The journey to science is rarely straightforward and clear cut. In this week’s episode, both our storytellers share their tales of how they came to science.

Part 1: With her truck stuck in the mud in the Serengeti, Aerin Jacob learns three important lessons.

Aerin Jacob is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Victoria and a Wilburforce Fellow in Conservation Science Fellow. Trained as an ecologist, she works to develop management strategies that incorporate local, Indigenous, and scientific knowledge to achieve conservation objectives while maintaining human well-being. She works with First Nations communities in British Columbia to study the environmental and socioeconomic outcomes of marine management in the Great Bear Rainforest. Aerin is also a member of the Sustainable Canada Dialogues, a network of scholars developing viable, science-based policy options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and guide sustainable development in Canada. Her previous work includes studies of land-use change, restoration ecology, and animal behaviour in East Africa and western North America. Aerin earned her PhD at McGill University and her BSc at the University of British Columbia.

Part 2: At four years old, Daniel Miller became one of the youngest people in the state of Texas ever to testify in court -- against his own mother, for sexual assault. As an adult, he struggles for stability, but finds hope in physics. (Warning: this story contains disturbing and potentially triggering events.)

Daniel R. Miller is a Ph.D. student and research assistant at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. Using large telescopes in the Chilean Andes to observe our Universe as it was 12 billion years ago along with state-of-the-art high performance computer simulations, he works at the intersection of observational and theoretical astrophysics on subjects including cosmology, cosmic structure, and reionization. He also spent several years doing research in plasma physics and controlled nuclear fusion on the MIT Alcator C-Mod experimental tokamak reactor. When not thinking strictly about physics, he may be found in the Future of Life Institute working on potential existential risks including climate change, nuclear proliferation, and artificial intelligence.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

Well, I never expected that three of the most important lessons I would learn about conservation science would come from a man with a machine gun. 

It’s summer 2003.  I’m twenty-two years old and I have the best internship in the whole world.  I’m studying cheetahs in Serengeti National Park.  Serengeti is incredible.  You can see more animals in one day than in the rest of your life combined.  I’m particularly excited to be here because I lived in East Africa when I was a kid.  My mom was a game warden, my dad was a biologist so I grew up surrounded by stories about wildlife and research and life in the bush. 

I've been studying conservation biology at university and I’m thrilled to start working as a real scientist.  So after a few weeks of learning the cheetah ropes, this is one of the first days I can go out on my own, and I've got butterflies.  I pack the Land Rover up with extra food, water, fuel, spare tires, data sheets, and I leave the field station at the crack of dawn. 

A Serengeti sunrise is like nothing else.  It’s just like that scene from The Lion King.  The huge sun rises over the savannah.  Everything glows orange and yellow.  The animals wake up, start moving.  You breathe in the rich scent of two million wildebeests, and there's me, driving along looking for cheetahs. 

So I drive for a couple of hours.  I stop every once in a while, look through my binoculars and finally, in the distance, I see something.  Is it a cheetah?  With all the dry season dust and the heat haze, it can be hard to tell the difference between a cheetah and what’s actually a termite mound, a bird, or a stump.  I can’t quite tell so I drive forward, slowly, looking through my binos and I’m certain it’s looking more and more cheetah-like.  I just know deep down inside that this is my cheetah, the first cheetah that I'll find and study all by myself. 

So this goes on for quite a while.  It keeps disappearing and reappearing.  Finally, I come to the edge of a small river.  It’s maybe thirty feet across.  This time of year it’s called Kiangazi, it’s the middle of the long dry season and many rivers are bone dry.  This one has hard, sun-baked mud, and my cheetah is on the other side. 

But even if the river is dry, I’m not going to just drive across without checking it out first.  So I get out, I scramble down the bank, I walk out into the riverbed and I stomp around for awhile, checking out the mud.  It’s like concrete.  So feeling pretty satisfied with my bush skills, I get back in the side, put the Land Rover in low range, I ease it gently down the steep bank and I start to cross. 

About a third of the way across, the Land Rover starts to sink.  It was like trying to drive on crème brûlée.  There was a thick crust on top but a few inches down was this oozing, wet mud.  My tires are spinning in this rancid, gross sludge.  Mud’s flying everywhere and I’m freaking out.  It stinks like rotten eggs and I don't know what to do.  I panic and I hit the brakes, and that was a big mistake. 

My face flushes as I remember my mom’s advice for driving in the mud.  Don’t gear down and don’t brake or you're going to get stuck.  I feel irritated.  I do not come from people who get stuck in mud. 

My family has all these crazy stories about adventures with vehicles from before I was born.  Like the time my mom was three days from the nearest road and the fan belt broke on her Land Rover.  She improvised using a wildebeest intestine, and drove out.  Or the time that the propeller fell off my dad’s airplane in midair, and he landed it anyways.  Suffice to say I am definitely not going to get stuck my first day being a real scientist. 

So I put the Land Rover in reverse.  I try backing up.  Nothing.  I saw the steering wheel from left to right trying to clear the mud from my tires.  Nothing.  I lock the differential, which usually let’s you power through anything.  Nothing.  The truck is not budging.  So I get out. 

The front end is sunk about two feet in the mud, and the back end is not much better.  But that’s okay because I packed a shovel and I’m going to dig my way out. 

So I dig and I dig and I dig.  The sun’s beating down, I’m sweating buckets, I’m getting filthy.  I’m getting pretty mad at myself too.  This isn’t exactly glamorous cheetah science. 

So finally I spent about an hour.  I've dug out most of the back tires.  I hop back in.  I try again.  Nothing.  So I spend another hour digging out most of the front tires.  I hop back in.  I try again.  Nothing. 

The radio crackles.  My boss calls in.  “Cheetah, cheetah from Aerin.”  I try to collect myself. 

“Go ahead, cheetah.” 

She goes, “Hey, Aerin.  How’s it going out there?”

And I am super chipper.  “Oh, things are great.  It’s a beautiful day.  I think I've seen a cheetah.”

She goes, “Oh, fantastic.  Well, get some good data.  And you're out on the short grass plains, right?”

And I say, “Yup, yup.  I sure am.  Okay, gotta go.  Bye.”  I hang up and it makes me wonder.  Where exactly am I? 

So I pull out the map and the old-school GPS.  Okay, that’s where I first saw the cheetah.  That’s where I pulled off the main road.  Then I drove around and around and around for a while.  So where is this river that I’m stuck in?  

Now, there's something you need to know about Serengeti.  For field work, researchers can go many places.  There's only a few areas that are truly off limits.  Maybe the most important one is called Moru.  And Moru is where the rhinos live. 

Rhino poaching is so bad that there are only a few rhinos left in all of Serengeti and they're heavily guarded by armed rangers, so no one can go to Moru. 

So where do I see the nearest river?  Slowly it dawns on me.  Oh, my God.  I’m in Moru.  I’m in the Serengeti’s number one Do-Not-Go zone with the rhinos and the rhino rangers and the rhino poachers.  And no one knows I’m here because I drove in early in the morning and now I’m stuck down in the riverbed.  And that kind of sneaking around, that’s exactly what poachers do.  So if anyone sees me, they're going to think I’m a poacher. 

How serious this was started to sink in.  This is bad.  Before, I was just mad at myself and potentially embarrassed about getting stuck so soon.   But now, if anyone finds out, I could get the research project in a lot of trouble. 

My heart is beating wildly.  I’m getting pretty stressed out and I think, “Okay, calm down.  Problem solve.  I need traction.  There's some logs on the riverbank.  If get some of those branches and I stuff them around and underneath the tires, I'll be able to get enough friction to get out of here.”  So I spend an hour.  I dig these elaborate trenches all around the tires, I fill them full of branches, I hop back in, I try again.  Nothing. 

My boss calls back, asks how things are going with my cheetah.  I make up this happy story about how it’s hunting. 

So now I've actually lied, which is really bad for a scientist.  Scientists are supposed to be objective and honest, in search of truth and higher knowledge.  I’m not doing that. 

So I think, “Okay, well, if traction didn’t help, maybe something is stuck underneath the truck.”  I get out, I crouch down and I see that the front differential, this big hunk of metal on the axle, is buried in the mud.  Okay, well that must be it. 

So I wriggle underneath on my belly.  There's barely any room.  I’m face down in this rancid mud, I keep banging my head on the undercarriage, and if it’s possible, I’m even dirtier than I was before.  My hair, my clothes, my shoes are caked in mud. 

So I’m lying there scooping out the mud by hand and I hear this weird noise.  It’s from the other side of the truck.  It’s kind of a breathy snuffling.  The hair on the back of my neck stands up.  I kind of crane my head around and I see a young hyena staring back at me.  And I flip out.  I mean, it’s a hyena.  They're a major predator.  They bring down buffalo.  Their jaws can crack through giraffe femurs, and I’m lying there on the ground. 

I scream.  I scramble out from underneath the truck.  As I go to leap back inside, one of my shoes falls off.  The hyena is a little bit startled so it backs off, but then dammed if it doesn’t come around the truck and pick up my shoe. 

Have you ever been so frustrated that you just snap?  Well, I snapped.  I don't know what possessed me but I take off my other shoe, I open the door and I burst out wielding it like a rolled up newspaper.  The hyena drops my shoe, tucks his tail between his legs and takes off.  I grab my shoe, leap back inside and slam the door. 

The adrenaline is amazing.  My heart’s pounding, my eyes are open wide, my nostrils are flared and my skin is on fire.  And I burst into tears.  I have to accept that although I got myself into this mess, I cannot get myself out of it.  What am I doing?  The truck’s not moving, I’m not collecting data, I’m lying to my boss, and if I don’t get back to the research station by dark, everyone is going to be really worried. 

So I take a deep breath, I swallow my pride, I pick up the radio.  “Cheetah, cheetah from Aerin.  Hi.  So I’m actually stuck.  Yeah, for a while.  Pretty much the whole day.” 

My boss is pretty understanding.  I give her my GPS coordinate.  I neglect to tell her that I’m probably in Moru.  She says that she and a few of the other researchers will leave immediately and come pull me out. 

So I’m sitting up on top of the roof of the Land Rover.  I can just see above the river bank.  Eventually, in the distance, I see this big cloud of dust rising.  That’s the research convoy coming to drag me out.  But from the other direction, from deep in the heart of Moru there's an even bigger cloud of dust rising.  And it’s coming my way even faster. 

Although the rangers couldn’t see me down in the riverbed, they could surely see that big cloud of dust, that research convoy coming.  They probably thought it was the world’s most brazen poachers. 

These two clouds of dust converge on the river at the same time.  The researchers are on one side, the rangers are on the other, I’m in the middle covered head to toe in mud.  There's yelling.  There's machine guns.  I’m trying to explain myself to everybody at once.  It’s chaos. 

Finally, things kind of calm down.  The rangers believe that I’m not a poacher but then they want to know what am I doing there.  And if I was so stuck, why didn’t I just ask for help?  I show them my trenches and branches, I tell them about the hyena.  Soon everybody is laughing, even me.  In the end, it only takes a couple of minutes to hook up the winch and pull me out. 

Just before we go to leave, I go to say goodbye to the rangers.  (Speaks in Kiswahili.) That’s Kiswahili for, “My friends, thank you so much.  I’m so sorry for all of this trouble.” 

One of the rangers leans on his machine gun and smiles.  He says, “Little Cheetah Woman, working on conservation is very hard. Today, you learned three important things.  First, education is life, not books.  Second, the medicine for fire is fire.  Third, unity is strength. 

As I walk back to my Land Rover I think about what he said, and I've thought about it many times since.  He's right.  First, you learn the most about conservation from being on the ground.  Second, you've got to be tough.  When the path gets muddy, don’t stop.  Keep going.  And third, you can’t do it all alone.  If you get stuck, don’t be afraid to ask for help. 

Nearly 15 years later, these Swahili proverbs are still three of the most important lessons I've ever learned about conservation. 

Part 2

It's June 1987 in a hot courthouse in Dallas, Texas. I'm four years old. I'm looking down at my Converse and fiddling with the buttons on my Oshkosh overalls and nodding yes. The judge leans in to me and says, "Danny, can you please say that the microphone?" I look up. A pretty lady is staring at me. The pretty lady with black hair, I leaned into the microphone and I say, "Yes." I'm four years old and I'm the primary witness in an aggravated sexual assault case. The defendant, the pretty lady with the black hair, with the smile, is my birth mother, Irene. The four-year-old boy in the overalls is me, the victim.

Dallas Times-Herald, August 1st, 1987. Boy, four, star witness against parents in indecency case. The parents, whose names are withheld to protect the boy's identity, were arrested in June 1986 as police confiscated more than $7,000 in cash, various quantities of marijuana and cocaine, condoms and six pornography magazines. The boy's been in a foster home since his parents' arrest. Prosecutors had cleared the way to calling the boy as a witness after two psychologists testified in a competency hearing that the very bright young man had an IQ of 135. "This is highly unusual," said District Judge John Ovard, who is presiding at the trial. "I've never seen an instance in which a four-year-old boy was to testify."

All right, let's back up a year. It's June 1986, and in a motel room in Dallas, Texas, my parents are packing up to move to a new house. What I know as houses are, in fact, motel rooms. My earliest memories are moving from motel room to motel room. My parents are drug addicts, drug dealers, drug transporters, and are living off the grid. In the parking lot, two police officers approached my parents and one of the police officers, a policewoman takes me to the side and asks me questions. I answer her questions. The motel room is searched. My parents are arrested. I'm taken to a police station, where I'm asked questions and interviewed, and then I'm taken to a children's shelter, where I'm interviewed yet again, this time in front of a video camera, and asked to demonstrate things with anatomically correct dolls. I spent a few days in the children's shelter, before I moved to a new family, a real family, the McWilliams, I'm told they're my foster family. But the most important person in my life is my caseworker, Betsy. I spend my most time with her, and I love Betsy. After my parents post bail, they disappear. I don't know where they've gone, and I don't understand why they've left me. I tell Betsy that I'm going to go look for them. Betsy tells me that she'll find them, but I shouldn't worry and reminds me that this doesn't have anything to do with me, that it's not my fault. The weeks after the motel incident are very confusing for me. There are a series of seemingly endless questions and even more of the same questions from lawyers, doctors, social workers -- all trying to make sure that I know that this isn't my fault. That it's my parents fault. And that I didn't do anything to deserve this. It's August 1986 in Dallas, Texas. It's early in the morning. My foster mother comes out and tells me that Betsy has found my birth parents. She says we're going to meet them that morning. Everybody's been telling me that my birth parents are terrible, but I miss them, so at the visit, I don't know how to feel. I don't know how I should behave. A few weeks passed before the second visit. Betsy picks me up for my foster parents' house. We drive to my psychologist's office. We arrive, we get out of the car. We're walking up to the office. Dan comes out of nowhere. He walks up quickly. He walks up to Betsy, pulls something from behind his back, and points it at her face. He sprays her with liquid. It's all over her face. Betsy falls down. She's screaming. Dan grabs me quickly and puts me in the passenger seat of his car. We drive away. I look at Dan. I ask him what he sprayed in Betsy's face. He says, "Shit." There's a large bag of cocaine in the cup holder. As we tear off down the highway. I asked Dan if we had Frosted Flakes at home. I'm only four years old. Soon, we stopped at a department store.

Dan changes his clothes and asks me to dress up as a girl. He buys me girls' clothes. He says to change. Do it fast. I do. And then we get back in the car and we tear off down the highway.

Associated Press, August 26, 1986. Man sprayed social worker's face with mace, snatches boy. The child was returned to the foster parents after his father, Daniel Glass Bernard, 43, of Harrison, Arkansas, was arrested Monday in Carrollton and charged with aggravated assault on social worker Betsy Lied, police said.

The day after the abduction, I moved immediately from the McWilliams' house to a new foster family. But the foster family act strange and I can tell they don't like me. I learned later that they're scared for the safety of their own daughter. So then I moved from that foster family to another foster family, the Chapmans. I live with the Chapman for three years. They're wonderful people. I learned to get comfortable with them. I loved them, but then I moved from the Chapmans after those three years. When I'm almost seven years old, I'm adopted by my parents, the Millers. Now, before I go on, I need to be really clear about something. By the time I was seven, by the time I was adopted, after the abuse and after the abduction, after the foster families, I was damaged, there's no two ways about it. You see, I was taken from my birth parents, rightfully so. And then the next most important person in my life, Betsy, she was attacked by my birth father and she left too. And then three foster families came and three foster families went. And each time I thought it was because of something I did. I thought it's because of something that was wrong with me. I never felt like a victim. I always felt like I was the bad guy. Like I was the perpetrator. I felt like I was a sneak. Like I had to hide who I was. Like, I had to hide who I really was and be perfect, I feel like I had to be perfect in order to receive forever parents, to get people to love me forever. This faulty belief system became a core part of who I was. And that was the real damage that was done.

It's 1994 in Dallas, Texas. I'm scanning the shelves of a bookstore looking for anything I can find on black holes or Einstein's theory of relativity. The week before, in my math class, my math teacher introduced us to the idea of black holes. I don't remember why he introduced them, but I knew that I had to know everything by the end of the class. What are black holes, really? Are they two dimensional, three dimensional? What's on the other side of the hole? Why hasn't anyone told me about them before? When I get home, I press my dad for more information.

I've been living with my parents, my adoptive parents for five years. Wonderful people. A professor and engineer, my dad's the engineer, and he does better than my math teacher. Black holes are predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity. There are an extreme warpage of spacetime. He tells me about light on trains and other phenomena. It's clear that he has no idea what he's talking about. At least, I'm not satisfied, so I leave the adults and move on to try to find answers in books. So on the shelves of this bookstore, I spot two books, one a thick, big black book with white lettering called Gravitation. Sure, it weighs almost as much as I do, but it has a picture of an apple on the front so it's probably appropriate for a 12-year-old. It turns out this was the canonical textbook for graduate-level general relativity students, not necessarily appropriate for a twelve-year-old. The other book was a thin, slim book called The ABC of Relativity by Bertrand Russell. Chapter one, page one, first sentence. "Everyone knows that Einstein did something astonishing, but few people realize what that was." That was it. I was introduced to physics, and I was off and running. Before the last page closed of The ABC at Relativity, the first page of had opened of Kip Thorne's Black Holes and Time Warps. And then Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Now this intellectual fascination that I had with physics, with our universe, with its character and nature and the beauty of it, was extremely important and it's defined my life in important ways.

And I do suspect that potentially there's a universe where, after that day in the bookstore, I became maybe some sort of child prodigy. I don't know. I like to think so, but that didn't happen in this universe. In this universe, I still had to deal with all that pain. I had to deal with that little boy and I had to take care of him. You see, I went through periods of severe depression. I went through periods of unbearable sadness and pain. I repeatedly threatened to commit suicide. I was put in a psychiatric unit for observation. But eventually I did find a solution to this pain. But the cost would be enormous. So in 1994, I discovered two things. I found Einstein and I found drugs. One was a fix for my intellectual curiosity. The other fix suffocated my emotions, prevented me from understanding who I was, and prevented me from growing as a person. By the time I was 13, I was on a daily regimen of drugs, marijuana in the morning, alcohol in the evening, LSD on weekends, and benzodiazepines and amphetamines as available. The trajectory resulting from this is predictable. For the next decade, my life became more and more unstable. A series of arrests, drug overdoses, and drug rehabilitation centers. I won't go into detail. I'll just say that my life unraveled, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.

It's October of 2004 in Austin, Texas. I wake up in a whole cold, hard jail cell. A combination of benzodiazepines and alcohol ensures that I have no recollection of how I arrived here. Not to worry -- judges are eager to provide you with this information during your arraignment. At my arraignment, my charges read off. Aggravated assault with a deadly weapon causing bodily injury. This is a serious charge. My bill is set at $20,000. As is typical, I call my parents to bail me out of jail. As is not typical, they say no.

Now, this time in jail was extremely important in my life -- it was a turning point in my life. For 30 days, I was clean. For 30 days, I had the ability to reflect on the discrepancy between what I thought my life was and the reality of my situation. I thought I was some genius rock star. The reality was that I was a 22-year-old drug addict. I lied to people. I stole from people. I hurt people. I hurt myself. I was a drug addict sitting in a jail cell because I had assaulted another man. I was becoming my birth father. And then I thought about that little boy. The one who had fought so hard to be loved, the one who testified and sat in that chair against his birth mother when his feet couldn't even touch the ground. And I realized that I was the one who let that boy down. I had abandoned him, utterly. So I decided to knock. I decided that boy had just been dealt a shitty hand, that he wasn't a bad kid. He just made a few mistakes along the way. So when I decided to knock, I decided I was just going to stop trying to fight against the universe. Stop trying to bluff about the shitty hand I was dealt. Just knock and get dealt a new hand and start again.

So I did. I knocked. When I did, the cell walls came crumbling down. The murals of delusion painted on them, replaced by the reality that was my life. I knocked and I was dealt a new hand, and having learned something about myself, having learned something about that little boy, I played this hand more carefully. Not perfectly, but carefully. Now, I wish I could tell you that I stayed sober after this, but it's important to be honest about what the road to sobriety looks like, and mine was a long, windy one with many detours. Four years after that, I went through cycles of relapse and recovery. During this time, I learned about myself, I learned about that little boy, and slowly I replaced drugs with healthier coping mechanisms. So I got better, sometimes slowly and sometimes more quickly. Or maybe I don't wish that I stayed sober after that. Maybe I'm okay with that long, winding road that I took toward sobriety. Or maybe I'm okay with it because I'm where I'm at now.

Of course, the most difficult thing to deal with is the pain that I inflicted on others. The people that love me the most got hurt the worst. My parents, my brother, my girlfriend. The people who knew all too well that I was nothing close to perfect, but in spite of that, asked me to stop hiding even more so that they could love me even more. So what do you do? What do you do when you've experienced all this, when you've put people through all this pain? What do you do when you put all this negativity into the universe? How do you cope with that? I'm not going to pretend to answer this question for you guys. I can just tell you my experience, what I did and what I'm doing. It's March 2014 in Winchester, Massachusetts. I'm in the living room of a world-renowned astrophysicist, someone I've admired since I was a child. I'm surrounded by other heavy hitters in the sciences. Geneticists, economists, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist to my right. A soon-to-be Nobel Prize-winning physicist to my left. It's a first meeting for the Future of Life Institute. We're meeting to figure out how to address existential risks, climate change, nuclear proliferation, artificial intelligence.

You see, humanity is in a very serious stage right now. Human civilization is very much in its infancy. And the future is uncertain. But I don't buy the cynicism that we can't change. I don't buy the cynicism that we're not going to rise to the occasion. I know what change looks like, and I believe in people.

It's June 2014. I'm high in the mountains of the Chilean Andes. I'm looking through one of the most powerful telescopes in the world at light that's traveled 12 billion years to get to us. Light that was emitted from an ancient quasar during a violent, tumultuous time at the infancy of a galaxy. But you can learn so much from these violent, tumultuous times at the beginnings of things.

It's May 2014, and I'm back in Dallas, Texas, visiting my brother for his wedding. I'm staring out the window of a fancy hotel room, not too far, in fact, from that first motel room where the story started almost 28 years ago. I'm being interviewed by a girl named Emily, a mathematics student who I met a couple of months earlier when she came to a lecture I was giving on cosmic inflation to the general relativity course for graduate students at MIT. Emily is working on a project to understand what the common factors are for people that are successful in the sciences. It's nearing the end of the interview when Emily asked me this following question: "What do you regret the most, Danny? If you could change something and go back, what would it be?" I told her, "I regret almost everything, and I would change none of it." Thank you.