>>Good morning an welcome to Global Perspectives.

I'm David Dumke.

Today we are joined by Doctor Kirk Johnson, who is the Sant Director of the Smithsonia National Natural History Museum.

Welcome to the show.

>>Thanks so much.

It's great to be here.

>>So I want to start with a very Florida point.

You were telling me earlier you are a sinkhole fan, which is be - may strike our audience as quite odd.

>>I love sinkholes, and the reason I love them is not because car parks fall into them, but because Florid has been Florida for a long time and sinkholes have been around for 35-40 million years.

Which means that when a sinkhole forms in a natural world, animals fall into the hole, they get trapped and sinkholes become filled up with mud and skeletons and they're little fossil treasure troves.

If you go to the museum in Gainesville, they have incredibl fossil, mammoths and mastodons and rhinoceroses, crocodile and turtles and horses and saber tooth cats.

All because there are sinkholes here.

And so if you have sinkholes, you get fossils.

And I love fossils.

So Florida is an amazing fossil state.

>>And you checked out one of these this this earlier this year, I understand.

>>Yeah.

Februar I went up and visited the staff at the museum in Gainesville, University of Florida.

And my goodness, they have a number of sinkhole that are now filled in with mud and skeletons.

We went out and dug, and I actually found part of a fossil rhinoceros, a rib cage of a rhinoceros, while I was digging there.

And they they just have every single sinkhole is sampling a different time period.

And you're getting this amazing record of life through time in Florida.

It turns out that Florida is probably next to Nebraska in terms of the richest state for fossil mammals.

>>I've got some follow up questions on Florida, but I want to get into another area about your museum.

First of all, your your enthusiasm for for the science and preserving natural history has been well documented.

And you're returning to our show.

I think the last time you were on was during Covid.

We we couldn't do it live, which is this is much, much, much better.

Tell us what you've described yourself as a museum kid.

And how did that lea - how di growing up lead you to a museum?

Then we'll get in a little, about the Smithsonian itself.

>>It's a quick story I was when I was a little kid.

My parents were outdoors people, my mom grip on a ranch in Wyoming.

My dad grew up on a, a garden farm in Fresno, California.

And every summer, I grew up in Seattle, an we'd drive down to California, drive over to the Rockies and we'd stop on the coastline.

We'd stop at the ranch.

And as a little kid, I started finding things like stones or arrowheads or fossils or flowers or whatever.

And I became a finder of things where we go somewhere I'd get out to look around on the ground.

I find cool stuff and by the time I was 10 or 11, I realized that the best stuff ends up in museums and not just on display i museums, but behind the scenes.

And so I talked my way into the back rooms of a museum in Seattle, and I pretty much never left.

I became a museum rat.

I volunteered at museums, and then I chose my college based on the fact that it had a museum.

And I've been working at museums my entire life, and now I run the world' largest natural history museum.

>>Well, tell us a little about the Smithsonian itself.

I mean many of our viewers have been to Washington, or at least familiar with some of the museums but it has a unique story and origin story in and of itself.

>>Yeah, you know, in 1829, this Englishman died.

And in his wil he said he would give his estate to the United States government to found in the city of Washington an institution for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.

So by the time the money finally got here in 1846, the US government founded this Smithsonian Institution.

They put the Chief justice of the Supreme Court in charge of it.

And over the next 179 years, that facility, which started as a red, Redstone building in the middle of the National Mall, has grown to 21 museums, nine research centers, the National Zoo, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

We have field station here in Florida.

We've got exhibits in Anchorage, Alaska.

We have stations in Panama.

It's a major complex, but at the end of the day, I always look at the Smithsonian as our nation's first bet on science, because the Smithsonian predated all the science agencies in the US government.

So we're before NOAA, we're before NASA we're before the USGS.

We were the scientist that were employed by the nation to do the science for the nation starting in the 1840s.

>>Whe you talk about natural history, of course a lot of people instantly think of dinosaurs.

And, you know, you're a paleo botanist by background yourself.

The past is obviousl very important, but it also is an indicator of a lot of what' going on now and in the future.

Tell us a little about that importance.

>>Well, you know, this is the thing all museum directors around the world know that they take care of objects we've collected in the past, help us understand the world, and museums really are where our culture stores the planet's memories, fossils, rock specimens, etc.

Over time, it's becoming very clear that the world is changing very rapidly right now, and these collections of things from the past really do inform the present and the future.

And one great example i we in 2019, we opened an exhibit called the David H Koch Hall of Fossils Deep Time, and it's the history of life on Earth from the very beginning of the planet, all the way to the present and going into the future.

And when most fossil halls and in the end with fossils and you think, well, it's in the past, that's not relevant to me, but this exhibit actually takes us forward and say, what's it going to be like at 300 years or a thousand years or 3 million years?

Because the story of the planet is ongoing.

So why stop in the present?

And remember, if you stop at the present, it becomes the past immediately.

So it's it's more, thoughtful way to think about that.

And it turns people's vision and views toward the future, you know, how do you impact what's happening?

And humans have a vast impact on the planet right now.

And the question is, what's that going to be like in the year 2100, whic seems like a long time from now.

But the fact is, there's a lot of people alive right now that are going to be alive in the year 2100.

They'll be citizens of the 22nd century.

This mission you have of both preserving the past and using science to tell us about the present and future.

>>There are some who would say, you know, there's been a lot of questions, that there's been a lot of political meddling lately, including towards the some of the Smithsonian individual museums there.

Has this been a threa to the Natural History Museum?

And how do we kind of overcome, get politics out of kind of the museum process?

>>I think one of the things that's really important to see about the Smithsonian is it is assiduously apolitical and nonpartisan.

We welcome all Americans.

We always have.

And that's what's so great about the National Mall.

That's where all Americans come.

It's where we see the history of our nation, and it's right next to what's happening, the modern, the modern story o what's happened in our country.

So we've been close to the action ever since the beginning.

I mean, the first Smithsonian Castle went up during, slightly before the Civil War started.

So the Smithsonian was around during the Civil War.

We've been around ever since then.

And we're one of the ways that Americans make sense of what's going on in our country, not just from the natural history point of view, but we have history, art and culture museums as well.

So it's this kind of a one stop sho for what it means to be American and how we understand the world we live in.

>>You were mentioning earlier about some of, you know, the displays and things in museum, but what what's behind the scenes and kind of the collection behind the scenes that people don't view.

How many artifacts are we talking about in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum alone?

>>In our museum alone, 148 million objects and people always ask m what percentage of your objects are on display.

So I one day did the calculation because we have 11,945 objects on display.

And that means that o display is seven 1,000th of 1%.

Almost none.

And people say, well, why is that?

And the real answer is that collections have multiple purposes.

There are a lot of objects in collections that are great to put on display to help educate people and understand the natural world, but they're also specimen we use for scientific research for a variety of purposes.

And I'll give you a really good example.

We have the National Mosquito collection, 2 million mosquitoes.

And you think, well, why would you have 2 million mosquitoes?

Well, it turns out that there are almost 3,70 different kinds of mosquitoes.

3,700 different species.

They're all blood feeders.

They all carry disease.

They are the cause of much death and misery around the world.

And the Smithsonian is the leading mosquit research facility in the planet.

And the only way to do that is to have the collection of mosquitoes.

And we've been doing the genome of mosquitoes for a long time, and it helps prevent the spread of mosquito borne diseases, primarily malaria, but a lot of other diseases as well.

>>Do you do you feel that people understand that, who support you?

I mean, a lot of people will visit because they're proud of this museum that's in our capital.

And obviously, you see dinosaurs, you see kind of the big ticket items that that draw crowds right away.

But this stuff's very important for daily life.

>>Exactly.

I think most people think a museum is a building full of exhibits that's attended by kids primarily.

And that's and it' a hard preconception to overcome because all museums have collections that are used for research or scholarly endeavors, and they also have the specialists that do the research.

So behind the scenes in our museum, we have vast vaults of collections of objects and scientists who take car of those objects and scholars, but also visiting researchers from around the world.

So we're a real magnet for global research.

And it's it's been interesting.

And I've talked to museu directors from around the world, and we all have the same challenge.

We have the perception of being an old building.

Maybe it's a museum, maybe it's boring.

But I'll tell you what, after 13 years as a director, it is a thrilling place.

And every day amazing things happen.

New discoveries are made, new insights are made.

So it's it's a conception we have to bust.

We have to help people understan how amazingly cool museums are.

>>I also understand, you know, you're talking about talking to directors of other museums around the world.

Everyone has their own databases and their own.

You know, they may not be as large as the Smithsonian's collection, but their own collections.

How much coordination and collaboration is there between institutions so you can really, truly have a global database of some of this?

>>I mean, if you think about this, if you take all the object in all the museums in the world that underpins what humanity knows about the planet.

So there's thi concept of One World collection, is that all those objects together represent the brain trust of the planet.

And the problem is that museums have been around for a long time.

I mean, most of the big museums in the world were built between 1860 and 1920, and that was way before there was digitization or computers.

So all the museums have a backlog to catch up, to catch up, to actually recor the objects, to digitize them, to image them.

And we're all working on this process.

For instance, we just digitized the National Herbarium and which is, paper sheets on which pressed plants are present.

And that's how we track all the plants in the world.

There's about 350,000 different kinds of plants in the world.

The National Herbarium has 5 million sheets.

And over the last five years, we scanned them all.

So no you can pull up on your iPhone any one of those plants from anywhere in the world and access it.

And not just you, but any scientists who are studying it or anybody, anywhere around the world.

So we're on the wa to that, that global collection.

But there's a long ways to go because it's hard to digitize some things.

Like, for instance, how would you digitize a blue whale skeleton or a pickled gorilla or a jar full of squid?

I mean, it' there's all of these things that how do you how do you recor these things in a digital form?

Because we think about it, the collections of a natural history museum.

It's kind of like the analog twin of the natural world.

And now we're trying to make digital twin of the analog twin.

And it's complicated.

>>It sounds certainly sound like an overwhelming challenge.

There are people working on this, obviously nonstop for years and-- >>Exactly.

>>You have to measure progress in inches, I imagine.

>>Yeah, we do.

I mean, right now we're doing a project where we're digitizing, pollinating insects and we have to the insects are on pins with little labels, and we have to imag the little insect and the label.

Sometimes the insec might be three millimeters long.

So we have an elaborate conveyor belt right now which is digitizing those.

And we can do about 1,500 a day on this conveyor belt.

So we're making progress.

But we do have 35 million insects.

So it's-- >>Lot of work-- >>It's a bigger problem.

It's a bigger problem.

>>Well you you were telling me about you have a lot of priority projects.

I want to ask you a little about those but I want to ask about some of the other work you're doing in Florida, including in Fort Pierce.

>>Yeah.

Fort Pierce is a marine station that the Smithsonian's had for many years.

And it's it's close to the Harbor Branch.

It's out there in the Indian River lagoon, which is a really interesting part of the Intercoastal waterway, because it's sort of right at the boundary between the temperate area to the north and the more tropical area to the south, and it's got tremendous biological diversity.

I mean, there's we have recorded over 11,000 species of marine organisms in that lagoon.

And it's also the are where the water is overflowing from the lake back into the, the lagoon.

So there's a lot of human interactivity there.

And we're working on ways to keep the waters of Florida clean and vibrant.

And, this work we're doing is now being enhanced by a brand new technique, which is really cool.

We can take now a glass of water from the Indian River lagoon and scan all the DNA that's in the water, and the water has got the DNA in it of all the organisms that are living in the water.

So a single glass of wate from that lagoon will give you the DNA codes for over 1,000 species.

And you can do it quick.

There's amazing technology, but the problem is you just have a thousand different kinds of DNA.

And what are those?

What animals do they go to?

So now we're actually using our collections to identify each of these DNA sequences with a real organism.

And basically turn this tool into one where probably in a few years, you take a water sample and say, what are the fish that are swimming in the lagoon right now?

You don't have to catch them.

You do have a sample, and you can just take the water sample and say, I have these ten species of fish are here today.

So it's a very cool high speed technique.

It's one example of how technology lets you jump over earlier impediments on t greater insights in the future.

>>The use of DNA and water.

Now what other what where where els will this lead in your-- >>Well, like for instance, right now we are looking at all of the fishes that swim in the coastlin around the entire United States and in the what we call the the, EEZ the like I would say, I don't know where the first is, but it's like the economic zone is a 200 mile boundary around the outside of the United States.

So all down the Atlantic coast, the Gulf Coast, up the West Coast, and also around Hawai and all the other territories.

There are something like 5,000 species of fish.

So that's that's a doable number.

We have 87% of those in our collections already in Washington, D.C.

we can take their scans, and they will be abl to basically build a fish device that will allow us anywhere in the coastal waters, United States, to identify fis simply by taking water samples.

And right now, the way NOAA does it is they go out and they take a net, they drag it and they catch the fish.

They identify the fish and say, these fish are here.

Now we can do it so much faster-- >>Very, yeah.

>>In this way.

And and you think about the ramifications for ecosystem health or fisheries, you know, food access.

There's all sorts of reasons that we want a better idea of what's happening with our fisheries.

And that's just one example saying it can be done on the American rivers.

And this fugitive DNA is the shed DNA is everywhere.

It's in soil, it's in rivers, it's in the ocean.

It's in the air right here in this room.

So that breakthrough, I mean we only discovered DNA in 1953.

Human human genome was 2004.

And now it's an incredible tool for sampling and monitoring the health of the global ecosystem.

>>With these these innovations that are coming.

I mean, you're you are heading a museum of natural history.

So a lot of people again, you know, and I'm, I'm including myself in this think of like a static, you know, analog building.

But you're talking about these innovations are happening all the time.

Is it is it a challenge for you to stay on top of every just the innovations?

>>Well, it is, but that's what makes life thrilling for me.

I'm a scientist and if you're a scientist, what you realize is that globally we are getting so much more information, so many scientific insights, breakthroughs, discoveries happening every single day around the world.

And if you're a scientist and you track those things, it is a thrilling time to be alive because insights are happening on a daily basis.

And even in the building, you know, even the building I'm in, we're getting daily discoveries.

But imagine all the scientists in the whole world or all the scientists and all the museums, the whole world, there's a lot going on.

And so I spent a ton of my time, scanning what's happening globally in the science world, what our guys are doing, how we're tied into that.

And I have what I call the Dangermond gap.

I named it after Jack Dangermond, who is the head of the company ESRI, which does all the geographic mapping, the digital mapping stuff.

And the reason I named i after Jack is that the insights that geo geographic informatio systems have allowed us to do, makin mapping the data of the planet because everything is somewhere.

So if you know where everything is, you can make all sorts of predictions.

If you know where all the car dealers are or where the sinkholes are, or where all the enemies are or all the friends are, whatever it is you're mapping, those insights are incredible, and the digital revolution mapped onto geography, which has given us the abilit to have a Google Maps and drive.

You have your car tell you where you're going instead of you telling your car where to go.

All that is so cool.

And yet most people just passively use it and they don't realiz how much knowledge we do have.

And the gap between what science knows and what people know about what science knows is huge right now, and growing rapidly because people are not getting better at knowing about science, but science is getting a lot better about getting more science out there.

So the gap is widening righ now, and I think we have in that gap, we have the solution to all of the world's problems.

>>One of the things you've you've been very effective at and you've you've written book that were for children as well.

But obviously any museum, you know, you you talked about a place where children go too, is getting children hooked on science, like, like you did an early age.

What is the Smithsonian doin to help help with that process?

>>Well, we exist for one thing, because, you know, every year 4 million people walk into the museum, and I know the thrill that I had when I walked in the museum.

And most kids are very curious.

I mean, I would say that the vast majority of kids are really interested in a lot of things.

And what happens is their curiosity gets funneled and narrowed off as they get older.

They find that they have to make decisions.

They don't get access to things.

And and museums aren't that common.

There aren't that many museums in North America.

I mean, there are if you look at museums of any size in North America, they're about a thousand, not just museums, but a lo - most of them are very small.

So most people don't have access to a good big natural history museum.

If they did, I'm pretty sure we'd have more people who are science savvy.

You don't have to be a scientist, but just being aware of what science is and aware of the power of science is important.

No matter what you do.

And I think that's that's the gap.

So I think just existing as museums, but also supporting the teaching of science in elementary school and middle school.

And most peopl find science hard and confusing.

And that's a problem with the science teachers, right?

It really science is thrilling and interesting if it's presented in the right way.

And I think that's one of the things that we strive to do in the museum context is make science compelling and lay dow that track for people walking.

I think this is cool stuff.

>>So in in closing that Dangermond gap you're talking about, it starts with with children.

I imagine getting them interested in an early age and keeping them interested.

>>Correct.

But it also goes to adults, right?

I mean, a lot of adults, for whatever reason, they've lost the curiosity about the natural world.

They don't know the names o the trees in their backyard or, you know, but they have those zones.

I mean, if you're a hunter or a fisherman or a hiker, a boater you know-- >>They know that.

>>Yeah.

>>Area.

>>And they enjoy being outside in nature.

And I think this is one of th great challenges of our time, is there are more and more of us are becoming scree oriented indoor in-car people.

But really, humans are of nature, and we're happiest when we're in nature.

And that's why people recreate in nature.

They go to national parks, they go out in boats.

It's like it's great out there.

It's amazing what you see.

It's beautiful, it's interesting, it's fulfilling.

And that goal of getting people more engaged in natur is a central goal of the museum.

And obviously it's kind of ironic is we're a building in a city and we're saying nature is awesome, go out and see nature, but we're the analog twin of the global nature in that building.

And it's one of my ambition to find ways to inspire people to know the planet is such a beautiful, wonderful place.

>>So on that note, w we only have a few minutes left, but if you could give us a few highlights of what this what the Smithsonian is doing right now and some of the new projects you have.

>>Well I think, you know, the two big, exciting projects we did this year was we were part of the team that worked with NASA to send the OSIRIS-REx mission all the way out to the Bennu asteroid, grab a little tiny sample, bring it all the way back, drop it out of the spaceship.

It landed in the desert in Utah.

Our guys were right there when that thing landed.

We got the first samples from Bennu, and they were remarkable what they told us, because in those samples, we found hydrated minerals.

That means there's water there.

There's amino acids, and there are these minerals that form i evaporating lake kind of thing.

So it's a window into the very early moments of our solar system.

And real clues to where lif came from and how life started.

So that was a big win for us, because we were right there in the middle of the actio and the literally the the guy, our guy who went to Utah came back with his little samples.

He thought less than an ounce of samples.

And, but and they spent two years with incredible microscopes interrogating these little crumbs that look like pieces of granola out of which came a huge insights.

And the team is also working on a couple of very fundamental questions, like, where did the ocean come from?

And how did continents form?

I mean, you think we knew, but we don't like there's some very big questions about the planet that are unanswered.

We're tackling those.

And on the other hand, we're developing this ocean DNA project, looking at understanding how we can use, new DNA technology to do natural history faster and more efficiently and kind of jump over the barriers in front of us.

We'r also doing a lot of digitization of our collections to get those things rolling.

And we're doing a number of cool exhibits.

We're going to, open next year, an exhibit called From These Lands, a celebration of the nation's 250th anniversary, which will have objects from every one of the states and also the US territories.

We're also building really cool exhibit about bison, because I watched the Ken Burns special about Bison on PBS, love PBS.

And, I learned that the Smithsonian played a key role in the popularization of the horrible fact that in the 1880s, bison were going extinct and the Smithsonian was, critical in the turning the corne and starting to conserve bison.

So the the American Bison Societ was founded by Teddy Roosevelt and a guy named William Hornaday, who was a Smithsonian taxidermist, who realized that if we didn't do something, there would be no more bison.

So we're doing that, and we're putting bronze bison on the steps of the National Museum.

That will be there by next March.

And they're big, beautiful bronze models of the original bison that were collected by the Smithsonian, 1886.

>>And when you had a little anecdote about those original bison.

>>Yeah.

Well, when I watched the Ken Burns show, I said, they gotta be in my collection somewhere, and I got more than 1,000,000 square feet of collections.

They could be anywhere.

And I called my mamma guys, like, where are our bison?

They said, well, bad news, boss.

We gave them away in 1957, I'm like you gave them away?

I mean this is the bison that was on the the 1901 $10 bill.

This is the bison that was on the seal of the Department of the Interior.

This bison was on stamps this is a famous bison, and we gave it away.

You don't give away icons like that.

And it turned out that we'd shipped them back to Montana.

And I tracked them to Montana.

And I found them i this little museum on the banks of the Missouri River in a town called Fort Benton.

There was an exhibit called the Smithsonian Hornaday Bison exhibit.

There they were, my six bison, which had been on display at the Smithsonian from 1888 until 1957.

They've been on display in Fort Benton since 1996.

So I saw them there, and I'm going to I can't bring them back to the Smithsonian, but I can make the bronze versions.

We'll put them forever on the steps because it is the national mammal.

You know, for the last ten years, this is the 10th year anniversary of it being the national mammal as well.

>>Well, Doctor Kirk Johnson, thank you so much for being with us today.

And thank you so much for all the great work you and your team does at the Smithsonian.

>>I can assure you it's a pleasure.

>>And thank you for joining us.

We'll see you again next week on another episode of Global Perspectives.