty.
Aarati Asundi (29:07)
Just blown away. Yes, stunned.
Jyoti Asundi (29:08)
That's beautiful, beautiful.
Aarati Asundi (29:11)
So he spent the summer at Friday Harbor Labs again. And then on the way back to Indiana, he stopped by Yellowstone again to collect some samples from the sulfur-rich springs of the park. And specifically, he was looking for that theothrix bacteria.
Jyoti Asundi (29:27)
Yes.
Aarati Asundi (29:28)
He didn't get any because what he didn't realize at the time was that the geysers at Yellowstone were too hot and acidic for theothrix bacteria to survive there. But despite this, he's totally hooked now. He's like "Yellowstone. That's where I've got to be."
Jyoti Asundi (29:44)
This is, yes, this is the best place on earth, yes.
Aarati Asundi (29:48)
Yes. So the next summer in 1965, he and Louise go back to Yellowstone, this time bringing with them nutrient-rich media to grow the bacteria that they collected.
Jyoti Asundi (30:00)
Ah smart, they're pre-planning it now. They're like, we are not getting anything because by the time we get back all the way to Indiana, things are not working out. We'll make sure that we grow them correctly right away. Yes, yes, yes.
Aarati Asundi (30:13)
Yeah. And I just love this idea too of them like packing their suitcases. Like, did you get your socks? Did you get your shirt? Did you get the nutrient rich media for the bacteria?
Jyoti Asundi (30:24)
And it's great that he's married to a microbiologist as well. So the both of them are on the same page. If he forgets his nutrient rich broth, then she's going to remind him. She's got it. Yes. Fabulous.
Aarati Asundi (30:34)
Yes, she's got it. Yeah, she's got it.
Jyoti Asundi (30:36)
She's got it. Yes. Fabulous.
Aarati Asundi (30:39)
So on this trip, they discovered huge masses of pink stringy material growing in a hot spring channel. And this caught their interest because most of the time scientists were studying bacteria that either grow in the soil or in our bodies. And normally that means they're growing in a temperature range of 20 to 45 degrees C... Celsius.
Jyoti Asundi (31:04)
Mm-hmm.
Aarati Asundi (31:05)
And they knew, like scientists knew that there were thermophilic bacteria that could grow at a little bit of higher temperatures. They could grow at 55 to 60 degrees Celsius. But they thought that that was kind of the limit for microbes. Or at least they hadn't really looked any higher. But there's this pink stuff that's growing in this hot spring channel. And the water there is like 80 degrees Celsius.
Jyoti Asundi (31:32)
Ooh, yes.
Aarati Asundi (31:34)
And when he asked the park rangers what they thought it was, they said they guessed it was algae. But when Tom Louise looked at its composition, they found that it had no chlorophyll like algae would have had. And it had a very high protein content and a very similar microscopic structure to filamentous bacteria that Tom was familiar with.
Jyoti Asundi (31:58)
Yes. Yes.
Aarati Asundi (32:01)
So despite there being no record of bacteria being able to grow at such high temperature, he becomes convinced that this pink stringy stuff is bacteria. And this is the first time he starts to think about the idea that maybe extreme thermophiles or hyperthermophiles could exist.
Jyoti Asundi (32:19)
Mmm, yes.
Aarati Asundi (32:21)
So based on this preliminary research, Tom wrote and received grant funding from the NSF to seriously work on the microbial ecology of Yellowstone.
Jyoti Asundi (32:32)
Oh nice! Yes.
Aarati Asundi (32:33)
So they set up a temporary lab in a rented cabin...
Jyoti Asundi (32:37)
Oh wow!
Aarati Asundi (32:38)
...and they delved deeper into this research. Yeah.
Jyoti Asundi (32:41)
That's fabulous!
Aarati Asundi (32:43)
Like such great times.
Jyoti Asundi (32:45)
That is so attractive. Yeah!
Aarati Asundi (32:46)
Yeah, I want to do research in the 60s! This sounds great!
Jyoti Asundi (32:47)
Yes, I'd like to do this. I'd like to do this kind of work. Being in middle of Yellowstone, researching these things. Yeah.
Aarati Asundi (32:56)
Yeah, surrounded by gorgeous nature.
Jyoti Asundi (32:58)
Nice. Yes, anytime you want a little tea break, you go out and look at the beauty surrounding you. Nice, nice.
Aarati Asundi (33:04)
It sounds amazing. I knew you would like this story. I you would love this story.
Jyoti Asundi (33:07)
Yes, yes, it appeals to everything. It appeals to the nature lover in me. It appeals to the microbiologist in me. Yes.
Aarati Asundi (33:15)
Yeah. So they set up this temporary lab in a rented cabin and they start publishing papers. The scientific community starts to sit up and take notice of this. And not just the microbiologists and the ecologists, but what he hadn't realized is that when he started this research, the biochemists and the molecular biologists and all these other scientists with different agendas, were all reading his papers and asking him questions about like these microbes' metabolisms and how they worked and how their survival mechanisms were different
Jyoti Asundi (33:49)
Oh! Yes! The wide ranging implications of a living organism being able to conduct all the processes required for life...
Aarati Asundi (34:00)
Yes.
Jyoti Asundi (34:01)
...at a temperature that is beyond what we know as being able to support life. And so the implications for all processes, biochemical, protein metabolism, everything all these processes are now impacted.
Aarati Asundi (34:16)
so everyone is just like, wait, how does it do this? Yeah.
Jyoti Asundi (34:16)
Yeah how does it do that at that temperature? Wait a second, what does that mean for my research? Yes
Aarati Asundi (34:21)
Yeah. If it can survive in this really weird environment, what does that mean for medicine and cancer and all these diseases that cause really our metabolism to go out of whack?
Jyoti Asundi (34:33)
Nice, nice.
Aarati Asundi (34:34)
So since this work was really starting to take off, they set up a more permanent lab in West Yellowstone. And then they were able to start bringing in grad students and lab techs to come and help with this work. In the summer of 1966, a young undergraduate student named Hudson Freeze came to work on the Yellowstone Project.
Jyoti Asundi (34:56)
Okay.
Aarati Asundi (34:57)
The irony of that last name did not escape me, by the way. Hudson Freeze studying extreme thermophiles.
Jyoti Asundi (35:03)
Well...
Aarati Asundi (35:05)
So Tom gave him the project of trying to culture that pink filamentous organism. So up until now, they had been collecting samples constantly to study it, but they hadn't been able to get the formula down for how to keep it growing in the lab.
Jyoti Asundi (35:19)
Hmm, yes.
Aarati Asundi (35:21)
So Hudson Freeze started trying to figure out what temperature it needed to grow at and what nutrients it needed and how much and stuff like that.
Jyoti Asundi (35:29)
Yeah. Just best growth conditions.
Aarati Asundi (35:32)
Yeah, so he wasn't successful, but he did in this process end up sort of accidentally culturing another yellowish bacteria came from the same samples and they hadn't really noticed it.
Jyoti Asundi (35:45)
Oh, so it's a mixed, mixed. Yes, because the pink guy is so strong...
Aarati Asundi (35:50)
Yes.
Jyoti Asundi (35:51)
...that maybe the pink one is growing faster and taking over. If it's a mixed culture of yellow and pink bacteria. this happens all the time in microbiology. You have to be very careful.
Aarati Asundi (36:02)
Yeah, so he's not able to get that pink bacteria to grow properly, but whatever he's doing is allowing the yellow bacteria to grow properly. And so they start culturing that one. And Tom called this yellow bacteria Thermus aquaticus or taq, T-A-Q.
Jyoti Asundi (36:22)
Oh this is the Thermos Aquaticus! Okay, okay. my God.
Aarati Asundi (36:25)
Yes, this is the one, this yellowish one that came...
Jyoti Asundi (36:29)
When you say the color yellow, it makes me think of gold and it turned out to be gold.
Aarati Asundi (36:32)
Mmm, yes, pure gold.
Jyoti Asundi (36:33)
It turned out to be pure gold for biotech.
Aarati Asundi (36:36)
Yes. So all the biochemists and molecular biologists also who are keeping tabs on Tom's work are super excited by Thermus aquaticus.
Jyoti Asundi (36:44)
Yes. Yes.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Aarati Asundi (36:52)
Hey Mom! Did you know that Galactic Polymath Education Studio is holding the first ever MySciJourney competition?
Jyoti Asundi (36:59)
Yes! It's so exciting! Where you could win up to $500 for sharing your science story.
Aarati Asundi (37:06)
Yep! Just make a short video describing your scientific career path and the importance of your research and upload it for your chance to win.
Jyoti Asundi (37:13)
Eligible videos will also become part of an online resource to show the public a glimpse of the real people and work done in science.
Aarati Asundi (37:22)
The MySciJourney competition is open to everyone from highschoolers to tenured college professors and is a great way to flex your science storytelling muscles.
Jyoti Asundi (37:32)
Upload your submissions by September 30, 2025. For more competition rules and resources, including beautiful slide templates to help you get started, visit galacticpolymath.com. G-A-L-A-C-T-I-C-P-O-L-Y-M-A-T-H.com.
Aarati Asundi (37:50)
That's galacticpolymath.com
Aarati Asundi & Jyoti Asundi (37:52)
We can’t wait to hear your stories!
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Aarati Asundi (37:56)
Hi everyone, Aarati here. I hope you're enjoying the podcast. If so, and you wish someone would tell your science story, I founded a science communications company called Sykom, that's S-Y-K-O-M, that can help. Sykom blends creativity with scientific accuracy to create all types of science, communications, content, including explainer videos, slide presentations, science, writing, and more. We work with academic researchers, tech companies, nonprofits, or really any scientists. To help simplify your science, check us out at sykommer.com. That's S-Y-K-O-M-M-E r.com. Back to the story.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Aarati Asundi (38:42)
We're going to take a little detour here, as I love doing ⁓ in my stories. So seven years later in 1976, a master's named Alice Chien at the University of Cincinnati published a paper called "Deoxyribonucleic acid polymerase from the extreme thermophile Thermus aquaticus."
Jyoti Asundi (39:04)
Ok so he's not, Brock is not the actually pulled out the...
Aarati Asundi (39:08)
No.
Jyoti Asundi (39:09)
...enzyme that I'm very familiar with as a biotechie. Alice Chien is the one who did that. Okay, okay.
Aarati Asundi (39:15)
Yes, so this is a landmark paper because DNA polymerases are the enzymes that help create new strands of DNA. So whenever there's a break in the DNA that needs to be fixed or when a cell is dividing and the DNA needs to be copied, the DNA polymerase is the enzyme that actually builds these new strands.
Jyoti Asundi (39:36)
Yes.
Aarati Asundi (39:37)
So super important that she got this. I think at the time maybe people were like, "Whatever" but like, it turns out to be a really important discovery.
Jyoti Asundi (39:47)
It turns out to be the foundation for big techniques that are used in biotech.
Aarati Asundi (39:53)
Yeah, and we're about to get into that. So nine years later, in 1985, a chemist at the Cetus Corporation in California named Kary Mullis developed PCR, or the polymerase chain reaction.
Jyoti Asundi (40:10)
Based on the DNA polymerase from Thermus aquaticus.
Aarati Asundi (40:15)
No, not yet. Not yet, actually.
Jyoti Asundi (40:17)
Not yet?
Aarati Asundi (40:18)
No.
Jyoti Asundi (40:17)
Oh, oh wait. Those two pieces haven't come together yet.
Aarati Asundi (40:20)
Those two things have not... no.
Jyoti Asundi (40:22)
Got it.
Aarati Asundi (40:23)
So he's developed this thing called PCR, And it's a way to basically guide the DNA polymerase to make tons of copies of a specific gene or section of DNA. And I know you've done this like a ton of times. How many times do you think you've done this?
Jyoti Asundi (40:40)
Millions of... I have no I had a dollar for every time I did it, I'd be very rich. But ⁓ it is one of the fundamental techniques that are used in biotech industries. So basically you're able to just take a piece of DNA and replicated it as much as you want. Make more of the DNA piece of your choice.
But it has three pieces to it because you have your template DNA that hey, this is the piece of DNA I want. This is the strand of DNA that I want. But the DNA is double stranded. So the first step is where you have to open it up. You have to heat the DNA...
Aarati Asundi (41:23)
Yeah, you denature it and kind of break the bonds that are holding the two strands together.
Jyoti Asundi (41:27)
Break the bonds that keep that keep the two strands together, make each one into a single strand. And now each of those single can become your template. And you figure out what the ends are of these piece that you want to replicate over and over. And you design little pieces of DNA, small like 18 or 20 nucleotides in each of them. And these are called primers. They serve as little seeds, almost like the starting seed. And so the second step is where you lower the temperature. So you have first heated it up very high in order to separate the two pieces of DNA. And then you lower the temperature so that these little seed pieces of DNA, these primers can attach and then you kind of increase the temperature slightly so that the seed pieces can then be...
Aarati Asundi (42:22)
Built upon.
Jyoti Asundi (41:23)
...built upon. Yeah, they can build upon and it's called extension and they extend and they meet each other and they make a new piece of DNA.
Aarati Asundi (42:33)
And so you do this with like one piece of DNA, it becomes two pieces.
Jyoti Asundi (42:38)
Yeah. So one round of PCR makes two pieces of DNA. Then you do this one more time and you have a machine that does this. The machine just automatically cycles these three things, ⁓ denature for like separate the pieces, And then you put the primers on, and then you extend it for four or five minutes. One more time. That's now, now you two became four. Do it again. Four becomes eight and so on and so forth.
Aarati Asundi (43:04)
so yeah, this allows you to basically create millions of copies of your gene of interest or your section of DNA that you want to study. And it is such a fundamental tool of biology nowadays that Kary Mullis actually ended up sharing the Nobel Prize in 1993 for developing PCR.
The problem with PCR, the way that Kary Mullis had developed it originally, was that the scientists, Kary Mullis and the scientists at the Cetus Corporation, were using a DNA polymerase from E. coli bacteria that lives in our gut at around 37 degrees Celsius all the time.
Jyoti Asundi (43:42)
Yes. Yes.
Aarati Asundi (43:45)
So in that initial denaturing phase of the PCR cycle where you have to heat everything up so that the DNA falls apart, the E. coli polymerase would also unravel and stop working. So after every single cycle, the scientists would have to manually go in and add more polymerase. And that got old really fast. People were like, yeah.
Jyoti Asundi (44:08)
Yes, because you literally are standing there...
Aarati Asundi (44:12)
Yeah, like every seven or eight minutes or something, you have to go and do it again. And you have to do that for like, what, two, three hours straight, just every seven minutes. Yeah.
Jyoti Asundi (44:18)
Yes, yes, yes, you just sit there with a stopwatch and three hours of your life can be lost like that.
Aarati Asundi (44:27)
I mean, settle in with a good book and a timer. What else can you do?
Jyoti Asundi (44:30)
Yes, exactly and a whole bunch of enzyme and you keep doing it.
Aarati Asundi (44:35)
So In 1986, one of Kary Mullis's colleagues, Randall Saiki, thought, hey, what if we use a polymerase from a thermophilic bacteria instead that could maybe survive that denaturing temperature?
Jyoti Asundi (44:49)
Very smart.
Aarati Asundi (44:49)
So he started using the Taq polymerase from the paper that Alice Chien had reported that she had isolated.
Jyoti Asundi (44:59)
That DNA polymerase. And then everything came together.
Aarati Asundi (45:02)
Yes. So in 1988, Randall Saiki, Kerry Mullis, and their colleagues published a paper in the journal Science called Primer-Directed Enzymatic Amplification of DNA with a Thermostable DNA Polymerase. And the rest is, as you know, history.
Jyoti Asundi (45:23)
Absolutely, absolutely. Like you said, once you bring in, you marry DNA polymerase from Thermus aquaticus, which can go through the cycles of high and low temperatures...add it in, put all your things together and walk away. And when you come back three hours later, the one copy of DNA that you started with has now become a million copies. That just becomes mind blowing in terms of its applications.
So for example, forensic science, you get this little piece of DNA from some crime scene. Now you are able to take it, extract it, put it in and start a PCR reaction, walk away. And now you have plenty of DNA to work with so that you identify more.
Aarati Asundi (46:10)
You can do a ton of different tests now on that DNA to figure out whose it is and do DNA matching and everything.
Jyoti Asundi (46:19)
It's revolutionary for agriculture because the scientists are working all the time to improve our crops and you know, make them more resistant to disease and less dependent on pesticides and more resistant extremes of weather. DNA fingerprinting, you know. Then medical diagnostics, is ⁓
Aarati Asundi (46:37)
Yes. Huge.
Jyoti Asundi (46:39)
Huge, huge in medical diagnostics. So clinical diagnostics, it's just incredible. And then of course we have the cloning, making more of the DNA that we want. We want to create a particular clone that creates this protein. You use PCR and you make that happen. And you and I, both of us in our scientific careers have done a lot of that, where we want a particular mutation. We want a particular piece of gene. And there it is. You have been able to make it.
Aarati Asundi (47:05)
Yeah, because literally every disease mutation that you want to study, you do PCR to amplify it and get a bunch of that DNA. Any genetic trait that you want to study, do PCR, build up that section of DNA so that you can study it. It's used for everything.
Jyoti Asundi (47:21)
Yes, yes. And it couldn't have this broad-based unless it had the ease of use...
Aarati Asundi (47:30)
Yes. People would never sit there for three hours doing this constantly.
Jyoti Asundi (47:33)
No, there would be some dedicated people who would do this. It would be a very niche... what do you call it...
Aarati Asundi (47:42)
Or people would have built a machine or something maybe that would keep adding it every maybe, but it's really a pain. Yeah.
Jyoti Asundi (47:45)
Adding maybe but yeah but the technique it would have been a very niche technique
Aarati Asundi (47:52)
Yeah. It would have been. It would not be just widely used anywhere nowadays you just have a thermo cycling machine you can go anywhere you can take it to the fields you take it here take it there it's a very robust, robust application at this point.
Aarati Asundi (48:05)
Yes, you can use it on any gene, any piece of DNA. Yeah.
Jyoti Asundi (48:09)
Anywhere and you can you can do so many things you can manipulate so many different types of DNA from so many different situations, whether it's agriculture or forensic science or medical diagnostics. So many different widespread applications, just changing humanity, changing our lives for the better.
Aarati Asundi (48:28)
And I think people realize this because in 1989, Science Magazine named taq polymerase its first molecule of the of the year.
Jyoti Asundi (48:38)
Yes. I can see that. You know, I am trying to imagine, as we are talking, I'm trying to imagine something as revolutionary as PCR using Taq polymerase, the kind of application that it has.
Aarati Asundi (48:57)
I think the next thing is going to be what people were saying, that CRISPR is the huge revolution in genetic engineering.
Jyoti Asundi (49:07)
And that also is based on PCR also. The foundation of that is also that is, yeah, it's built on PCR.
Aarati Asundi (49:13)
Yeah. So even that is like, it's not possible without this. Yes.
Jyoti Asundi (49:18)
CRISPR, which is going to now revolutionize us again by allowing changes like... Just, quick note here, CRISPR is the technique we can maybe employ send a new piece of DNA into the body and change characteristics. And people in the future, you'll be able to change eye color and you can be able to change hair color and all sorts of things for the person. If you already know that the baby has some sort of genetic disease, you can go in and fix that. They're already doing that using CRISPR, and so that's going to be the new revolution. But even that, the foundation of that new upcoming technology is back to PCR.
Aarati Asundi (50:00)
And then PCR, of course, like we've been saying, would not have been possible without Taq polymerase and Taq Thermus aquaticus, which was discovered by Tom Brock and Hudson Freeze.
Jyoti Asundi (50:13)
Yes.
Aarati Asundi (50:13)
So thanks to its use in PCR, by 1990, there were over 1,000 papers citing the use of Taq polymerase. But meanwhile, Tom was continuing his research of thermophilic bacteria in Yellowstone. So the world is blowing up and he's just like, sweet, I'm still in Yellowstone studying these thermophilic bacteria.
Jyoti Asundi (50:33)
Yes, having the best time of his life in a beautiful national park. Good for him.
Aarati Asundi (50:38)
Yeah. And so he starts looking for bacteria at even higher temperatures. And he does this by hanging slides on strings and then immersing the slides into the boiling waters of the geyser pools, and then pulling them out a few hours later to check if anything's grown on them.
Jyoti Asundi (50:57)
Yes, yes, yes.
Aarati Asundi (50:58)
And he wrote another paper called Life at High Temperatures, where he published evidence that there was bacteria that could grow at above boiling temperatures.
Jyoti Asundi (51:09)
Oh wow.
Aarati Asundi (51:10)
So that makes you maybe wonder, how hot can we go? So if it can grow at boiling temperatures where literally we thought no life can exist, what's the upper limit?
Jyoti Asundi (51:21)
Yes.
Aarati Asundi (51:22)
And Tom thought that it would be possible to find bacterial life anywhere between 110 and 200 degrees Celsius because 200 degrees Celsius is when the DNA nucleotides actually start to break down. So he's like, OK, so life probably,
Jyoti Asundi (51:37)
Oh wow, okay, As long as the...
Aarati Asundi (51:40)
As long as it's DNA based, as long as the life is DNA based.
Jyoti Asundi (51:42)
Yeah. I don't know. As a microbiologist, I think the limit is 121 degree centigrade because...
Aarati Asundi (52:04)
Yes, you are correct. Yeah. So in the 1970s, scientists discovered deep sea thermal vents, which brought renewed interest to his work. In 1997, a team of scientists discovered pyrolobus fumarii, which is Latin for fire lobe of the chimney. And it was discovered in a hydrothermal vent in the mid Atlantic ridge and it grows best at 113 degrees Celsius.
Jyoti Asundi (51:23)
Wow.
Aarati Asundi (52:24)
But currently, you're correct, the most heat tolerant thermophile in general is the Geogemma borossii strain 121, which can grow ⁓ at 121 degrees Celsius. And that's just in general, but the all time record holder is the Methanopyrus kandleri, which can grow at 122 degrees Celsius.
Jyoti Asundi (52:50)
Oh wow, oh wow,
Aarati Asundi (52:51)
So right now, that's our upper limits that we've just been able to discover.
Jyoti Asundi (52:56)
Oh wow, that's... Oh my gosh, 121 degrees centigrade, not Fahrenheit.
Aarati Asundi (53:04)
In Fahrenheit, that's like 250 degrees Fahrenheit.
Jyoti Asundi (53:08)
Yeah, yeah, no, 121 Fahrenheit is more like the very, very hot water that you would use at the most, like a super hot water in which plumber tells you, don't do that, don't set, you'll burn yourself if you do that kind of thing. That's 120 Fahrenheit, but 121 degrees centigrade is the limit.
Aarati Asundi (53:27)
OK, so back to Tom Brock. In 1976, he started writing a book called Biology of Microorganisms, which was his first major textbook. It did fairly well with Tom continually revising it over the years. In 1988, the fifth edition of this book came out, and it was the first full-color microbiology textbook on the market, which if I had been alive at that time and studying microbiology, that would have been a huge selling point for me.
Jyoti Asundi (53:57)
You know, I think I have seen that textbook in my life...
Aarati Asundi (54:01)
Have you?
Jyoti Asundi (54:01)
as a microbiology student. Brock. Yes.
Aarati Asundi (54:04)
Yes, that's kind of why I was wondering if you had heard of his name because...
Jyoti Asundi (54:08)
I didn't make the connection. You know how I am with names. But once you told me the textbook and that color and everything, it clicked. Yes, I have seen the textbook. I did have to study his textbook.
Aarati Asundi (54:18)
Yeah, because this would have been in the 80s. It would have been around this time when he's writing these textbooks and you would have been going to school.
Jyoti Asundi (54:22)
Yes. Correct. You're right. You're right. And as I said, I'm not good with names and so I don't make the connection. But yes. I don't remember the details.
Aarati Asundi (54:29)
I mean, that's better...Like, I can't name a single author of any of the textbooks I've ever used, so, you know.
So his textbook is actually still being used today. It was renamed Brock's Biology of Microorganisms and is currently in its 16th edition.
Jyoti Asundi (54:48)
Yes. No, it was it was not named like that. His name was a small underneath it.
Aarati Asundi (54:54)
Yeah, I think it was renamed in like 2004 or something like that. Yeah.
Jyoti Asundi (54:56)
That makes sense. That makes sense. Yes.
Aarati Asundi (54:59)
In 1971, Tom was offered the E.B. Fred Professor of Natural Sciences Emeritus position at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. And he was really excited by this because when he had been discharged from the Navy as a young man, UW had been one of his top school choices. But he had a hard time getting in because he was a non-resident. He was living in Ohio at the time.
Jyoti Asundi (55:24)
And now they are offering him a position.
Aarati Asundi (55:27)
Yeah, wonderful.
Jyoti Asundi (55:29)
Isn't it beautiful how, life has these little full circles that it gives you. He's being offered a position in the university that he coveted as a young man and he's now being feted and honored and welcomed. Please come and be one of us and a position of power, not as a lowly little student. Yeah, now acclaimed, honored professor there.
Aarati Asundi (55:54)
Yes, You're not applying to go. We're inviting you.
Jyoti Asundi (55:57)
Yeah, you're not applying. We are honoring you. We are welcoming you. We are begging you to come to us. Wonderful.
Aarati Asundi (56:02)
Side note to the story, also around this time, his personal life changed quite a bit. So at some point, he and Louise got a divorce and I could not for the life of me figure out why or what happened. I did find it a bit surprising because she had been with him throughout all of his work at Yellowstone and everything. But for whatever reason, I guess it didn't work out.
But he did get remarried to another woman named Katherine Middleton, not Kate Middleton. Katherine Middleton.
Jyoti Asundi (56:33)
Oh my god!
Aarati Asundi (56:35)
Yeah. There's so many of these in this story. Yeah.
Jyoti Asundi (56:36)
Unbelievable! Unbelievable fun names in this story.
Aarati Asundi (56:41)
Yes. She went by Kathie and they stayed together for the rest of his life.
Officially, his project at Yellowstone ended in 1975. But afterwards, he started traveling the world looking for exotic microbes. He developed into quite the travel bug. No pun intended.
Jyoti Asundi (56:59)
Yes.
Aarati Asundi (57:01)
He was visiting hot springs in Iceland, Japan, the Caribbean, New Zealand, Italy, and Central America.
Jyoti Asundi (57:09)
Good excuse to go to all these places.
Aarati Asundi (57:11)
Yeah, why not?
Jyoti Asundi (57:12)
Why not?
Aarati Asundi (57:14)
Yeah, and he found hyperthermophiles in pretty much every hot spring he visited, but he also kept going back to Yellowstone. He simply said because it was the most accessible location where so many microbial habitats existed, but I'm sure it was also just a special place in his heart at this time.
Jyoti Asundi (57:33)
Yes, yes, the place where he was initially so unwilling to go became so close to his heart. That is again ironic. There is so many little, little circles of life ironies in this story.
Aarati Asundi (57:47)
Yeah. But he also started turning his focus a little closer to home by looking at the ecosystems around the Great Lakes since he's now living in Madison.
Jyoti Asundi (57:56)
Yes!
Aarati Asundi (57:57)
And he felt like he should give back to the taxpayers of Wisconsin who are essentially funding all his research.
Jyoti Asundi (58:02)
Okay, okay.
Aarati Asundi (58:04)
So in 1981, he helped found the North Temperate Lakes Long-Term Ecological Research Network to fund long-term limnology. This is a new term I hadn't heard of. Limnology is lake research.
Jyoti Asundi (58:19)
Oh nice! I did not know this okay
Aarati Asundi (58:22)
Yeah. Also around this time, he becomes once again interested in the history of microbiology. And so he starts, you know, going back to the kind of like he had written a textbook called Milestones in Microbiology. And he once again comes back to updating that. And he was surprised to find that there wasn't really a good biography of Robert Koch, the original microbiologist, German microbiologist.
Jyoti Asundi (58:49)
That's the one who he translated initially. Yeah.
Aarati Asundi (58:51)
Yeah, there wasn't a good biography of him in English. So once again, he uses his German translating skills to write one. And I was like, thank you for writing that because I will probably use that in future episode on Robert Koch. You know? Yeah.
Jyoti Asundi (59:08)
Yes, yeah, and it's the writer in him coming out. You know, initially he wanted to be a writer. He has that science communicator, educator feeling in him all the time. So all of it is coming out to create these beautiful pieces of work. Nice.
Aarati Asundi (59:22)
Yeah, and I love that he thought it was important that Robert Koch's biography gets told. He had spent time already, obviously, translating his research and his scientific work, but he's like, there's no biography of this guy's life. And I was like, yes, that's exactly why I have this podcast too.
Jyoti Asundi (59:43)
That's right! We need to understand these scientists are coming from. It's amazing.
Aarati Asundi (59:50)
He and his wife, Kathie, also started an academic publishing company called Science Tech Publishers that they operated for 12 years. Overall, during his career, he published over 250 papers and 20 books.
Jyoti Asundi (1:00:04)
Wow! A lot of work.
Aarati Asundi (1:00:06)
So he got that writing in anyway. Doesn't matter.
Jyoti Asundi (1:00:09)
Yes, yes, yes, you know, when I say, who am I? When I ask the universe, who am I? And something comes to you, you know. And if you're doing something else, then somehow you will find your way back to the core of who you are. So it sounds like at the core, he's a writer, he's a creator, he's inquisitive guy who looks around him sees things that are different and then writes about it, educates others about it. That's at the core of him, that's who he is. And that doesn't matter what setting you put him in. That core identity of him comes out.
Aarati Asundi (1:00:55)
Yes. So he retired from the University of Madison in 1990 at around 65 years old, but he was far from done from working. With all of the royalties that Tom and Kathie had from their years in publishing, they put that all to good use. During his work kind of understanding ecology and specifically the unique environment in Wisconsin, Tom learned about an extremely rare kind of ecosystem that existed called an oak savanna. These oak trees thrive in dry areas with poor soil quality and very interestingly, they depend on fairly frequent fires to survive.
Jyoti Asundi (1:01:41)
Oh wow!
Aarati Asundi (1:01:42)
So the oak trees themselves are fairly fire tolerant, but if there's any like invasive species like buckthorn or honeysuckle that's growing in the area, they get burned away and allow the oak tree to thrive.
Jyoti Asundi (1:02:09)
Wow! Again it's an oxymoron. It's like you would think the oak tree would not survive the fire but it's opposite. That's interesting.
Aarati Asundi (1:02:05)
Yeah, they've developed or they've evolved to be able to survive and thrive in these types of, extreme environments again, like this fire is raging and they're like, okay,
Jyoti Asundi (1:02:15)
And probably all the ash serves as fantastic fertilizer for the oak tree to thrive even better.
Aarati Asundi (1:02:21)
Yeah, and this is a very rare ecosystem that exists in North America and a couple of other places, it does exist naturally in Wisconsin. ⁓ But when people like settlers came to Wisconsin and they started farming the land and settling in the area, they stopped letting any fires burn through the area. And so now these oak trees are essentially getting overgrown and choked out and dying due to all of these invasive species.
Jyoti Asundi (1:02:51)
They need the fire to survive well.
Aarati Asundi (1:02:54)
Yes. So Tom and Kathie, with all of their money now, bought 140 acres of abandoned farmland about 20 miles west of UW's campus and established the Pleasant Valley Conservancy. And they slowly started restoring the land back to its original state, encouraging the original biodiversity that was part of the ecosystem to return to the area through controlled burns basically.
Jyoti Asundi (1:03:24)
That is a very good legacy. They really are giving back, you know, respecting that nature and giving back and making sure that the nature that they are so in love with is protected.
Aarati Asundi (1:03:38)
Yes. They developed a lot of restoration procedures that became very useful for land and conservation and other wildlife preserves and national parks. And today you can go and visit Pleasant Valley Conservancy throughout the year if you want to observe the wildlife that has returned to the area.
Jyoti Asundi (1:03:56)
Nice.
Aarati Asundi (1:03:57)
Over the years, Tom and Kathie received numerous awards for their efforts in conservation and restoration. And of course, ever the writer, he published two books about their restoration efforts.
Jyoti Asundi (1:04:10)
Everything he comes across he writes, catalogs. Very nice.
Aarati Asundi (1:04:15)
Which is part of the reason why this episode is so long and detailed because I had so much information to draw on for this episode, which was fantastic.
Jyoti Asundi (1:04:24)
But that's important because it's a nice learning experience for all of us. We see where they have been and their efforts and we respect that, move forward, build on that legacy.
Aarati Asundi (1:04:38)
Yeah, and he saw the importance of sharing not just his work, but like how he got there, his life and, you know, everything that led to these discoveries.
Jyoti Asundi (1:04:48)
Truly wonderful.
Aarati Asundi (1:05:50)
In 2019, he received an honorary degree in microbiology from the University of Wisconsin to acknowledge his extraordinary lifetime accomplishments. In 2021, Tom died after taking a fall in his home in Madison. He was 94 years old. So.
Jyoti Asundi (1:05:09)
Okay, okay. Yeah.
Aarati Asundi (1:05:11)
Very long, good life.
Jyoti Asundi (1:05:13)
Good, good productive life, a good legacy. And sometimes it's not necessary. The fall is just the ultimate cause. It's not, it was old age and he had to go one way or the other. That is so, but he had a good life. He had a good run there and he did good with the life that he was given.
Aarati Asundi (1:05:32)
Yeah, I mean, change the world.
Jyoti Asundi (1:05:33)
Wonderful. What, what a beautiful story.
Aarati Asundi (1:05:36)
I had known that Thermus aquaticus had been discovered in Yellowstone, and that's kind of why I went chasing his story. But I love how he was so obsessed extreme organisms and how all these... even up to an oak tree, it's not just microbes, but it's like, "Oh! This oak tree that lives in fire. I want to learn about that. That's an extreme organism."
Jyoti Asundi (1:05:58)
But there are so many lessons there even in terms of even like, these oak trees, do they survive? For example, okay, fire is very dramatic, but they seem to survive in poor soil, not as strong with nutrition. How do they do that? Can we apply that to other ⁓ organisms?
Aarati Asundi (1:06:20)
Can we learn from that? And yeah, yeah.
Jyoti Asundi (1:06:22)
Yeah. Can we help other trees to grow where the soil characteristics have depleted and so they are not able to do so well anymore. So many good lessons.
Aarati Asundi (1:06:31)
Yeah, it's going to be huge. It would be huge for agriculture and stuff because, know, whenever you grow crops take up all the nutrients from the soil and then the soil gets depleted. And then we have to add that back by either using fertilizer or we have to rotate crops so that we're not using the same land every single time, every single year, which of course means you require a ton more land than normal. But if you could maybe in, like using PCR and using CRISPR and all these things, if you could insert a gene into that allows them to, yeah.
Jyoti Asundi (1:07:05)
Yes, figure out. Yeah, yeah, that allows them to thrive anyway. Yeah.
Aarati Asundi (1:07:09)
And especially with climate change and all these things happening, the soil is getting worse because of the dry heat and, you know, lack of rain or whatever.
Jyoti Asundi (1:07:17)
And, and temperatures are going to higher levels than they were before. So how do we survive that? These extremophiles would probably give us a few lessons in Very relevant.
Aarati Asundi (1:07:28)
I mean, it's kind of sounding sci-fi-ish, but you know, I mean, 20 years ago, CRISPR sounded sci-fi-ish. So you never know. You never know where science is going to take you. So yeah.
Jyoti Asundi (1:07:38)
Yes, yes, you never know. yes, yes. And how important these findings as we move forward.
Aarati Asundi (1:07:58)
Yep. Thanks for listening. If you have a suggestion for a story we should cover or thoughts you want to share about an episode, reach out to us at smartteapodcast.com. You can follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Blue Sky @smartteapodcast and listen to us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And leave us a rating or comment. It helps us grow. New episodes are released every other Wednesday. See you next time!