Season 8

[SOUND EFFECT: Construction site sounds, used with permission under a Creative Commons License]

STEVE FRANDZEL: Construction work is a regular contender for the title of most dangerous job. The top causes of injury and death have even earned their own dark category: the Fatal Four: There’s falling, possibly from a great height. There’s being struck by an object, which could also be falling from a great height. There’s electrocution. And there’s something called “caught in between”: getting pinched or crushed between, say, equipment and a wall, or between two steel beams. And on and on in countless combinations. Hands are often the unfortunate victims. On a construction site, almost everything can turn against workers.

[MUSIC: Impending Boom, by Kevin MacLeod, used under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License]

Tools become projectiles and unintentional weapons. A moment of inattention can turn into a long nightmare of pain, disability and recovery. The toll in human suffering is impossible to reckon. But in the cold calculus of financial loss, the cost of on-the-job injuries and fatalities reaches tens of billions of dollars every year. There is some good news: The injury rate declined steadily from the early ‘90s until about 2007. But since then, it’s kind of leveled off.

JOHN GAMBATESE: And that plateau we think is predominantly due to the fact that we have eliminated the lower severity incidents. But now we are in a position where we are struggling to eliminate lower frequency but higher severity injuries.

FRANDZEL: That’s John Gambatese, a professor of civil and construction engineering. Before joining academia, he was an engineer in the San Francisco Bay area, where he evaluated and designed systems to guard structures against earthquakes. For much of his career since then, he’s focused on making construction work safer.

Early in our conversation, John said something I didn’t expect: The construction industry knows how to make the job safer. Workers know, too. Objectively, there’s no good reason why the work should hover at the apex of high-danger jobs. So what’s going on?

I’m your host, Steve Frandzel, and in this final episode of the season, which focused on health and safety, we’ll get some answers to that question. We’ll see how some very human traits get in the way of our own good. And we’ll find out what can be done to make construction work safer.

[MUSIC: The Ether Bunny, by Eyes Closed Audio, used with permission under a Creative Commons Attribution License]

GAMBATESE: We know how to be safe. All of us know how to be safe on the job or even in our regular life. I personally think that often we choose not to be safe, for whatever reason, and it boils down to risk and reward. So if I’m going to cross a street or I’m going to climb up a ladder, or I’m going to choose something to eat, I balance the risk of doing that action and the reward or the benefit of completing that action.

FRANDZEL: We all can relate to this simple idea. You’re in a hurry.

[MUSIC: Airliner, by Poddington Bear, used under an Attribution-NonCommercial 3.00 International License]

You decide to run across a busy road in the middle of the block. You’ve done it dozens of times. It’s no big deal. But it doesn’t always work out. If you get off lightly, an angry driver honks and offers you a one-handed gesture of, um, goodwill. You could also end up in the hospital. Or worse. But we assume we’re going to make it, right?

GAMBATESE: You may choose to do something in the right way, or maybe you may choose to take a shortcut, because you want to get it done fast. That’s the same thing on a construction site. We have competing priorities. We’ve got safety, costs, schedule, quality, all these things that we’re trying to balance.

FRANDZEL: Yet the gulf between knowing the right thing do and doing it every time can be huge. John gave and an example how easily our choices can change with circumstances. There’s a study where workers on a building site were asked to put on a harness. The gear would prevent them from falling.

GAMBATESE: And then, as part of the experiment they said, OK the first time we’re going to do it, it will take maybe 20 minutes to go get the fall-protection equipment, put it on and then go do the work. The next time they extended it to 30 minutes – took longer to put the fall-protection equipment on and go up, and then they extended it to maybe 40 minutes. And what they found was that the more time it took to put on that safety control, the workers were discounting the risk.

FRANDZEL: So the longer it took to prepare for the task, the more likely workers were to go ahead and start the job without putting on the gear. What changed? Well, it’s all in our heads.

[MUSIC: TipToes, by Myuu, used with permission of the artist]

GAMBATESE: About 90 percent of the incidents are related to human behavior. About 10 percent is related the working site conditions, and then a certain percentage is related to perhaps acts of God.

FRANDZEL: Wherever an accident occurs the cause will almost always come down to human foibles. Take your pick. Forgetfulness, distraction, overconfidence, time pressure, money, ignorance, stress, fatigue, stubbornness, or just the mindset of “that stuff doesn’t happen to me.” But it does, and when it does, it’s usually because we made bad decisions despite good intentions.

GAMBATESE: As humans, we make mistakes, and we have certain behavior. We can all relate to the occasional incident at home where we get injured, unfortunately, and that’s the same thing that happens on a construction site.

FRANDZEL: John is not just a pessimist full of dire warnings. He brings answers, too. To put them in some context, it helps to start with a system of ranking or categorizing solutions. One system used in many industries is called the hierarchy of controls.

GAMBATESE: In safety management, safety engineering, we have different ways to address a hazard. So we have a hazard on a site. Maybe it’s a place where we could fall, and then we ask the question, Well how can we control that hazard? And the hierarchy of controls is something that guides us.

[MUSIC: TipToes, by Myuu, used with permission of the artist]

FRANDZEL: You don’t need to get caught up in the jargon. The idea is straightforward. Think of a bookshelf with four or five shelves. On the lowest shelf are the simplest and least expensive answers, but they’re also the least reliable. Each time you move to a higher shelf, the available methods become more effective, but also more costly and more complicated.

An example of low-level hazard protection is a harness to prevent falls – just like the one in that risk perception study we talked about a few minutes ago. The worker puts it on and clips it into an anchor point, kind of like a rock climber would. It will stop the worker from falling – if it’s used. That variable is why the harness is considered somewhat unreliable: The worker has to take action. It’s like your seat belt. It can save your life, but only if you buckle up.

Moving higher you get things like warning signs and worker training. Further up the hierarchy are physical barriers, like guardrails. The presence of a barrier means that workers don’t have to make a conscious choice to avoid harm. That’s a good thing. It means one less distraction. An air-bag is somewhat equivalent. It’s just there, standing guard, so to speak. At the top of the hierarchy is hazard elimination – getting rid of the source of danger itself.

GAMBATESE: The best thing that you can do is to remove the hazard from the site.

FRANDZEL: It’s also the most complicated way to go. It requires a lot of planning. And it calls for a fundamental shift in how designers and builders view safety in the grand plan of big construction projects. Hazard elimination lies at the core of an overarching safety philosophy that John has advocated for years. It’s called Prevention through Design.

GAMBATESE: So prevention through design, a very big topic that says I recognize the hierarchy of controls and I would like to eliminate the hazard if we can. I’m going to design that building, bridge, or roadway in such a way that the hazards are not present on the site. So an example of that is, if I have a building and I choose whether to put a skylight in the building. A skylight is nice. Right? It lets in light it opens up the working area, it provides a nice working space and so forth. The skylight provides a safety hazard, it creates a safety hazard for the workers while they are building that facility. And even for people who are maintaining the facility after, if they have to go up on the roof. If they step on the skylight perhaps they might fall through the skylight. And so prevention through design says, well, let’s try not to have that skylight and design it out of the building so that that hazard is not present.

FRANDZEL: And if the builder really, really wants that skylight, the solution might call for additional safety features, like strong metal mesh over the glass. In other areas of the work site, the measures could include built-in anchor points to hook in safety harnesses; parapets around the perimeter of a roof; ladders and work platforms that are bolted on to the steel frame so that workers can safely travel across narrow, exposed beams. The practice is not limited to structural elements. It can address things like reducing toxic asphalt fumes. Or reducing noise at its source rather than relying on personal hearing protection. The whole idea of Prevention through Design, though, can be a tough sell.

GAMBATESE: So there have been a number of studies that have tried to track the design of a building or a bridge to the safety during construction. It’s very hard. It’s hard to connect the design to an incident. But when we’ve been able to do that, we have seen benefits in lower levels of risk. We’ve seen increases in quality and production of the work, because the worker no longer is distracted by the safety hazard. They can concentrate on their work. They can do it faster as well.

FRANDZEL: Prevention through Design is common in Europe and some other parts of the world. But it hasn’t gained much traction in the U.S. Considering the potential upside, the question is why?

GAMBATESE: Yeah, a very good question, something we’re scratching our heads about. Applying prevention through design is not very common in the construction industry in the U.S., and there are a number of reasons for that. One of them is essentially the lack of training for engineers and architects in terms of safety. It’s often not part of their curricula at the university.

FRANDZEL: And ironically, builders worry that by designing safety features into their plans, they actually expose themselves to liability if an injury does occur during construction.

GAMBATESE: So a lot of the architects and engineers kind of step back from safety and don’t get involved in safety for that reason.

FRANDZEL: There are practical reasons as well.

GAMBATESE: It’s very difficult to identify what the hazards might be when I’m looking at the computer screen of a big facility before it is built. Can I foresee what the hazards are? And then if I cannot, it’s hard to design them out. One other one that comes into play a lot is if I am an architect or an engineer, I might recognize a hazard. I can create a design that eliminates that hazard, but maybe that design creates the building aesthetics that I don’t like. And so you have this competing priority between safety, cost, aesthetics, quality and other things.

FRANDZEL: Finally, there’s the very American aversion to regulation.

GAMBATESE: But here in the U.S., we have gone a different route where we have said let’s not regulate it at this point. Let’s try to incorporate it into our standard practices and procedures and then later on, once we’ve done that, maybe we can develop a regulation, but I don’t think that will happen anytime soon.

FRANDZEL: John has put in a lot of time and effort educating the industry. It’s challenging, but he believes he’s making an impact.

GAMBATESE: I’ve been involved with prevention through design for almost 25 years, so over the years it’s been slow, but we continue to develop new products, new practical tools to assist people. We continue to give workshops and seminars, and it’s slowly increasing interest.

FRANDZEL: In fact, a week or so before this episode came out, John gave a workshop to a company in Washington, D.C. Then he stopped in at Congressman Peter DeFazio’s office to talk about getting research funding for a very different type of construction site danger. It’s called work-zone intrusion. Any time you drive by a road crew, you’re looking at a very perilous situation.

GAMBATESE: There are public vehicles driving right by the work zone, because we don't want to close down the roadway. Obviously that creates a safety hazard for everybody, including the driver.

FRANDZEL: The Oregon Department of Transportation, or ODOT, posted a chilling video about one close call.

[MUSIC: A Chase, by Houses of Heaven, used with permission of the artist]

When a tractor trailer burned out its breaks on a long I-5 downhill, the driver lost control and veered into a work area at about 80 miles an hour. Some of the workers felt a blast of air as the truck rocketed by, before they even knew what happened. They were lucky, and no one was hurt. But the outcome isn’t always so good, and plenty of workers have been killed or seriously injured by intrusions. You can find a link to that video in the show notes on our website, by the way.

ODOT asked John to evaluate some proposed solutions that are designed to keep work zones safe. They range from simple, time-tested interventions, like lights and barriers, to high-tech, networked systems that might be able to actually predict an intrusion and buy some time for workers to reach protected areas.

GAMBATESE: One of the controls that we are investigating currently is the use of flashing blue lights on the equipment. Sometimes when we place a police car in the work zone, that is a very, very effective control. The idea here is to mimic that control, put the blue lights on the piece of equipment. So when a driver sees the blue lights they will interpret it perhaps as being law enforcement and slow down.

FRANDZEL: Police aren’t thrilled about this. They worry that drivers could become desensitized to the urgency of flashing lights on a police cruiser speeding to an emergency.

GAMBATESE: In many states, flashing blue lights are reserved for emergency vehicles, and blue is typically reserved for law enforcement. The concern is, long term, how will that affect the driver’s behavior when they do see a law enforcement vehicle. So some of the research that we were asked to do here was to investigate the implications of using a flashing blue light in the work zone.

FRANDZEL: Even those signs that flash your actual speed and kind of shame you into slowing down are somewhat effective. Then there are those big concrete barriers along the perimeter of the work zone. They create a potent line of defense between workers and traffic. But they aren’t always practical. They’re big, they’re heavy, and the roadway might be too narrow to accommodate them. They can’t be used where there’s cross traffic or if vehicles need to change lanes. They’re also very expensive and it takes a long time to install and move them. The future is decidedly oriented toward high-tech solutions.

[MUSIC: Boardroom Theme, by Unicorn Heads, used with permission of the artist]

GAMBATESE: An example of that would be some type of system where if there is an intrusion into the work zone, a signal is sent to the workers either via some device that they are wearing, maybe it vibrates, or maybe there’s a loud alarm, or maybe there’s a light that goes off to say: There’s that car intruding into the work zone, get out of the way. Some of them work well, some of them have their drawbacks. What we’re going to see in the future is the use of more technologies, technologies that give real-time information to the driver, technologies that connect the driver to the work zone – what’s happening. Technologies that provide information to cars upstream of the work zone to alert them that maybe there is a queue of vehicles waiting to get through, so slow down sooner. Automated flagging stations, so you don’t have to put a flagger there, maybe a technology that allows workers to perform the work remotely from the shoulder rather than in the work zone, or autonomous construction equipment that runs on its own out in the lane and workers are offsite. Implementation of technologies is really what we’re looking at in the future.

[MUSIC: Last Train to Mars, Dan Lebowitz, used with permission of the artist]

FRANDZEL: This episode was produced and hosted by me, Steve Frandzel, with additional audio editing by Molly Aton. Our executive producer is Jens Odegaard and our technical director is Rachel Robertson. Our intro music is “The Ether Bunny” by Eyes Closed Audio on SoundCloud and used with permission of a Creative Commons attribution license. Other music and effects in this episode were also used with appropriate licenses. You can find the links on our website. For more episodes, visit engineeringoutloud.oregonstate.edu, or subscribe by searching “Engineering Out Loud” on your favorite podcast app. Bye now.

[MUSIC: Lone Harvest by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) used with permission of a Creative Commons Attribution License.]

NARRATOR: So slight and nearly imperceptible are the first inroads of this malady, and so extremely slow is its progress, that it rarely happens, that the patient can form any recollection of the precise period of its commencement. The first symptoms perceived are, a slight sense of weakness, with a proneness to trembling in some particular part; sometimes in the head, but most commonly in one of the hands and arms.

These symptoms gradually increase in the part first affected; and at an uncertain period, but seldom in less than twelve months or more, the morbid influence is felt in some other part. 

JENS ODEGAARD: That was an excerpt from an 1817 essay describing a disease known as The Shaking Palsy. It was written by a British doctor. You might have heard of him. Dr. James Parkinson.

[MUSIC: “The Ether Bunny” by Eyes Closed Audio used with permission of a Creative Commons Attribution License.]

NARRATOR: From the College of Engineering at Oregon State University, this is “Engineering Out Loud.”

ODEGAARD: Hi, I’m Jens Odegaard, your host. This season on “Engineering Out Loud” we’re sharing stories of how our researchers are helping us stay healthy and safe. Today’s show is about work being done by an industrial engineer and her team to assist the early detection of Parkinson’s disease or as it’s sometimes called, PD.

NEMBHARD: One of the things that I often start with is to say, "By show of hands, how many of you know somebody with Parkinson's disease?" And, often, right, a quarter to a third of the hands go up in the room. PD affects two percent of all seniors, so its prevalence in the U.S. is about 1 million people, and 60,000 cases are diagnosed each year.

ODEGAARD: That was Harriet Nembhard. She’s the head of the College of Engineering’s School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering. Overall, Parkinson’s disease affects more than 10 million people worldwide. And the symptoms are the same that Dr. James Parkinson documented more than 200 years ago. Though today, we know a bit more about what’s actually going on inside our brains, particularly in something called the substantia nigra, a structure in the midbrain.

NEMBHARD: Parkinson's disease is a neurodegenerative disorder. And, what we do know from neuroscience is that the nerve cells in the substantia nigra produce the dopamine.

ODEGAARD: This dopamine is released onto motor control areas of the brain to facilitate smooth, coordinated movements of the body’s muscles.

NEMBHARD: And in Parkinson's disease, it's those nerve cells that are dying. As those nerve cells die, then one side of the substantia nigra perhaps becomes compromised first, and then that is what results in the asymmetry of the movement.

ODEGAARD: What normally comes to mind when we think of the symptoms of Parkinson's disease are tremors and slow movements. But early on there are signs of asymmetrical movement.Normally our limbs work in coordination with each other. Our arms swing back and forth as we walk. But when Parkinson's sets in those kinds of movements can become less coordinated. It’s this asymmetrical movement that could help in early detection of the disease.

NEMBHARD: So for me as an industrial engineer, I see that diagnosis of those 60,000 cases as a system, a PD detection system. And right now I would say that system has a few cracks in it because often patients are diagnosed much later in the development of the disease, and are unable to get early treatment. It's not a curable condition. So early detection and treatment is really the key.

[MUSIC: Flow by MK2 used with permission from the YouTube Audio Library.]

ODEGAARD: Harriet and her colleague Conrad Tucker, an associate professor of engineering at Penn State University, brought together a team of people from a variety of backgrounds to look into the issue. They were leading the National Science Foundation Center for Health Organization Transformation and tapped into the talents of researchers from engineering, health policy, information sciences, and medicine.

NEMBHARD: We were working with a neurologist who expressed some frustration in some sense about the fact that by the time patients came to her, it was already pretty clear that they had had Parkinson's disease for some time.

ODEGAARD: That neurologist was Xuemei Huang, also from Penn State. They asked Xuemei, “How could you possibly know this?” It turns out that somebody with her specific training can recognize certain movements of a patient in the very early stages of Parkinson’s disease. And she didn’t even have to be in the same room to recognize the symptoms.

NEMBHARD: This same colleague had taken a look at some 20 years of footage of Michael J. Fox. There was one scene in which there is an explosion that happens behind him, and he turns around at the noise. But you could see very clearly that one arm extended out in that turn and the other arm kind of stayed by the side. For a neurologist, that asymmetrical movement is an important early tell.

ODEGAARD: Michael J. Fox is an actor famous for playing Marty McFly in the “Back to the Future” trilogy. His Parkinson’s disease was diagnosed in 1991 when he was only 29 years old. But the symptoms Xuemei had observed were from even earlier performances.

[MUSIC: Lone Harvest by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) used with permission of a Creative Commons Attribution License.]

His diagnosis was devastating. Here’s how he described it in a 2017 interview on “CBS Sunday Morning.”

MICHAEL J. FOX: Ya, in fact, it’s one of the few times in my life I felt like saying, “Do you know who I am? This is ridiculous; you can’t tell me that.” This was a case, when I just thought, “This is preposterous that this is happening to me.”

ODEGAARD: Although early diagnosis is heartbreaking it’s important, because starting treatment can help manage the symptoms which get worse with time.

NEMBHARD: What typically happens, if you can treat it early, is that you can start Levodopa-based medications which help to produce dopamine, help the body to produce dopamine, and compensate for those low dosages of, dopamine. So, getting that treatment early is really one of the main ways we have to combat it. And if we don't start it until later, it's harder to really improve quality of life for the patients.

ODEGAARD: Many cases of Parkinson’s are missed or misdiagnosed in the early stages. So Harriet and her team were driven to develop a system that could detect asymmetrical movement early on.

NEMBHARD: And, we started doing some digging into that and thinking about it as, “Well, how can we perhaps translate the ability of that neurologist to see these physical manifestations into a system?”

ODEGAARD: The team had a few design goals in mind. One obviously was detecting Parkinson’s early. They also wanted a scalable system that they could get into the hands of as many people as possible. Finally, they wanted sensors that weren’t intrusive or intimidating.

They decided to borrow from video gamers. Seriously! They used the Microsoft Kinect sensor from the Xbox 360. You remember. Using your body as the controller to knockout characters with your avatar, racing cars, and scoring the game winning free kick.

Though the technology now is pretty dated for video games, it was perfect for what they were trying to accomplish.

NEMBHARD: There's a software developer kit that you can use to access control of the camera, the cameras and the sensors. And rather than connecting it to a game console, we connected it to a computer just to collect the data that we needed.

ODEGAARD: The way the system works in detecting asymmetrical movement is fairly straightforward.

NEMBHARD: All we really need is for the patient to walk towards the Kinect sensor. The first simple test is walk forward, walk back, walk to the left, walk to the right, within a marked-off box.

ODEGAARD: Harriet and her team programmed the sensor to collect positional data from 20 different areas on the patient’s body. These areas included the head and shoulders, the chest, elbows, wrists, knees, and ankles. Data is collected at a rate of about 10 observations per second at each area. From there, it’s on to some computational number crunching.

NEMBHARD: Then the data analysis phase is really about looking at all of those observations using some machine learning algorithms. We wrote several machine learning algorithms to go through that data and flag for each node what is symmetrical movement or not. And so, it's a very specific, then, you know, spatial and mathematical comparison on a node-by-node basis to say: “Yes, there's PD risk in this pair of movements,” or “No, there is not.’

[MUSIC: Gotta Find Out by Silent Partner used with permission from the YouTube Audio Library.]

ODEGAARD: These algorithms work in such a way that detection of asymmetrical movement is tailored to the individual patient.

In theory, the detection system could be used to assist a healthcare provider in diagnosing Parkinson’s by providing fast, automated detection of some of the earliest signs of the disease.It could also be used in ongoing treatment of those with Parkinson’s by helping detect if medications are effectively treating the symptoms.

Harriet and her team have shown the idea works. But before something like it shows up in your doctor’s office or community care clinic, there are still a lot of questions to answer about how it would be implemented in the healthcare process.

As an educator, Harriet is using the research as a foundation for her students to build upon and attempt to answer some of these questions.

One group of undergraduates experimented with the Kinect software developer kit to help tailor the system’s functionality.

NEMBHARD: I had another group, it was a mechanical engineering student and two IE students, to help design a portable, adjustable, safe console for such a system. If you're imagining that we're taking it to different community health fair settings, right, it's not just like we can take it out of our case and put it on a counter, right? How can you really make it portable? So they, they looked at that.

ODEGAARD: By IE students she means industrial engineering. She had some more industrial engineering students imagine a completely different scenario. This one for reaching people in remote locations or those who have difficulty leaving the house.

NEMBHARD: You know, how many seniors are in Oregon, what if we wanted to do this in a telehealth capacity, what would potentially be the cost, what would be the potential hurdles? So it's been exciting to see it, you know, become this, you know, teaching tool.

ODEGAARD:This whole project inspired Harriet to think about other ways a collaborative team could improve human health.

NEMBHARD: And so, one of the questions that I've been interested in is, could using sensors and machine learning be helpful in the detection and management of concussions.

ODEGAARD: She doesn’t have an answer yet. But she imagines a potential system that would include coaches, team doctors, other players, and potentially even some type of monitoring system based on game footage.This system would help detect concussions and help the support and recovery from those injuries.

NEMBHARD: Well I will say, as an academic leader, I'm particularly concerned with the impact of concussions and CTE on football student athletes' health.

ODEGAARD: CTE stands for chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which is a condition associated with both concussions and repeated blows to the head.

NEMBHARD: So this is well understood that, you know, football puts people at higher risk of concussion, and potentially for a future onset of, of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. You know, so I think that all of that becomes a part of a system, but those are some of the questions that certainly interest me. How can we really do all that we can do, while these players are in our charge, to make sure that we protect their health and safety?

ODEGAARD: Harriet’s in the early stages of pulling together an interdisciplinary team of people from across Oregon State and beyond to start addressing this medical issue.

[MUSIC: Nice to You by Vibe Tracks used with permission from the YouTube Audio Library.]

ODEGAARD: In reckoning with his own diagnosis, Michael J. Fox decided to go all in on scientific research and development. So he founded the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. He had this to say about the importance of medical research, and I quote: “Medical science has proven time and again that when the resources are provided, great progress in the treatment, cure, and prevention of disease can occur.”

This progress all starts with people like Harriet who take action and use their skills to support the health and success of those around them.

NEMBHARD: I love everybody who's here. I'm excited about investing in their success, right? I'm excited about making sure that we have an academic community where we have each other's backs, that we're encouraging each other to, um, to really thrive.

ODEGAARD: This episode was produced and hosted by me, Jens Odegaard. The vocal talent at the top of the show was provided by:

ADAM KEENAN: I’m Adam Keenan, I’m a second-year exchange student from Lancaster University in the United Kingdom. I am involved in the theatre department here at OSU. I’m currently doing a production of “The Little Prince” and last term I did a production of “The Passion of Dracula.”

ODEGAARD: Audio editing is by the talented Molly “99” Aton. Our intro music is “The Ether Bunny” by Eyes Closed Audio. You can find them on SoundCloud and we used their song with permission of a Creative Commons attribution license. Other music and sound effects in this episode were also used with appropriate licenses. For more episodes, bonus content, and links to the licenses, visit engineeringoutloud.oregonstate.edu. Also, please subscribe by searching “Engineering Out Loud” on Spotify or your favorite podcast app. See ya on the flipside.

[MUSIC: “Fortress Europe” by Dan Bodan. Used with permission of YouTube Audio Library.]

OWEN PERRY: Remember the Ebola scare that dominated the news just a few years ago?

[SOUNDBITES from NPR’s Hidden Brain, “Don't Panic! What We Can Learn From Chaos”]

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: "totally out of control."

[SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "FRONTLINE"]

WILL LYMAN: A catastrophe is unfolding - the world's deadliest outbreak of Ebola.

[SOUNDBITE OF CBS NEWS BROADCAST]

KELLY COBIELLA: Highly infectious, quick to kill, with no vaccine and no cure.

PERRY: It was terrifying. It devastated countries like Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. The 2014 epidemic was the most widespread in history, with 28,000 cases and at least 11,000 deaths.

And during that outbreak, for the first time, there were cases of Ebola in Europe and North America, mainly aid workers who were infected by the disease while working with patients in Africa.

It may not be in the news as much now, but Ebola is still out there. Even as we record this, there’s an outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Though, aid organizations are applying lessons they’ve learned to help make sure this outbreak and future ones aren’t as bad.

Here at Oregon State, one researcher thinks he can help...with robots.

[MUSIC: “The Ether Bunny” by Eyes Closed Audio used with permission of a Creative Commons Attribution License.]

NARRATOR: From the College of Engineering at Oregon State University, this is “Engineering Out Loud.”

PERRY: I’m your host, Owen Perry. This season on “Engineering Out Loud” we’re sharing stories of how our researchers are helping us stay healthy and safe, from here in Oregon to halfway around the world in West Africa.

BILL SMART: My name is Bill Smart, I’m on the faculty here at OSU in the robotics program in the College of Engineering. Most of what I spend my time doing is looking at how robots and people work together, collaborate together on tasks.

PERRY: One of those tasks is how robots might be used during an outbreak to treat patients with the Ebola.

Bill has partnered with Medecins Sans Frontieres. That’s Doctors Without Borders for those of you who don’t speak French. For this story, you’ll mostly just hear them referred to as MSF. They are an aid organization that brings medical humanitarian assistance to victims of conflict, natural disaster, or, in this case, disease epidemics.

The group has been on the frontline combating almost every reported Ebola outbreak. They set up isolation units and provide care to the infected, raise community awareness about the disease, conduct safe burials, and support existing health structures.

They’re always on the lookout for new approaches to contain and treat the disease. Bill reached out the them to see if robots might be useful.

[MUSIC: “We Drive 3 Days,” Blue Dot Session, used with permission of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License]

SMART: If you have Ebola, I can be completely safe from catching it if I'm three feet away from you. To catch Ebola from someone, I have to get some of their infected bodily fluids — blood or something — inside my body and that's relatively hard to do under most conditions.

PERRY: But for those working directly with patients, that risk of infection rises significantly. They must wear protective gear, including full body plastic coveralls, several layers of gloves, face protection, and goggles.

SMART: Typically Ebola thrives in places that are very hot and very humid, maybe 100 degrees of heat on 100 percent humidity. It takes about an hour to put the gear on. It takes about an hour to take the gear off. And in those conditions you get about 40, maybe 50 minutes of useful work and then you heat stroke.

PERRY: There is no cure for Ebola, but, despite its high mortality rates, people do survive it.

SMART: It's like the flu you just keep people hydrated, you make sure they eat, they make sure they take care of their personal needs and they, they kind of ride it out, and if you give them supportive care, then Ebola is survivable, and the less care you give less of the supportive care you give, the greater your chances of dying from the disease.

PERRY: So those 40 to 50 minutes workers spend with patients are precious.

SMART: One of the problems in the last big outbreak is that the healthcare workers just didn't have enough time to work with the patients to do all the things they needed to do to keep them alive in the long-term.

PERRY: In a traditional hospital model, you have doctors, nurses, housekeeping staff, and catering staff – all types of people in very specialized positions. But Ebola outbreaks tend to happen in remote villages without hospitals. A single health care worker’s job can include treating and feeding patients, checking vitals, taking samples, mopping up vomit or other fluids, just to name a few tasks. And they do it all while wrapped in plastic in sweltering heat.

This is where Bill thinks robots may have a role to play. But maybe not in the way you’re thinking.

SMART: When you think about robots in these, these healthcare situations, you think about maybe the da Vinci surgical robot and these very high tech interventions to these very high tech things, but we're really looking at is much simpler applications of robots not to do the medical care, but to free up people to do the medical care.

One of our thoughts was we could take robots, we can take automation, we could apply automated planning, artificial intelligence, all these techniques and see if we could make the healthcare workers jobs a little bit more efficient or a little bit easier. Can you take a robot and do some of the simpler stuff?

PERRY: Imagine a robotic table that can move about the tent delivering food and medication to patients or equipment to workers.

SMART: You assemble it, and you put it in the corner, and you give it a map of the tent, and then when it comes time, when it's lunchtime, you come in, and maybe you hit a big red button on top of the table and it goes to each of the beds in turn.

If I can take away 10 minutes of fetching and carrying, then you can spend those 10 minutes with a patient and then you can make the patient outcomes better.

PERRY: Another idea is a floor scrubbing robot -- something like a Roomba -- that rushes over to clean spilled blood. Or one with more advanced programming that actually keeps track of people’s movements and identifies when they might be unknowingly spreading contamination around the room.

SMART: So a lot of what we've been focused on is really identifying working with people from MSF who've been in the field and dealt with Ebola and trying to understand what they do, what their pressures are on, where they think they could use some help because one of the things we're really sensitive to is coming up with a solution and saying this is the way we should do it, giving it to them, and they just don't use it because it's nonsense.

PERRY: And where you’re dealing with Ebola, there’s no room for nonsense.

SMART: Where Ebola breaks out, it's very under resourced. There's not a lot of infrastructure in place. There isn't often reliable electricity. There isn't reliable satellite internet, there's none of the stuff we take for granted in more resourced environments like the US.

MSF/Doctors Without Borders has a lot of engineers on staff, but they are engineers for water and sanitation, for building construction, for logistics. They don't have any roboticists because they don't use robots. And so you have to make whatever technology you ship with them, really, really robust. Right? You have to take it out of the box, turn it on, and it has to work. And so making it simple really helps with that.

PERRY: But being simple is not enough. These robots also need to be tough enough to survive the heat and humidity as well as being dipped into a 50-gallon drum of disinfectant. Or they have to be built cheap enough that you don’t mind incinerating them when you’re done.

SMART: As an engineer, that's a really interesting set of constraints to work in because you know, when we use robots in the lab, if it doesn't do its job, if it breaks, if you need to go and do something with it to get out of a corner, it's not that big of a deal. But really in the field when you're talking about these literally life or death situations, then it really changes the equation, really changes the balance of what you want to try.

Anything that we do with them can't have any potential for reducing the quality of care. At the very worst it has to not impact them.

[MUSIC: “Master,” Blue Dot Session, used with permission of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License]

PERRY: That’s right, even robots have to follow the Hippocratic oath, do no harm.

Having robots work near people raises another question. How will robots be received in communities that aren’t used to advanced technology.

Even without robots, people in these small villages are suspicious of healthcare workers. MSF has found that people avoid care because of rumors that the workers are killing people not helping them.

That's why it is critical to understand the local culture. To do this, MSF relies on ethnographers who can help identify and minimize the friction between the locals and these strange looking foreigners.

SMART: They integrate as well as they can, but there's still these people dressed like space aliens come in and a lot of our people die. And I think robots make that worse because now the people dress like space aliens are bringing robots. Your family member goes into a tent with a robot and they die.

PERRY: Bill is looking at ways to introduce these new technologies to help gain the trust of the local people.

SMART: Maybe you buy some radio controlled cars and you take them to the village and you give them to the kids and then the kids drive the cars around it because kids love radio controlled cars. And then you can have a conversation with the grownups of that's sort of on the lines of, well, we have robots in that clinic, but they're just like radio controlled cars, right? And you can start to build a relationship and you can start to explain what's going on with this technology they've never seen before in terms that they can really get their head around.

PERRY: Approaches like that may be helpful gaining acceptance in a community, but for an individual patient, a robot may still be pretty scary.

SMART: If you've never seen any technology before, and then all of a sudden this robot is coming over and forcing a drink in your face, that's going to be terrifying. And so that will make your health outcomes worse, and if rumors of that get out, fewer people might come in and the outbreak might not be treated as effectively.

PERRY: But Bill has a plan to address that too.

In his lab here in Corvallis, Bill is trying to understand how people might react to robots in these outbreak scenarios. He sets up simulations, complete with plastic tents, cots, and, of course, robots.

SMART: We bring people in and we briefed them about the, the context, sort of like, pretend you're in this Ebola treatment unit, pretend you're feeling sick, and you get them to maybe lie on one of these cots. And we have robots do things around them. And then we measure their physiological responses. We measure their heart rate, how much they're sweating other signs basically to show how calm they are, how agitated they're being around the robot.

PERRY: One thing they’ve found is that people tend to be more relaxed when they can see a person is controlling the robot.

SMART: So, that's kind of important because then when you're building these systems and you're putting them in treatment units in the field, then you want to make sure that there's a window in that treatment unit that's looking through onto the operator of the robot because that'll make people feel calmer and over the long term that that'll improve their medical outcomes.

If we could do just a little bit better we could save a significant number of lives.

[MUSIC: “Master,” Blue Dot Session, used with permission of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License]

SMART: For a roboticist, it's a really interesting project because a lot of it really isn't about the technology of the robots. It's about that larger question of how these robots fit into an existing set of social structures.

PERRY: For Bill, big questions about robots’ place in society are nothing new. And he’s in good company here at Oregon State, where questions like this gave rise to the Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems Institute – or CoRIS – where faculty study the theory, design, development, and deployment of robots and intelligent systems, both in the physical and virtual world.

SMART: When we were putting CoRIS together, we really wanted to focus not just on the technology involved but also on how that technology fits in society.

The idea there is we wanted to make the academics, the research and policy, which is sort of shorthand for how things fit in society, equal because no one of them can exist without the other two. And I think we're one of the few places in the country that that's thinking about this in the strong terms. So all, I think all of the faculty and robotics are really interested not just in building the robot but in understanding how it fits into these bigger structures. And that makes us kind of unusual, I think.

[MUSIC: “We Drive 3 Days,” Blue Dot Session, used with permission of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License]

PERRY: Bill calls it unusual. I call it something special, and I find it reassuring that there are people thinking about these things in a holistic way.

Thanks for listening. This episode was produced and hosted by me, Owen Perry. Audio editing was by Molly Aton. Our intro music is “The Ether Bunny” by Eyes Closed Audio. You can find them on SoundCloud and we used their song with permission of a Creative Commons attribution license. Other music and sound effects in this episode were also used with appropriate licenses.

For more episodes and bonus content, visit engineeringoutloud.oregonstate.edu. Also, search for “Engineering Out Loud” on your favorite podcast app, and do us a solid, please subscribe.

SMART: What else do I want to say? It's all about talking and sending emails to people. That's what it's about. That's engineering…being good with Gmail.

[MUSIC: Drum solo used with permission of Jed Irvine, senior faculty research assistant of computer science at Oregon State University, and Engineering Out Loud listener]

KEITH HAUTALA: How does an insect climb straight up walls or windows without losing its grip? And how does a snake slither across sharp rocks, without slicing itself open? Can engineers use this knowledge to improve biomedical technology? Stay tuned for some sticky and slippery science.

[MUSIC: The Ether Bunny by Eyes Closed Audio used with permission of a Creative Commons Attribution License] From the College of Engineering at Oregon State University, this is Engineering Out Loud.

HAUTALA: I'm Keith Hautala. This season we are focusing on research that keeps us healthy and safe. I'm going to take you on a journey that will follow the tiny, wet footprints of a ladybug, and we’ll go inside the mouth of a frog. But it all starts with the secret language of lobsters.

JOE BAIO: So, actually, my very first project in this field was when I had just finished undergrad and I started working in a lab doing biomechanics work. We were looking at fast animal movements,

[SFX: Spiny Lobster Sound, California Academy of Science, used with permission under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial]

Lobsters actually make noise, you know? They talk to each other; they make these little scratching noises.

HAUTALA: That’s Joe Baio. He’s an assistant professor of bioengineering here at Oregon State.

BAIO: And if you look at that mechanism, it’s a stick-and-slip. So they have this little, like, violin bow on their antennae. And it sticks, and then it slips, and that's what makes a little noise, like a scratching noise.

[SFX: Spiny Lobster Sound, California Academy of Science, used with permission under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial]

And so we’re looking at that stick-and-slip mechanism. And then that kinda got me in. Like, “Oh, that's what's going on with a slug or snail!” It sticks and then slips, sticks and slips, and that’s how it kind of slides.

HAUTALA: If you’ve ever sat and watched a snail or a slug moving, it is kind of fascinating. That trail of slime it leaves behind actually plays a key role in how it gets around.

BAIO: So there's something about the chemistry there that's interesting, right? It for some reason can, under certain environmental conditions, get sticky and provide a lot of friction for the animal movement. And then, all of a sudden, it turns off and allows the animal to move freely. So it's slippery. So that's kind of how I got into the adhesion business, or the interest in that. And then you start looking at all kinds of animals, right? I mean they can stick to all kinds of things.

HAUTALA: If you were going to try to come up with the First Law of Sticky Science, it might be that for every thing that wants to stick  to something, there’s something else that doesn’t want things sticking to it.

BAIO: And then on the opposite end there’s all kinds of plants. So, plants don't want insects walking on the leaves, so they come up with crazy waxy surfaces that prevent insects from walking on them, prevent insects from eating them and destroying the plant. So there's just tons of different systems out there that rely on these dynamics between sticky and slippery, and we're just starting to look at them at the molecular level.

HAUTALA: These molecular mechanisms evolved over very long periods of time, basically through trial and error.

BAIO: Yeah. So you know, if you look at the natural world, it's all these “extreme properties” materials — whether it's skin or a plant leaf — that really just kind of adapted to these really extreme temperatures, or to deter predators, or to be able to stick to something, or to be able to prevent their skin from falling off when they slide on a rocky surface. Evolution has gone through hundreds of millions of years to find solutions to these problems, and we as engineers are just starting to look at them, and look in the natural world for solutions to some of our problems.

HAUTALA: There are all sorts of applications in medicine, particularly, for getting things to stick where you want them to. And to not stick where you don’t want them to.

BAIO: Trying to come up with coatings that don't wear down, like a coating that you could put on an artificial hip so that it doesn't wear down, or that prevents bacteria from adhering to it, or a new type of adhesive that can basically turn on and off … Can we get away from stitches, right? Or staples, and glue tissue together, right? Or glue dental implants in. And maybe, do it in a way that's biocompatible, right? It's — we're using kind of biological molecules — so maybe it's less likely to kind of cause a problem in your body when you put it in. And also, looking at these adhesives from nature, it’s that they turn on and off.

HAUTALA: That’s kind of a key selling feature of these natural adhesives: The ability to turn the stickiness on and off. Imagine a bandage that would stick to your elbow all day without falling off. But then, it peels off easily, without ripping off two layers of skin!

BAIO: So let's say a fly or some spiders even — or ladybugs is what we actually study in our lab. And they have these little hairy feet, and they look similar to a gecko foot, where they're full of hairs. And, unlike the gecko, these insects also have a little fluid. So these hairy feet bend and they make, like, a really nice contact to whatever substrate they're trying to adhere to. And then this fluid also gets, you know, basically emitted from their feet and kind of also helps make contact. And kind of the theory was that this fluid can adapt, right?

HAUTALA: So this mysterious ladybug foot juice changes properties, depending on what kind of surface the ladybug is walking on. If that sounds like there’s some complicated chemistry going on, well … there is.

BAIO: So, it's super complicated. It's like an emulsion of proteins. All kinds of biomolecules. So: lipids, fatty molecules, proteins, sugars, water, other acids. And we were thinking maybe, like, different parts of these things are important depending on what substrate they're walking on, right? Evolution has over-designed it. And so we were looking at: OK, let's let an animal walk on all kinds of different substrates and look how this fluid actually adapts, and adapts at the chemical level.

HAUTALA: When it comes to sticking and slipping, all of the important action takes place where the rubber hits the road, so to speak. At the surface.

BAIO: We are kind of surface scientists in my group. And so we are really interested in what's going on at the outer few molecules of an interface, right? Whether it's the surface of a silicon wafer on a computer chip or the surface of a ladybug’s foot.

HAUTALA: To figure out what happens on the surface of a ladybug’s foot, Joe and his colleagues created a whole bunch of designer surfaces with different properties for ladybugs to walk on.

BAIO: And when the ladybug walks on it, it leaves actually a little wet footprint. And then we immediately take that footprint and do our chemical analyses on it. And we kind of look through what are the chemical components that actually interact with that substrate. And then we maybe look at how that changes as it walks on different substrates. And so then we can look at the physics in the mechanism of how different parts of this fluid come down and bind to the substrate versus they bind to the foot edge of the ladybug. And then we can take all of what we know about these components, maybe put something that's similar into a beaker and then make our own kind of sticky ladybug fluid. And, and we've been mildly successful. We're at the stage now where we know what's going on, kind of like the different chemistries, and what's actually interacting, and we're still in the process of making a mimic and then applying that mimic to, to biomedical applications.

[SOUND EFFECT: Ambience, Florida Frogs Gathering, A, used with permission of Creative Commons Public Domain]

HAUTALA: Another sticky mystery concerns the tongues of frogs. When a frog sees something it wants to eat — say a tasty cricket — it shoots out its tongue. The tongue sticks to the cricket, and the frog pulls it back in.

BAIO: So something about the frog tongue chemistry makes it sticky, but it can't be sticky when it's in their mouth, right? They'll just stick to the roof of their mouth. So when a frog hits a prey item, the frog extends its tongue, it has a bunch of this fluid on its edge of its tongue, it hits a fly or something it wants to eat, sticks to it, and retracts it back in. So there's some sort of chemical change going on where, all of a sudden, how does this become sticky as it hits the fly surface? And so, we're interested in looking at that mechanism too. And so, my graduate student made a bunch of substrates with different chemistries on it and allowed the frog, to hit it. We basically, actually … These little substrates were clear and when you stick a fly behind it and trick the, the frog into hitting, whacking, our sample with its tongue.

HAUTALA: So, what they get is a frog tongue-print on a glass slide.

BAIO: And what's left there is the spit of a frog. And if you look at the chemical structure there, you notice that it's different when it's on his tongue versus at the surface. So when it’s at the surface as it sticks, there's a bunch of fluid between the tongue and the substrate as the tongue is retracted. It again applies this kind of force, this kind of sheer force. And then that causes the basic molecular structure to change. It almost causes these little molecules to form fibrils, almost like a rope. And it gets really, really strong and sticky, and that allows the frog to retract its prey. And so again, this idea of on and off, right? Why, by applying a certain force you can turn the stickiness on or off or adjust it in different ways. And what's really interesting me is just this crazy idea that force, like something physical, can change the chemical structure of these kind of fluids.

HAUTALA: In the frog’s saliva is a kind of mucus, which contains these big molecules called mucins. These are basically just proteins with lots of sugars on them. What Joe and his collaborators found out is that in their “off state,” these mucins are just a disordered mess, pointing in all directions. But when they stick to a surface and get stretched, they interact with each other. They start to stack up, and form these fibrils that are very strong and very hard. And nobody really knew how this worked before. It took some really smart bioengineers to figure it out.

BAIO: And the way we kind of did this, this, we do a lot of surface analytical work. So again, going back to my students, we had this frog print, right? So then we have this goo on a slide or on a substrate and then we take it to the synchrotron, and so this is where, you know, a synchrotron, we're, we're using tunable X-rays. So they spin electrons around very fast, and create tunable X-rays that we use. So we hit this surface, we have our surface with our spit on it, we hit it with X-rays and what comes off are other light photons, so pieces of light, and then we measure the kinetic energy of this light that comes out and that can tell us what's at the surface, what molecules are there. And the cool thing is it's also sensitive to order. So the way we set up the experiment is we changed the way the light interacts, with polarization, the way the light hits the surface at certain angles, and we look for changes in the, in the response and that can tell us: Oh! All of these molecules are well-ordered! Or all of them are disordered. And so that's how we could tell that this, this fluid turns on after it hit the surface, right? Hits the surface, it undergoes an ordering process, all these molecules order a very distinct way. And we were able to see that with our spectroscopy.

HAUTALA: So the frog tongue mucus is basically a pressure-sensitive adhesive that turns on when force is applied to it.

BAIO: The interesting thing about it, though, is just how fast that process is. It's super fast, right? It becomes sticky almost immediately, right? It has to, right? Otherwise the prey item can just disappear or fly away or escape. And so that's … I think the next step is understanding the kinetics. So how fast is this kind of chemical re-formation process, right? How it can go from disorder to order that quickly is super impressive.

HAUTALA: This kind of pressure-sensitive adhesive could find some novel, if not downright revolutionary, applications in biomedical fields.

BAIO: Yeah, I mean, so yeah. Again, gluing,really crazy tissues together, right? During surgery, so let's say you cut open a heart and you need a glue that works really fast, right? To prevent the patient bleeding out. Or something that you could, you just want a temporary adhesion to something, right? You know, you want to be able to hold pieces of tissue together and then be able to reopen them, you know, maybe in later surgery. These sorts of things. Or just a way, you know, you don't have to put a lot of foreign things in your body. These are proteins. These are, fat molecules, maybe some water and a little bit of fatty acids, and things like this. And so the body might not see i t the same way as it see like a huge piece of metal staple, right?

HAUTALA: So, ladybug feet and frog tongues are examples of two completely different mechanisms on the sticky side of things. On the other end of the spectrum, we get into the slippery stuff. Things like snakes. What sort of useful tricks can they teach us?

[MUSIC: “Curb Stomp,” by Underbelly. Used with permission of YouTube Audio Library.]

BAIO: One example I give is the ball of an artificial hip, right? It's rubbing against the other part, the cup of your hip, or artificial cup, and over time it wears down, right? And so then you have to replace that hip. And so could you come up with a way to make it slippery, so you prevent this abrasive kind of process. And, I was talking to a colleague, and he's like, “Oh, you know, snake skin has to deal with this all the time.” So we studied the king snake from California. And they're on all kinds of crazy sharp rocks, and while they do shed their skin, it's pretty anti-abrasive. There are scales, and so they can slide over and over on something that's really sharp, or really rough, and their skin maintains its integrity. It's also self-cleaning, which is a whole ’nother thing is, is just fouling, so it prevents stuff from adhering to it. If you can create something that's self-cleaning or non-fouling you’re going to make like a billion dollars, you know?

Catheters that you stick into a body: If you make them non-fouling, bacteria can't stick to them. Or a stent. When you stick in a stent in your bloodstream, preventing blood clots and things like that. So this idea of having something really anti-abrasive and non-fouling or self-cleaning is super impressive, this material.

HAUTALA: Snakes are a lot more slippery on their bellies than on their backs. Joe and his colleagues figured there was some kind of specially adapted biomolecular mechanism at work.

BAIO: Again, we took the samples and kind of chemically imaged them with our surface analytical tools and found that on the belly of the snake, where it's slipperier, there are these basically fat molecules, kind of like these really long-chain carbon molecules. And they form a really beautiful monolayer at the snakeskin surface. And if you look at the top of the snake where there's higher friction forces, they have these same molecules, but the way they're interacting with the surface, the way they're pointing, the way they're ordered is way different.

So on the bottom, it's well ordered, well stacked together, like all lined up. And on the top they’re kind of disordered again. And so this well packed layer, of oil basically, allows these snakes to slide on a substrate or a surface without a lot of abrasion. And then this layer also provides, I think, some non-fouling capabilities. And so we've started to identify what molecules are actually at these surfaces, and then trying to come up with a way to easily coat, like, a biological implant or an artificial hip, or these sorts of things. Is there an easy way to create a coating that exactly mimics the chemistry of it, like a king snake skin surface.

HAUTALA: Joe says he gets a lot of inspiration from nature, whether he’s reading a biological science paper about it or just living in it, taking hikes with his young son or exploring his own backyard. And it’s something he says all kinds of engineers can benefit from.

[MUSIC: “Quiet Nights,” by Nate Blaze. Used with permission of YouTube Audio Library.]

BAIO: There's all this research that just being out in nature, you know, really calms nerves and inspires you and, and I think just being able to look at biology, I think more engineers need to look at biology instead of just looking at what other have done, right? So when most engineers take a product — whether you're designing a new engine for a plane or a, a new type of diabetic glucose sensor — and look at what's previously been done and kind of make iterations on that. But I think this idea of kind of going back and looking at what sort of problems nature has already solved, and how did they do it, and can you kind of take any inspiration from that — is key. I think by studying nature we can make some, or probably lead to some really cool discoveries that can have a huge impact in medical field, or in all kinds of different fields.

HAUTALA: This episode was produced by me, Keith Hautala, with additional audio help from Molly Aton and Rachel Robertson. Our intro music is “The Ether Bunny” by Eyes Closed Audio on Soundcloud, used with permission under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Other music and sound effects were also used with appropriate licenses. You can find the details in our show notes, which are online, along with other episodes, at engineeringoutloud.oregonstate.edu. Subscribe on our website, or by searching for “Engineering Out Loud” on your favorite podcast app.

[MUSIC: Elloree, by Paul Marhoefer, used with permission of the artist]

STEVE FRANDZEL: Jason Rivenburg hugged his pregnant wife, Hope, and his two-year-old son and left for work. He was filling in as a long-haul truck driver to earn extra money. He  hopped into the cab of his semi and drove out of Fultonham, New York, about 45 miles west of Albany. He dropped off a load in Virginia and headed to his second delivery: organic milk for the Food Lion distribution center in Elloree, South Carolina.

He had arrived early in the evening, well ahead of schedule. But he was turned away because his appointment wasn’t until 8:00 the next morning. The center doesn’t allow early deliveries, and it won’t let truckers park and wait.

He needed to rest, but there were no truck stops or other proper facilities nearby. He pulled into an abandoned gas station on a county highway in St. Matthews, a dozen miles from his destination. It was a safe place, according to the grapevine. That night, he was shot twice in the head with a .45-caliber handgun by a career felon on probation. His body was found two days later. On March 18, 2009, less than two weeks after the murder, Jason’s wife gave birth to twins.

SAL HERNANDEZ: He was just simply looking for a place to rest. There was no adequate truck parking locations for him to do so when that happened. He was simply parked in an abandoned gas station just to make sure he met his hours of service, and he was killed for seven dollars – for a measly seven dollars.

FRANDZEL: That’s Sal Hernandez, an assistant professor of Civil and Construction Engineering. Sal’s research covers a variety of transportation issues, including transportation safety.

HERNANDEZ: Truck parking shortages is a national concern. The problem is finding safe and adequate truck parking. And it’s forecasted to see a rise in truck volumes over the next few years, so finding safe and adequate truck parking is the issue. There is not enough of it.

FRANDZEL: Welcome, I’m your host, Steve Frandzel. In keeping with this season’s theme of research at Oregon State that’s focused on health and safety, we’ll take a closer look at that shortage and what’s behind it. We’ll examine the harm it causes to people and commerce and offer up some good reasons why anyone who drives should care about a problem that they may not even know exists.

[MUSIC: The Ether Bunny by Eyes Closed Audio used with permission of a Creative Commons Attribution License]

FRANDZEL: From the College of Engineering at Oregon State University, this is Engineering Out Loud.

You’ve probably noticed long-haul trucks parked on highway off-ramps and shoulders, on access roads, in retail store parking lots. I never really gave them much thought. I had no idea that the reason they sometimes park in such odd places is because drivers struggle to find better spots, appropriate spots. And it’s happening all over the country. Making the problem worse has been the closure of many designated highway rest areas where truckers are allowed to sleep in their cabs. Federal law mandates that truckers can drive no more than 11 hours within a 14-hour window, so long as they’ve rested at least 10 hours beforehand. More and more, those hours are tracked and reported automatically by electronic logging devices.

[MUSIC: Looking for the Son of Man, by Paul Marhoefer, used with permission of the artist]

HERNANDEZ: Like a stopwatch, it indicates when their hours are over, and when their hours are over, they have to pull over and rest. That could be in the middle of anywhere in America, any roadway, it may not be even close to a truck parking location.

FRANDZEL: So drivers resort to whatever they can find. The closer they get to their driving limit, the more urgent things become. Options go from bad to worse.

HERNANDEZ: Really what motivated me on this whole issue was when I was actually driving between I-10 and I-5, over the last few years, seeing trucks parked along the roadway, seeing truck-related crashes, when we see vehicles crashing into trucks along those routes, and just seeing our exit and off ramps just full of truck drivers. And I felt, you know what, there’s something that needs to be done, and it was quite timely. During the time when I was really thinking about doing some of this research, the Oregon Department of Transportation, ODOT, had reached out to me and said, Sal, there’s an issue with truck parking, I don’t know if you’ve heard of Jason’s law, and, as a matter of fact I had.

FRANDZEL: Jason’s Law, named for the murdered trucker Jason Rivenburg, was enacted in 2012. The law provides $120 million in federal funds for the construction and restoration of safe roadside parking lots where truck drivers can rest. The money is also used to study regions where parking shortages are most acute. The Pacific Northwest is one them.

HERNANDEZ: So Jason’s law makes safe parking for truck drivers a national priority in hopes of protecting our truck drivers of course. And the idea behind Jason’s Law, it actually provides additional funding and opportunities for states to do some self-assessment. We knew the problem existed, but it took something tragic to really get that national attention, that funding, for states to conduct studies.

FRANDZEL: Jason’s Law even inspired a song, called Elloree, which you heard at the start of the episode. It was written by full-time trucker and part-time singer-songwriter Paul Marhoefer, aka Long-Haul Paul. I caught up with Paul on a frigid, late-January day in Northern Illinois.

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[Telephone ringing]

PAUL MARHOEFER: Hello?

FRANDZEL: Hey, is this Paul?

MARHOEFER: Yes.

FRANDZEL: Paul, hi, this is Steve Frandzel calling from Oregon State University.

MARHOEFER: Yes, Steve, yes, how are you?

FRANDZEL: I’m doing well, thank you, how about yourself?

MARHOEFER: I’m doing pretty well, I’m near Rockford, Illinois, I just dumped off a load of milk and I’m easing down to go back to the farm and get another load. It’s a little cold here, it’s about 2 degrees.

FRANDZEL: We compared notes on the weather and found out we grew up not far from each other in the Chicago area. Paul mentioned that he used to deliver tropical plants throughout Oregon. And he told me that his own troubles with parking was a big reason why he switched to running shorter routes. Then he told me the story of how Elloree came to be. After performing at a trucking show in Dallas a couple of years ago, one of his fans had a little surprise for him.

MARHOEFER: There’s a very nice lady from Texas who was giving me these beautiful vintage harmonicas that were in pristine condition, and she gave me this gorgeous handmade Italian accordion. And she said I want you to do something for me. And I thought, OK, I didn’t know her that well, and I didn’t know where this was going. She said, could you write a song about Jason’s Law? I usually have to get angry, or I usually have to be sort of in a state of duress before I write a song. And I did find myself upset enough to write that song and framed it as a murder ballad, and the intent was to do what murder ballads always did: to sort of mark and mourn by trying to do a truthful reporting of the event. It was sort of a way to memorialize in a sense.

[MUSIC: Elloree, by Paul Marhoefer, used with permission of the artist]

FRANDZEL: If you’re getting the impression that the parking shortage is something that only truckers need to worry about, well, that’s only part of a much bigger story. If you drive a car, if you just ride in a car, you might want to pay attention here. It’s bad enough to collide with another passenger vehicle, but the thought of smashing into a 40-ton brick on wheels at high speed is kind of terrifying. I would prefer that those drivers are well-rested and alert. They would too. This is where Sal’s research comes in. He conducted a study for the Oregon Department of Transportation to look at the extent and impact of Oregon’s truck parking shortage.

HERNANDEZ: We really couldn’t look at the whole state, but we focused on U.S. 97 first to see what the issues were on that route.

FRANDZEL: U.S. 97 runs 289 miles from California to Washington on the east side of the Cascades. It’s the most important north-south highway corridor in the state, other than Interstate 5. Truck traffic is heavy. Sal surveyed 201 truckers who deliver goods in the Pacific Northwest to find out more about their parking woes. He also gathered seven years of historical data for truck crashes on 97. He looked for crash trends and crash hot spots. And he applied something called crash harm.

HERNANDEZ: Crash harm is a metric that we use. It allows us to quantify the impact of safety issues. For example, it allows us to take into account various economic, potential loss of life, maintenance, rehabilitation, due to a crash. So there are numerous studies out there that actually allow us to quantify injury severity, types of crash, the monetary loss, damage to goods and so forth. So we use these values, put them together, and that becomes the potential crash harm metric.

FRANDZEL: Results from the first part of the study confirmed what was evident.

HERNANDEZ: I kind of had an idea of what we would be expecting to see: We don’t have enough truck parking locations.

[MUSIC: George Corley Wallace, by Paul Marhoefer, used with permission of the artist]

FRANDZEL: The survey did, however, add depth to that knowledge. For example, nearly two-thirds of the drivers said they often have trouble finding safe and adequate parking. The worst season is winter. The worst day is Friday. And the worst time is from midnight to 6:00 a.m. What shook things up was the second part of the study, which found that crashes where truckers were at fault were far more likely to occur when parking was most difficult to find.

HERNANDEZ: We basically analyzed all the at-fault truck crashes that may have been related or could have been related, or had some correlation to truck parking. Through our data analysis and through these surveys, we determined when there’s increased volumes we see, again, high demand for truck parking, and that high demand increases the possibility of seeing more crashes related to the lack of truck parking.

FRANDZEL: He has some pretty good ideas why this is the case.

HERNANDEZ: You end up seeing drivers who are maybe more fatigued who cannot find truck parking locations. We may be seeing drivers speeding on our highways because they’re trying to race before their hours of service clock is out to reach a safe and adequate truck parking location. And we’re seeing a lot of truckers parking on exit and on ramps along the roadways, on empty lots along the roadways, and that causes a safety hazard and safety issue to our general public.

FRANDZEL: Even more compelling was the huge economic hit caused by the wrecks.

HERNANDEZ: And we came up with a value of about $75 million in potential crash harm if we did nothing in this state. That was the big number that really caught people’s eyes. Whoa, $75 million, holy cow, especially if it’s only one corridor, the U.S. 97 corridor.

[MUSIC: George Corley Wallace, by Paul Marhoefer, used with permission of the artist]

FRANDZEL: Those numbers represent a very human toll: In 708 at-fault crashes identified in the study, 30 involved fatalities, and 264 resulted in injuries. A few other truck parking studies were floating around when Sal’s work was published in summer 2017, but they didn’t get much attention beyond the industry. Seventy-five million dollars, though, that set things on fire.

HERNANDEZ: As soon as the study ran, I was getting calls off the hook from radio stations in Klamath Falls, from folks from Wisconsin, New York, Florida, Oregon, I got interviewed by channel 21 Bend news with regard to truck parking, and they independently interviewed several truckers along U.S. 97 and completely confirmed the results of this study: that there is not enough truck parking. So even up to this day, I’m still receiving requests and calls about, Hey, what was your study about? What are the trends, what do you think is going to happen in the future with the application of new technologies that are coming into the market?

FRANDZEL: Solutions can’t come soon enough. The country relies more and more on trucks to deliver food, fuel, holiday gifts, pet supplies, clothing, you name it, more of it is going to come by truck.

HERNANDEZ: Our consumer behavior is changing, the way we’re purchasing and buying things is more online. It has to either come by truck or by rail, or by airplane. The container ships are growing, so they’re carrying more goods, and that creates more truck traffic at our ports, which then creates increases of volumes on our roadways.

FRANDZEL: I asked Sal the same thing that the media asked: What’s next? What’s it going to take to solve this problem?

HERNANDEZ: In the short term, I think when you look at the issue of truck parking, things like development of apps – there’s a lot of apps out there that provide information to truck drivers on the number of spaces available on both public and private truck parking locations. As that technology – those apps – become more prevalent in the market, we may be seeing better planning by our carriers and the truckers, of course. DOT is doing their best to work with and create private/public partnerships with industry to provide more truck parking locations. Some other technologies that are being provided are these variable message signs along the highway routes informing truck drivers on the nearest truck parking location and the number of spaces available for them to park so they can start planning.

FRANDZEL: Sal’s also preparing a study for the Idaho Transportation Department. He wants to determine if truck parking information can be integrated into the state’s 511 traffic information hotline. And he’s evaluating the potential of other technologies and that could help truckers plan ahead. Then there’s the autonomous elephant in the room.

HERNANDEZ: Medium-longer term is the penetration of autonomous vehicles in the market, especially for long-haul distances. Of course, you’ll still probably need a truck driver in some of those just to make  sure when you’re approaching a dense urban area that the trucker can maneuver the vehicle in the system if the city is not ready to handle such technologies. But at least in the long-haul distances, we’ll see, I would say, more rested truck drivers. I’m very optimistic, hopefully in my lifetime I see that all the vehicles are autonomous, maybe like the Jetsons, we’re flying around, everything is quite autonomous and free of crashes of course.

FRANDZEL: But he made it clear that it’ll be a while before autonomous freight vehicles play a major role in freight distribution. Until they do, we need truckers, and they need rest, they need proper parking, and they deserve the right to sleep easy.

[MUSIC: Mother Maybelle, by Paul Marhoefer, used with permission of the artist]

*HERNANDEZ: Anything we can do to improve the safety of our driving population, especially our truck drivers, they do so much. Our economy really depends on them, really, a big part of it. If we don’t provide a safe and adequate location for them to park, it makes it really difficult for them, it makes it really dangerous for everybody.

FRANDZEL: This episode was produced by me, Steve Frandzel, with additional audio editing by Molly Aton and production assistance by Jens Odegaard. Thanks Jens.

[MUSIC: Tooter and the Line, Paul Marhoefer, used with permission of the artist]

JENS ODEGAARD: You’re welcome.

FRANDZEL: Special thanks to Paul Marhoefer, who graciously let us to share some of his wonderful music. All the music in today’s podcast came from Paul. I just can’t stop listening to his stuff. Check him out on YouTube. There’s a link in the show notes for today’s episode. Our intro is “The Ether Bunny” by Eyes Closed Audio on SoundCloud and used with permission of a Creative Commons attribution license. For more episodes, visit engineeringoutloud.oregonstate.edu, or subscribe by searching “Engineering Out Loud” on your favorite podcast app. Bye now, and keep on truckin’.

[Reser Stadium crowd chanting: “O — S — U, O — S — U, O — S — U”]

ODEGAARD: Every single day in the United States, 40,000 people — almost enough to fill Reser Stadium to capacity — receive a nuclear medicine imaging procedure that uses the radioisotope technetium-99m or, as it’s commonly called, Tc-99m.

Picture that, 40,000 people every day. That’s more than 14.5 million per year heading into medical facilities all around the country to have their insides imaged.

But Tc-99m doesn’t just grow on trees — not even here in the land of Doug Firs. Nope, it takes a whole different kind of beaver to produce and harvest this resource. Oregon State Beavers to be exact.

[MUSIC: “The Ether Bunny” by Eyes Closed Audio used with permission of a Creative Commons Attribution License.]

NARRATOR: From the College of Engineering at Oregon State University, this is “Engineering Out Loud.”

ODEGAARD: Hi I’m Jens Odegaard, your host. There are three Beavers (that’s the Oregon State mascot in case you’re from out of state) that I’ll introduce you to in a minute. But first let me set the stage.

This season on “Engineering Out Loud” we’re sharing stories of how our researchers are helping us stay healthy and safe.

Tc-99m is incredibly important for nuclear medicine imaging procedures because it’s the industry workhorse used in 80% of them. It’s an ideal medical isotope because it can be used in a broad range of applications. It’s commonly used to image bones, the brain, kidneys, lungs, and the heart.

REESE: The real beauty of technetium-99m is that you can attach it to many, many different kinds of molecules.

ODEGAARD: That’s Steve Reese, director of the Oregon State Radiation Center and an associate professor in the college’s School of Nuclear Science and Engineering. He’s the driving force behind Tc-99m production at Oregon State — something that’s never been done at the university level.

REESE: Famously, it's used in what is called a "stress test," which many people would probably be familiar with — the idea is that you run on a treadmill, you inject the technetium-99m, which is attached to a chemical, then you place radiation detectors around the body, and you look to see how the heart moves the blood. And you can see, like, blood flow, blood volumes, condition of valves. It adds a lot of fidelity and a lot of information for a physician.

ODEGAARD: The problem is that the Tc-99m supply is bottlenecked with the entire U.S. supply being imported from overseas. To understand why, we have to jump into a quick technical and historical lesson. You with me?

[MUSIC: New Land by ALBIS on Youtube Audio Library. Used with permission.]

Tc-99m is actually a decay product of the element molybdenum-99 or Mo-99 for short. That is to say, Mo-99 turns into Tc-99m as it emits radiation. So to get Tc-99m, people make Mo-99. This Mo-99 is then shipped to medical facilities, which have instruments that, and I swear this is the actual term, “milk” the Tc-99m from the moly when a patient is ready for the procedure.

Now here’s the kicker: Mo-99 is traditionally made in large nuclear reactors that generate an enormous amount of neutrons.

REESE: Traditionally, and currently Mo-99 is made in about five places around the planet. And these are associated with rather large reactor facilities in terms of research reactors.

ODEGAARD: So to make the Mo-99, you put a uranium-filled container called a target into one of these large nuclear research reactors and then bombard it with neutrons. As the neutrons hit the uranium, the uranium fissions, which makes a variety of daughter products, one of which is Mo-99.

The sole North American producer of Mo-99, Canada’s National Research Universal Reactor, stopped producing it in 2016 and shut down completely in March 2018. Even before that it suffered shutdowns in 2007 and 2009.

These early shutdowns caused a bit of chaos.

REESE: So this created a crisis in the moly community, because they were making at the time about half the world's supply. And, certainly, more than half of the U.S. supply.

ODEGAARD: This obviously left a gaping hole in the U.S. market. Enter Oregon State. Tentatively, even doubtingly, at first.

REESE: And it was about that time after the crisis abated a little bit that I was approached by a group asking me if TRIGA reactors like the one here at Oregon State could be used. And, the first time they came in, I said, "Um, no, the reactor's too small.”

[MUSIC: Drawing Mazes by Chad Crouch, used with permission of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.]

ODEGAARD: Let me interject. Oregon State’s TRIGA reactor can operate at a maximum steady state power of 1.1. MW, or to put it technically, a heck of a lot smaller than the reactors traditionally used for Mo-99 production. Reactors like the 80 MW Canadian reactor.

Anyway, back to Steve.

REESE: “And they said ‘Okay, thank you very much,’” and they went away. And they came back a second time, and they said, "Well, is it, is it possible to use it?" And I said, "Well, yeah, but the problem is, we don't make enough neutrons." And, neutrons are proportional to the size of the reactor, so if you're too small, you can't make enough. And so they went away, and I started thinking about it, and that's when I grabbed Todd, and I said ….

ODEGAARD: Todd is Todd Palmer, a professor of nuclear engineering here at Oregon State. And basically what Steve said was, “Todd, since we can’t make more neutrons with our reactor, can we make a better target?” If you’ll recall from our earlier technical lesson, the target is the container that holds the uranium that fissions to make moly-99.

And what did Todd say …

PALMER: And, we looked at this target design, which is very, very simple. I mean, incredibly simple, and it just seemed to beg for a little innovation, you know? It's just like, “Hey, it's a can, it's a can that contains a layer of uranium in it. Well, alright then. Maybe we could do something a little bit better than that.”

[MUSIC: Button by Chad Crouch, used with permission of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.]

ODEGAARD: They embarked on a journey to design a new target that would both increase the number of neutrons hitting the uranium and also use low-enriched uranium rather than highly enriched uranium as the fuel source. Highly enriched uranium can be used to make nuclear weapons, so you can see why low-enriched uranium is the option of choice for university research reactors.

To start on the target design, Todd and Steve borrowed a concept from industry.

PALMER: There were things that had been done in the commercial industry over the years, that, where people had figured out that with a judicious use of water, rather than more fuel, that you could actually get more neutrons into a target. We thought, well, what if we, instead of having water only on the outside of the target, what if we had an annulus, where we had water flowing through the center of this tube, an annular tube, and you got just lots more thermal neutrons coming into this target as a result.

ODEGAARD: This idea seemed pretty good, so the next step was to start computer modeling some designs. This is where another member of our Oregon State community enters the story.

MUNK: I am Madicken Munk. Right now I am a postdoc at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. And when I was at Oregon State working on this project, I was an undergrad student researcher.

ODEGAARD: At the time she was getting ready to start her junior year and had been doing some work with Todd.

MUNK: So when I came on the project, Dr. Palmer and Dr. Reese told me a little bit about the design they were interested in optimizing and then what I did is I performed parametric studies to figure out what design we needed to come up with that would make the most moly in the limitations that we had. So I played a lot with the thickness of how much material we could have, how much of the fuel material we needed to make the moly, but I also came up with lots of other crazy ideas. I would propose them and they were kind of my own. And of course, I wasn't exactly sure what I was doing, but I would name them these crazy names like "The Tiger Design,"

[laughing]

and then try and pitch them to Dr. Palmer and Dr. Reese. I have no idea what you two thought of that.

[laughing]

REESE: You know, Madicken, I remember that Tiger design now.

[laughing]

MUNK: It was a double annulus, do you remember?

PALMER [interjects]: Stripes.

REESE: And I remember thinking, how on earth are we going to build this?

[laughing]

MUNK: I mean, okay, look, I was having fun with the mental ideas but I was not thinking about if it was feasible, at all.

ODEGAARD: Though the Tiger didn’t roar, Madicken’s work was crucial in optimizing the target design as she simulated hundreds of design iterations.

MUNK: There are lots of different variables that we have when we're optimizing these different targets. And so, I got to do my own experiments and play around with it and see the effects of how the design change affected our target and how much moly we were making, and that was something I really enjoyed doing, It was really just this fun, sort of mental playground that I got to be on every day. So, I didn't really even think of it like work; I was really just having a good time.

ODEGAARD: Through this experimental work the team honed in on a final target design.

Now back to Todd Palmer with a valiant attempt at describing what the final design looks like via some not-so-helpful anatomical metaphors.

PALMER: What is it. It's about as long, as long as your arm? And uh and about this big around? About as big around as your eye socket? I don't know.

ODEGAARD: An okay sign.

[laughing]

PALMER: Yeah, about an okay sign. It's, you're laughing because I said the eye socket; you can't see my okay sign out here.

[laughing]

But, yeah, how thick is the annular region? I don't even remember exactly how big that is.

REESE: It's pretty thin. But the whole thing, I mean the whole diameter is only about an inch and a half.

PALMER: Yeah, so this is not real big.

ODEGAARD: To recap that whole digression: the target is a cylinder about 2 feet long and about 1.5 inches in diameter. The low-enriched uranium is sandwiched between two layers of metal cladding. In the center is an annulus or tube that allows water to flow through.

It’s this water-circulating annulus that's the key to the whole design, because, as we discussed earlier, water increases the number of neutrons that hit the uranium, causing more fission, and thus producing more moly-99.

In fact, through more validation experiments conducted at a national lab and funded by grant money, the team found that they had struck gold.

REESE: And we came up with this design that seemed to suggest that you could make commercial quantities of moly in a reactor as small as 1 megawatt, like we have here at Oregon State University. And the reason why that's fairly profound in the moly production community is that you go from maybe five facilities on the planet to upwards of probably 30 to 40 reactors around the world. So, you could essentially take the reactor and it would no longer be a bottleneck anymore.

ODEGAARD: The target designed by the team here at Oregon State can be used in almost any small research reactor.

REESE: Each reactor's unique, but the beauty is, these targets are such a size that you can put it in not only TRIGA reactors but also plate-type reactors as well.

ODEGAARD: The plate-type reactors that Steve mentioned are another type of fairly common research reactor. The whole design and idea is so promising that Steve, Todd, and Madicken patented the technology.

REESE: Yeah, and as a matter of fact, the patent application went in and was filed, and then shortly thereafter, a company formed — Northwest Medical Isotopes — to license the technology from the university, and to go forth and try to mature the concept.

ODEGAARD: Maturing the concept basically means setting up the whole process for getting the moly to market. First of all, once moly is produced in a research reactor, it must then be processed or separated from the uranium at a facility.

REESE: And, this is not something we'd be doing at Oregon State University. But the ultimate endpoint is that you have to remove the moly-99 from not only the uranium but all of the rest of the radioactive constituents that are in the target. And then once you separate the moly-99, you make sure that it is of the purity that you need, and if it isn't, you purify it; and then what happens is you take that moly-99, usually in a liquid, and you — for lack of a better word — sell it to a company that then puts it in a form that can be injected into the human body.

ODEGAARD: Northwest Medical Isotopes, is full-steam ahead with plans to commercialize this operation. They’re moving toward building a processing facility in Missouri, which is an ideal central location for shipping moly to medical facilities around the country.

[MUSIC: New Land by ALBIS on Youtube Audio Library. Used with permission.]

The ultimate plan is that research reactors across the United States, including the TRIGA reactor right here at Oregon State, would use the target design to produce moly, ship it securely in lead-lined containers to the production facility, which would purify the moly, and then send it wherever it’s needed.

If all goes well, and so far it has, production should start up sometime around 2020, breaking the bottleneck and impacting thousands of people in the United States everyday.

REESE: It's just around the corner.

ODEGAARD: Cool.

PALMER: As for us, I mean at this point the handoff has happened right, and we're just hoping to see it come to fruition …

ODEGAARD: If, or hopefully when, it does come to fruition it will mark a huge success for the role universities and their researchers play in benefiting both our everyday health and wellbeing, and in developing industry ready technology.

This episode was produced and hosted by me, Jens Odegaard. Audio editing was by the talented Molly “99” Aton. Our intro music is “The Ether Bunny” by Eyes Closed Audio. You can find them on SoundCloud and we used their song with permission of a Creative Commons attribution license. Other music and sound effects in this episode were also used with appropriate licenses. For more episodes, bonus content, and links to the licenses, visit engineeringoutloud.oregonstate.edu. Also, please subscribe by searching “Engineering Out Loud” on Spotify or your favorite podcast app. See ya on the flipside.