Tiny Matters
Take a dive into the genes, microbes, molecules and other tiny things that have a big impact on our world with Tiny Matters. Join scientists Sam Jones and Deboki Chakravarti as they take apart complex and contentious topics in science and help rebuild your understanding. From deadly diseases to ancient sewers to forensic toxicology, Sam and Deboki embrace the awe and messiness of science and its place in the past, present, and future. Tiny Matters releases new episodes every Wednesday and is brought to you by the American Chemical Society, a non-profit scientific organization advancing chemistry and connecting the broader scientific community. Tiny Matters is produced by Multitude.
Tiny Matters
Vaping vs. smoking: What does decades of research tell us?
E-cigarettes, commonly referred to as “vapes,” were invented in the early 2000s with the explicit goal of helping people quit smoking by transitioning them to something safer. But there are many people, particularly in the United States, who start vaping without ever having smoked a cigarette, leading to fears that vaping will be an on-ramp to smoking — a “gateway drug.” In fact, in the U.S. alone, nearly half a million middle school students vape. And in 2019, the CDC started receiving reports of severe and acute lung injury in people who vaped. By February of 2020, almost 3,000 people had been hospitalized and 68 people had died.
We know that smoking is deadly (in fact, it’s estimated to take about 10 years off your life), but of course vaping isn’t risk free. In this episode of Tiny Matters, we’ll dive into the science behind both to answer, “What’s more dangerous, smoking or vaping?” “And does vaping actually help people quit smoking cigarettes?” We’ll also get to the bottom of why so many people got sick or died from vaping back in 2019 and 2020, yet we haven’t seen injuries like that since.
Send us your science stories/factoids/news for a chance to be featured on an upcoming Tiny Show and Tell Us episode and to be entered to win a Tiny Matters coffee mug! And, while you're at it, subscribe to our newsletter at bit.ly/tinymattersnewsletter.
Link to the Tiny Show & Tell story is here. All Tiny Matters transcripts and references are available here.
Okay, Sam, I want to read you two sentences from the World Health Organization's website. You ready?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Quote both tobacco products and ENDS pose risks to health. The safest approach is not to use either End quote. Now, ends stands for Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems, so basically we're talking about vapes, also known as e-cigarettes here. Now, after hearing that sentence, which do you think is worse for you, e-cigarettes or regular cigarettes?
Speaker 2:Probably about the same, since the WHO is saying you shouldn't do either.
Speaker 1:Right, that's how I interpret that too, but the more I dug into this and the more I talked to people, the more I realized that, even though those two sentences are technically correct, they're also incredibly misleading and they could cause millions of people to make what would really be a catastrophic health choice.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Tiny Matters. I'm Sam Jones and today I'm joined by science communicator George Zaidan, who you've heard in past episodes as well as tiny show and tell us bonus episodes. Welcome, george.
Speaker 1:Hey, sam, good to be here for another episode. So today we're digging into vaping, also known as e-cigarettes. This is actually a topic that has fascinated me since at least 2019. So I'm very excited to be covering it in podcast level detail. Let's dive in.
Speaker 2:Cigarettes have been around for more than a century. Vapes are much newer. They were invented in the early 2000s with the explicit goal of helping people quit smoking by transitioning them to something safer. But there are a lot of people, particularly in the US, who start vaping without ever having smoked a cigarette, leading to fears that vaping will be an on-ramp to smoking, a gateway drug. I was honestly kind of shocked to discover that over half a million middle schoolers are vaping.
Speaker 1:And then, in 2019, the CDC started receiving reports of severe and acute lung injury associated with vaping. By February of 2020, almost 3,000 people had been hospitalized and 68 of those people had died.
Speaker 2:So does vaping actually help people quit cigarettes? How bad is vaping really? Is it worse for you than regular old cigarettes? And just a reminder that we are not here to give medical advice. That's between you and your doctor.
Speaker 1:So let's start with that last question. The most rigorous way to compare how bad two different things are for you is to pit them against each other head to head in a randomized controlled trial. You take a large group of people, you split them into two groups and then you randomly assign one group to, in this case, smoke cigarettes and the other group to use e-cigarettes. And then you follow both groups for 30, 40, or even 50 years and you see what happens to each group.
Speaker 2:And the reason a trial like this would take three to five decades is because the diseases caused by smoking often take that long to manifest. But we don't want to wait that long to get our answer.
Speaker 1:And there's another problem too, right, we already know that smoking cigarettes is really bad for you, so it would be very unethical to make one group of people in a clinical trial take up smoking. You would literally be killing people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we're not going to do that. So what is the second best way to figure out whether vaping or smoking is worse for you?
Speaker 1:So here different scientists can have legit differences of opinion. So some might say that you should do animal experiments, for example exposing mice to vape smoke and seeing what kind of diseases they come down with. But there are other approaches as well. I called physician scientist Wilson Compton, who's the deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and he told me about a classic study by Mashe Ganowitz and colleagues from 2014.
Speaker 4:They did a really remarkable set of work, where they used machines to smoke cigarettes, which has been done in research for a long time, but they adapted them to do the same procedure for vaping devices, and so what they were able to compare was the levels of chemicals like formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, acroleins, toluene, nitrosamines and others.
Speaker 4:And the headline result is that the scientists found a much higher level in conventional cigarettes of all of these potentially toxic agents in the conventional cigarettes compared to e-cigarettes. On the other hand, I also note that the levels weren't zero in the e-cigarettes. Let's other hand, I also note that the levels weren't zero in the e-cigarettes.
Speaker 1:Let's look at two specific examples. First is formaldehyde, which is both toxic and carcinogenic and fun fact it's also used as an embalming agent. So when you think about a museum storing samples of old, dead stuff, they are usually stored in formalin, which is the aqueous version of formaldehyde. Anyway, a typical cigarette might contain between 2 and 50 micrograms of formaldehyde in it, and the scientists found that the e-cigarettes they tested contained anywhere from 0.2 to 6 micrograms of formaldehyde per 15 puffs. All 12 models of e-cigarettes they tested contained formaldehyde. So it's possible to actually get more formaldehyde from 15 puffs of an e-cigarette than from one conventional cigarette, and you're likely to get some formaldehyde regardless of which model of e-cigarette you choose.
Speaker 2:The second example is a chemical called N-nitrosonornicotine, or NNN for short. It's also carcinogenic. A typical cigarette contains roughly 5 to 200 nanograms of NNN, and the scientists found that the e-cigarettes they tested all contained less than 0.43 nanograms of NNN per 15 puffs. In three of the e-cigarette models they couldn't detect NNN at all. So when it comes to this carcinogen, you're basically guaranteed to get a lot more of it on average, 380 times more of it from smoking a cigarette than from vaping.
Speaker 1:The scientists found that, for the toxins they studied, smoke from a cigarette contained, on average, between nine times and 450 times the amount of toxin as vapor from an e-cigarette and you know as a chemist, this actually makes perfect sense.
Speaker 2:Explain that.
Speaker 1:Okay, so with a cigarette, you are burning tobacco. Tobacco is a natural product, meaning it's made up of hundreds, if not thousands, of different chemicals, and that in and of itself is not bad.
Speaker 2:Right, I mean an apple is also made up of hundreds, if not thousands, of chemicals, and clearly apples are not bad for you, except red delicious. Red, but not so delicious.
Speaker 1:But then you are burning that tobacco using fire, so the temperatures inside a cigarette can actually hit upwards of 800 degrees Celsius.
Speaker 2:And when you burn something the chemistry gets pretty wild.
Speaker 1:It does, especially because the combustion inside a cigarette, or pretty much anywhere else for that matter, is not complete combustion. So you are taking a chemically complex natural product and you're burning it with not enough oxygen and, as an old organic chemistry professor of mine used to say, in that situation all hell breaks loose.
Speaker 2:Whereas e-cigarettes are much, much simpler.
Speaker 4:Basically, it's an electrical wire that heats up, that turns a liquid into a vapor, that's then inhaled. And that's the short version.
Speaker 2:And that wire might hit 150 or 200 or even 250 degrees Celsius, but it doesn't even get close to the temperature of actual fire.
Speaker 1:And the liquid that you're heating up in an e-cigarette is much simpler. It's usually a mixture of propylene glycol, vegetable glycerin, nicotine and some flavorings.
Speaker 2:So there's maybe five or 10 things in there maximum. So whereas a cigarette burns thousands of chemicals at a really high temperature, an e-cigarette heats five to 10 chemicals at a much lower temperature. So far less hell breaks loose in an e-cigarette versus a traditional cigarette.
Speaker 1:One of the experts. I talked to psychologist Lynn Kozlowski, who's a former dean of the School of Public Health and Health Professions at the University at Buffalo. He had a funny metaphor for how to think about it.
Speaker 3:If you imagine a cigarette as a softball-sized rock of poisons, vaping is something like a pebble.
Speaker 1:Now, he didn't say this next part, but I sort of imagined like, would I rather get hit in the face with a rock or a pebble?
Speaker 2:Why not both, George?
Speaker 1:Every expert we talked to was super clear about this, though perhaps none were quite as poetic as Lynn.
Speaker 4:E-cigarettes or vaping products are undoubtedly safer than combustible smoked tobacco products.
Speaker 5:We know that smoking is about the worst thing you can do for your health. It's a major contributor to the 10 most common causes of premature death and we know that vaping does help some people stop smoking. They switch from smoking to vaping. For those people, I think it's a very clear health benefit.
Speaker 2:The last person you heard there is physician Neil Benowitz. He's a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
Speaker 1:Now I should emphasize here that the 2014 study did not look at every possible toxin or carcinogen, nor did it look at every model of e-cigarette on the market, so it is not a perfect study.
Speaker 2:But there's also no such thing as a perfect study.
Speaker 1:Right, and that is why you do follow-up studies. So some of the same scientists who did this study did another one in 2015, in which they leveled up and used human subjects. Obviously, they used them ethically, and what they did is they took a bunch of people who smoke cigarettes and they gave them e-cigarettes, and then they tracked them for four weeks.
Speaker 2:Specifically, they tracked a bunch of metabolites of cigarette smoke that are present in much higher levels in people who smoke cigarettes than people who don't, and they found that switching to e-cigarettes reduced the levels of most of those metabolites, sometimes to the point of being no different than people who'd never smoked.
Speaker 1:And here's another interesting thing and this is why you do studies with humans whenever you can, as opposed to like ferrets or mice or whatever is that people behave in ways that you don't expect. So it turns out that some of the people in this study, when they were given e-cigarettes, they actually ended up using both, so they vaped, but then they also smoked cigarettes.
Speaker 2:And at least from the data in this one study, it seems that you need to fully switch over to e-cigarettes in order to have those metabolites go down to what you'd see in people who'd never smoked.
Speaker 1:That is kind of the bad news here, that if you cut down from, let's say, two packs of cigarettes a day to one and replace that one pack with e-cigarettes, that might not actually do that much for you health-wise because that one pack of cigarettes still has so much junk in it.
Speaker 3:If you're trying to reduce the harm that you face, switch completely exclusively to vaping and don't touch a cigarette ever again.
Speaker 1:Now you might have noticed there that Lynn said if you're trying to reduce the harm that you face, there are still detectable levels of toxins and carcinogens in vapes. So all of the experts I talked to said if you can quit smoking completely and not inhale anything into your lungs, you should do that.
Speaker 5:But if you want to take nicotine, then you use the least harmful nicotine product that you can. So the least harmful would be like nicotine gums and patches, nicotine pouches or somewhere down there. And then going up a little bit would be, say, e-cigarettes, which are less harmful than cigarettes, which are less harmful than cigarettes not harm less, but that's reducing your harm.
Speaker 2:By the way, Neil Benowitz, who you just heard, is an author on the two papers we've been talking about so far.
Speaker 1:Neil told me that in some ways, e-cigarettes fit well into an established concept in public health called harm reduction, where, instead of trying to get people to completely quit something that's bad for them, you instead encourage them to switch to something that is less harmful.
Speaker 2:Same principle behind a sterile syringe program. And while they can sometimes be controversial from a public health perspective, harm reduction approaches work.
Speaker 1:Recently, the Cochrane Group published a review on e-cigarettes.
Speaker 2:And if you haven't heard of the Cochrane Group, well, we don't blame you? No, they're not exactly a household name.
Speaker 1:Basically, it's an independent group of scientists who publish very large meta-analyses. They try to collect all the relevant studies on a topic, combine the data, crunch a lot of numbers and come to conclusions, and they also tell you how certain or uncertain they are about their conclusions.
Speaker 2:It's actually my first stop. When I want to know whether some medical intervention works, like, for example, if I want to know whether I should take vitamin C when I get a cold, I check Cochrane first.
Speaker 1:Ooh, what do they say about vitamin?
Speaker 2:C George, you gotta focus, but I will link to it in the episode description for you and for any listeners who are interested.
Speaker 1:Right, sorry. So okay, cochrane's meta-analyses can be pretty big, like for the one they just published on e-cigarettes. They included 47 randomized controlled trials with thousands of participants, and they found that people who smoke cigarettes were 60% more likely to quit by using nicotine e-cigarettes versus nicotine patches or gum.
Speaker 2:But we should emphasize that if you want to stop smoking cigarettes, this doesn't mean that e-cigarettes should be your first choice. Based on what the experts told us. Start with the least harmful thing and then work your way up from there, because, you never know, gum or patches or other therapies might work for you and there'd be no need to even try vaping.
Speaker 1:Whatever the least harmful thing is that keeps you off cigarettes stick with that.
Speaker 2:So that's harm reduction in a nutshell, and from this lens e-cigarettes make a lot of sense. But there are some crucial differences between e-cigarettes and other harm reduction interventions like sterile syringe programs For one. E-cigarettes are sold all over the place.
Speaker 1:And they are marketed and promoted far more freely than you'd expect if they were just intended to help people quit smoking.
Speaker 4:And that's a problem, because we know that there are, depending on which year you look at, somewhere between 4 to 6 million youth that are using e-cigarette products, vaping products, and certainly the long-term concern is that you'll start with vaping products and then either shift to combustible tobacco or continue long-term when otherwise you might have had a very healthy lung outcome.
Speaker 2:This leaves you with a real public health conundrum.
Speaker 5:How you balance out possible harm for kids who are vaping versus a benefit for smokers who quit using vaping. And you know my point of view. I think that the still and then effect is beneficial because smoking is so harmful, and I think the main thing we something less accessible is to make it prescription only.
Speaker 1:I asked Neil about that and he said something really interesting and I have to say it struck me to hear smoking being described as a disease, partly because of the language around smoking.
Speaker 2:Right, like we don't say I was a smoker, then I was cured.
Speaker 1:Right, we say I was a smoker and then I quit.
Speaker 2:But smoking is an addiction, and addiction is a disease, not just a habit.
Speaker 5:So Neil's point here is that most people who smoke they think it's just like a bad habit and they would like to take care of it themselves, and so if they can do it with over-counter medication, they're more likely to access that rather than a healthcare provider.
Speaker 1:So by making e-cigarettes prescription products, you would reduce their effectiveness because smokers would seek them out less.
Speaker 2:But you'd also prevent kids from taking up vaping. Theoretically At least, you'd reduce the number of kids who vape, right? Okay, so far everyone you interviewed agreed that regular cigarettes are way worse for you than e-cigarettes, but also that e-cigarettes are not harmless. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Now the interesting thing is that, at least in the US, the perception of e-cigarettes is completely different than what the chemistry shows. Lynn said this thing to me that at first, honestly, I just didn't believe 83% of smokers thought that vaping was equally or more harmful than cigarettes.
Speaker 1:So I checked and in 2018 and 2019, which is the most recent data that I could find, 82.6% of people who smoke cigarettes in the US thought that e-cigarettes are just as bad for you or worse than cigarettes. The US thought that e-cigarettes are just as bad for you or worse than cigarettes.
Speaker 2:That is a lot. That's the vast majority.
Speaker 1:And that number is almost double what it was in 2013-2014, when the number was 45 percent.
Speaker 2:So you're probably wondering what's behind that change, and we'll come back to that in a minute, but for now, I think it's important to emphasize that this statistic really puts into perspective the challenge when it comes to public health messaging, because, on the one hand, you want people who smoke cigarettes to know that e-cigarettes are far, far less dangerous than the thing they're currently using.
Speaker 1:And, on the other hand, you want kids to know that e-cigarettes are not harmless. You don't want them to start vaping if they don't currently smoke.
Speaker 2:So I think these competing priorities are how you end up getting the World Health Organization messaging that we started with at the top of the show Quote both tobacco products and ends pose risks to health. The safest approach is not to use either.
Speaker 1:That sentence is true the safest approach is not to use either.
Speaker 2:But if you smoke and someone says to you both of these things are bad, you shouldn't use either, it's totally reasonable for you to come away thinking well, if both of these are bad, I might as well just keep smoking, like what's the point of switching to vaping if it's also bad for me?
Speaker 1:And that would be an absolutely catastrophic decision, because smoking shortens your life by an average of 10 years an average.
Speaker 2:Whereas vaping on average delivers tens to hundreds of times fewer toxins than cigarettes. We don't know yet how that translates to life expectancy, because e-cigarettes have only really been on the market for two decades and, like we mentioned at the start of the episode, that kind of data can take 50 years or longer to gather. If I had a loved one who smoked cigarettes.
Speaker 3:If the best I could do was to get them to switch to a vaping product, I'd work very hard to do that.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's come back to the worsening perception of e-cigarettes. Probably one of the biggest factors behind that change is the lung damage epidemic we referenced at the top of the show called EVALI.
Speaker 2:I remember that got a ton of media coverage initially, but I don't remember ever hearing if they figured out what caused it.
Speaker 1:I didn't either, but it turns out they did.
Speaker 4:We certainly have pretty definitive information about what caused electronic vaping associated lung injury, or EVALI, and it turns out that it had not much to do with the electronic cigarettes or the vaping itself. It had to do with what was put into those vaping devices.
Speaker 5:People were diluting cannabis oil with vitamin E acetate and then reselling it, and people were buying cannabis oil with vitamin E acetate on the street and vitamin E acetate while it tastes good, it looks good, it vapes well and so it's also it's safe to use orally when you heat it up it breaks down to something called ketene, which is a lung toxin, so like phosgene, so it causes severe lung damage.
Speaker 2:Oh, so the problem was contamination, like when the CDC tells you to stop eating lettuce because it's been contaminated with bacteria lettuce because it's been contaminated with bacteria?
Speaker 1:Yes, except in this case, the contamination appears to have been on purpose to try and make more money.
Speaker 3:If you imagine that there was a part of the country in which people were making bootleg liquor and it ended up being wood alcohol, which is poisonous, and they slapped a label on it and sold it as alcohol you could drink, and people did, and people got very sick from it and died from it. Once that operation was shut down, the problem's gone.
Speaker 2:So George has, writing this podcast episode, changed how you think about e-cigarettes.
Speaker 1:It actually has.
Speaker 2:How so.
Speaker 1:Well, first I was really struck by the fact that the experts that I talked to either explicitly or implicitly view smoking as a disease rather than a habit, like it's something you have as opposed to something that you choose to do. And when I first started doing the interviews, I honestly was really stuck on this idea of, like, how do you convince someone that cigarettes are far, far worse for them than e-cigarettes? And I asked Wilson about this. I mean not to put you on the spot too much here, and it's fine if you don't answer this, but like, if you had 30 seconds with a current smoker, cigarette smoker what would you say to them?
Speaker 4:How can I help you stop this life-threatening behavior?
Speaker 1:I'm so interested that you asked a question. That's like I was expecting you to kind of just say a declarative sentence, and what you're hearing there is my brain rebooting. Declarative sentence, and what you're hearing there is my brain rebooting like you know that Windows crashing sound effect Like this one? Yes, exactly that. Like that's what my brain is doing right there and I'm like quickly coming up to the reality of yes, obviously don't try and convince anyone of anything like, just be there and be helpful.
Speaker 4:Telling people what to do often backfires. Most smokers have made multiple attempts to stop. At this point, a typical person that I might encounter would be in their mid-40s, has made multiple attempts to quit and is kind of discouraged about trying that again, and so understanding their background and being very supportive and kind and gentle and encouraging is a key element of helping people make that important change.
Speaker 2:That is such a great reminder, and it truly applies to so many scenarios beyond smoking. All right, what's the second thing?
Speaker 1:So the second thing I realized is just how much we are still living with the legacy of smoking. It's been over a century that we've been smoking cigarettes, and they are really bad. They are so bad that a device specifically designed to bathe your lungs in aerosol is significantly less bad for you than a cigarette.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I think I just saw the really scary vaping report in 2020, and I never saw a follow-up saying that it had to do with contamination. But as someone who doesn't smoke, I'm, of course, not leaving this and thinking I should pick up vaping. My lungs are already filtering enough junk that humans put into the air. I'm not trying to add to it. It's tiny show and tell time.
Speaker 1:Who went first last time?
Speaker 2:That's a great question. Well, you must have, because it wasn't my first time I think so, I think so last time. That's a great question.
Speaker 1:Well, you must have, because it wasn't my first time. I think so. I think so, so you were showing me the ropes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Do you? Would you like to go first this time, George?
Speaker 1:I would be happy to go first All right. So we're recording this on. Oh my gosh, it's actually. It's Friday, september 13th. It's Actually. My tiny show and tell is actually a bit spooky. Oh so, seven days ago, last Friday, in Science, researchers published just an absolutely crazy finding, which is this If you take yellow number five— oh my God, George, we have the same tiny show and tell.
Speaker 3:No.
Speaker 2:No, this has actually never happened. This is a first in tiny matters history. This is amazing Toboki and I always would talk about when is it going to happen? It never did, but it did today. Okay, please go ahead.
Speaker 1:Well, this is how amazing this news was is that we both we both like immediately saw it and we're like okay, this is it.
Speaker 2:I was like I have to talk about this, Okay, I'm so. I'm actually excited about this. Go ahead, but you should.
Speaker 1:Just Don't let me get through the whole thing. I already talked too much. Okay, so yellow number five, which is in so much stuff that we eat Doritos it's in Doritos.
Speaker 2:It's in a lot of cosmetics and stuff too, which I didn't realize.
Speaker 1:Oh, really, I didn't know that. Yeah, oh that's interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's in like ice cream I think about like the vanilla ice creams or like certain ice creams that have that kind of like hue to them. Didn't realize, but yeah, I didn't realize it was an ice cream at all.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's interesting If you take yellow number five and you make it really concentrated so it has to be pretty concentrated and you make it into a gel, and you take that gel and you massage it into the abdomen of an anesthetized mouse. I just want to make clear that the mouse is asleep, for this.
Speaker 2:It would not be just like laying there for you. Let me also as someone who used to do a lot of mouse work. The mouse would not just hang out for a belly rub, so Mice don't like belly rubs.
Speaker 1:Not that I found so if you do this and then you put a glass slide over the mouse and you put the mouse on a really bright light, you can see through the mouse's skin Crazy Into its guts. And they tested a bunch of different, not just dyes, other molecules too. And I didn't know that. Glycerin so just plain old vegetable glycerin, which actually, hilariously, is one of the ingredients in vape juice, which we've just been talking about. Glycerin will do this slightly to a small extent, but at least to the author's knowledge, tartrazine yellow number five is the first thing they've discovered that will do it to this crazy level where you can really like you can see one of the videos that I I think my favorite video from this whole paper so if you go to the paper's website you can actually see the videos was. They gave a mouse a meal and then they watched the food work its way through its intestine A live mouse. It was incredible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's amazing. So I guess we can talk about why it seems to work.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And please correct me, george, if I'm wrong but essentially our skin and the different tissues and our abdomen, light is going to scatter differently depending on what it's hitting, and that's what makes your tissue, like your skin, look opaque. Right, you can't see through it typically, and so the idea with this is that the yellow five will actually absorb certain wavelengths of light, which shifts the refractive indices of fluids within cells, and then that means that it reduces the contrast between the different tissues and cell types and your skin and you're able to just see through.
Speaker 1:What I remember them saying is the aqueous and the fatty parts of your tissue have very different refractive indices. Yes, and by massaging yellow number five into your skin, you increase water's refractive index to match that of fat. So, rather than continuously zigzagging through these interfaces of like water, fat, water, fat, water fat which happens throughout your skin because your cells are partly water and partly fat, because you've now matched the refractive index of fat by increasing the refractive index of water, now light passes straight through.
Speaker 2:This is amazing, and I think, other than it just being so cool. Well, first off, just washing it off of the mouse's skin brings things back to normal there, don't?
Speaker 2:seem to be any negative side effects. It seems, at least in these early animal studies, to be quite safe, and then you can imagine how incredible this might be for being able to detect a huge number of issues if it worked in people right. Something I read was like you could even try and visualize back injuries or like monitor different diseases, and how wild would that be. Yeah, I also want to say that this doesn't mean you should go crush up Doritos and spread them on your stomach and think you're going to see through it Like this is a wildly increased concentration of this yellow dye.
Speaker 1:Yes, that is a great point. And also you should leave experimenting on yourself to the professionals. Yeah, so on that note, uh, the script I wrote for just a little shout out to reactions. Here we're doing a pretty sure we're going to do a short on this. And one thing that I was surprised by was that the researchers did not try this on human skin. Now they did mention that human skin is significantly thicker than mouse skin. Um, you can, you can kind of see through mouse skin a little bit, even without anything. You know, if you put a mouse on a really bright background and you use Nair to get the hair off its belly, which is what the researchers use they use Nair. And so I'm in this short video. Unless anyone stops me, I am going to order some tartrazine, not use Doritos. And I'm going to order some tartrazine, not use Doritos, and I'm going to try it on my pinky and see what happens.
Speaker 2:Because I think that's the thinnest part of my body and you don't need it.
Speaker 1:So if it falls off, right. So exactly, exactly yes.
Speaker 2:Well, this is like a tiny matters holiday or something. I'm curious to see what they do next. I'm sure they've already. I mean Tiny Matters holiday or something for people Chose the same one. I'm curious to see what they do next.
Speaker 1:I'm sure they've already. I mean, if you're a researcher.
Speaker 2:Do you really think they haven't tried it on their skin?
Speaker 1:I was just going to say that they 100% have tried it. Yeah, yeah, but they just haven't published it yet.
Speaker 2:Maybe they're like so excited because they already know that it's going to work.
Speaker 1:I bet that they published this paper because they were afraid that some other group was going to publish it at the same time or something similar, and so they probably are doing the human tests right now. They're just like let's get this out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of Tiny Matters, a production of the American Chemical Society. This week's script was written by me and edited by Mike David and Sam Jones, who is our executive producer. It was fact-checked by Michelle Boucher. The Tiny Matters theme and episode sound design is by Michael Simonelli and the Charts and Leisure team.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much to Neil Benowitz, wilson Compton and Lynn Kozlowski for joining us. A reminder that we have a newsletter Sign up for updates on new Tiny Matters episodes, videos from interviews, previews of upcoming episodes and other content we think that you'll really like. I've put a link in this episode's description.
Speaker 3:We'll see you next time.
