Science Diction: The Origin Of 'Bunsen Burner'

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Every high school chemist has no doubt fiddled with a Bunsen burner—but where did the apparatus get its name? Science historian Howard Markel talks about the German chemist Robert Bunsen, and why his experiments necessitated the invention of the gas burner still in use today.

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(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: The alphabet has only 26 letters. With these 26 magic symbols, however, millions of words are written every day.

FLATOW: Ah, that music means it's time for our monthly episode of Science Diction, where we talk about the origin of scientific words with Howard Markel, professor of history of medicine, University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Welcome, Howard.

HOWARD MARKEL: Hi, Ira. How are you?

FLATOW: What word do we have today?

MARKEL: Well, it's a great one. It's the Bunsen burner.

FLATOW: Oh, the Bunsen burner.

MARKEL: And we all know what it is. It's the iconic symbol of high school chemistry. But how many people know who Bunsen was?

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: You're right.

MARKEL: And he was a brilliant chemist, Robert Bunsen was his name. And he was a graduate of the University of Gottingen where his father was the chief librarian. But he actually created with some laboratory assistants the Bunsen burner or the gas burner in 1855. Now, chemistry - these chemists have arguing for years over who deserves the credit. Bunsen and a colleague named Henry Roscoe actually wrote it up in 1857.

But, you know, there were prototypical gas burners even before that, from the 1820s on. But those earlier forms used to produce diffuse and flickering light, and they also would - they were very flammable, no pun intended, and if you didn't put a metal wire over - a mesh, the flames would get all over the place, but that introduced artifactual colors and soot and all other things like that.

FLATOW: Mm-hmm. And was it really basically the same one we have today? No...

MARKEL: Pretty much. I mean, there's been a few, you know, tweaks here and there. But, you know, it's kind of neat. You know, all great laboratory equipment is the result of doing experiments. And Bunsen and his colleagues were trying to look at the spectral analysis of elements and compounds. They had a theory that each compound or element had a fingerprint if you lit it, if you burned it. And you could measure that through a prism.

So that was really novel, but they didn't have a good source of heat to do that. These earlier flames would just be, you know, not sufficient. And they figured this out one day when they - I'm sure you remember doing this in eighth grade - they burned a piece of magnesium. You remember that?

FLATOW: Oh, yeah. Pretty hot.

MARKEL: I can still see that bright light, that bright white light. And then they said, well, maybe other compounds have this as well. So they needed the right type of heat source. And you know, the great unsung heroes of science, I think, are the apparatus beakers, you know, before there, you know, Erlenmeyer flasks. Someone had to blow those and make them. And the same thing with the Bunsen burner was a very neat guy named Peter Desaga. And this - he toyed with the length of the tube and the width of the tube so that created a colorless, sootless flame. It was very hot. It didn't flicker, and it didn't need that wire mesh, so it didn't introduce any artifactual colors.

FLATOW: And there you have it. Thank you, Howard.

MARKEL: Thanks a lot, Ira.

FLATOW: Always a pleasure. Howard Markel, professor of the history of medicine, University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, also director of the Center for the History of Medicine there.

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In Scott's Race To The Pole, Science Beat Speed

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Edward Larson, author, "An Empire of Ice: Scott, Shackleton, and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Science" (Yale University Press, 2011), professor, history and law, Pepperdine University, Malibu, Calif.

David Wilson, author, "The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott: Unseen Images from the Legendary Antarctic Expedition" (Little, Brown & Company, 2011), London, England

A hundred years ago, two teams were racing to the South Pole. The Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen made it first, beating British explorer Robert Scott. But only Scott did pioneering science—and photography—along the way. Ira Flatow and guests discuss the achievements of the first Antarctic expeditions.

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IRA FLATOW, host: You're listening to SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. A hundred years ago today, November 1911, two teams of explorers were racing to be the first to the South Pole. Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian explorer, led one party, British explorer and Royal Naval Officer Robert Falcon Scott the other.

Amundsen ultimately won the race; Scott and the other four members of his team died on the way back. But whereas the Norwegian team had one sole motivation, and that is making it to the pole and getting back, Scott's team had a second goal in mind, and that was conducting science along the way.

And indeed, members of his expedition made many pioneering observations in Antarctica, tracking the movement of glaciers, studying ice crystals, collecting fossils, observing seals, penguins, killer whales, and one of my next guests writes about that scientific history in his new book, "An Empire of Ice: Scott, Shackleton and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Science."

But of course you have to document the trip, right? So aside from his other duties, Scott learned the art of photography while down in Antarctica, taking pictures around his home base and part of the way on his fateful trip to the Pole, pictures that were lost for decades, but now they have been found.

My second guest has uncovered those long-forgotten photos in his new book, "The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott: Unseen Images from the Legendary Antarctic Expedition." And you can see a few of them on our science and arts website if you go to sciencefriday.com/arts.

Let me introduce my guests again. Edward Larson is the author of "An Empire of Ice: Scott, Shackleton, and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Science." He's also professor of history and law at Pepperdine in Malibu, California. He joins us from WOSU in Columbus, Ohio. Welcome back to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Larson.

EDWARD LARSON: Delighted to be back, thank you, Ira.

FLATOW: You're welcome. David Wilson is the author of "The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott: Unseen Images from the Legendary Antarctic Expedition." He joins us from the BBC in London. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Wilson.

DAVID WILSON: Thank you very much.

FLATOW: Now, you are actually a descendent of the famous Dr. Wilson of that expedition, are you not?

WILSON: I am. He was my grandfather's older brother, so my great-uncle.

FLATOW: Your great-uncle. What kind of science did Scott's Terra Nova Expedition do in Antarctica? Edward Larson, give us a little overview.

LARSON: Actually, it was sort of a predecessor of everything that's being done today. It was really a remarkable achievement. Edward Wilson, David Wilson's great-uncle, was in charge of the overall program, but his specialty was birds. He was studying the penguins especially, took an amazing winter journey.

Shortly before he went on the polar expedition with Scott, he went to Cape Crosier to study the emperor penguins. There were other teams going out to study glaciology, geology. Fossils were very important. They were trying to document the connections between Antarctica and the other southern continents. They were doing oceanography. They were doing regular dredging of the water off the - where their main base was by digging trenches through the ice and then dredging.

They also checked the lakes for small - for algae and different plants growing there. There was seismograph work. They were studying earthquakes, terrestrial magnetism. Basically all the sorts of scientific research, the different types that we continue to do today, they were literally opening a new continent for science.

They were the third in three British expeditions that were funded for that exact purpose, of opening a new continent for science and potentially for empire.

FLATOW: So are you making the case in your book that Scott's secondary mission would be to have been to get to the South Pole?

LARSON: Well, that's how it started. You have a series of three expeditions. The first was Scott's discovery expedition in 1901 that was organized by the Royal Society and the Royal Geographic Society in London, Royal Society being the world's foremost scientific association at that time, funded by the British government for the purpose of doing science.

And they kept their ambition, Scott's ambition to reach the South Pole, quiet. They didn't talk about it. Clements Markham, who was the organizer, president of the Royal Geographic Society, certainly wanted to reach the South Pole. They fell far short. They went south with Edward Wilson, David's great-uncle, and Ernest Shackleton, tried to go toward the Pole, fell, as I said, far short.

But their expedition was billed primarily for science. Then Shackleton came back with his first expedition that he led, the Nimrod Expedition, took along some really superb scientists - Edgeworth David, a member of the Royal Society, other top scientists.

They peeled out, fanned out over the raw(ph) sea area, doing - collecting science. He - with Shackleton, his stated goal was to also reach the pole. He tried, fell 100 miles short, and then Scott came back with his own expedition, again, with this team of scientists who were going off in other directions.

So it's tough to say which came first and which was second. Certainly Scott wanted to reach the pole. That had become actually something of a British obsession. But they wouldn't have considered - it wouldn't have been proper in Edwardian England to not try to do proper science along the way, and it's the science that gave it a measure of respectability that a mere dash to the Pole could never have commanded at that time.

FLATOW: David Wilson, being part of the family, the Wilson family, of that expedition, were these photos that you discovered in somebody's scrapbook, or how did you find them?

WILSON: Well, I came across them over a glass of gin and tonic.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

WILSON: In a bar, in a bar after a sale in London, I had a gentleman came up to me and said: You'll never guess what I've got in my collection. And I hazarded a couple of guesses, and the result was he said that he'd found the lost photographs of Captain Scott, at which point I nearly choked on the lemon.

But I went round to his flat a couple of days later and looked at the photographs, and there were 109 contact prints, about three inches by four inches. They had the original cataloging numbers visible on them. But they were in something of a muddle.

The original catalog had been lost. There were no identifications, and so beyond saying Scott had taken them, it took some years of work to identify them all and sort them all out.

FLATOW: And somebody had to teach Scott how to take photos, right?

WILSON: Absolutely. Well, it goes along with what Ed was saying. You know, the important job of an explorer is to bring back records, you know, maps and scientific records and images of where you've been so that the unknown becomes known. That's part of - an important part of human progress.

And originally, you know, the navy had conquered the world with cannon fire. It had mastered it with a pencil and paper. And the tradition of exploration art that all royal naval officers were taught to follow was founded by Captain Cook and his taking of a professional artist with him on his second expedition in 1775, '6.

And that was continued right through to Scott's day, and my great-uncle, on his first expedition, was the sort of last practitioner where pencil and paper was more important than the camera as a means of making a scientific record.

But Scott was - you know, he's from that era where science and human progress were taken as goods. You know, it's before our cynical age, after World War I and Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II - you know, human progress was considered an unmitigated good. And he believed that the camera and modern technology could open up the Polar Regions.

He developed the first motorized tracked sledges, and he also invited a professional photographer on his second expedition specifically to improve the use of the camera for scientific exploration. And he invited Herbert Ponting along as that man, and he revolutionized the imaging of the Polar regions.

FLATOW: 1-800-989-8255 is our number. We're talking with Ed Larson, author of "An Empire of Ice: Scott, Shackleton, and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Science"; David Wilson, author of "The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott: Unseen Images from the Legendary Antarctic Expedition."

As I say, our number again, 1-800-989-8255. As someone who was - went to Antarctica and the South Pole back in 1979, all they talked about was the comparison. I remember they talked about the comparison of Scott and Amundsen. And Scott was basically seen as the amateur, the amateur explorer compared to the knowledge that Amundsen brought with him, you know, having come from Norway and studied under (unintelligible) and all these great explorers.

And people seem to be trying to resurrect Scott's reputation of those years. Did you see this? Did you have that in your mind, Ed Larson, when you were writing this book?

LARSON: No, I did not have that particularly in my mind. I know it's happening. You can read it in the different books. I'm - I take nothing away from Amundsen. Giving credit to the science of Scott's expedition actually does take nothing away from Amundsen's achievement. Only the Norwegians reached the pole and returned safely, and they did so over an unknown route in less than 100 days with food to spare.

Further, the pursuit of science doesn't excuse Scott for poor choices that, combined with forgivable misfortune, contributed to suffering and death on his polar journey. But it does give perspective. And it gives meaning to the British endeavor. And the one thing that Roland Huntford(ph) in his famous book about Scott and Amundsen didn't do was talk about the other aspects of Scott.

Oh, he criticized Scott for Scott's mistakes, and Scott did make mistakes. Amundsen was certainly - planned a better trip to the Pole. But what Scott was also planning was a multifaceted, complex expedition. He had 32 men on the ice. He had teams going all over, where Amundsen had 30 and they were focused on one end. They did that one end better. But if you look at the overall expedition, actually, the British Terra Nova Expedition, Scott's expedition, was actually more modern and a marvel of planning, if not execution.

FLATOW: Here's a tweet, came in from James Healey(ph), who says: Didn't hauling rocks and things helped contribute to the team's death?

LARSON: Well, you can certainly say that might have. I mean, their death was - you could have a lot of but for excuses they might not have died. But for the weather being colder. They might not have died, but for the fact that they stopped and collected geological specimens, very important geological specimens, on the way back at the Beardmore Glacier, when they were already highly stressed. But, on the other hand, if you take those things away, it wouldn't be Scott. It wouldn't be a British expedition.

British, when they traveled - and they David mentioned Captain Cook. You can also - James Clark Ross going - discovering this region, they took along artists, they took along geographers, they took along scientists, natural historians making collections. It wouldn't be a British expedition without those. And so while certainly they were stressed - just think of Edward Wilson, David's great uncle. Before going on the polar journey, he had made this death-defying midwinter journey to Cape Crozier to collect penguin eggs and studying the evolutionary development of penguins.

Scott himself had gone in an opposite direction from the Pole, just a month before leaving for the Pole, to check movements of stakes that have been placed on a glacier to see how much a glacier had moved. Certainly, all these activities made it much less likely for Scott to succeed. Still, he thought he had a margin of safety, that he could do all this science, and with the margin of safety provided by the enormous amount of resources he brought down, that he could still make it back safely. And the surprising thing was that there was a combination of mistakes and chance, with the fuel leaking from the containers in the stores that they didn't expect so they ran out of fuel, and the extraordinary cold that - I know it's always cold in Antarctica - but it was even colder than it - than normal. And it was that combination of taking risks, trying to do science, making mistakes and misfortune. And it took them all combined, because they came so close to getting back, only 11 miles from their supply depot.

FLATOW: Mm-hmm. I'm Ira Flatow. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR. Talking with Ed Larson and David Wilson. David, Ponting, the photographer, I think maybe that Ed talked – was touching on this, had an extraordinary bad luck, where there's one incident, in particular, with killer whales almost getting him. Tell us about that?

WILSON: I'm not so sure if it was bad luck as what goes with the territory in those days, you know, where they had big, heavy, cumbersome camera equipment and sort. And yes, he used to get people to pose on icebergs and they fell off icebergs. And he was trying to film for killer whales, and then they decided that they try and eat him and came up under the ice, bumping it in the technique that they have, and decided they'd quite like him for lunch, so he knew he got eaten by killer whales. And on another occasion, he licked his lips whilst taking a photograph and it - his tongue stuck to a little part of the metal work on the camera, and it froze to the camera and he had to jerk his head away and left the tip of his tongue stuck to the camera. So...

FLATOW: Wow.

WILSON: They were hazardous times for explorers.

FLATOW: I did that with a stenography pad (unintelligible). I got it off pretty fast, so – those little curly cue, you know, on the top of the pad. 1-800-989-8255. Let's go to the phones, to Kirsten in Berkeley. Hi, Kirsten.

KIRSTEN: Hi. I was calling to say that I have a lot of undocumented photographs from Amundsen's expedition because my grandfather, Magnus Eriksson(ph), was there from Spitsbergen all the way through. And I heard great stories about polar bears and fires, and all kinds of things that had happened. I don't have anything to add to the (unintelligible). I think it's really great what you're doing. I...

FLATOW: Let me just - allow me to interrupt, because you say you have photographs no one has seen from Amundsen's expedition.

KIRSTEN: Yes, that I inherited from my grandfather. I have...

FLATOW: Anybody interested?

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

WILSON: Oh, I think everyone will be interested in seeing those if you put them into a museum.

KIRSTEN: Yes, I have lots of photographs. I have maps and some things from my grandfather.

FLATOW: Wow.

KIRSTEN: And I think even pictures of Mussolini and all kinds of stuff.

LARSON: Well, David and I were together just last week in Ireland at the Shackleton - Major Shackleton conference, and the people from the Fram Museum in Norway over there. I'm sure - and David's book is beautiful, by the way. The - I'm sure there - lots of museums would be very - right here at Ohio State, Byrd Polar would be very interested in those, but so were the Fram Museum, so were the Scott Archives in - Scott Institute in Cambridge.

FLATOW: Take them out of the attic, Kirsten, bring them out so we can (unintelligible).

KIRSTEN: They're in a box. I pull them out and I look at them all the time because I grew up with the childhood stories of the expedition. So I would be - if anybody would like my contact information - I won't give it over to this phone, but I will give it to somebody and they can contact me.

FLATOW: All right. We'll take - we'll put you on hold and we'll take your contact information. You're in Berkeley. There's got to be a lot of people in Berkeley who can help you out with...

KIRSTEN: Yes. If somebody can just put me in touch, that would be great.

FLATOW: OK. We're going to put you...

LARSON: I'll actually be there next semester at Stanford, and I'd be delighted to come over and look at those photographs. It'd be an honor.

KIRSTEN: OK.

FLATOW: Don't hang up, Kirsten. I'm going to put you on hold.

KIRSTEN: I'm not hanging up.

FLATOW: All right. Good luck with that. That was very interesting. One other thing is that, you know, she talked about Shackleton. Shackleton had his own photographer. He had a guy with a movie camera, didn't he, on his trip?

LARSON: Mm hmm.

FLATOW: Gorgeous.

WILSON: Yup. He did. Frank Hurley went south, first, with Douglas Mawson at about the same time as Scott went south, taking Ponting. But his photographs weren't particularly better than the average for the period. It was only when he started Ponting's film and Ponting's photograph from Scott's expedition that he learned the techniques that really worked in the Antarctic. And that was what enabled him to produce those amazing photographs and the astonishing film for Shackleton's second expedition. So the key is Herbert Ponting's work. And, you know, all photography, up to this day, is a footnote to Ponting's effort. Even David Attenborough's programs find their roots in Herbert Ponting.

FLATOW: We're going to get more into that, talk more about "The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott: Unseen Images from the Legendary Antarctic Expedition," and "An Empire of Ice: Scott, Shackleton, and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Science." Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. I'm Ira Flatow. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

FLATOW: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow.

We're talking this hour about the heroic age of Antarctic exploration - a hundred years ago today - and some of the scientific observations that were made on those early trips and some gorgeous photographs that came back that were made by Robert Falcon Scott.

Ed Larson is the author of "An Empire of Ice: Scott, Shackleton, and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Science." And David Wilson is the author of "The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott: Unseen Images from the Legendary Antarctic Expedition."

And I wanted to - David, I'll talk to you about those photographs. But before you do, let me just set the stage. A hundred years ago today, at - where were they at this point?

LARSON: Well, a hundred years ago today, Scott had just left. He had left. He left his base on November 1st. So he was still traveling with the entire contingent of forces that he was bear - bringing to bear on getting south. So he had his tractors that Dave has already told you about, developed these new tractors. They hadn't yet broken down. They would break down very soon. He had ponies pulling sledges. That was an innovation that Shackleton had worked on. He had dogs pulling sledges, and he had himself and others on foot. And they were heading down very slowly. They weren't far past the beginning.

And the idea was that these different teams, this vast number of people, what they do is they would fall back in stages. It would be like Apollo rocket. They would go away, and then they'd drop off supplies, and the tractors stopped, and then the horses would fall back and then the dogs.

Now, Amundsen was much further along. He originally left in September, found out it was too cold, went back and then left in mid-October. Now, he was traveling very rapidly, only with men that would go the entire way. They were dog-sledged, these sleds being pulled, 52 dogs he was starting with in these large teams of 13, 14 dogs pulling a sled, and the cross-country skiers, expert Alpine cross-country skiers. Amundsen had learned how to mush dogs when he took his northwest passage. He was the first person to make the northwest passage. And they were speeding along. At this point, they were speeding along what's now known as the Ross Ice Shelf, and then heading up the glacier toward the pole.

FLATOW: And Amundsen would mush his dogs all the way up there and actually eat them as part of their food. And - but Scott just had man-hauled those sledges. There were no animals involved during the last pushes up there.

LARSON: Right. The idea was that - he had pretty well determined that the ponies could make it across the Ross Ice Shelf, which is at sea level. But because Shackleton had - the ponies had failed by falling into the huge crevasses going up the Beardmore Glacier, that ponies couldn't make it up that. So the idea was to man-haul.

Now, they had used dogs on the first Discovery Expedition. But the trick was - they had used dogs to pull their sleds, but it hadn't worked very well. The trouble is, it's very hard to mush dogs, as anybody who's ever done it knows, and the British hadn't mastered that skill.

And so if the dog - if you're not mushing the dogs right, it's just a mess. They're pulling in different directions. The British even tried to man-haul and use dogs at the same time, and dogs won't pull with humans. And that combination of events, coupled with the fact that Shackleton almost made it to the pole, within a hundred miles of the pole, by man-hauling up the glacier and across, led Scott to believe that was the way to go.

One other fact has to be remembered, and that is Scott didn't know he would be in a race. He thought that he was the only one going. So he - sounds ironic today he had planned his trip for safety, where Amundsen, from the get-go, knew it was a race. He hadn't announced he was going to the South Pole. He had publicly announced he was going to the North Pole, and then turned on a dime and went south.

And so while, by the time Scott left he knew that Amundsen had come south. When he planned his trip, when he planned his trip with the ponies and the horses and the - I mean, ponies and the dogs and the tractors, he wasn't anticipating a race. He was planning for safety. So it turned out that it was a very unequal race if you're just talking about speed.

FLATOW: Yeah. David Wilson, from an artistic point of view, in - these photos of yours in your book are just fantastic. Do they serve as mere documentation of the trip, or do they aspire to something more? Because there are some beautiful photographs of the snow there, just...

WILSON: Mmm.

FLATOW: You know? Not...

WILSON: They - yeah, they aspire to considerably more than just document it - just documentation. Scott and Ponting were about replacing the tradition of exploration art with the camera. So they wanted to replace the use of sketchpad and pencil with cameras for scientific purposes. So - but I don't think that even Scott or Ponting realized quite how radical the photographic program was going to turn out to be. Ponting was one of the finest landscape photographers of his time, and he took with him the tradition of Victorian photography. So he produced the most beautiful landscapes, very carefully posed.

He would wait for hours for the penguins to get into exactly the right shape to echo the shapes of the mountains behind. All the images were carefully composed, and he produced the most astonishing photographs taken certainly to that date. He also produced pictures in the Victorian tradition of the sublime, you know, small human figures set in vast, icy landscapes. But he was also starting to produce - to sort of push the aesthetic tastes of the time and was taking him - he got interested, when he was down there, in the form and the texture and the shape of ice.

And so he started to take photographs which are really a form of proto-modernism. They foreshadow modernism by about 20 years, so they're very, very 20th century photographs. And they weren't particularly popular with the Edwardians when they were sent home, so they tend to forget - get forgotten about. But Scott was taught by Ponting in all those traditions, and it shows in his photographs.

But Scott went one further than Ponting. He also - there was little bit of reportage in his methods, but he also wanted to take action photographs. I think that's a reflection of the man and his character, you know? And so he started taking some action photographs, which are absolutely stunning. I mean, some of the scenes taken on their way to the polar are absolutely amazing. But the primary purpose was scientific, and most of Ponting's images are actually of the life cycles of the birds and the seals and the penguins and all sorts of, you know, different aspects of Antarctic wildlife.

They don't often get shown these days, but they were for use in the scientific reports when they got home. And he used, even with his - those sorts of photographs, they're all very carefully taken, very carefully composed, you know, the skewer chicks are put up against rulers so everyone can see what size they are, that sort of thing. But he also had a film camera with him. And with that, he pioneered the modern wildlife documentary and paved the way, as I say, for, well, Walt Disney and David Attenborough, really, and their sort of sequences of wildlife films over the 20th century.

And he started to use film as a method of recording life cycles, but he also started making scientific breakthroughs with film. So he was the first to record the Weddell seal making its hole in the ice with its teeth with his film, and he was very proud about that because it disproved the theory of my great uncle as to how they kept their holes open through the winter. And so, you know, that's the breakthrough. Prior to that, there had been filming the Antarctic, but it was always sort of entertainment, you know? There's a famous sequence of film from the Scottish expedition where they play bagpipes at emperor penguins and that sort of thing.

But this is the first time filmmaking got serious with science in the Antarctic. And it transformed cinema, and people forget that. People tend to dismiss Ponting as Scott's photographer, but he actually pushed, you know, 19th century photography into 20th century photography. And he pioneered film. His was the first film to receive a royal command performance, which meant it was shown to the king. And every year ever since there's been a royal command film for the monarch of the period. And prior to that, that was an honor that was only given to the high arts, to opera and ballet and so on. So it was the birth of cinema in some ways, in this country anyway.

FLATOW: Hmm. This is a quite interesting book. It's quite beautiful with those photos that were brought back. Ed Larson, I always thought it was unusual that following Scott's and his party's death and then - and after the winter was over and they went back and found the bodies, they didn't bring the bodies back with them. Why is that?

LARSON: Well, there were various reasons for that, but that's, I mean, look where they all ended? Shackleton and Amundsen also ended up in polar realms, and that's where their bodies lie. They had - first, it would have been awkward and difficult because then they'd have to - once they got them back, they'd have to bring them back on the ship. But here, they found them in the tent where they died. In a dramatic pose, actually, Wilson and Bowers are at the side in the attitude of sleep, and Scott is open with his arm flung out.

His sleeping bag half open, arms flung out across Wilson. They had with them the rocks, the geological specimens that they had collected. They had brought those all the way back to where they died. They had their diaries. They had their journals, which were written up, almost ready for publication. And it seemed fitting that at that place, they build a large cairn of ice.

Because what would happen would be then it would be covered over the years and sink down into the glacier, into the Ross Ice Shelf and then move gradually out to sea so that the best anybody can tell about this time, the chunk of ice that entombs Wilson, Bowers and Scott will break loose and float into the sea. And to the people on that expedition, that seemed to be the appropriate way to commemorate what they had achieved.

FLATOW: 1-800-989-8255. Let's see if we can get a phone call or two in here. Let's go to John(ph) in San Rafael, California. Hi, John.

JOHN: Hi, Ira. Thanks for taking my call. I'm a biologist who studies whales. And a lot of the historical information that we have about whales and whale biology comes from the pioneering works that the British did in the Antarctic, the British Antarctic survey folks. And also one of the tools that we use as whale biologists now is photography to document individuals and follow individuals over time. So it struck me how important the books that your two guests have are to the field of marine biology and studying whales specifically. So I'm looking forward to reading both books, and all that work in the Antarctic was so critical to what we know about whales today.

FLATOW: Let me just remind everybody that I'm Ira Flatow and this is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR. Go ahead. Did you want to react to that?

LARSON: Well, reaching his point, he's absolutely correct. I want to thank the caller for his observations. The Discovery expedition, which was Scott's first, was designed to follow up on the great Challenger expedition, the expedition of the British of the 1880s, which went around into the Southern Ocean. And that was designed in part to follow up on Ross's expedition and on before that on Cook's. So it was a series of British expeditions, and many of these were designed with a part in mind whales.

Whales were important part of the economy then. They were monitoring the whales. Scott was very interested in the whales. They did take the photographs. David has beautifully described the type of photographic work they did, and I agree with him. I studied it closely. They viewed this as an integral part of the scientific research they were doing. That was also part of the reason why they moved to filming, to catch movies, to make movies of the whales and especially the penguins.

They'd come back from the Discovery expedition, says, no one can capture these penguins unless you do it with a movie. And so Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott came back, in part, to capture these penguins and the way they moved in movies, partly for entertainment to be sure, and certainly they are entertaining and they become a rage in Edwardian England, but also as a part of - as a critical part of scientific research. So the penguins, the whales, the seals, this was a central part of what all these expeditions were about.

FLATOW: David, did they actually have a darkroom down there in Antarctica?

WILSON: They did have a darkroom. Ponting had his own dark room in the hut in which he developed a lot of the film. He actually had the only private space in the expedition hut. So they certainly took it seriously. On the precise question of whales, the Terra Nova expedition was equipped to sample whales in the Antarctic. They took with them some harpoons and things. My great uncle at the time was involved in one of the great illustrative projects illustrating the standard work of British mammals. And the third volume of which was never published because he died was on the Cetacea. And he wasn't terribly happy with the paintings and illustrations he'd made, and he wanted to study whales in more depth.

But they'd also spotted species on the Discovery expedition, they though were new species and they wanted to see if they could collect samples, which is why they took the harpoons with them and so on. So they were certainly very, very interested in studying the whales, and the Natural History Museum was interested in them bringing specimens home.

FLATOW: Ed...

WILSON: But...

FLATOW: Oh, I'm sorry, I just want to interrupt because we only got a minute left. I want to touch on one thing that was quite interesting to learn about, Ed, and that was about that they were also studying global warming at that time here.

LARSON: Oh, they were tremendously interested in global warming because they had - by this time, during the 1800s, they discovered that Europe had once been covered by glaciers and that the shape of Europe was shaped by these glacial retreats. And they very much - it was very much part of the itinerary for the Discovery expedition and then the Nimrod and the Terra Nova was that this is one place where they could study the glaciers that are still of the size that were in Europe.

They noted the retreat, and they documented the retreat of the glaciers in Antarctica. They were talking about - they were trying to study how much it retreated, how it moved out of dry valleys. Scott had discovered the first dry valleys in the Antarctic during his Discovery expedition. They were documenting global warming, climate change over time.

FLATOW: Quite interesting. And let me just repeat the names of the books. They're terrific books. "An Empire of Ice: Scott, Shackleton, and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Science" by Edward Larson. And David Wilson is author of "The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott: Unseen Images from the Legendary Antarctic Expedition." David, are there any other photos left? Do you think you have them all?

WILSON: Oh, I don't know. I know we don't have them all, and I'm rather hoping that, like your lady caller earlier, somebody's got them hiding in their attic. And if they have, perhaps they'd call you and tell me.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: Well, we have the number. We'll get you in touch with her and see. She did mention something about polar bears, so we're not quite sure that's the south - Antarctica or not. So maybe he went some other places and had some other photos also. So thank you both for taking time to be with us today. And great...

LARSON: You're welcome.

WILSON: Thank you so much.

FLATOW: ...great books. Thank you for writing them.

Have a great weekend. Don't forget to turn that clock. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flatow in New York.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

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Science Diction: The Origin Of 'Bunsen Burner'

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Every high school chemist has no doubt fiddled with a Bunsen burner—but where did the apparatus get its name? Science historian Howard Markel talks about the German chemist Robert Bunsen, and why his experiments necessitated the invention of the gas burner still in use today.

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(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: The alphabet has only 26 letters. With these 26 magic symbols, however, millions of words are written every day.

FLATOW: Ah, that music means it's time for our monthly episode of Science Diction, where we talk about the origin of scientific words with Howard Markel, professor of history of medicine, University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Welcome, Howard.

HOWARD MARKEL: Hi, Ira. How are you?

FLATOW: What word do we have today?

MARKEL: Well, it's a great one. It's the Bunsen burner.

FLATOW: Oh, the Bunsen burner.

MARKEL: And we all know what it is. It's the iconic symbol of high school chemistry. But how many people know who Bunsen was?

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: You're right.

MARKEL: And he was a brilliant chemist, Robert Bunsen was his name. And he was a graduate of the University of Gottingen where his father was the chief librarian. But he actually created with some laboratory assistants the Bunsen burner or the gas burner in 1855. Now, chemistry - these chemists have arguing for years over who deserves the credit. Bunsen and a colleague named Henry Roscoe actually wrote it up in 1857.

But, you know, there were prototypical gas burners even before that, from the 1820s on. But those earlier forms used to produce diffuse and flickering light, and they also would - they were very flammable, no pun intended, and if you didn't put a metal wire over - a mesh, the flames would get all over the place, but that introduced artifactual colors and soot and all other things like that.

FLATOW: Mm-hmm. And was it really basically the same one we have today? No...

MARKEL: Pretty much. I mean, there's been a few, you know, tweaks here and there. But, you know, it's kind of neat. You know, all great laboratory equipment is the result of doing experiments. And Bunsen and his colleagues were trying to look at the spectral analysis of elements and compounds. They had a theory that each compound or element had a fingerprint if you lit it, if you burned it. And you could measure that through a prism.

So that was really novel, but they didn't have a good source of heat to do that. These earlier flames would just be, you know, not sufficient. And they figured this out one day when they - I'm sure you remember doing this in eighth grade - they burned a piece of magnesium. You remember that?

FLATOW: Oh, yeah. Pretty hot.

MARKEL: I can still see that bright light, that bright white light. And then they said, well, maybe other compounds have this as well. So they needed the right type of heat source. And you know, the great unsung heroes of science, I think, are the apparatus beakers, you know, before there, you know, Erlenmeyer flasks. Someone had to blow those and make them. And the same thing with the Bunsen burner was a very neat guy named Peter Desaga. And this - he toyed with the length of the tube and the width of the tube so that created a colorless, sootless flame. It was very hot. It didn't flicker, and it didn't need that wire mesh, so it didn't introduce any artifactual colors.

FLATOW: And there you have it. Thank you, Howard.

MARKEL: Thanks a lot, Ira.

FLATOW: Always a pleasure. Howard Markel, professor of the history of medicine, University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, also director of the Center for the History of Medicine there.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

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Dance Your Ph.D.: When Science People Shake A Tail Feather, Everybody Wins

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UPDATE: The grand prize winner is Joel Miller, for his "Microstructure-Property relationships in Ti2448 components produced by Selective Laser Melting: A Love Story." See that and the other winners here.

Every now and then, you learn about something so amazing that you're instantly (1) cheered that you know about it now, and (2) sad for yourself that you never knew about it before.

That's how I felt when Andrew Prince at NPR's science desk told me about Dance Your Ph.D., a contest in which people who work in the sciences — physics, chemistry, biology and social science — create videos of dance interpretations of their Ph.D. theses, and they compete for a $1,000 prize. (NPR covered the contest back in 2008; I was somehow in bed at the time.)

Now, the risk, naturally, is that this will just become a contest to make the most slickly produced music video, so they have a rule. As stated in the FAQ, "The author of the Ph.D. thesis has to be one of the dancers." So there's no hiring all your hot friends to do the dancing while you do the thinking. No no! This is Dance YOUR Ph.D., not Dance Your Less Coordinated Friend's Ph.D.

This year's winner is being announced today in Brussels (where else would you do it?). You can watch the finalists here, including this man-teaches-robot-to-dance video that utterly delighted me. The technical title is "Human-Based Percussion and Self-Similarity Detection in Electroacoustic Music." You can probably tell that from the dancing, though.

Then there's this one. I don't understand it, but I like it. "The Effect Of Western-Style Diet Consumption On Epigenetic Patterns." (So don't steal that title for YOUR YouTube video.)

Later this afternoon, we'll be back with an update on the winner. But let's face it: these people are all winners already, and I mean that with nothing but sincerity.

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When Politics Meets Science

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October 14, 2011

Audio for this story from Talk of the Nation will be available at approx. 6:00 p.m. ET

In his new book, Fool Me Twice, writer Shawn Otto tells why he thinks science is under assault in America. Otto, CEO and co-founder of Science Debate 2008, also explains why his "American Science Pledge" for candidates might bring more science into political decision making.

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Science Diction: The Origin Of The Word 'Epilepsy'

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Humans have long suffered from epilepsy, the neurological disorder hallmarked by sudden seizures. Medical historian Howard Markel discusses the condition's names through the millenia, from the "sacred disease" of ancient texts to its description as "the falling sickness" in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

IRA FLATOW, host: Up next, it's time for our monthly episode of Science Diction, where we explore the origins of scientific words with Howard Markel, professor of the history of medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY. Welcome back.

HOWARD MARKEL: Hello, Ira.

FLATOW: Tell us what the word is today. Is it...

MARKEL: The word today is epilepsy.

FLATOW: Epilepsy.

MARKEL: A very odd word. It's - as we know today, of course, it's an abnormal firing of neurons in the brain that leads to some abnormal movements of one part of the body or another, depending on what part of the brain is affected. But for a long time, that disease was terribly feared, and many people thought it was a sacred disease, that somehow people were struck by either a god or a devil to have this uncontrollable movement. And it's very frightening to watch, actually, and so people were very nervous when they saw other people seize.

FLATOW: Mmm. It seems like, at one point or another, Hippocrates described every disease and disorder out there.

MARKEL: He did. You could always rely on Hippocrates. You know, there is a Greek - word - there's always, there's many Greek words, actually.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

MARKEL: But this one, epilambanem - in len, there's epilepsia - and that literally means to seize or to be taken hold of. And Hippocrates wrote a wonderful treatise called "On the Sacred Diseases." And he said, you know, he described epilepsy to a T because he was such a good observer, but he said this disease is no more sacred than any other disease.

It's affecting some part of the brain, and he explained it in the way he understood the body in terms of four bodily humors and so on. But he was the first one to actually strike out against it being a part of evil or doing bad or a weakness of character or something like that. And he did not like that name. Later on, it became the falling sickness, and that's what it was called for millennia. And, really, even in the English language, for a long time it was referred to as the falling sickness, but that all changed around 1578.

FLATOW: Mm-hmm. I'm Ira Flatow. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR, talking with Howard Markel about the definition of the word epilepsy. When did anybody - you say it's a falling sickness. Is that because they were able to define it as a real illness?

MARKEL: Well, yeah. I mean, now epilepsy, we know, is really many disorders...

FLATOW: Right.

MARKEL: ...40 or 50 disorders that include seizures. But when people suffered from what used to be called grand mal seizures or, you know, generalized seizures, they would often fall down. And it struck them, and they fell down or they started seizing. And it was not a bad name. But Henry Lyte in 1578 - he was a famous British botanist - translated another botanist book called "Cruydeboeck" by Rembert Dodoens. He was a Flemish botanist. And there were some recipes of how to treat seizures in there. And Lyte preferred the word epilepsy to falling sickness, and so he used that translation. But, you know, it took another couple of decades.

And it wasn't - of course, you know, if you talk about the Greeks and the Bible, then you have to have Shakespeare. Shakespeare described epilepsy in 1599 in his famous play "Julius Caesar." Now, Julius Caesar did have epilepsy, and Cassius describes him as having, quote, "the falling sickness." But what's really neat is, about a few years later in 1603, in "Othello," Shakespeare describes him as raging and foaming as if he has fallen into epilepsy. And, again, the following year in 1604, in "King Lear," Kent talks to Oswald and says, a plague upon your epileptic visage. That would be a good thing in the playground to say to someone you don't like. But after that, epilepsy really took hold, and it became the way we describe this falling sickness.

FLATOW: Yeah. And a lot of famous historical people had it.

MARKEL: Yeah, epilepsy, or at least seizures. You know, there was Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Dostoyevsky, my favorite - one of my favorite novelists. And, in fact, he gave his character Raskolnikov in "Crime and Punishment" epilepsy, as well. And probably the most humorous if you're an Abbott and Costello fan, Bud Abbott had epilepsy.

FLATOW: Had no idea.

MARKEL: Yeah. He was not on first when it came to that problem.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: I'm glad you said it and I didn't, because I would have.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: Do we know, actually, what causes epilepsy?

MARKEL: Well, it depends on what type of epilepsy you have and what part of the brain has been affected. There are a number of causes. For example, if you injure your brain, say you hit your head against something or - and you caused some scarring of the brain tissue, that could be a cause. But so, too, can tumors or metabolic disorders. There are a number of causes that cause the syndrome of epilepsy.

FLATOW: Is it an easy word to research?

MARKEL: Well, yeah, it is. I mean, you know, you start with the Oxford English Dictionary, as I always do, and then you work your way back, and then you start finding out who these people are. So, Hippocrates is easy, and I had known...

FLATOW: Yeah.

MARKEL: ..."On the Sacred Diseases" for my days in graduate school. But I got to meet Henry Lyte along the way, and it's always a great excuse to read Shakespeare.

FLATOW: Yeah. And it's interesting that Shakespeare did incorporate it.

MARKEL: He did. And there's so many, I mean, he was such a wonderful observer of human nature and things that affected human beings. And so there's lots of medicine and science to be described in the plays of Shakespeare.

FLATOW: Yeah. Well, Howard, once again, you've done it again.

MARKEL: Well, thank you, Ira.

FLATOW: When you figure out what that is, you let me know.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

MARKEL: Yeah. We'll see who's on first then, huh?

FLATOW: All right. Have a good weekend. Howard Markel is professor of the history of medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, also director of the Center for the History of Medicine there. And if you want to read more about epilepsy, check out our website. It's sciencefriday.com. And we'll give you a whole bunch of stuff there.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

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Christians Divided Over Science Of Human Origins

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Barbara Bradley Hagerty, religion correspondent, NPR
Daniel Harlow, religion professor, Calvin College
Albert Mohler, president, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

The story of Adam and Eve is a primary belief for many Christians. Some Christian scholars argue that research on the human genome shows that modern humans did not descend from the Biblical couple, and that Christianity must find a way to reconcile modern science and religious beliefs.

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Disagreement over the science of human origins is creating tension within the Christian faith.

Guests got to see a photo exhibit of children from more than 160 countries who live in New York.

A Roman Catholic monastery in North Dakota is putting its ranching operation out to pasture.

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Science Looks At The Sibling Effect

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Are you a first-born? A middle child? A twin? An only child? In his new book The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us, author Jeffrey Kluger describes current scientific research into the effects of siblings on human behavior, from birth order studies to sibling rivalries and fighting.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

IRA FLATOW, host: Next up, do you have a brother or a sister, maybe even more than one, and have you ever wondered how your life might have been different had you not had siblings or if you had been the oldest, the youngest or a middle child or if you had a lot of other siblings?

In recent years, scientists have been working to tease out what effect siblings have on people. Siblings always fight. You know, for example, is that sibling rivalry a good thing? What if it extends into adulthood? Is that a positive thing? How does that affect you?

Joining me now to talk about it is Jeffrey Kluger, he is senior editor and writer at Time magazine author of "The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us," just out from Riverhead. He's here in our New York studios. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.

JEFFREY KLUGER: Thanks for having.

FLATOW: So did you discover anything about yourself from doing this research? Do you have any brothers and sisters?

KLUGER: I have multiple brothers and sisters. I have three full brothers. I have a half-brother and a half-sister. There was a time when I had two step-sisters. And in addition to being scientifically and journalistically fascinated with the topic and having done a lot of work on it, I'm also intimately involved with it and have been profoundly shaped by those relationships.

FLATOW: Does it matter which order you are?

KLUGER: It does, and birth order is one of those rare things that the average person came upon even before scientists really began realizing it. The population had it right before the folks in the labs did. And it is essentially, very broadly, true that firstborns will be the most successful. They will be the ones who earn the most. They will be the ones who are most loyal to the family, most driven to achieve in traditional ways.

They will also be the tallest, even if it's only by a few centimeters, and they tend to have higher IQs by about three points over the second-born.

FLATOW: Well, that explains all my shortcomings.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

FLATOW: You're listening to SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. We're talking with Jeffrey Kluger. New book out: "The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us." 1-800-989-8255. For good or bad, siblings can teach us about new things. You know, you depend on your older brother or sister to teach you how to cook, how to throw a baseball, whatever.

Does this carry over into later life somehow? Does it affect us for how we deal with other people?

KLUGER: Absolutely, and one of the most profound effects siblings have on you is that area of conflict resolution skills, that area of relationship formation and maintenance. And, you know, what I - the analogy I like to use is that what goes on in the playroom is a little bit like kittens wrestling.

Kittens aren't really trying to hurt one another when they bite each other in the neck. They always hold back. But what they learn and what they learn when they're wrestling is what they'll use later when they do kill a mouse.

When kids are in playrooms, those skills they practice again and again and again are taken out with them to the playground and to the classroom and to life later on. And a lot of studies do show that conflict resolution skills that are evident when kids are two tend to be used when kids are five, and they're in preschool and kindergarten.

FLATOW: So if you resolved your conflict by batting your brother over the head with a toy, is that what you're going to do later in life?

KLUGER: Well, only to a point, because at some point you go to prison for that.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

KLUGER: But yes, one study did show that, particularly among boys, since they tend to be more pugilistic than girls, particularly among boys, physical fighting at home does tend to translate to a greater likelihood of physical fighting at school then later on. Now, again, obviously in adulthood you're not going to be slugging people in bars without getting busted for it, but it does mean that your conflict resolution skills will be worse, and you'll tend to revert to verbal violence or verbal hostility.

FLATOW: If you went to your parents instead and sought their ability to resolve it, does that also carry over?

KLUGER: Well, yeah, the ability to seek wise intervention certainly carries over, and I tell my two school-age children that all the time. You know, come to me first. Let me see what you can - you know, let's see if we can resolve it, although there is - one of the canards that a lot of parenting texts will teach is that unless kids are killing each other in the playroom, you really should stay out and let them resolve those things.

And there is truth to the fact that parents can't possibly police every fight. They would do nothing else. But when kids - when parents do intervene, they help kids learn more sophisticated conflict resolution skills, like the ability to apply a resolution that they learn in Tuesday's fight to Friday's fight, if Friday is about the same thing.

If kids don't get parental intervention, it's sort of like "Groundhog Day," they keep having the same fight again and again.

FLATOW: As baby boomers are aging, are they finding solace in their siblings?

KLUGER: Absolutely, and one of the points I make, one of the most salient points I make, is that siblings are the longest relationships we'll ever have in our lives. Our parents leave us too soon, our spouses and our kids come along too late. As baby boomers age, a lot of us are getting into our 80s and our 90s and beyond, and by definition one spouse is going to outlive another.

So a lot of people are going to wind up in senior adulthood without a husband or wife, their kids have scattered to other cities, and the only people left at the dance will be the ones what brung them, which is their brothers and sisters.

FLATOW: And looking at it from the other direction, these - the baby boomers have aging parents that need to have special care now.

KLUGER: That's right.

FLATOW: I have seen cases where people - in both ways, where siblings who haven't spoken to each other in years are now forced to come back and share the care.

KLUGER: Right, that's right, and this is one area that I also stress, a couple of points. First of all, this raises favoritism issues among a lot of kids because, you know, if the older brother has always been mom's and dad's superstar, but it's the sister who happens to live in the city as the parents, and she suddenly winds up taking care of them, you know, there's a good reason for some resentment there if he's off making millions of dollars on Wall Street.

So it is a good time not to relitigate those fights of childhood but at least to try to see if you can resolve them.

Also, the idea that - one study showed that about 10, 15 percent of sibling relationships truly are so toxic that they're - that they're irreparable. But 85 percent are anywhere from fixable to terrific. And you know, the argument I make, particularly when it comes to taking care of aging parents, is if you can fix them, do. Your sibs are just such a resource.

FLATOW: I have seen cases where people have come back together, you know, have rediscovered a little bit of something in common, in taking care of mom and dad, or mom.

KLUGER: That's right, and hardship can often do that. That's one of the reasons that you find that when siblings - when parents divorce, siblings as a rule tend to get closer rather than further apart, because the two anchors in your life, mom and dad, are becoming completely unmooored. So the sibs tend to hold more tightly. That's what happened in my family.

FLATOW: Yeah. Is it easy or hard to do research about siblings?

KLUGER: It's both easy and hard, and that's not just the easy answer. The hard reason is that it's only about 15 years ago that scientists really began pouring themselves into this because the belief was always that siblings are fungible. They're household inventory. You stock your shelves with them, and the only limit to how many kids parents had is sperm, eggs and economics. As long as they can have them and support them, they should keep doing it.

They have none of the uniqueness of parents or your own kids. So the research didn't really begin until 15-or-so years ago in any vigorous way. But now that it's begun, it's easy to do it because so many people are piling into the field, and so many people like to talk about it.

We're all informed by our sibling experiences. We either had them or were raising them. Some people were only children who have no kids, but that's a rather small minority.

FLATOW: But it's got to be difficult to do a case-controlled experiment, right, on real people and real families?

KLUGER: That's exactly right, and that's one of the concerns. But again, that's a concern of all social and anthropological and psychological sciences, that they don't have the empirical neatness of physics or chemistry. So you do have to do more studies. You have to build up a massive body of work before you can begin to say correcting for all of the other variables.

That's also one of the reasons siblings, sibling research used to turn scientists off because the variables are so numerous. There's gender. There's age. There's age gap. There's the number of siblings. There's income. There's culture. There's education. There were just too many X factors.

FLATOW: Here's our number, 1-800-989-8255, talking with Jeffrey Kluger, author of "The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us." Here's an interesting tweet from MotherlodeBeth(ph), who says: My brother is 17 years older than me. So I was raised as an only child.

KLUGER: And that's a great observation, and that often does happen, that the gap becomes so big that your older sibling is effectively an uncle or aunt. We have some friends - my older daughter has a friend who's her age, 10 years old, and she has two older brothers who are 24 and 25. But, you know, their parents just decided to have a third child, and they're very much her sort of de facto uncles.

FLATOW: Let's go to David in Birmingham, Alabama. Hi, David.

DAVID: Hello, thank you for having me on. I'm a first-time caller, listen to your show all the time.

FLATOW: Thank you.

DAVID: When I heard today's subject, my ears particularly picked up. I'm the oldest of three boys. My parents divorced when I was 11, and then I picked up a stepsister, and then my dad and his wife adopted three additional children. So my kingdom went from the oldest of three to the oldest of seven.

And you talk about resolution conflict, and the things that you have to learn growing up - I feel like I'm a much more successful adult in dealing with my adult relationships now due to the unique dynamics of my childhood siblings.

I'm on my second marriage to a single child, and it's just been really interesting, especially with this new marriage, the fact that, you know, when she comes to my family reunions, well, we have a lot of people. When I go to hers, you know, it's basically her and her parents.

I guess I was just wondering: Do you see a lot of conflict, or are you aware of a lot of conflict in your studies, between those people who have married into a family with lots of siblings?

FLATOW: All right, thanks for the call.

KLUGER: There doesn't seem to be a lot of conflict in that area. You're absolutely right, though, that kids who grow up in a single-child playroom and kids who grow up in a multiple-child playroom tend to have different approaches to the world and tend to have somewhat different conflict resolution skills.

But the idea of the extended family is a very powerful one and often works, particularly when sibs have been disparate, to pull them back together. Now, you see this a lot in situations in which siblings have drifted, but suddenly there's a whole passel of next-generation cousins, and the gravity of those cousins tends to pull the families back together as well.

So you see the salutary benefit of a later generation in healing old sib differences.

FLATOW: We've had a - he brought up the only child. We've had a lot of questions come in, tweets come in about only children. Tell us something about them.

KLUGER: Well, there's a whole chapter in the book devoted to the two far ends of the sibling relationship: multiple births and only children. G. Stanley Hall, a psychologist at the beginning of the 21st - 20th century, infamously said being an only child is a disease in itself. And that kind of wrongheaded thinking informed psychology for a long time. There have been a wealth of studies since then, and they've shown a few things. First of all, it is obviously true that you get a kind of socialization in a multi-child playroom that you don't get in a single-child playroom.

However, there are so many compensating variables now in a culture in which two-income households are much more common. Both parents are working. There's no full-time mom at home. So kids are winding up in daycare when they're four and five months old. Both of my daughters were. So they get socialization there. We lament the idea of the overscheduled child who, you know, finish his classes at three in the afternoon, but isn't home from soccer and swim and chess club until six.

Well, yes, we should look at how heavily we're scheduled in our kids. But for only children, that's three more hours of socialization in which that kid learns outside the home when he's not learning in the home. That's not to say it's easier. It is to say that the compensating factors are there. It's also important to note that single children tend to skew higher in a lot of qualities we value. They tend to have better vocabularies. They tend to have a more sophisticated grasp of current events. They tend to have more sophisticated senses of humor, all because they're living in a home in which they're outnumbered by adults two-to-one.

FLATOW: And as far as leadership, if I recall, I'm just going off my memory from the old astronaut days. Weren't the early astronauts - tended to be single children?

KLUGER: Well, I think 21 of the first 23 astronauts were either firstborns or only children. And, you know, firstborns and only children get a lot of the same benefits.

FLATOW: Is there - did you find any research, people - they set out to plan their family in advance. Is there an optimum number of children for them to plan for?

KLUGER: There really isn't. Again, nature says the optimum number is 50. And if you can have...

FLATOW: Fifty?

KLUGER: ...51 - well, because nature just wants genes. They just, you know...

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

KLUGER: ...reproducing is a genetically narcissistic act. So all you want to do is get as many genes as possible across to the next generation. For the kids themselves, it's all about - it's also about survival. But in this case, it's about competing for precious resources - food, love, attention from mom and dad. You know, if you've got 10 chicks in the nest and mom only has nine worms, someone's going to go hungry. If mom only has five worms, you're in big trouble, which is one of the reasons that we're so hardwired for sibling competitiveness. And it's one of the reasons we all jostle for attention.

FLATOW: Mm-hmm. 1-800-989-8255 is our number if you'd like to talk about siblings in the few minutes we have left here. We're talking with Jeffrey Kluger, author of "The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us," on SCIENCE FRIDAY, from NPR. I'm Ira Flatow, heading over to the phones. Let's see if we've got - we've got an interesting caller, from - Michelle in Merced, California. Hi, Michelle.

MICHELLE: Hi. It's really exciting to speak with you.

FLATOW: Well, thank you. It's exciting to talk to you, too.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: Go ahead.

MICHELLE: My question was actually, when you started describing - I'm the youngest of two siblings. I have an older sister of three years. And when you just started describing the traits of the older sibling, I realized that we're almost the exact opposite of what you described. I'm taller. I actually have a much better career. I'm much closer to the family. And I would actually describe us having a rather toxic relationship. We can barely be in the same room together.

But when my father remarried, I actually gained two step-siblings, an older sister and an older brother by about 12 to 15 years. And I find I'm much, much closer to them, like I can call them on the phone. I can spend holidays with them. And I was wondering if you found anything in your research that maybe described the relationship of a younger sibling not having a good enough relationship with their blood sibling and, like, attaching to a step-sibling.

KLUGER: Sure. There's a lot of research that touches on all those things. First, keep in mind that, you know, the science behind this is - it's hard genetic science. It's hard behavioral science. And in that sense, we all come with essentially the same software preloaded. But layered on top of that - in human beings, as opposed to in other animals - there's a whole suite of other factors in play. There's compassion and there's anger and there's tenderness and there's resentment. And there are all the other things that can confound the underlying rules.

So there are plenty of exceptions to these rules, which is why it doesn't surprise me that by no means does every birth order - or birth order of traits consistent across families. In terms of finding that kind of kinship in step-siblings, that's very common, and a very healthy compensation that - that people come up with. Only children, for example, will tend to find sibling kinship in their cousins.

They'll gather a group of de facto siblings around them. Step-siblings can be - can serve an equivalent function, both when kids are only children, and when they have fraught relationships with their blood siblings. In addition, step-siblings and families - now, your case is a little bit different, because the ages sound a little bit off. But step-siblings and families, if that family is fused young enough and the family can survive a good threshold - it's about six years - if the family can survive six years or so, the difference is that separate a step-sibling from a real sibling tend to vanish entirely. And, in fact, step-sibling relationships can be a little less challenging, because they don't have that early-life competition for the resources of the same parents.

FLATOW: All right...

MICHELLE: What would you say would be young enough to have that fusing between the sibling and the step-sibling?

KLUGER: Well, again, any age. I mean, if you - if the kids are young enough that they're going to get a good six years in one another's company, that's usually a good cutoff point. But remember, anything that happens very young, kids are more impressionable. Young kids don't need as much from a new parent, as long as the new parent loves them and shows them attention and is willing to get goofy with them, they'll fall in love with that new parent. So the younger they are, the better they are. But figure 12 is the upper limit of where you want to begin introducing these things.

FLATOW: All right. Thanks for calling. Was there - about a minute left. Any quick surprise you found when you - about yourself when you did research, something that jumped out?

KLUGER: Well, I think one of the things I found was - had to do with my half-brother and half-sister. We didn't meet them. I knew they existed. But we didn't get to know them until my full brothers and I were in our 30s, and they were in their 20s. And I never would have thought that with all of the deep, deep immersion I had and all the challenges my brothers and I went through together, that I would have been able to forge anything like that level of intimacy with my half-brother and half-sister. And we have. That was about 20 years ago. And, you know, as I said, the step-sibling and full-sibling lines can separate and - or it can begin to vanish, and so can the half and full.

FLATOW: Well, thank you, Jeffrey, for coming in. Great book. Jeffrey Kluger's book "The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us." We're going to take a break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about, oh, how to join a club to make anything you want to. So stay with us. We'll be right back after this break.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

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Science Looks At The Sibling Effect

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Are you a first-born? A middle child? A twin? An only child? In his new book The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us, author Jeffrey Kluger describes current scientific research into the effects of siblings on human behavior, from birth order studies to sibling rivalries and fighting.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

IRA FLATOW, host: Next up, do you have a brother or a sister, maybe even more than one, and have you ever wondered how your life might have been different had you not had siblings or if you had been the oldest, the youngest or a middle child or if you had a lot of other siblings?

In recent years, scientists have been working to tease out what effect siblings have on people. Siblings always fight. You know, for example, is that sibling rivalry a good thing? What if it extends into adulthood? Is that a positive thing? How does that affect you?

Joining me now to talk about it is Jeffrey Kluger, he is senior editor and writer at Time magazine author of "The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us," just out from Riverhead. He's here in our New York studios. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.

JEFFREY KLUGER: Thanks for having.

FLATOW: So did you discover anything about yourself from doing this research? Do you have any brothers and sisters?

KLUGER: I have multiple brothers and sisters. I have three full brothers. I have a half-brother and a half-sister. There was a time when I had two step-sisters. And in addition to being scientifically and journalistically fascinated with the topic and having done a lot of work on it, I'm also intimately involved with it and have been profoundly shaped by those relationships.

FLATOW: Does it matter which order you are?

KLUGER: It does, and birth order is one of those rare things that the average person came upon even before scientists really began realizing it. The population had it right before the folks in the labs did. And it is essentially, very broadly, true that firstborns will be the most successful. They will be the ones who earn the most. They will be the ones who are most loyal to the family, most driven to achieve in traditional ways.

They will also be the tallest, even if it's only by a few centimeters, and they tend to have higher IQs by about three points over the second-born.

FLATOW: Well, that explains all my shortcomings.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

FLATOW: You're listening to SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. We're talking with Jeffrey Kluger. New book out: "The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us." 1-800-989-8255. For good or bad, siblings can teach us about new things. You know, you depend on your older brother or sister to teach you how to cook, how to throw a baseball, whatever.

Does this carry over into later life somehow? Does it affect us for how we deal with other people?

KLUGER: Absolutely, and one of the most profound effects siblings have on you is that area of conflict resolution skills, that area of relationship formation and maintenance. And, you know, what I - the analogy I like to use is that what goes on in the playroom is a little bit like kittens wrestling.

Kittens aren't really trying to hurt one another when they bite each other in the neck. They always hold back. But what they learn and what they learn when they're wrestling is what they'll use later when they do kill a mouse.

When kids are in playrooms, those skills they practice again and again and again are taken out with them to the playground and to the classroom and to life later on. And a lot of studies do show that conflict resolution skills that are evident when kids are two tend to be used when kids are five, and they're in preschool and kindergarten.

FLATOW: So if you resolved your conflict by batting your brother over the head with a toy, is that what you're going to do later in life?

KLUGER: Well, only to a point, because at some point you go to prison for that.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

KLUGER: But yes, one study did show that, particularly among boys, since they tend to be more pugilistic than girls, particularly among boys, physical fighting at home does tend to translate to a greater likelihood of physical fighting at school then later on. Now, again, obviously in adulthood you're not going to be slugging people in bars without getting busted for it, but it does mean that your conflict resolution skills will be worse, and you'll tend to revert to verbal violence or verbal hostility.

FLATOW: If you went to your parents instead and sought their ability to resolve it, does that also carry over?

KLUGER: Well, yeah, the ability to seek wise intervention certainly carries over, and I tell my two school-age children that all the time. You know, come to me first. Let me see what you can - you know, let's see if we can resolve it, although there is - one of the canards that a lot of parenting texts will teach is that unless kids are killing each other in the playroom, you really should stay out and let them resolve those things.

And there is truth to the fact that parents can't possibly police every fight. They would do nothing else. But when kids - when parents do intervene, they help kids learn more sophisticated conflict resolution skills, like the ability to apply a resolution that they learn in Tuesday's fight to Friday's fight, if Friday is about the same thing.

If kids don't get parental intervention, it's sort of like "Groundhog Day," they keep having the same fight again and again.

FLATOW: As baby boomers are aging, are they finding solace in their siblings?

KLUGER: Absolutely, and one of the points I make, one of the most salient points I make, is that siblings are the longest relationships we'll ever have in our lives. Our parents leave us too soon, our spouses and our kids come along too late. As baby boomers age, a lot of us are getting into our 80s and our 90s and beyond, and by definition one spouse is going to outlive another.

So a lot of people are going to wind up in senior adulthood without a husband or wife, their kids have scattered to other cities, and the only people left at the dance will be the ones what brung them, which is their brothers and sisters.

FLATOW: And looking at it from the other direction, these - the baby boomers have aging parents that need to have special care now.

KLUGER: That's right.

FLATOW: I have seen cases where people - in both ways, where siblings who haven't spoken to each other in years are now forced to come back and share the care.

KLUGER: Right, that's right, and this is one area that I also stress, a couple of points. First of all, this raises favoritism issues among a lot of kids because, you know, if the older brother has always been mom's and dad's superstar, but it's the sister who happens to live in the city as the parents, and she suddenly winds up taking care of them, you know, there's a good reason for some resentment there if he's off making millions of dollars on Wall Street.

So it is a good time not to relitigate those fights of childhood but at least to try to see if you can resolve them.

Also, the idea that - one study showed that about 10, 15 percent of sibling relationships truly are so toxic that they're - that they're irreparable. But 85 percent are anywhere from fixable to terrific. And you know, the argument I make, particularly when it comes to taking care of aging parents, is if you can fix them, do. Your sibs are just such a resource.

FLATOW: I have seen cases where people have come back together, you know, have rediscovered a little bit of something in common, in taking care of mom and dad, or mom.

KLUGER: That's right, and hardship can often do that. That's one of the reasons that you find that when siblings - when parents divorce, siblings as a rule tend to get closer rather than further apart, because the two anchors in your life, mom and dad, are becoming completely unmooored. So the sibs tend to hold more tightly. That's what happened in my family.

FLATOW: Yeah. Is it easy or hard to do research about siblings?

KLUGER: It's both easy and hard, and that's not just the easy answer. The hard reason is that it's only about 15 years ago that scientists really began pouring themselves into this because the belief was always that siblings are fungible. They're household inventory. You stock your shelves with them, and the only limit to how many kids parents had is sperm, eggs and economics. As long as they can have them and support them, they should keep doing it.

They have none of the uniqueness of parents or your own kids. So the research didn't really begin until 15-or-so years ago in any vigorous way. But now that it's begun, it's easy to do it because so many people are piling into the field, and so many people like to talk about it.

We're all informed by our sibling experiences. We either had them or were raising them. Some people were only children who have no kids, but that's a rather small minority.

FLATOW: But it's got to be difficult to do a case-controlled experiment, right, on real people and real families?

KLUGER: That's exactly right, and that's one of the concerns. But again, that's a concern of all social and anthropological and psychological sciences, that they don't have the empirical neatness of physics or chemistry. So you do have to do more studies. You have to build up a massive body of work before you can begin to say correcting for all of the other variables.

That's also one of the reasons siblings, sibling research used to turn scientists off because the variables are so numerous. There's gender. There's age. There's age gap. There's the number of siblings. There's income. There's culture. There's education. There were just too many X factors.

FLATOW: Here's our number, 1-800-989-8255, talking with Jeffrey Kluger, author of "The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us." Here's an interesting tweet from MotherlodeBeth(ph), who says: My brother is 17 years older than me. So I was raised as an only child.

KLUGER: And that's a great observation, and that often does happen, that the gap becomes so big that your older sibling is effectively an uncle or aunt. We have some friends - my older daughter has a friend who's her age, 10 years old, and she has two older brothers who are 24 and 25. But, you know, their parents just decided to have a third child, and they're very much her sort of de facto uncles.

FLATOW: Let's go to David in Birmingham, Alabama. Hi, David.

DAVID: Hello, thank you for having me on. I'm a first-time caller, listen to your show all the time.

FLATOW: Thank you.

DAVID: When I heard today's subject, my ears particularly picked up. I'm the oldest of three boys. My parents divorced when I was 11, and then I picked up a stepsister, and then my dad and his wife adopted three additional children. So my kingdom went from the oldest of three to the oldest of seven.

And you talk about resolution conflict, and the things that you have to learn growing up - I feel like I'm a much more successful adult in dealing with my adult relationships now due to the unique dynamics of my childhood siblings.

I'm on my second marriage to a single child, and it's just been really interesting, especially with this new marriage, the fact that, you know, when she comes to my family reunions, well, we have a lot of people. When I go to hers, you know, it's basically her and her parents.

I guess I was just wondering: Do you see a lot of conflict, or are you aware of a lot of conflict in your studies, between those people who have married into a family with lots of siblings?

FLATOW: All right, thanks for the call.

KLUGER: There doesn't seem to be a lot of conflict in that area. You're absolutely right, though, that kids who grow up in a single-child playroom and kids who grow up in a multiple-child playroom tend to have different approaches to the world and tend to have somewhat different conflict resolution skills.

But the idea of the extended family is a very powerful one and often works, particularly when sibs have been disparate, to pull them back together. Now, you see this a lot in situations in which siblings have drifted, but suddenly there's a whole passel of next-generation cousins, and the gravity of those cousins tends to pull the families back together as well.

So you see the salutary benefit of a later generation in healing old sib differences.

FLATOW: We've had a - he brought up the only child. We've had a lot of questions come in, tweets come in about only children. Tell us something about them.

KLUGER: Well, there's a whole chapter in the book devoted to the two far ends of the sibling relationship: multiple births and only children. G. Stanley Hall, a psychologist at the beginning of the 21st - 20th century, infamously said being an only child is a disease in itself. And that kind of wrongheaded thinking informed psychology for a long time. There have been a wealth of studies since then, and they've shown a few things. First of all, it is obviously true that you get a kind of socialization in a multi-child playroom that you don't get in a single-child playroom.

However, there are so many compensating variables now in a culture in which two-income households are much more common. Both parents are working. There's no full-time mom at home. So kids are winding up in daycare when they're four and five months old. Both of my daughters were. So they get socialization there. We lament the idea of the overscheduled child who, you know, finish his classes at three in the afternoon, but isn't home from soccer and swim and chess club until six.

Well, yes, we should look at how heavily we're scheduled in our kids. But for only children, that's three more hours of socialization in which that kid learns outside the home when he's not learning in the home. That's not to say it's easier. It is to say that the compensating factors are there. It's also important to note that single children tend to skew higher in a lot of qualities we value. They tend to have better vocabularies. They tend to have a more sophisticated grasp of current events. They tend to have more sophisticated senses of humor, all because they're living in a home in which they're outnumbered by adults two-to-one.

FLATOW: And as far as leadership, if I recall, I'm just going off my memory from the old astronaut days. Weren't the early astronauts - tended to be single children?

KLUGER: Well, I think 21 of the first 23 astronauts were either firstborns or only children. And, you know, firstborns and only children get a lot of the same benefits.

FLATOW: Is there - did you find any research, people - they set out to plan their family in advance. Is there an optimum number of children for them to plan for?

KLUGER: There really isn't. Again, nature says the optimum number is 50. And if you can have...

FLATOW: Fifty?

KLUGER: ...51 - well, because nature just wants genes. They just, you know...

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

KLUGER: ...reproducing is a genetically narcissistic act. So all you want to do is get as many genes as possible across to the next generation. For the kids themselves, it's all about - it's also about survival. But in this case, it's about competing for precious resources - food, love, attention from mom and dad. You know, if you've got 10 chicks in the nest and mom only has nine worms, someone's going to go hungry. If mom only has five worms, you're in big trouble, which is one of the reasons that we're so hardwired for sibling competitiveness. And it's one of the reasons we all jostle for attention.

FLATOW: Mm-hmm. 1-800-989-8255 is our number if you'd like to talk about siblings in the few minutes we have left here. We're talking with Jeffrey Kluger, author of "The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us," on SCIENCE FRIDAY, from NPR. I'm Ira Flatow, heading over to the phones. Let's see if we've got - we've got an interesting caller, from - Michelle in Merced, California. Hi, Michelle.

MICHELLE: Hi. It's really exciting to speak with you.

FLATOW: Well, thank you. It's exciting to talk to you, too.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: Go ahead.

MICHELLE: My question was actually, when you started describing - I'm the youngest of two siblings. I have an older sister of three years. And when you just started describing the traits of the older sibling, I realized that we're almost the exact opposite of what you described. I'm taller. I actually have a much better career. I'm much closer to the family. And I would actually describe us having a rather toxic relationship. We can barely be in the same room together.

But when my father remarried, I actually gained two step-siblings, an older sister and an older brother by about 12 to 15 years. And I find I'm much, much closer to them, like I can call them on the phone. I can spend holidays with them. And I was wondering if you found anything in your research that maybe described the relationship of a younger sibling not having a good enough relationship with their blood sibling and, like, attaching to a step-sibling.

KLUGER: Sure. There's a lot of research that touches on all those things. First, keep in mind that, you know, the science behind this is - it's hard genetic science. It's hard behavioral science. And in that sense, we all come with essentially the same software preloaded. But layered on top of that - in human beings, as opposed to in other animals - there's a whole suite of other factors in play. There's compassion and there's anger and there's tenderness and there's resentment. And there are all the other things that can confound the underlying rules.

So there are plenty of exceptions to these rules, which is why it doesn't surprise me that by no means does every birth order - or birth order of traits consistent across families. In terms of finding that kind of kinship in step-siblings, that's very common, and a very healthy compensation that - that people come up with. Only children, for example, will tend to find sibling kinship in their cousins.

They'll gather a group of de facto siblings around them. Step-siblings can be - can serve an equivalent function, both when kids are only children, and when they have fraught relationships with their blood siblings. In addition, step-siblings and families - now, your case is a little bit different, because the ages sound a little bit off. But step-siblings and families, if that family is fused young enough and the family can survive a good threshold - it's about six years - if the family can survive six years or so, the difference is that separate a step-sibling from a real sibling tend to vanish entirely. And, in fact, step-sibling relationships can be a little less challenging, because they don't have that early-life competition for the resources of the same parents.

FLATOW: All right...

MICHELLE: What would you say would be young enough to have that fusing between the sibling and the step-sibling?

KLUGER: Well, again, any age. I mean, if you - if the kids are young enough that they're going to get a good six years in one another's company, that's usually a good cutoff point. But remember, anything that happens very young, kids are more impressionable. Young kids don't need as much from a new parent, as long as the new parent loves them and shows them attention and is willing to get goofy with them, they'll fall in love with that new parent. So the younger they are, the better they are. But figure 12 is the upper limit of where you want to begin introducing these things.

FLATOW: All right. Thanks for calling. Was there - about a minute left. Any quick surprise you found when you - about yourself when you did research, something that jumped out?

KLUGER: Well, I think one of the things I found was - had to do with my half-brother and half-sister. We didn't meet them. I knew they existed. But we didn't get to know them until my full brothers and I were in our 30s, and they were in their 20s. And I never would have thought that with all of the deep, deep immersion I had and all the challenges my brothers and I went through together, that I would have been able to forge anything like that level of intimacy with my half-brother and half-sister. And we have. That was about 20 years ago. And, you know, as I said, the step-sibling and full-sibling lines can separate and - or it can begin to vanish, and so can the half and full.

FLATOW: Well, thank you, Jeffrey, for coming in. Great book. Jeffrey Kluger's book "The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us." We're going to take a break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about, oh, how to join a club to make anything you want to. So stay with us. We'll be right back after this break.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

View the original article here

Peliculas Online

Read More