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MUSIC: "Our World" theme
This week on Our World: It's Darwin's birthday; Charles Darwin born 200 years ago this week ... why Pluto's demotion hurts ... and young people focus on clean water and sanitation ...
SHOUP: "Of the world's six billion people, over a billion lack access to clean water, and two and a half billion live without access to improved sanitation."
Those stories, the costs and benefits of preventing deadly disease, our Website of the Week, and more.
I'm Art Chimes. Welcome to VOA's science and technology magazine, "Our World."
Charles Darwin at 200: natural selection and music
Thursday is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. His landmark book on evolution, On the Origin of Species, was published 150 years ago, and it's still considered perhaps the most important science book ever.
In his book, Darwin described the idea of natural selection - species change and evolve, and organisms with characteristics more suitable to survival are more likely to reproduce. His ideas upended a 19th century world where most people believed that plants and animals always had their present form, and always would.
His theory of evolution, as it's sometimes called, itself evolved over more than two decades, beginning with a five-year sea voyage aboard a British survey ship called the Beagle, where he served as naturalist, collecting specimens and observing exotic plants and animals.
To get a larger picture of Charles Darwin the man and scientist, we're joined by an anthropologist who has written about Darwin and natural selection. Richard Milner is the author of numerous books and articles. And he's also a performer, playing the title character in a one-man musical show called Charles Darwin: Live and In Concert. We reached Mr. Milner at his home in New York.
MILNER: Charles Darwin was the son of two generations of English country physicians. He was born a naturalist, he said. When he was a little kid he loved poking under rocks, looking for fossils and bird's nests, making collections. His father shipped him off to medical school when he was 16 to be a doctor, like the rest of his family. But he couldn't stand the sight of blood.
So then his father said, why don't you be a clergyman? So he was studying at Cambridge to be a church man.
But he could not get rid of this love he had for nature and trying to understand the birds and the beasts. And so when an offer came through one of his professors to be the ship's naturalist on a surveying ship, H.M.S. Beagle, that was going to do a five-year voyage around the world, he got permission to go, and he said, that was the start of my real life, that was the start of my real education.
Q: So he sailed on the Beagle, which skirted around the coast of South America among other places in its journey over five years starting in 1831, and was there someplace along the line a "eureka moment" for Charles Darwin?
MILNER: Yeah, he had a eureka moment, but it had nothing to do with evolution. His first eureka moment came with his first scientific book, which most people don't know about. It's called The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs. He had a theory that the sea floor was sinking in certain places, and that these corals lived on the edges of underwater volcanoes, and as they continued to sink, the critters kept growing up towards the light very, very slowly, it took millions of years for these reefs to form. And that was his first scientific publication, the theory of coral reefs.
The evolution stuff came much later, when he was back in England. Contrary to the popular myth, he missed the whole lesson of the finches and the Galapagos tortoises and didn't realize until about 1837, after he was home, started to try to figure out what he called the laws of life and became an evolutionist.
Q: What was it that he saw during his voyage on the Beagle that firmed up for him the concept of natural selection?
MILNER: Well, Darwin, first of all, he was a collector on that ship. He collected thousands of specimens of rocks, fossils, insects, birds. Anything that moved, he shot; that's what biologists used to do, they used to kill everything in studying life. And he started to see patterns. He excavated some giant sloth fossils in Patagonia and some glyptodon, which is a giant, extinct armadillo, and he realized - well, there are armadillos down there today. There are little small ones and there are sloths there today, little small ones. But what's the connection between the ancient, large prehistoric animals and the modern ones, they must be related. He began to get the idea that all of life is related, and this is probably even more important than the idea of natural selection. The great tree of life. Darwin saw that we're all netted together, all living things are our cousins, and that's the foundation of evolutionary biology with or without natural selection.
Q: Well, it's a pretty radical concept. How were Darwin and his book received in his lifetime, after the publication of Origin of Species?
MILNER: Well, at the beginning there was a great outcry. And of course there were some very famous moments. A bishop's wife is said to have remarked, 'Descended from the apes? My dear, let us hope that it's not true. But if it is, let us hope that it does not become generally known to the public.'
Q: So let's fast-forward to the 21st century and Darwin's ideas have certainly remained good science, but by performing as Darwin you must get a sense of how he resonates with the people of our world.
MUSIC: "Darwin's Nightmare"
MILNER: Well, many people find that I humanized him in a way that takes him away from being the stodgy, old, bearded icon because for me, there are many Darwins. You know, there's the young boy turning over rocks and collecting bird's nests as a student, trying to find a career, never losing his boyhood love of nature. He's an explorer. He's a field collector. He climbed mountains. He was a philosopher. He was a father of 10 children. He battled fraudulent psychics and spiritualists. Turned out hundreds of papers [and] books. Remarkably large man, large mind, large life.
Q: Richard Milner in New York, thank you very much.
MILNER: Thank you, and may your life and your listeners' lives, like Charles Darwin's, be one great, long voyage of discovery.
Richard Milner is the author of Darwin's Universe, due out in May from the University of California Press. For an extended version of my interview with Richard Milner, with more music from his show, check out our website, voanews.com/ourworld.
We'll have more on Darwin later in the show, but first ...
Economic downturn threatens disease funding
As world leaders grapple with the global financial crisis, the world's largest source of funds to combat killer diseases is facing a crisis of its own. The organization known as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria supplies one-quarter of all AIDS funding, two-thirds of tuberculosis funding and three-fourths of malaria funding. But as VOA's Rosanne Skirble reports, a $5 billion funding gap now threatens this institution's worldwide programs.
SKIRBLE: The Global Fund was established in 2001. Each year since then, leaders from the world's wealthier nations have renewed their commitments to fund all approved disease treatment, prevention, and research programs in poor countries. According to Jeffrey Sachs, a special United Nations advisor and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, the Global Fund was designed to keep the promises made to the world's poor to help them fight AIDS, TB, and malaria:
SACHS: "The promise is essentially reducing deaths from malaria to near zero by 2012. The world is supposed to be implementing a global stop TB effort.The world is supposed to be guaranteeing universal access to antiretroviral medicines by the year 2010."
SKIRBLE: Sachs says that despite the urgency of its mission, the Global Fund has been forced by the recession-pinched budgets of its donor countries to cut back or delay funding.
SACHS: "It already cut by 10 percent the budgets for the approved plans. And it's warned that it would have to cut by 25 percent the second half of those plans."
SKIRBLE: The cutbacks are all the more distressing to Global Fund supporters because in its relatively short life, the organization has reported remarkable progress against killer diseases. For example, malaria deaths are down 66 percent in Rwanda and 80 percent in Eritrea over the past five years.
Peter Chernin is one of a number of business leaders who've supported a $100 million campaign to fight the malaria pandemic in Africa. He says the disease has cost industry on the continent about $12 billion in lost worker productivity.
CHERNIN: "And [with] just a fraction of that investment, we can end malaria deaths and remove a major obstacle to economic development. So this is obviously a humanitarian issue, but I think also shows great economic return."
SKIRBLE: Keeping up the fight against killer diseases like malaria, TB, and AIDS is essential to the economic development of poor nations, says Columbia University's Jeffrey Sachs. And it's just bad economic policy, he believes, to cut long-term investments in development for near-term savings.
Sachs argues that the United States, which currently contributes about one third of the Global Fund's resources, could make a significant dent in the Fund's $5 billon shortfall if it chose to.
SACHS: "There is no shortage of funds at the moment when in three months the rich world has found about $3 trillion of funding for bank bailouts"
SKIRBLE: Global Fund Board Chairman Rajat Gupta agrees that the United States could do more to help the Fund out of its financial crisis. He believes that if the U.S., which has fallen behind on its pledged commitments, were to take on more of a leadership role, other nations would follow.
GUPTA: "Each country or different countries have kind of egged each other on to do more, and now it's U.S.'s turn to step up and get that going."
SKIRBLE: Gupta says the Global Fund's progress in the fight against AIDS, TB, and maia must be sustained. That continued support, Gupta says, could save nearly two million additional lives in the coming years. I'm Rosanne Skirble.
New book explores Pluto's planetary demotion
In 1930, American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered a small, rocky object at the edge of our solar system. Although Pluto was a bit of an oddball with a strange orbit and size that didn't quite fit, there was little doubt at the time that it deserved to be called the ninth planet. But in 2006, the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto to a new category, "dwarf planet." That move is still controversial, and it's the subject of a new book. VOA's Adam Phillips has more.
PHILLIPS: If Pluto were discovered today, few astronomers would classify it as a planet. At 2,500 kilometers in diameter, it's smaller than seven moons in the solar system, including our own moon. And it's the only planet that crosses the orbit of another planet. No wonder some astronomers started reconsidering the question of Pluto's planetary status.
TYSON: "In the 1990s, we, the astrophysics community, was discovering icy bodies in the outer solar system orbiting kind of the way Pluto orbits the Sun. And we found other icy bodies out there and said 'Well, wait a minute! Maybe Pluto is not just an oddball planet. Maybe Pluto is a normal version of this other class of object - these icy bodies, these icy comets.'"
TEXT Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson heads the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He says the eight other planets form two neat groups.
TYSON: "Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. They' re all small and dense and rocky. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, they are all big and bulbous and gaseous. They all have rings. They have many moons. We grouped them together as well."
PHILLIPS: When Tyson and his colleagues designed the exhibits at the Rose Center, they focused on the characteristics of the objects in the solar system, not the label 'planet.'
TYSON: "The count of planets doesn't matter. That's not where the science is. The science is in the properties of these objects, what they have in common, and how they differ. And it's that simple.
PHILLIPS: More difficult was dealing with the surprising emotional attachment people had to Pluto as a planet. Tyson was deluged by letters from the public, decrying what they saw as Pluto's unfair demotion in the Rose Center's solar system exhibit. In Tyson's new book, The Pluto Files, he tries to understand what all the fuss was about.
TYSON: "Had Neptune been demoted, I don't think anyone would have cared. So I thought long and hard about this, and I have only one answer. And it's the dog!"
PHILLIPS: That would be Mickey Mouse's dog Pluto, the Disney character who was first sketched in 1930. That was, by coincidence, the same year that Pluto, the cosmic object, was discovered.
TYSON: "So I blame Disney all the way."
PHILLIPS: In fact, the solar system's Pluto was named, at the suggestion of an English schoolgirl, for the Roman god of the underworld. It was considered an apt name for a distant world, cold and dark.
Clyde Tombaugh, the farm boy and amateur astronomer-turned-professional who found Pluto, was the only American to discover a planet. That's another reason, according to Tyson, that many Americans want to keep Pluto in the planetary club.
In 2006, Tyson and his colleagues were vindicated by a vote of the International Astronomical Union, which defined a planet as a round object orbiting a sun that does not orbit another round object and that has cleared its orbit. Pluto and several other objects in the solar system were reclassified as dwarf planets. It's a designation that many here on Earth may not appreciate, but which Neil deGrasse Tyson assures us with a twinkle is probably just fine with Pluto itself. This is Adam Phillips reporting from New York.
Darwin's writings on our Website of the Week
Time again for our Website of the Week, when we showcase interesting and innovative online destinations.
It's hard to know what Charles Darwin would have made of the Internet. Can you imagine him blogging as he traveled on the Beagle? There are lots of Darwin-related sites on the Web, but I don't think we can improve on one we featured last year in this space.
Van WYHE: "Darwin Online is the largest resource of material by and about Charles Darwin ever published online. It contains all of his books and articles and also the largest collection of his private papers ever assembled. So it's more material written by Darwin than one has ever seen before."
John van Wyhe is the director of Darwin Online at darwin-online.org.uk.
Here, you can look at the handwritten diary Darwin wrote on board the Beagle as he explored South America in the 1830s. And you can read his books and articles and find out what he really said, not what people say Darwin said.
Van WYHE: "People could go and have a look at it and see that Darwin never said, for example, we come from monkeys. So there're loads of things that are not true, and it is possible now for people to just go to the originals and have a look."
Darwin Online includes some 180,000 images of books, articles, journals, and other material by and about Darwin. And thanks to optical character recognition technology, it's all searchable.
Darwin's work sparked debate when it was first published, and the controversy continues. Van Wyhe says the material collected in Darwin Online is an essential part of today's conversation about evolution and natural selection.
Van WYHE: "If you look at Darwin Online you can find in his papers the articles and the press clippings that he collected where clergymen discussed how they saw [that] Darwin's views were completely compatible with Christianity. Now, that's, I think, very valuable for that material now to also be available for people today, to inform current debate."
John van Wyhe says Darwin Online gets visitors from all over the world, and he hopes in the future to add translations of Darwin's work to the website.
Learn about one of history's great scientists at darwin-online.org.uk, or get the link from our site, voanews.com/ourworld.
MUSIC: Tangerine Dream - At Darwin's Motel
We're constantly evolving here at VOA's science and technology magazine, Our World. I'm Art Chimes in Washington.
Youth explore global water and sanitation crises
Contaminated water sickens and kills millions each year, mostly young children in developing countries.
Kids here in Washington - who pretty much can take for granted having safe water at home and school - recently got a lesson from top experts in the challenges faced by those who lack clean water and proper sanitation.
As Véronique LaCapra reports, they learned you're never too young to start meeting those challenges.
LaCAPRA: About 80 high school students gathered at the World Bank to take on a global crisis.
SHOUP: "Today, of the world's six billion people, over a billion lack access to clean water, and two and a half billion live without access to improved sanitation."
LaCAPRA: Heidi Shoup, president of the World Affairs Council, the educational non-profit which sponsored the event, was quick to emphasize the severity of the problem.
SHOUP: "Each year, five million people die as a result of water-related illnesses. That's about one every six seconds."
LaCAPRA: Malaria, schistosomiasis, and intestinal worms are all water-related health issues. But World Bank water and sanitation specialist Peter Kolsky told the students that diarrheal disease is by far the biggest killer:
KOLSKY: "The most important thing to know about diarrheal disease is it kills two million kids a year. Ninety percent of the deaths are kids under five."
LaCAPRA: Most of those deaths are in developing countries. Diarrheal diseases like cholera spread when people drink water or eat food or anything else that has been contaminated with human feces.
KOLSKY: "Think of the five year old child, don't think of adults. Children eat dirt, you know? It's just life."
LaCAPRA: According to the World Health Organization, close to 90 percent of diarrheal disease cases result from unsafe water supplies, inadequate sanitation, or poor hygiene.
Kolsky said that changing people's behavior can be the most difficult challenge, but that improved hygiene can also provide the greatest benefits, in terms of preventing disease.
KOLSKY: "You can reduce diarrheal disease 50 percent, in the world, if all of us washed our hands with soap at the right time."
LaCAPRA: But, Kolsky explained, people want access to water and sanitation for many reasons besides disease prevention. When clean water for drinking, cooking, and washing is not l ocally available, women and children have to fetch it for their families, often carrying heavy buckets over long distances for many hours each day.
The presentations prompted lively discussions with the high schoolers in the audience, and one posed a question that got right to the heart of the day's topic:
STUDENT: "What do you think that we, as like teenagers, could do to address this issue in our own communities?"
LaCAPRA: One of the most compelling answers came not from the water and sanitation experts, but from another student - ten-year-old Marguerite Harris, from a local bilingual elementary school.
HARRIS: "This fall, our school got involved with an organization called H2O for Life. H2O for Life partners schools here in the U.S.A. with schools in developing countries around the world."
LaCAPRA: The American students raise money to help provide students in the developing country - in this case, Nicaragua - with clean water, sanitation, and hygiene education at their school. Marguerite says she and her classmates have learned a lot in the process.
HARRIS: "It really hit me when I learned that the burden of fetching water falls mostly on girls. They have to walk hours a day in the hot sun, to fetch heavy buckets of water, instead of attending school like the boys."
LaCAPRA: As World Affairs Council president Heidi Shoup told the students, it will be up to their generation to find ways to meet the world's water and sanitation needs.
SHOUP: "Every one of you can be part of the solution to the world water crisis."
LaCAPRA: For Our World, I'm Véronique LaCapra.
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That's our show for this week. If you'd like to get in touch, email us at ourworld@voanews.com. Or use the postal address -
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Rob Sivak edited the show. Bob Doughty is the technical director.
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