EMILY 0:04
There's a lot of research now that kids who grow up in homes with dogs or, you know, relatedly grew up on farms and have lots of contact with livestock are less likely to develop asthma and allergies and autoimmune diseases.
PHIL 0:22
I'm Phil Hatterman and this is Dog Words presented by Rosie Fund. Joining us from Brooklyn, New York science writer Emily Anthes talks about her latest book The Great Indoors_ The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health, and Happiness and the 2014 release Frankenstein's Cat_ Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts. After we tackle science, research and journalism, we move on to a fascinating discussion of how dogs impact our environment and some medical advances for animals. Links to Emily's website, newsletter and social media are in the episode description. But she's pretty easy to find EmilyAnthes.com, that's e-m-i-l-y-a-n-t-h-e-s dot com.
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Today's guest on Dog Words is author Emily Anthes. Welcome to the show, Emily.
EMILY 2:59
Thanks so much for having me. I'm happy to be here.
PHIL 3:02
I read an article about your new book, The Great Indoors_ The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health, and Happiness. It really highlights how much we are indoor even with an active lifestyle compared to a few generations ago, let alone centuries ago. One would think you started this book March of 2020. But it hit the shelves this past summer. So obviously, you had begun work on this some time ago. So, first of all, what was the genesis of the book and how long had you been working on it before you realized the timing of this release could not be better?
EMILY 3:49
Yeah, you're absolutely right that I did not start in March. I'm not that fast of a writer. But...
PHIL 3:54
I'm stuck indoors. What can I write about? Oh, the indoors!
EMILY 3:58
Exactly. So I think I started back in 2015 in terms of like, at least, conceiving of the project and starting to do a little bit of research. But even before these lockdowns, you know, we spend 90% of our time indoors. Modern humans are essentially an indoor species. And I'm a science writer so I'm interested in the science of different things and places. And, you know, we talk a lot about our outdoor environments but it just sort of dawned on me that we spend all this time indoors but we don't talk much about the science of those spaces and how they shape our lives. So that was sort of the initial kernel and it was just either lucky or unlucky — I'm not sure which one — that it turned out to be so timely.
PHIL 4:48
We probably take — and you're the one who research this so please correct me if I'm wrong on this assumption — that we take the indoors for granted because it's mostly a controlled environment. That the temperature, the humidity, the filters, and the HVAC, our comfortable chairs, our connection to the outside world. What gets our attention, though, is when we step outside because we can't control it. So that's suddenly a key concern like "How do I control the outdoors?" Because you take for granted how easy it is, or has become easy for us to control the indoors. Even though, as you noted, that's where we spend all our time.
EMILY 5:32
Yeah, I mean, I think the other piece of that is that because we spend so much time indoors, especially, you know, in maybe just a few places, our homes, our offices — during times when we're allowed to go to them — they become so familiar to us that we sort of take them for granted. We don't think that there could possibly be that much interesting or to discover there. Because we're there all the time we think we know every nook and cranny of them, what could we possibly learn? But it turns out that is really wrong. There's a lot to learn about our indoor spaces.
PHIL 6:06
Well, yeah, it's a space that we have created and or chosen. So we know everything there is to know about it.
EMILY 6:14
Mm hmm. But we don't.
PHIL 6:16
Yeah, that should be a red flag. When you make the assumption that you know everything, and you're a science writer, that's when you know you're on the wrong track. When you think, "I know everything about this." That should be a red flag that you're missing.
EMILY 6:26
Exactly. I write a lot of science articles. And almost always there's a paragraph towards the end where it says, "Researchers say we have more left to learn about x, y and z." There's always more left to learn.
PHIL 6:39
This show does not get into the political but I'm always curious, fascinated by science. Have always enjoyed science, nonfiction and science fiction. Typically enjoyed the hard science fiction over the soft science fiction. The hard science fiction, for those of you who are not science fiction literature fans, is when they take plausible scientific concepts instead of something that's fantastical or supernatural and explore our interaction with those concepts. But when somebody says, "Settled science," that to me, again, is a red flag, because for a true scientist very little is settled. It's the start of the discussion. That's what science is, is that unending quest for not the ultimate truth, but just a deeper understanding.
EMILY 7:35
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think we've learned a lot in the last few decades about how science can go wrong. You know, we've seen examples of misconduct or sloppy research. Things that don't replicate. But at its best, and what makes science so powerful, is that it does have this self-correction mechanism. And it's this constant process of iterating and learning more and building on what's come before.
PHIL 8:01
I promise our listeners we will talk about dogs here in a moment but I'm so fascinated and engaged by this concept. You are a science writer, you write books, you write columns, you would call yourself a science reporter. Perhaps others would call you a science reporter, as well. Do you ever become frustrated or grind your teeth when you read science reporting or reference to a scientific study or research by a reporter who is not a science reporter who is taking the surface level information and rushing to, "I hear I'm explaining this for my audience," when it's clear you don't really understand it yourself? Or if you ran that by the researchers, they would throw their hands up and say, "No, no, no, that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm not drawing conclusions. I'm presenting evidence. It's not your job as a reporter to draw these conclusions for your audience. Just present the facts and let people figure it out."
EMILY 9:03
Yeah, I mean, I don't want to paint with too broad a brush here but there's definitely there's a lot of bad science journalism out there. There's a lot of really good science journalism out there. And I think we've seen that over the last year. But we've also seen how important it is to have reporters and journalists who really understand science, and what it can and can't tell us. I mean, I think a lot of the sort of damaging and harmful stories about the pandemic have been from political reporters or journalists that don't have any particular training or knowledge about science. And that's not to say they can't do a good job. Some of them do a great job but it also can lead to a lot of mistakes.
PHIL 9:45
Not to throw the reporters under the bus, even though some of them share the blame, I would say those who need to perk up and take responsibility for understanding the science, being curious, are the general population. When you read something that says, "Here's the data, here's the science, this is settled," don't stop at that article. And especially in this day and age where our access to primary sources is easier than it's ever been in the history of science. So let, yeah, let us science article be your entry into that topic or that study.
EMILY 10:32
Yeah. And it's also — I mean, it's tricky, because in some ways, science and journalism have sort of different values and practices and they certainly move at different speeds. So there is this inherent tension where you see a lot of stories that are about like some single study. And often these are like diet or nutrition studies and stories. So you know, like, blueberries cure cancer, or coffee causes cancer, whatever that is. And it's this one study in one headline and that's often how journalism works. But science doesn't really work that way. Science is this body of literature and it's not what any one given study says. It's how that fits into a broader literature. And so it's hard. These are different fields that sort of have different values and practices. So I'm sympathetic to to the challenge.
PHIL 11:26
And news is a 24 hour cycle. Science is not.
EMILY 11:30
Correct.
PHIL 11:31
You may have a deadline for filing for a grant or something but ultimately, you're on a continuous quest to explore a topic. And you don't have an editor breathing down your neck, or a social media department that says, "Hey, we have to have a soundbite. From your article, give us something." Which brings me to, if you have more than a minute and a half to learn about the world, from headlines and tweets and such, and you actually want to sit down with a book, The Great Indoors_ The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health, and Happiness is Emily Anthes' book that we've been talking about obliquely for the last few minutes. So in 2015, you thought about exploring what does this mean that we're indoors all the time and where did it go from there?
EMILY 12:28
Well, it went in a lot of different directions. You know, I sort of defined indoor environments and well-being really broadly. That was part of what appealed to me about this topic. So when I say I looked at how these spaces affect us, it was everything from how our homes affects our physical health, whether that is the microbes that live there, which I think we'll we'll talk a little bit more about, or the air pollution in our homes. So how is that affecting health and disease. To things like, how are the way our offices set up affecting our productivity? Or how does hospital design affect patient outcomes? How can schools influence student behavior? So it's really a broad base, look at how different kinds of indoor environments shape different aspects of our lives.
PHIL 13:21
Still teasing that we will be talking about dogs. A moment ago, you were saying scientific studies that talk about here's the thing with blueberries, here's the things with coffee, or eggs, like seems like every year it's, we don't eat enough eggs to eggs will kill you. We're back and forth on eggs. When it comes to indoor space, you talked about workspaces. We need an open environment, no walls, no cubicles, everybody, just sharing the same space with tables and desks to no everyone needs their own space where they can control whether they're in a cubicle or in their office. That seems like the egg thing that it's always going back and forth, that companies, especially ones who have a lot of capital to burn are constantly remodeling. More open space. Less open space. Where did that land by the time when you wrote your book? Because it may have changed in the last couple months.
EMILY 14:15
Yeah, I mean, I think the overwhelming consensus of the evidence is that open offices are not really good for much except for saving companies money. That is really what's driven the open office trend. In almost every way they seem to be bad for workers. So they're noisy and distracting. They can impair productivity. They can accelerate the transmission of disease, which is something I'm sure people are thinking about right now. And there's studies showing that people who work in open offices take more sick days than people who work in closed offices just because, as you can imagine, it's it's easier for germs to travel. And even some of the sort of purported benefits that you might think would make sense in open offices, like they might be good for collaboration and teamwork. There's not a lot of solid evidence that that's true. And there are actually some interesting studies I cite that show that when companies switch from closed to open offices, face to face communication declines and people move most of their workplace communication online to email and direct messaging and Slack and things like that. And, you know, that could be because they're hyper-conscious of how they're affecting their colleagues. They don't want to go stand and talk to someone and interrupt everyone else. It could be because that doesn't really provide any privacy. It's hard to have a confidential conversation that way. So...
PHIL 15:40
Well, yeah, if I wanna — if have an idea that is going to shake up the industry or is not the norm for how our organization works and so it might be a possibly off limits topic, I'm going to keep that to myself rather than stand in someone's cubicle and talk about it and have every adjoining cubicle hear my possibly heretical theory on how we should do our work.
EMILY 16:06
Yeah, and that's not to say that open offices are necessarily bad or wrong for every circumstance. I mean, there is some contradiction in the literature and the other sort of one of the big lessons from the book is there's no such thing as a one size fits all environment. Different spaces are good for different people and different tasks. But on balance, the weight of the evidence really seems to be that there's very little that redeems open offices from the point of view of workers. Again, they're cheaper and more flexible for employers, which is why they've become so popular.
PHIL 16:42
And if that's the reason an employer is doing it, just be honest, and say, "This is our priority." And don't put lipstick on the pig. And speaking of animals — I'm a pro see. that transition there and going from pigs to dogs. You discuss how dogs are part of our environment and studies that let us know what we're doing to dogs or what dogs are doing to us. What did you learn there?
EMILY 17:13
If I could back up for one second to just provide a little bit of context. So one of the really interesting things I learned very early in research for the book is that our indoor spaces are ecosystems, we don't tend to think of them that way. You know, we think of ecosystems as existing outside. But a lot of studies...
PHIL 17:30
Yeah, we're a bubble isolated from the ecosystem. We're in our house. Or our office.
EMILY 17:33
Exactly. Our houses are meant to seal us away from ecosystems and other species. But it turns out that there are just thousands of kinds of microbes in all of our buildings, including our homes, and that's something scientists have learned over the last five to 10 years. And though that might sound kind of icky, really, it's nothing to be too concerned about. Most of these microbes are totally harmless. And some of them even seem to be beneficial. And that's where dogs come in. So one of the first things that researchers noticed was that dogs really changed the microbial makeup of your home. In particular, they make the microbes that exist in our homes more diverse. So if you think about what a dog is doing, you know, like coming in and out from outside from the yard, maybe dozens of times a day, depending on your dog, they are tracking in soil microbes, plant microbes, they're also shedding their own sort of doggy microbes from their drool and their skin into our homes. So they're creating this much richer, microbial environment. And the other thing researchers have learned is that that seems to be good for us, especially for young kids. That when our immune systems are first developing, if we're exposed to a rich diversity of microbes that essentially helps train our immune systems and teaches them to be able to recognize things that might be threats. And there's a lot of research now that kids who grow up in homes with dogs, or you know, relatedly grew up on farms and have lots of contact with livestock are less likely to develop asthma and allergies and autoimmune diseases. And we think that's because of all the microbes that the dogs are introducing into our lives.
PHIL 19:24
Another reason that you should get a dog.
EMILY 19:28
Exactly. That's the takeaway from the book, really. Get a dog.
PHIL 19:33
And our audience probably doesn't need much prompting but this is evidence that they can share with their friends and relatives that they're trying to convince to to get a dog. In your book, in the introduction, in fact, you reference the somewhat famous study that compared an Amish community to a Hutterite community that is genetically very similar but as far as health, just what you noted, the Hutterite children tended to have a lot more allergies. But the most significant difference between the two communities is the Amish children have much more exposure to livestock and that diverse environment than the Hutterite, which is, I wouldn't say industrial but tends to use more modern means in their, their farming. So don't be too clean, be hygienic, but don't be too clean. Don't filter out everything from your environment, and certainly not what your dogs bring in. In reading your book, The Great Indoors, which there's a link to Emily's website and to the publisher's website in the description for this episode so I encourage everyone to read this book. It's it's fascinating. But I'm now looking forward to reading Frankenstein's Cat. Again, listeners, I promise we'll talk about dogs. But there are dogs in Frankenstein's Cat, but tell us about that book.
EMILY 21:05
Yeah, so Frankenstein's Cat is really actually sort of much more up my alley in terms of my interests and what I tend to cover. I cover a lot of animal science and veterinary science, The Great Indoors, it's a bit of a departure, but Frankenstein's Cat is a look at animal biotechnology and especially sort of with the focus on what it means for animals. So there's a lot of discussion when we talk about things like genetic modification or cloning or technologies like that, like, "What does it mean for us humans?" Like, is it safe to eat? Is it going to help us make new medicines? But there are also a lot of ways in which these technologies are changing the lives of animals. It was really fun book to write. I look at things like pet cloning of both cats and dogs. I actually got to meet the world's very first cloned house cat, as I did research for that book. I look at things like animal prosthetics, which have become really high tech and actually feature some dogs who have had sort of bionic limbs basically implanted after losing a leg. And so it's a really broad based look at what some of these modern technologies mean for animals and animal welfare, including our pets and our dogs.
PHIL 22:19
The prosthetics for dogs, as with other research, was it prosthetics for humans that someone realized, "Hey, we can do this for dogs and cats?" Or was it someone starting with dogs and cats as far as researching prosthetics for ultimate use on humans?
EMILY 22:39
Yeah, and actually, more often than not, tends to go in the latter direction from animals to humans. And what I thought was interesting about it was, in a lot of ways animal bodies are similar to ours but also in a lot of ways they're different. And in solving some of the problems that an animal prosthetic presents you can make better prosthetics for humans. So in the case of these dogs that had these bionic limbs — and these were legs that were essentially implanted in the bone — that was something that it was easier to sort of get approval for and to try out in veterinary medicine and was then subsequently pioneered in human patients. There's another example in the book which is actually about dolphins and prosthetist who made a prosthetic tail for a dolphin. And one thing about dolphins is their skin is really sensitive and much more sensitive than our own human skin. And so it turns out in making sort of a prosthetic that wouldn't irritate the dolphins' very fragile skin they developed new materials that are now helping human amputees have prosthetics that are less irritating to their own skin. So one of the big sort of overarching themes of Frankenstein's Cat is that often we can have these win win situations where we have innovations that are good both for animals and for us.
PHIL 24:06
There might be people who question the ethics of subjecting animals to research for the benefit of humans. However, especially with like these prosthetics or this dolphin without this prosthetic a dolphin probably would not survive. The risk to the dolphin is minimal. It's like there's only upside. If this doesn't work, it's no worse off than it would have been before. We're giving it a chance. Which would seem to be the case with a lot of, you know, prosthetics for dogs. This is a quality of life issue for the dog that we're giving a chance.
EMILY 24:44
Yeah, absolutely. And I think when you talk about animal experimentation sort of broadly, there are a lot of different categories of that. I mean, probably what comes most to mind when you say animal experimentation or lab animals is animals that are being sort of instrumentalized or sacrificed purely for human good. So you know, like lab rats that are being euthanized to find something out for humans. But there's a whole other class of research that I think is even more interesting, where researchers are really trying to figure out how to improve animal lives. And human benefits are just sort of a nice side effect down the line. So like a lot of veterinary trials are like this. I also talk about a gene therapy trial in dogs where researchers were able to improve the vision of visually impaired dogs and it was done to improve those dogs lives. Again, once it turned out to be successful in dogs it has since been piloted in humans and also seems to work in humans. But there's a whole strain of research that we don't really talk about as much that's really about putting the animal welfare first.
PHIL 25:56
It's a hot button topic for a lot of people because as you said, they think of the instrumentalisation of animals and they picture rows of cages full of bunnies with lipstick and eyeliner that are being subjected to that just so that humans can have makeup. But again, when it's quality of life that we're trying to improve for the animal or the human, it can be a win win. Frankenstein's Cat and The Great Indoors, again, both will be linked in the description. Both I think our listeners would enjoy. What are you working on now? Even if it's not dog-related.
EMILY 26:36
Yeah, it's not super dog-related. But um in between books I freelance as a science writer and obviously the big story right now for science writers is the pandemic. So I am working on some pandemic related science stories, some related to the indoor environment, because that's been turns out a huge part of our pandemic experience. But I'm also interested in this idea that sometimes called "One Health". And what that means is that it's sort of a look at public health, across disciplines, and premised on the idea that what's good for animal health is also often good for human health. And there are things we can learn from each other. And that's really true with this pandemic, too. You know, there's been a lot of concern about what happens when this virus gets into great ape populations, which are already really struggling. And we know that cats seem to be susceptible to this virus. And so I'm interested in looking at some of those cross disciplinary efforts to sort of protect animals from this virus that might also have have benefits for us.
PHIL 27:45
You can look for Emily's work in the New York Times ,The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Wired, Nature, Slate, Bloomberg, Businessweek, of course Scientific American, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and others. So if you're a subscriber to those, you've probably already read Emily's work. And if it's a good piece, then it usually gets picked up elsewhere. So I'm confident you've probably read something with Emily's byline before, but now you can put a voice with the text. Emily, thank you so much for updating our listeners on the latest in science on the indoors and animal research and what you're doing going forward. Feel free to come back if you have any thing else on dogs to share with us. We'll bring you back on even if it's a short update. Doesn't have to be a full interview. We'd love to hear from you.
EMILY 28:38
Thanks so much for having me. And I guess I'll add if people are really craving more dog content, I do actually write about dogs a lot so if people want to visit my website, I have a whole bunch of my past articles there including a lot on dogs. So if you're interested in science and dogs, you can check out some of those links.
PHIL 28:57
That will be linked in the description. Thank you for sharing your time with us today, Emily.
EMILY 29:04
Of course, it was so nice to be here. Thanks for having me.
PHIL 29:11
I'm Phil Hatterman and you've been listening to Dog Words presented by Rosie Fund. Thank you again to Emily Anthes for joining us today links are in the description to amazon smile for both The Great Indoors_ The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health, and Happiness. And Emily's 2014 release Frankenstein's Cat_ Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts. With Amazon Smile, Amazon donates a portion of their profits to charity. We'd be very grateful if you chose Rosie Fund as that charity. Links to Emily's website, newsletter, and social media are also in the episode description. Again she's pretty easy to find at e-m-i-l-y-a-n-t-h-e-s.com EmilyAnthes.com.
Remember to use the keyword "Rosie" if you commission Ashley Schanz to do a sketch of your pet so that the proceeds benefit Rosie Fund. If you don't use the key word Rosie some other worthy charity will still benefit. A link to Ashley's Facebook page is in the description but if you aren't on Facebook message Rosie Fund through the contact form at RosieFund.org, and we'll get you connected with Ashley.
Next time on Dog Words Jodi Vogler talks about life with her family's deaf dog Greta.
A big thank you to alternative string duo The Wires featuring cellist Sascha Groshang, and violinist Laurel Morgan Parks for playing the wonderful music you've heard on today's and previous episodes of Dog Words. Learn about the wires at TheWires.info and download their music on iTunes. Check out FiddleLife.com and learn to play fiddle and cello fiddle online from Laurel and Sasha, even if you've never played before.
Celebrate five years of Rosie Fund by supporting our campaign to sponsor 50 dogs. You can donate on our website or Facebook page, or contribute by making a purchase from the store on our website or buying a t-shirt at Bonfire.com. Links are in the description.
As always, please download, subscribe, rate and share Dog Words. This helps us with sponsorships then Rosie Fund can help more dogs. Send us your comments, questions and suggestions at RosiFfund.org. And let us know if you would like to be a sponsor of the Dog Words podcast.
Thank you for listening. And remember, we save each other.
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