Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Marsha for Radio I, and today I
Speaker 1: would be reading National Geographic Magazine dated June twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: which is donated by the publisher as a reminder. RADIOI
Speaker 1: is a reading service intended for people who are blind
Speaker 1: or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
Speaker 1: printed material. Please join me now for the continuation of
Speaker 1: the article I began last time, entitled this Pig Could
Speaker 1: Save Your Life by Matthew Cher. The idea was not unprecedented.
Speaker 1: For decades, scientists had been transfusing animal blood into or
Speaker 1: grafting animal skin onto human patients. The kidney and the
Speaker 1: use of immunosuppressants in the human recipients would merely represent
Speaker 1: a step up in scale and complexity. A few years later,
Speaker 1: Remsma was vindicated when one of his patients survived approximately
Speaker 1: nine months with the chimpanzee kidney, a promising feat in
Speaker 1: an era when the stakes for patients with failing kidneys
Speaker 1: were even higher than they are today. There was no
Speaker 1: widespread access to dialysis treatment, and there was no national
Speaker 1: donor database for kidney transplants. Euphoria was short lived. In
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties, kidney disease had already reached crisis scale
Speaker 1: in the United States, and even if zeno transplantation could
Speaker 1: be perfected a big if. Considering twelve of reama's thirteen
Speaker 1: patients lasted no more than eight weeks on the chimpanzee organs,
Speaker 1: how could scientists possibly secure enough primates A hard to
Speaker 1: come by solution simply didn't make sense, says Robert Montgomery,
Speaker 1: a transplant specialist at New York University Langone Health and
Speaker 1: himself the recipient of a donor heart, he already had
Speaker 1: the animal welfare angle. People like Jane Goodall have added
Speaker 1: so much to our understanding of how similar we are
Speaker 1: to primates, he said. Finally, Montgomery added, there was the
Speaker 1: arrival of AIDS, which is believed to have originated in apes.
Speaker 1: Having a donor species that is closer to humans on
Speaker 1: an evolutionary scale is going to make it easier to
Speaker 1: get a good result, Montgomery told me. But by the
Speaker 1: same token, it's also easier to pass a pathogen from
Speaker 1: a primate to a human than it would be with
Speaker 1: another animal, like a pig, say, Despite being notably intelligent creatures,
Speaker 1: pigs tend not to be viewed with any particular reverence
Speaker 1: by most people eb white, notwithstanding, by one estimate, more
Speaker 1: than a billion of the creatures are slaughtered and eaten
Speaker 1: by humans every year, and pigs breed with alacrity, typically
Speaker 1: twice a year and sometimes three, with litterous averaging eight
Speaker 1: to twelve piglets. This is one of the reasons that,
Speaker 1: beginning in the nineteen nineties, many researchers in the zeno
Speaker 1: field began to gravitate away from primates. But the shift
Speaker 1: presented its own unique obstacles, the most vexing of which
Speaker 1: was represented by a porcine antigen known as galactose oligos
Speaker 1: saccharide or alphagal for short. This antigen, found in pigs,
Speaker 1: is not present in the human body, which will attempt
Speaker 1: to rid it from the bloodstream by producing antibodies that
Speaker 1: bind to the antigen. When this occurs after an organ transplant,
Speaker 1: it usually prompts the acute rejection of the donor organ.
Speaker 1: Antibiotics and immunosuppressants can help, but not in the long term.
Speaker 1: As waves of researchers reluctantly concluded, they realized the need
Speaker 1: to remove the alphagal antigen from the pig kidney. A
Speaker 1: time consuming process. An efficient solution to this issue was
Speaker 1: pioneered in twenty twelve when scientists Emmanuel Charpentier and Jennifer A.
Speaker 1: Dudna patented a technology known as Crisper cast nine and
Speaker 1: oft used simile likens it to a pair of molecular scissors.
Speaker 1: With Crisper, scientists made cuts in humans in human and
Speaker 1: animal genetic code, thus replacing disease causing mutations and fundamentally
Speaker 1: changing the way genes were expressed in the US and Europe.
Speaker 1: Any experimental intervention must pass through two stages before it
Speaker 1: is made publicly available. In the preclinical stage, a drug
Speaker 1: or surgery is tested in the lab. In the second,
Speaker 1: providing the results are acceptable to regulators, research researchers can
Speaker 1: move on to humans. In twenty seventeen, a year before
Speaker 1: Rick Slayman received a human donor kidney, scientists affiliated with
Speaker 1: e Genesis opened a pre clinical trial on several long
Speaker 1: tailed macoques that were outfitted with lab modified pig kidneys
Speaker 1: informally dubbed knockouts, a nod to the antigens removed via
Speaker 1: the gene editing process. One monkey lived nearly three hundred days.
Speaker 1: We had a meeting with the FDA, and we basically asked,
Speaker 1: what would you need to see in order for us
Speaker 1: to move to the next stage? Recalled e e Genesis
Speaker 1: CEO Curtis, They gave us a figure of twelve months
Speaker 1: survival in a monkey. I was like, well, look, we're
Speaker 1: clearly moving in the right direction. But Egenesis was not
Speaker 1: alone in its pursuit of FDA approval. Revivicore, a subsidiary
Speaker 1: of the biotech firm United Therapeutics, had simultaneously been working
Speaker 1: on its own modified porcine kidneys. At a high level,
Speaker 1: the engineering methods employed by e Genesis and United Therapeutics,
Speaker 1: which is publicly traded and designated as a public benefit corporation,
Speaker 1: appear remarkably similar. Scientists at each company start by editing
Speaker 1: porcine fetal cells to remove the expression of dangerous antigens,
Speaker 1: before cloning the cells via nuclear transfer, a technique that
Speaker 1: yields embryos of matching genetic composition. Healthy embryos are then
Speaker 1: implanted into female pigs, which give birth to litters of
Speaker 1: piglets with identically edited cells. But there the resemblance and
Speaker 1: approach end United Therapeutics, for its part, knocks out just
Speaker 1: four poresene genes, preferring to utilize a breed of pig
Speaker 1: the land race for its fertility and litter size. Conversely,
Speaker 1: Egenesis makes sixty different edits to its cells, sixty two
Speaker 1: of which are knockouts and even of which and seven
Speaker 1: of which are additions from the human genome, and those
Speaker 1: cells are different in origin. Egenesis favors relying on the
Speaker 1: smaller Eucatan pig breed, whose organs more closely match a
Speaker 1: human's in size. In September twenty twenty one, n y
Speaker 1: U Langon was granted permission by regulators to transplant a
Speaker 1: United Therapeutics edited pig KINDI kidney into a brain dead
Speaker 1: human patient. As a brain dead patient is considered legally dead,
Speaker 1: the body would be supported by a ventilator during the procedure.
Speaker 1: My Gretgomery of n y U Langon was tasked with
Speaker 1: carrying out the surgery. I have spent most of my
Speaker 1: career trying to increase the number of living organ donors,
Speaker 1: Montgomery told me, noting that the annual number of living
Speaker 1: human kidney donors has been a flat line for fifteen years,
Speaker 1: hovering at six thousand. It was hard not to see
Speaker 1: the transplant as a breakthrough. You could sense the enthusiasm.
Speaker 1: I felt it too. In October of twenty twenty one,
Speaker 1: n Yu Langong went public with the news the Zeno
Speaker 1: transplanted kidney had been attached by a network of blood
Speaker 1: vessels to the patient's upper leg, where it started to
Speaker 1: function immediately creating urine for nearly three days. Just one
Speaker 1: major step remained a test on a living patient. Within
Speaker 1: hours of Slayman's final informed consent meeting at Winfried William's office,
Speaker 1: ears began turning at the Genesis Farming facility. As Bjorn
Speaker 1: Petersen watched. The small pig was loaded into the van,
Speaker 1: which raced down the road and onto the freeway, douing
Speaker 1: cross country journey was a whole logistical dance, Mike Curtiz
Speaker 1: told me. Traveling east through the night, the pig reached
Speaker 1: a veterinary center in western Massachusetts. There, both its kidneys
Speaker 1: were removed by Slayman's surgical team, with euthanasia administered post
Speaker 1: pre procedurement. By noon, the organs were packed into a
Speaker 1: refrigerated box and placed in the back of a different truck,
Speaker 1: who did this time toward Boston. At mass General. Slayman,
Speaker 1: who had already been prescribed a strong course of immunosuppressants,
Speaker 1: was put under and prepped for surgery while his family
Speaker 1: waited anxiously in the waiting area. At one p m.
Speaker 1: On March sixteenth, the procedure commenced. From his position in
Speaker 1: the operating theater, Williams watched his colleague's Leonardo Riella, Mass
Speaker 1: General's medical director of kidney transplantation, Tatsuo Kowai, who had
Speaker 1: performed Slayman's original kidney transplant years earlier, had and had
Speaker 1: worked with Riella to coordinate the FDA approvals, and Nahel Elias,
Speaker 1: surgical director of kidney Transplantation, carried out the procedure. They
Speaker 1: all knew the difficulties that Slayman's long struggle with kidney
Speaker 1: disease and hypertension would present. His whole vascular anatomy had changed.
Speaker 1: Williams said, he had very calcified, very hardened vessels, and
Speaker 1: you can't just crack open calcified vessels and make them work.
Speaker 1: You've got to find the right anatomic distribution. Plus you
Speaker 1: need to remember that mister Slayman was a big guy,
Speaker 1: and the vessels that were available for attachment to the
Speaker 1: donor kidney were sort of deep within his abdominal cavity.
Speaker 1: In the days leading up to the operation, p. S.
Speaker 1: Slayman reminded to Haarrish herself how confident her father had
Speaker 1: been that the surgery would be a success. When she
Speaker 1: entered the recovery sweep that evening, she took her father
Speaker 1: by the hand and wept with relief. Although he grasped
Speaker 1: the history making meaning of the procedure and the interest
Speaker 1: it would inspire in reporters, Slayman told her hospital staff
Speaker 1: he'd prefer to stay out at the limelight. Gamely, he
Speaker 1: agreed to pose for a few photos with his family
Speaker 1: before returning to the house that he shared with his fiancee,
Speaker 1: Farren Woolery. Following week was hard. Within a few days
Speaker 1: of the surgery, Slayman was diagnosed with symptoms of acute
Speaker 1: rejection and treated with what Williams described as the same
Speaker 1: anti rejection medication we would use in a garden variety
Speaker 1: human transplant. The treatment was effective, but fifty one days
Speaker 1: post transplant, Slayman returned once more for an appointment with
Speaker 1: Kawai and Riella. The doctors noticed signs of volume depletion.
Speaker 1: He was losing more nutrients and fluids than he was
Speaker 1: taking in. Sleiman was hooked up to an ivy to
Speaker 1: boost fluid volume. Williams told me, and he had a
Speaker 1: magnesium infusion to address some low levels. That same day,
Speaker 1: Slayman and Woolery left mass Gen General and picked up
Speaker 1: groceries near their home in the Massachusetts town of Weymouth.
Speaker 1: They made stops two stores. Slayman accompanied his fiancee into
Speaker 1: the first one, but begged off when it came to
Speaker 1: the second. He didn't feel up to it, he told Woolery.
Speaker 1: That night, after eating dinner and watching television together, the
Speaker 1: couple went to lie down in the bedroom. Woolery noticed
Speaker 1: Slayman's breathing had grown labored and shallow around eleven thirty
Speaker 1: p m. Around midnight, Slaman went into cardiac arrest. Woolery
Speaker 1: called nine one one, then dialed Williams, who told the
Speaker 1: empty crew by phone to take Slayman to the nearest
Speaker 1: a muge emergency room. Williams rushed to meet them at
Speaker 1: South Shore Hospital in Weymouth, but their combined efforts as
Speaker 1: at resuscitation came up short. Slaman passed away in the
Speaker 1: early morning of May eleventh, at the age of sixty two.
Speaker 1: In the hours after Slamon's death, his family huddled with
Speaker 1: Williams at South Shore for a debriefing. Sliman's brother and
Speaker 1: fiancee were on hand. Williams explained that it was critical
Speaker 1: to understand what had happened to Slayman, giving his relatively
Speaker 1: healthy status earlier in the day. After making a call
Speaker 1: to Slayman's mother, the family granted permission for an autopsy.
Speaker 1: The results, which were published earlier this year, revealed that
Speaker 1: the issue had been Slayman's heart, not the kidney. What
Speaker 1: we think happened, william said, is that because of his
Speaker 1: severe cardiac disease, he had a rhythmia, and he suffered
Speaker 1: an a rhythmic event that led to his death. The
Speaker 1: tissue of the kidney was healthy, and although there was
Speaker 1: residual evidence of the initial rejection symptoms, there was no
Speaker 1: acute kidney failure that would have been caused for mister
Speaker 1: Slayman's demise. Williams said, bottom line is that the xenograph
Speaker 1: was functioning reasonably well. It could be difficult to see
Speaker 1: it that way, of course, given that recipients of a
Speaker 1: kidney from a diseased human donor can live twelve years,
Speaker 1: and recipients of an organ from a living donor up
Speaker 1: to two decades. Slayman managed less than two months with
Speaker 1: a handful of medical interventions in between, and Lisa Paisano,
Speaker 1: who in April twenty twenty four became the second living
Speaker 1: patient to receive a modified pig kidney hers from United Therapeutics,
Speaker 1: passed away three months after her transplant due to heart issues.
Speaker 1: But Montgomery, who led Pizzano's surgery team, offered a useful
Speaker 1: reminder patients on the edge of dying already. Patients were
Speaker 1: trying to rescue with a brand new technology we're still refining.
Speaker 1: Are just not good indicators of how the science will
Speaker 1: faire in the long term, Montgomery said, we kind of
Speaker 1: set ourselves up with the most difficult scenario. Several days
Speaker 1: after Slayman's passing, William's recalt he received an invitation to
Speaker 1: speak at his funeral, held at a Baptist church in Milton, Massachusetts.
Speaker 1: He wasn't sure how he would be greeted. His mind
Speaker 1: traced back to the lingering legacy of the Tuskegee experiments.
Speaker 1: When you walk into this kind of congregation, you never
Speaker 1: know how you're going to be received, he told me,
Speaker 1: because there may be this suspicion, even if it's unspoken,
Speaker 1: that they experimented on this individual, like this is what
Speaker 1: they do to black people. The church, Williams was joined
Speaker 1: by Slayman's entire medical team, and he began his remarks
Speaker 1: by introducing Kowai. Immediately, William's fears about his reception vanished.
Speaker 1: Before I finished speaking his full name. The entire congregation
Speaker 1: gets up and gives us a standing ovation. It was
Speaker 1: just unbelievable, the energy. Recounting to me what he told
Speaker 1: the pack church, Williams held back his tears. I said,
Speaker 1: he'll go down in the pantheon of medical history, he
Speaker 1: told me. I wanted them to understand that he had
Speaker 1: provided new hope for patients everywhere. In the wake of
Speaker 1: Slayman and Pizzano's operations, e Genesis and United Therapeutics, along
Speaker 1: with hospitals around the country, fielded a torrent of inquiries
Speaker 1: from patients who had spent years on a list for
Speaker 1: a human donor kidney. It didn't matter that FDA regulators
Speaker 1: were still only authorizing expanded access trials. News of the
Speaker 1: transplants had opened the floodgates. People were asking why not me?
Speaker 1: Curtis recalled, my health is already declining, why should I
Speaker 1: have to wait? Notice, for his part, could only respond
Speaker 1: with the truth, Egenesis was working as hard as possible
Speaker 1: to get the technology to more patience. I'd say, we
Speaker 1: want the same thing, but we want to do this right,
Speaker 1: he told me, and doing it right would require approval
Speaker 1: for trials on healthier patients. He went on, patients like
Speaker 1: Tim Andrews, a former supermarket manager from Concord, New Hampshire.
Speaker 1: Andrew Drew's sixty seven, had for two years undergone thrice
Speaker 1: weekly dialysis, a process that often took six hours, including
Speaker 1: travel in prep time, and left him exhausted and weak.
Speaker 1: When I spoke with him about the difficulty of dialysis,
Speaker 1: he recalled his appetite disappearing as he dealt with near
Speaker 1: constant nausea. He began to stare at the likely reality
Speaker 1: of never receiving a human organ and of repeating this
Speaker 1: emotionally draining routine for the rest of his life, as
Speaker 1: had been the case for Slayman. It was a daunting
Speaker 1: thing to try to accept. But last August Andrews was
Speaker 1: offered the opportunity to undergo Xeno transplantsy at Mass General
Speaker 1: as part of a new three patient FDA approved trial
Speaker 1: launched by Egenesis. If he agreed, he'd have the chance
Speaker 1: to start over, to have, as he put it, a
Speaker 1: second chance. His family was leary. His sister and nurse
Speaker 1: warned him about the risks, but he was adamant. This
Speaker 1: is not how I want to go out. I want
Speaker 1: to do something, Andrews recalls saying, and I knew that
Speaker 1: I might die right off, and I said to my
Speaker 1: wife and to the Mass General team. If I die
Speaker 1: and you learn something, so be it. And if I don't,
Speaker 1: then I get to give people hope. That's what I
Speaker 1: really wanted. In January, Andrews underwent his transplant, with Kawai
Speaker 1: leading the surgery team. Once more, Andrews walked out of
Speaker 1: the hospital, beaming, wife Karen at his side. Nothing was certain,
Speaker 1: he knew still he had what he'd hoped, a new
Speaker 1: lease on life. Every day, he said, is a new day.
Speaker 1: When we spoke in March, Andrew's recovery was progressing as planned.
Speaker 1: He goes to Planet Fitness twice a week regularly takes
Speaker 1: his nine year old German short hair pointer on walks
Speaker 1: and helps his wife around the house by vacuuming. If
Speaker 1: all continues to go well, he said, next year the
Speaker 1: couple will board a plane and visit her relatives in
Speaker 1: northern Italy. With his energy returning, Andrews is also trying
Speaker 1: to serve as inspiration for the tens of thousands of
Speaker 1: people affected by the organ donation crisis. Every Wednesday night,
Speaker 1: he meets online with a support group for transplant patients.
Speaker 1: They encourage one another on their journeys, and of course
Speaker 1: they ask about his poor seeing kidney. I want to
Speaker 1: give that hope to everybody else that's on dialysis or
Speaker 1: is struggling with kidney disease, he said. This an escape
Speaker 1: from dialysis. A whole body reinvigoration is the future for Andrews,
Speaker 1: but potentially for dozens of people in the coming years,
Speaker 1: should the clinical trials expand to a field of fifty
Speaker 1: patients as planned, and both Andrews and Curtis recognize none
Speaker 1: of it would be possible without Sleiman and Pizzano, who
Speaker 1: proved that the potential of genetic modified kidneys was more
Speaker 1: than hypothetical in a real solution worth pursuing to get here.
Speaker 1: We owe so much to brave people like mister Slayman,
Speaker 1: and to all scientists on whose shoulders we stand. Kurtis
Speaker 1: told me, we have been fortunate to enter the field
Speaker 1: when we have because we're able to leverage decades of
Speaker 1: progress and research and integrate it all into making this
Speaker 1: thing a reality. You have to kind of pinch yourself,
Speaker 1: but here we are proud to design a life saving kidney.
Speaker 1: Placing a pig's kidney inside a human patient is more
Speaker 1: complicated than merely swapping one organ for another. For the
Speaker 1: biotechnology company, e genesis process begins by genetically modifying the
Speaker 1: embryo of a Yucatan pig so or grow kidneys that
Speaker 1: will be accepted by the human body. Here's how it's done.
Speaker 1: One evaluate a tissue sample. A specimen from the ear
Speaker 1: of a Yucatan pig is carefully reviewed or sequenced to
Speaker 1: ensure there are no issues that will interfere with the
Speaker 1: gene editing process. Two delete problematic pig genes using the
Speaker 1: gene editing technology Crisper. E Genesis scientists must alter the
Speaker 1: tissue sample to prevent the spread of viral disease. And
Speaker 1: potential organ rejection. This means removing four pig specific genes
Speaker 1: three make it more human. Scientists then insert seven human
Speaker 1: genes into the sample's DNA that will protect the future
Speaker 1: kidney from inflammation, cell damage, and coagulation, and also trick
Speaker 1: the human immune system into accepting the foreign organ. Four
Speaker 1: insert the modified DNA. The edited DNA is then fused
Speaker 1: with a nuclei of fetal pig cells. Scientists implant these
Speaker 1: developing embryos into a sow that will give birth to
Speaker 1: piglets capable of growing human ready kidneys. Five, harvest the
Speaker 1: organ and transplant into patient. Whence the piglets reach maturity,
Speaker 1: their kidneys can be harvested and prepared for transplant. After surgery,
Speaker 1: patients must still take immunosuppressive drugs to prevent human organ rejection.
Speaker 1: Beyond kidneys, pigs are ideal candidates for xeno transplantation because
Speaker 1: their organs are similar in size to ours and have
Speaker 1: a similar anatomy and function. Research is under way to
Speaker 1: determine which body parts from pigs could be most useful
Speaker 1: to humans a kidney crisis. More people than ever need
Speaker 1: a kidney transplant, but in twenty twenty four is thirty
Speaker 1: percent of patients on the waiting list received one. Doctors
Speaker 1: hope Zeno transplantation could soon address that unmet need for
Speaker 1: more kidneys and endless weight. Patients who are able to
Speaker 1: immediately receive a kidney from a human donor are often
Speaker 1: required to go through painful and tiring dialysis treatments to
Speaker 1: stay alive. Next article Oases on the Brink by Tristan
Speaker 1: mc connell. Across the world, hundreds of millions of people
Speaker 1: have relied for centuries on desert wetlands that are now vanishing.
Speaker 1: In southern Morocca, one community is blending ancient knowledge with
Speaker 1: modern innovation to protect the oasis. Driving south out of
Speaker 1: the Atlas Mountains into Morocco's Draw Valley, travelers find that
Speaker 1: the landscape becomes increasingly stark until the paved National Highway
Speaker 1: vanishes into the desert. At the oasis town of Mohammed
Speaker 1: el Ghislane, the sometimes known as the gateway to the Sahara,
Speaker 1: Ahmed and its surrounding villages are home to about sixty
Speaker 1: one hundred people for generations. The settlement has straddled the
Speaker 1: Dara River, with wispy tamarisk trees lining the road on
Speaker 1: the north bank of the river and palm plantations spreading
Speaker 1: out to the south. But today the concrete bridge built
Speaker 1: to span the water rises over a dry riverbed of
Speaker 1: sand and gravel. Tourists still come to Mohamed, drawn to
Speaker 1: camel tracks, camping and sand boarding. They arrive by the
Speaker 1: bus load and make their way to hotels that offer
Speaker 1: swimming pools and massages. A leam spy, fifty five tall
Speaker 1: and bespectacled with dark gray flecked hair, was borne in
Speaker 1: the town like a lot of residence. He remembers a
Speaker 1: different Mohmet, greener lusher. When he was a kid, he
Speaker 1: herd a live stock beneath the dense shade of thick
Speaker 1: groves of palm trees and fished in the draw, Morocco's
Speaker 1: longest river as it wound lazily through town. In the
Speaker 1: decades since, he has watched the oasis shrivel as the
Speaker 1: rain has all but stopped and the river has dried up.
Speaker 1: The thick forests of dap palms have withered and thinned,
Speaker 1: and the fields of fruit and olive trees have produced
Speaker 1: less and less each year. Most young people have escaped
Speaker 1: for a better life elsewhere, leaving houses in entire neighborhoods
Speaker 1: to be swallowed by the encrossed croaching dunes. When there
Speaker 1: is no water, nothing green, the sand becomes very strong,
Speaker 1: a very fast enemy, says Spy. It takes a lot
Speaker 1: of land. The desert is pressing in from every direction.
Speaker 1: According to Spy, the outer edge of the oasis moves
Speaker 1: inward by more than three hundred feet eet each year.
Speaker 1: Sometimes Sabai worries that he might be witnessing the end
Speaker 1: of the oasis altogether, and with it an ancient ecosystem
Speaker 1: and the nomadic culture and traditions it enables that he
Speaker 1: holds deer. For thousands of years, people have lived and
Speaker 1: thried in oayses, developing a complex agricultural system finely calibrated
Speaker 1: to the harsh desert environment with its water scarcity and
Speaker 1: ecological fragility. By some measurements, owases occupied seven hundred forty
Speaker 1: thousand square miles worldwide, roughly three times the area of
Speaker 1: Texas and in North Africa, and Asians sustain an estimated
Speaker 1: one hundred fifty million pupil. In Morocco, oases are home
Speaker 1: to one million pupil. The stresses of contemporary climate change
Speaker 1: are accelerating with increasing aridity, temperatures, and the desertification, as
Speaker 1: well as destructive floods and wildfires. Yet, Sabai is an
Speaker 1: optimist steeped in nomadic culture, and he believes that owaysies
Speaker 1: contain the seeds of their own salvation. What is an
Speaker 1: oasis an imagined place, a mythical one, an isolated palm
Speaker 1: fringed pool in the desert, a place of safety, somewhere
Speaker 1: desperate travelers might find relief or dismay if the oasis
Speaker 1: turns out to be a mirage. Ecologically, it is simply
Speaker 1: an area made fertile by a water source in an
Speaker 1: otherwise harsh and arid environment. But human ingenuity has transformed
Speaker 1: oases into complex civilizations. Ten thousand years ago, northern Africa
Speaker 1: was hammered by strong monsoon rains and the Sahara was burdened.
Speaker 1: With the climate gradually shifted and the grasslands and rivers
Speaker 1: dried up. In the newly unforgiving desert landscape. Water was scarce.
Speaker 1: Where people found it, they exploited it and created pockets
Speaker 1: of habitable land that made life not just possible, with
Speaker 1: prosterus providing homes and livelihoods to many thousands. Radiocarbon dated
Speaker 1: barley and wheat grains, as well as millstones used to
Speaker 1: grind flower show that oases were already developing in the
Speaker 1: Draw Valley during the fifth century. As oasis grew, so
Speaker 1: too did Saharan trade. Date palms. The hallmark species of
Speaker 1: the oasis are drought and heat resistant and grow steadily
Speaker 1: in the desert wherever there's water close to the surface,
Speaker 1: but it takes huge amount of labor and engineering to
Speaker 1: successfully cultivate them. These costs were in part met by
Speaker 1: the salt, gold and textile traders who plied the caravan
Speaker 1: roots between Marrakesh and Timbuctu. Oases were a place for
Speaker 1: them to rest and restock before their next expedition. As
Speaker 1: Spy puts it, you can't be a nomad all the time,
Speaker 1: just moving everywhere. You need to stop relax. The essential
Speaker 1: ingredients of the oasis are date palms and people, and
Speaker 1: neither flourishes without the other. The thick fronds of the
Speaker 1: date palms crown provide a shady canopy beneath which other
Speaker 1: species can grow protected from the punishing sun. Scientists have
Speaker 1: described the date palm as a keystone species for the
Speaker 1: ingenious three tiered agricultural ecosystem it anchors. The tree produces
Speaker 1: valuable dates, and the humid, temperature controlled microclimate beneath the
Speaker 1: den's overstory fosters other crops such as fruit, olive, and
Speaker 1: hannah trees. At ground level, beans, wheat, barley, and alfalfa
Speaker 1: grow protected from the wind and sand by the palm's
Speaker 1: tough trunks. Mohammed at El Moktar, professor of plant physiology
Speaker 1: and biotechnology at Hassan, the Second University in Casablanca, who
Speaker 1: has studied the impact of climate change on oasis ecosystems,
Speaker 1: describes the date palm as the umbrella beneath which all
Speaker 1: else thrives. If we want to sustain this structure in
Speaker 1: the oasis, we have to sustain the date palm. He says.
Speaker 1: Oases worked, in other words, because they stayed in balance.
Speaker 1: Rainfall in this part of Morocco was always sparse, but
Speaker 1: still the drawer was filled with snowmelt and rain water
Speaker 1: that flowed more than eleven thousand feet down from the
Speaker 1: peaks of the High Atlas Mountains. Farming communities work together
Speaker 1: to dig and maintain geometric networks of irrigation channels to
Speaker 1: siphon river water into the palm plantations. They use stone,
Speaker 1: mud bricks and rammed earth to build warnlike fortified homes
Speaker 1: and villages, nonsksars and casbahs, and expanded their agricultural lands
Speaker 1: into the increasingly irrigated desert. But climate change has devastated
Speaker 1: many oases and its only expected to get worse. Temperatures
Speaker 1: in Morocco are projected to rise by as much as
Speaker 1: nine degrees fahrenheit by the end of the century and
Speaker 1: rainfall to be reduced by thirty to fifty percent. Extreme
Speaker 1: flooding is on the rise and government figures show that
Speaker 1: around ten thousand palm trees burned every year in wildfires.
Speaker 1: This concludes readings from National Geographic Magazine for to day.
Speaker 1: The reader has been Marsha. Thank you for listening, Keep
Speaker 1: on listing and have a great day.