A Marvelously Entertaining Film.

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: DECEMBER 03, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 120301np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Archive Interview with Authors Sontag and Drew
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:06

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

During the cold war, tens of thousands of American men traveled underwater in cramped submarines on spy missions off the coast of the Soviet Union. The submarines were hidden deep in the ocean, and their missions were kept under wraps through top secret classification.

The subs most important weapons included cameras, advanced sonar, and complicated eavesdropping equipment. The story of cold war submarine espionage is told in the bestseller "Blind Man's Bluff." It's now out in paperback.

On this archive edition, we have an interview with the authors, journalists Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, recorded when the book came out in hardcover.

Drew is special projects editor for the Metro section of "The New York Times." Sontag has worked at "The Times" and written for the "National Law Journal."

I asked them if the American public was told anything about these cold war submarines.

(BEGIN AUDIOTAPE)

CHRISTOPHER DREW, AUTHOR, "BLIND MAN'S BLUFF: THE UNTOLD STORY OF AMERICAN SUBMARINE ESPIONAGE": No, the public was really told nothing. Before we started working on the book we kind of figured what I think most people do, that we had missile submarines that were hiding in the ocean with ballistic missiles ready to fire if a war broke out.

And we had other kinds of submarines -- attack submarines -- that, as far as anybody knew, were just sort of out in the Atlantic practicing for a replay of World War Two. I don't think most people had any idea that submarines had become one of the most important spy vehicles of the cold war.

SHERRY SONTAG, AUTHOR, "BLIND MAN'S BLUFF: THE UNTOLD STORY OF AMERICAN SUBMARINE ESPIONAGE": Even more astounding is that not only did the general public know, but these men went out and they didn't tell their families, their wives, their kids, their best friends. Sometimes the folks who were "spooks" -- the spies on board -- did not tell anybody else on board what they were doing.

So this information was very close -- tightly -- held. In fact, it was so tightly held it was given classifications higher than top secret.

GROSS: Some of the subs had self-destruct mechanisms so that if they were captured, the captain could blow up the American submarine and the secrets that the American sub carried would never be revealed to the Soviets. Why was that considered necessary, and did any captain actually resort to blowing up their sub and their men?

DREW: It never quite got that far, but one of the most chilling things in a lot of the interviews we did, in talking to the men who served on the four special submarines over the years that did the cable tapping, was to hear them describe practicing self-destruct drills on their way over to the Soviet waters.

They would actually go right into a Soviet sea, comparable to a Soviet sub coming into the Chesapeake Bay, and let out divers. And these divers would actually leave the submarine, tap up -- hook up this huge tap pod with recorders to these undersea communications cables, and they'd be working about three or four hundred feet deep.

And Soviet ships in one location -- Soviet ships were constantly passing overhead, it was such a dangerous area to be in. And these men were taking all this risk -- really putting their lives on the line -- but this was one of the most productive kinds of intelligence operations we ran during the whole cold war.

GROSS: What were the results of being able to tap this cable? What did Americans learn about the Soviets?

DREW: Well, what we really learned -- it was really an inside look at the Soviets' game plan for what they were going to do with their navy and their missile subs in a time of war. If you can imagine that this was a form of communications for the Soviets that they felt was impenetrable -- I mean, you know, if you bounce communications off a satellite somebody can intercept them on the way back down.

These words that were flowing through these undersea cables were often not encrypted at all, or only lightly encrypted, because the Soviets just never dreamed we'd be able to sneak into their sea and snatch these communications.

And so they sent their most sensitive messages, where their nuclear missile subs were going to hide in a time of war, what kind of condition they were in, where they would go on patrols, just everything you'd really want to know if your main aim was to try to counter their missile subs.

GROSS: How did the Soviets find out that we were tapping their underwater cables?

DREW: A spy named Ronald Pelton (ph) who worked for our National Security Agency tipped them off in 1980 to the first location where we were doing it. Pelton was a guy who had gotten in financial trouble, filed bankruptcy, ended up selling this secret for $35,000. This was one of the most sensitive and important things we did in intelligence in the whole cold war.

What was fascinating is that even though some people within our intelligence agencies were warning -- I mean, we didn't know exactly why -- how the Soviets had found the cable at first, it took about five years before we caught up with Pelton.

And even though it was still a mystery, we kept sending some of these submarines to these other locations on the other side of the world, up in the Barents Sea up over Europe to tap cables there, because this was so productive that nobody wanted to stop doing it, even though we realized there was -- could be a big risk that there could be a spy.

GROSS: Were any of the American subs that were tapping Soviet communications discovered by the Soviets?

SONTAG: They were detected on occasion, but not really. It's like the Soviets heard something, and what the USS "Parchee (ph)" -- another submarine that was nearby, sent as a decoy, made a lot of noise and just lured the Soviets away. So they were detected but not captured, and nobody understood what they were there for and what they were doing.

DREW: We tell the story in the book of a very dramatic moment in 1986 when President Reagan was meeting Gorbachev in Reykjavik at the summit there, and that was one summit that came up very quickly. And the USS "Parchee," one of these best of the cable-tapping submarines, was out on its way to a cable tapping site near Murmansk, the huge Soviet port up around the Arctic Circle. And she was actually stopped by radio message and told not to go into Soviet waters while Reagan was in Iceland.

The last thing we wanted to do was take a chance of her getting caught and something messing up that summit meeting. And the minute Reagan's plane -- the wheels were up on his plane to leave Iceland, the order went to "Parchee" to go in. And that was one case after she had done her work and she was starting to leave that people on board describe this ping off the side of the submarine.

And some Soviet ship had found her there. And this was one case where another decoy submarine rushed in and created a lot of noise, and the Soviets chased her, and the "Parchee" got away.

GROSS: My guests are journalists Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, authors of the new book "Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage." And it's about submarine espionage during the cold war.

You know, you have these instances of American subs chasing, tracking Soviet subs that had nuclear missiles on them. I'm wondering if there were ever any near-collisions of subs that had nuclear missiles on them, or ever any near-catastrophes with nuclear missiles that you found out about in the research for your book.

DREW: Well, Terry, there were a couple of things that happened. In the days when the Soviets were first sending their missile subs to sea in the 1960s, and it became a big priority to trail them and see where they were going so that we could take them out if a war happened. One of the first missions like that was a huge success.

One of our submarines followed a Soviet missile sub for 47 days all through the Atlantic and learned exactly where it was going to hide and taped its sounds by hanging very close to it.

I mean, if you can picture two cars going down the interstate, one right behind the other, for a long time, and you're in the rear car and you can't see the other guy in front of you, you're just listening to these sonar sounds to try to interpret how he's moving -- and really that's sort of where the name "Blind Man's Bluff" comes from, for the book.

It was highly dangerous. So the first time it was done in a big way, it was a huge success. So every other sub captain who came out there wanted to do the same thing and get a medal from the president, which that first boat had gotten. And what do you know, the very next year there's three collisions between American and Soviet subs.

And over the years there were 12 to 15 collisions. And it would happen in just that way, that they would be very close to each other. They would be trying to learn everything they could about each other. One would turn one way, somebody would misinterpret it as they were listening on the sonar headset or watching on a computer screen that gave a sense of what the sounds were indicating.

And now when you go back and talk to both sides, because we had a researcher in Russia do a lot, of course, whose fault a given collision was, depends on which side you're asking. But it was that kind of blind world, and it was very dangerous. And there were a lot of times were these subs just smashed right into each other.

GROSS: Were there ever any lost nuclear weapons in the sea?

DREW: Most of the submarines that had collisions were carrying some type of nuclear weapons, either nuclear missiles or nuclear-tipped torpedoes. The one case where one of the Soviet missile subs sank in the late 1960s -- a Gulf submarine that had three ballistic missiles that had been targeted against United States -- was one of the big episodes of this whole submarine battle, because we were able to detect where the submarine was lost, and it was very clear that the Soviets had no idea where they had lost their submarine.

And this gave rise to one of the biggest missions of the whole cold war, the effort to raise this Soviet sub, because we wanted to try to recover these missiles and some of the encoded transmitters for communications.

And one of the fascinating things that we have in the book is that the Soviet sub was located by one of our special projects submarines, "The Halibut," and it dangled cameras 20,000 feet deep in the Pacific Ocean -- basically just dangled them on elevator cable with laser lights and took 22,000 photographs of this sunken submarine on the bottom of the ocean.

A few of the photographs had also had pictures of the skeleton of one of the Soviet sailors lying on the seabed nearby. And it was just his -- it's his stark white bones, still wearing his foul weather jacket and his boots. And these pictures were shown to President Nixon.

And that's what gave rise to an effort that has been reported in the past, where the CIA enlisted Howard Hughes, the eccentric billionaire, as a cover story, to build a huge ship that was going to try to recover this Soviet submarine.

SONTAG: It was also a very famous failure because the Navy right all along wanted to just recover maybe the code books, maybe a missile warhead, by sending down a small submersible. The CIA, in a massive move of one-upmanship, made this effort to build this enormous crane-laden ship called the "Glomar Explorer," reached down and grabbed the entire sub. And of course, it fell apart en route. And everything that the Navy thought would be of value was lost.

GROSS: Now the men who worked on these submarines were sworn to secrecy. This was top secret stuff. How did you get them to talk with you? Because they're still sworn to secrecy, there's no statute of limitations that has expired on that.

DREW: No. Actually, as they would go out on these missions -- each time they'd go out they would have to sign security oaths that basically -- where they promised not to talk for 25, 30 years about anything they had done. And it was very hard going for us.

We started in the early 1990s, and the cold war was still very fresh, and it was hard to get people to talk. We traveled all over the country. We interviewed hundreds of people. A lot of people wouldn't talk. Sometimes the naval investigative service, when they heard we were in an area talking to people, would call people, particularly ones who had been on these cable-tapping boats, and tell them not to talk, remind them of their oath.

But over time, not only the men on the boats, but also lots of high-level intelligence officials and White House officials from different time frames, just came to feel that it's about time the public knew what went on. It's about time that some of these men got credit for the risks they took.

And it's really -- even they recognize that, you know, in the middle of a crisis situation, a period like the cold war where there's a huge foe and things need to be secret, that there comes a time like now when you've got to be able to pull up, and the public's got to be able to evaluate what went on, because we know another secretive period is going to come later. And so there were enough people at high levels as well as low who came to feel that way that we were able to dig out the story.

GROSS: Our submarine program was a very expensive program, and the people who worked on those subs were very brave. Was it a very productive program? Did we get a lot out of it, finally?

DREW: Well, we went into this book, into the research on it, feeling very skeptical about that question. We were concerned -- I mean, so little had come out, and we'd heard about some of these collisions and these subs hanging off the Soviet coast. And we went in really thinking we were going to find a bunch of stories about a bunch of cowboys just playing games and acting like fighter jocks and having a good time.

In the end we were persuaded -- I mean, you can never really know because we don't have access to all the information that was gathered. But in the end, after meeting so many of these men, and when you stop and realize that once the Soviets did have submarines that were hiding in the ocean with missiles on them and pointed at New York, Washington, and all our other cities, we had to have some means of tracking them, some means of learning what they could do and where they were going.

And this was really the only way to do it. And so in that sense we came to feel that, in the end, it was a worthwhile program.

GROSS: Well, I want to thank you both very much for talking with us.

DREW: Well, thank you.

SONTAG: Thank you.

(END AUDIOTAPE)

GROSS: Christopher Drew and Sherry Sontag are the authors of "Blind Man's Bluff," which recently came out in paperback. Our interview was recorded earlier this year, when it was published in hardcover.

Coming up, a review of Pedro Almodovar's new film, "All About My Mother."

This is FRESH AIR.

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia, PA
Guest: Sherry Sontag; Christopher Drew
High: American Submarines and espionage during the cold war. We feature an interview with SHERRY SONTAG and CHRISTOPHER DREW, authors of the best selling Blind Man's Bluff. Their book chronicles the voyages of submarines off the coast of the Soviet Union, during the height of the Cold War. Tens of thousands of American men traveled in these submarines, executing top secret missions. They monitored Soviet harbors and collected information using advanced eavesdropping equipment. Blind Man's Bluff is out in paperback. CHRISTOPHER DREW is special projects editor at the New York Times. SHERRY SONTAG has worked at the Times and has written for the National Law Journal. (rebroadcast from 2/09/99.)
Spec: Militray; War; Media

Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 1999 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1999 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Archive Interview with Authors Sontag and Drew
Show: FRESH AIR
Date: DECEMBER 05, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 120302NP.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Review of "All About My Mother"
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:25

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TERRY GROSS, HOST: Film director Pedro Almodovar has a new film called "All About My Mother." It won the best director's prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival and was the International Critics Association pick for best film of the year.

Our film critic, John Powers, expects "All About My Mother" to be Almodovar's most popular film since "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown."

JOHN POWERS, FILM CRITIC: Back in the '80s, Pedro Almodovar exploded into fame, showering the screen with jolly drag queens, big penis contests -- with himself as M.C. -- and couples making love like bunnies weaned on Spanish fly.

But for all of Almodovar's liberating post-Franco outrageousness, there's always been another side to his work, a rapt adoration of old-fashioned movie melodrama, tragic tales of ill-starred love, weepy sagas of mothers and daughters. He spent years trying to bring everything together, to wed camp and pathos, comic brio and heartfelt emotion.

Yet the perfect balance has always eluded him, until now. Almodovar gets everything right in "All About My Mother," a satisfying tale of maternal love with all the humor and warmth of a h2 classic.

Like all Almodovar films, it has a plot that spreads like ivy. Cecelia Roth (ph) stars as Manuela, a doting single mother in Madrid. Her life is shattered when her handsome, Truman Capote-loving son, Esteban, is killed outside a theater where they've gone to see a Tennessee Williams play.

Devastated, Manuela heads to Barcelona to look for the boy's father, Lola, a transvestite roue with bigger breasts than she has. Soon she's hooked up with three other women. There's the lover act (ph) theatrical diva, played by glorious Marisa Peretes (ph), who's on stage the night Esteban died. There's the beautiful, gentle nun, played by Penelope Cruise (ph), who harbors a cruel secret. And then there's your old friend Agrada (ph). That's Antonia San Juan, a wisecracking transsexual hooker who's always being beaten up by her clients.

All these women's stories come together in a vivid post modern fabric that sometimes echoes "Streetcar Named Desire," and sometimes "All About Eve."

While "All About My Mother" is marvelously entertaining, it must be said that not everyone feels that Almodovar has actually grown as an artist. Some think he's simply gone soft, falling into the bourgeois sentimentality he once mocked. When the movie played at Cannes, a prominent Latin American director was heard to say, "I liked Pedro better when he was a faggot. Now he's a homosexual" -- meaning he's been domesticated and rendered safe. He's now breeding sacred cows rather than barbecuing them.

And there's a way in which such a complaint is true. This new movie lacks the radical edge of his great underclass comedy, "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" or his giddily sexual "Law of Desire." It makes the audience feel cozy.

I could show "All About My Mother" to my mother and never worry that she'd be shocked or appalled. After all, no one could be offended by a movie that's dedicated to women, because they must act to survive.

But having said that, it's worth noting that Almodovar's vision of life has matured since he created all those crazy Chiquitas in "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown." In the past, Almodovar delighted in playing up female neurosis, even hysteria, with an almost stereotypically gay fondness for over-the-top womanhood. Here, his vision is more complex. He realizes that there actually is pain in the world and that women's feelings are more than just camp.

Manuela and her friends emote like crazy, but they aren't neurotic. They're coping with genuine suffering and loss.

But while "All About My Mother" is laced with melancholy and pain, from addiction to AIDS to violent death, it never wallows in miserablism. Manuela and her friends face life with an enviable stoicism and good cheer, and Almodovar writes them crackerjack jokes about Prada, Bette Davis, and plastic surgery, as in a classic scene when Agrata gives a peso-by-peso breakdown of what her various body parts cost her.

"You're more authentic the more you resemble what you've dreamed you are," she tells us, and she's obviously speaking for Almodovar, who's gone from being a gay weirdo in the Spanish sticks to an international brand name.

Back when he was making comedies set in dingy apartment blocks, he must have dreamed of movies designed like this one, with witty decor and glowing reds and blues. Many directors seem to fear sensual pleasure, but Almodovar loves getting and giving it. His style is alive with an infectious joy in color, music, laughter, and the amazing actresses who make up his cast.

Which is why I find "All About My Mother" so exhilarating. It makes the world bright with delight, even though the story it's telling may bring you to tears.

GROSS: John Powers is film critic for "Vogue."

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia, PA
Guest: John Powers
High: And Film Critic JOHN POWERS reviews All About My Mother, the new movie from director Pedro Almodovar.
Spec: Movie Industry; Entertainment; Film

Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 1999 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1999 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Review of "All About My Mother"
Show: FRESH AIR
Date: DECEMBER 05, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 120303NP.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Achive Interview with Biologist Robert Sapolsky
Sect: News; Domestic
Time: 12:30

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TERRY GROSS, HOST: Dr. Robert Sapolsky was one of the first researchers to chart the effects of chronic stress on the human body, like cold sores, digestive problems, and loss of libido, to name just a few.

He's a professor biological sciences and neuroscience at Stanford University and has been a MacArthur fellow.

I spoke with him last year after the publication of an updated edition of his book "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers." He points out that our bodies are in some ways outdated models. They respond to the stresses of too much e-mail and traffic jams with the same physiological reactions that enabled early man to flee from predators.

I asked Sapolsky about some of the costly things our bodies do to respond to emergencies.

(BEGIN AUDIOTAPE)

ROBERT SAPOLSKY, BIOLOGIST; AUTHOR, "WHY ZEBRAS DON'T GET ULCERS: AN UPDATED GUIDE TO STRESS, STRESS-RELATED DISEASES, AND COPING"; PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES AND NEUROSCIENCE, STANFORD UNIVERSITY: All sorts of logical stuff, if you think about stress as you said, being a short-term crisis. You're sprinting for your life, some predator is coming after you. What do you want to do? You want energy. You want energy not tucked away in your fat cells for some building project next spring, you want energy right now in the circulation, going to whichever muscles are going to save your life.

You want your blood pressure to go up. You want your heart to beat faster so you can deliver that energy as rapidly as possible. And also, another thing you want to do is, you want to shut down everything in your body that's not essential for the next three minutes -- turn off growth, turn off digestion, turn off reproduction, turn off the immune response. Basically, you know, make your sperm, make your antibodies tonight, if there is a tonight, shut down everything that's not critical for right now.

GROSS: So this is really good if you're being pursued by a villain and you really need that energy for the next three minutes until you get out of his grasp. But if the stress that you're facing is a long-term project that's going to last for six months, you're in big trouble.

SAPOLSKY: Yes, and that's essentially the centerpiece of why we as humans get a lot of stress-related diseases. Not a whole lot of us are wrestling somebody for a canned food item in the supermarket or having, you know, an axe fight in the jungle clearing. What we do instead is sit and think about taxes and the ozone layer and mortality, and these things that make no sense at all to 99 percent of the mammals out there.

And we have this amazing ability to turn on the exact same stress response worrying about a mortgage that a zebra does when it's sprinting away from a lion. And the punch line of the whole field is, if you turn it on long-term for psychological reasons, you get sick.

GROSS: So this answers the question that your book title poses, "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers." They don't get it because they really are running away from a lion or something, as opposed to worrying about taxes.

SAPOLSKY: Yes, exactly.

GROSS: Now, you are a neuroendocrinologist, so part of what you study is hormones.

SAPOLSKY: Yes.

GROSS: And what is the impact of stress on our hormonal system? What are some of the hormones that are increased and others that are inhibited by the stress response?

SAPOLSKY: Well, number one on the list is the one we all know about, when you get your proverbial adrenaline surge, when you've just barely missed being, you know, broadsided by somebody running a stop sign, that kind of thing.

Adrenaline is the defining hormone of the stress response. It's got another name in the United States, epinephrine. This is the main hormone you secrete within a couple of seconds. There's a second wave of hormones you secrete as well called glucocorticoids. These are steroid hormones that come out of your adrenal gland.

And I guarantee everybody out there has heard of the synthetic version of glucocorticoids, hydrocortisone -- hydrocortisone or prednisone, a bunch of other synthetic versions. And these are hormones that are very commonly used in clinical medicine. These are central to saving you during the stress response.

At the same time, there's a whole bunch of hormones you stop secreting, and they make perfect sense, given sort of the stuff I outlined before -- turn off everything that's not essential, shut off growth, grow tomorrow if there is a tomorrow. One of the things that happens with the onset of stress in lots of species is growth hormone disappears from the bloodstream.

Turn off reproduction. You're running for your life. You know, thicken your uterine wall some other time, that kind of thing. Along with that, along comes stress, and down goes the level of every sex hormone you can imagine. So those are the hormones that tend to get shut off during stress.

GROSS: I think a place where a lot of people are very immediately hit by stress is the digestive tract. I mean, you get stomach cramps. It's hard to digest your food. A lot of people get the runs when they're really nervous. So let's talk about digestion a little bit. Oh, did I mention ulcers? And why is it hard on the most simple level just to digest your food well when you're under stress?

SAPOLSKY: Well, it's -- the logic of it is, you know, digestion is -- turns out to be this big-time expensive process, and you use a huge amount of your calories just for the process of churning in your stomach and peristalsis in your intestines and all this muscular stuff going on.

And it's the same logic. You know, the saber-toothed tiger's coming after you, worry about breakfast some other time. You're trying to avoid being somebody's lunch. And you promptly shut down digestion during stress because that's not where you're getting your energy from. You get your energy within a couple of seconds from your fat cells and your liver. Digestion takes hours. Don't worry about it right now.

And we all know the first step in that, which is, say, you're speaking in public and you're a little bit stressed by that, and you discover your mouth is dry. You've stopped secreting saliva, which is the first step of shutting down the whole digestive tract.

GROSS: Why do so many people get the runs when they're under a lot of stress, especially if there's a big event or something coming up, a big thing that they're facing?

SAPOLSKY: Aha. OK, you have now asked, What are the central remaining questions in the latter part of our millennium as to why some people have this problem.

Turns out it actually makes some sense in terms of how your small and large intestines work. OK, here it is. During stress, here's what you do. You shut down your stomach. You shut down your pancreatic juices. You shut down your small intestine. All as part of this logic of, you know, you got better things to do right now.

Your large intestine, something else happens in there, which is, your large intestines are not very useful to you for nutrition. Anything in your large intestines, you're not going to get any nutritional value out of. That's what's your small intestines do. Large intestines, you just move the junk along there. You absorb some water so you don't dessicate every time you go to the bathroom, that kind of a thing. That's what the large intestines are good for.

OK, so you're running for your life, lions coming after you. You've shut down every step along the way except for your large intestines. They're sitting there full of something or other that's going to provide you with zero nutritional value, and you've suddenly got this choice. You can go sprinting for your life with or without, you know, five pounds of dead weight sloshing around in your lower torso.

And suddenly, it makes a great deal of sense to increase activity in your large intestines, get rid of that dead weight. And that reflex is well enough understood that in lots of cases when people are executed in this country, they are executed wearing diapers, because you lose control over your large intestines at that time. Part of this logic, get rid of your dead weight.

So if you are chronically stressed, there is a tendency, a subtype of colitis, a tendency for your large intestines to get just a little bit out of control and unregulated and just have too much of a tendency to dump whatever comes in there as fast as possible. You've got stress-induced diarrhea.

GROSS: Well, let's get back to the zebra of your title, "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers." If a zebra is under stress, so to speak, it's because they really are being chased by a larger animal and they're fleeing for their lives. Is that zebra likely to -- to relieve himself before fleeing for his life?

SAPOLSKY: Oh absolutely. Carefully documented in many doctoral theses.

GROSS: Really.

SAPOLSKY: This is a very -- well, probably somebody out there no doubt studied this, but...

GROSS: Oh. (laughs)

SAPOLSKY: ... just passing observation will confirm this out in the field. Yes, this is exactly what happens. I mean, animals in a panic do that. Humans in the middle of battle will do that as well, and that's, you know, a consistent sort of anecdotal experience of people when they're really, really terrified. You wet your pants for the same logic of emptying your bladder of all that dead weight. And you empty your bowels. You know, bodies run faster under the circumstances, nice logical reflex to have.

GROSS: What about memory? You say even memory is affected by stress.

SAPOLSKY: Yes, that's actually one of the hot topics in this field. That's the stuff I work on in my laboratory. You know, we all know examples of this. We all learned somewhere back when, you know, that the stressor of staying up for two straight nights studying for finals doesn't make for the sharpest memory when you actually sit down with the exam.

And we actually know something about the science of this by now, why, after a couple of hours of stress, neurons, brain cells, and the part of your brain that's involved in learning and memory -- why neurons there aren't getting as much energy as they normally do and aren't functioning as well.

What's also clear is by the time you've had a couple of weeks, a couple of months of stress, it looks as if some of the processes -- the means by which neurons connect to each other -- these processes will atrophy. And by now, there's even some evidence emerging that really big-time chronic stress could actually damage -- kill some of these neurons. And we're beginning to think that's got lots to do with why some of us age with our memories intact and some of us don't do as well in that realm.

GROSS: My guest is Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a neuroendocrinologist who studies the effects of stress on the body. We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

GROSS: My guest is Robert Sapolsky, and he is the author of "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: A Guide to Stress, Stress-related Diseases, and Coping." He is a neuroendocrinologist at Stanford University. He studies the cellular mechanisms of stress-induced disease.

Well, you've made it very, very clear that stress has a lot of very bad effects on our bodies. So now I'm interested in what your suggestions would be on how to control stress.

Two of the things you hear mentioned most often, I think, are, you know, meditation-type approaches and exercise-type approaches, one in which you consciously slow your body down, and the other, exercise, in which you work so hard that you kind of work out that energy of the stress, instead of, like, if it's the flight-or-fight response, you're moving. You're working that energy out and getting rid of some of the adrenaline and whatever.

Do you have a preference between the two?

SAPOLSKY: Well, my personal bias is the exercise, but probably the most important message to get across is, one's personal bias makes a huge difference. I mean, does meditation decrease the likelihood of stress-related disease? And the answer is, it depends. Does daily exercise decrease the likelihood? It depends. Does going up on the roof of your building and playing the trombone for 30 minutes a night decrease the chances? It depends.

What it depends on very heavily is the psychological interpretation you give to doing that. There are definitely some stress management techniques out there that are being sold by card-carrying stress management experts, where doing that every single day would give me an ulcer.

And I guarantee that whatever I find to be calming, somebody else out there would find it to be the most awful thing they could ever experience. By definition, by the time you're dealing with humans and what counts as stress management, one person's stressful misery is what somebody else would pay to do as their favorite hobby.

GROSS: Theoretically, why does exercise help control stress?

SAPOLSKY: Well, it's part of that logic again of what the stress response is actually about. For 99 percent of the beasts on this planet, what a stressor is, is you are about to run for your life or run for your next meal, some huge outpouring of energy. And we as humans will be having the exact same physiology while we're sitting there being stressed, you know, having to smile at the boss's idiotic joke in the middle of a conference. And what you really want to do is, you know, savage the person with your canines.

I mean, what exercise essentially allows you to do is, as you said, do with your body what you are being primed to do, instead of sitting there in a state of psychological duress. It's a great releaser.

GROSS: You suggest that predictability can help control stress. How does predictability fit in?

SAPOLSKY: Oh, this sort of plugs into a classic, a very elegant literature, showing basically what is it about psychological stress that is stressful? And once again, getting gored by an elephant is going to be stressful. Why is it that being on the slow bank line ulcerates only some of us?

And what these studies show is essentially for the same exact physical stressor, an organism, an organism -- a lab rat, a lab primate, a college freshman who has volunteered, for the same physical stressor, you are far less likely to get a stress response if you have a sense of outlets for the frustration that's been building up, if you have means to get out the tension -- exercise, meditation, et cetera being prime examples.

If you feel like you have a sense of predictive information -- How bad is the stressor? How long is it going to last for -- that sort of thing, if you feel like you have a sense of control -- This is miserable, but at least I can end it whenever I want to. And we're all familiar with everyday examples of that -- the predictive element.

OK, you're sitting there in the dentist's chair, dentist is drilling away. It hurts. You're miserable. You finally say, Are we almost done? And you know the difference between the dentist who can tell you, Two more bits of drilling and we're finished, and the dentist that says, Hmm, I don't know -- could be all day, you could be here hours, that sort of thing. Predictive information, knowing how bad it's going to be, makes stressors far less stressful.

In the same way, that sense of control is very powerful as well. I saw a great example of this a while back, talking to somebody who worked as a temp in a secretarial agency. And I was sort of commenting, God, that must be terribly stressful. You know, every week, you're sent to a new place, and very different people, and having to figure out what the rules are there, and people no doubt dumping on you because you couldn't possibly be on top of the job as the person who's on vacation. Must be terribly stressful.

And she said, "Actually, it's not stressful at all because, you know, I know the minute it gets to be too much, I'm out of there." A sense of control. And my bet is that person hardly ever walks out of a job. It's not the leaving the job, it's the sense of control that she could. She has the option. These are really powerful variables when you think about psychological stressors.

GROSS: We seem to be having an epidemic of depression, and I'm wondering if you see depression as being a stress-related disease.

SAPOLSKY: Boy, if you had to teach somebody the archetypical stress-related disorder, depression is it. This is a disease you cannot understand without understanding the effects of stress and the genetics of depression, the neurochemistry, the hormones, the psychological factors. This is not depression -- you get some bad news and you feel down for a couple of days. This is this horrible, major crippling psychiatric disorder that gets nearly 15 to 20 percent of us at some point in our lives.

And it is a disease that is absolutely stress related, and that is in no way saying that this is a disease that's purely environmental. This is a disease with a heavy biological component, and this is one that people absolutely have to get help for. And this is something I'm often on the bandwagon about. People very frequently view a depression as, Oh come on, pull yourself out of it. We all get depressed. Get yourself together. Stop indulging yourself.

And when you look at the biology of depression, it is as biological as is having diabetes and you don't tell a diabetic, Oh, come on, what's this insulin stuff? Stop babying yourself. It's a highly biological disorder whose trigger is stress. Real critical for people to understand it.

GROSS: What is the connection between stress and depression?

SAPOLSKY: On a brain chemistry level, stress brings about some of the neurochemical changes that are the leading candidates for what's wrong in this disease. On a hormonal level, those glucocorticoid hormones I mentioned before can cause depression. Give somebody a whole bunch of synthetic versions of them to control some disease, and you've just dramatically upped their chances of getting clinically depressed.

On a psychological level, that whole business of stress being about loss of control, loss of outlets, loss of predictability -- that's your shopping list as to what psychological events you need to set somebody up for a depression. And the sort of most catchy phrase out there for cognitively what a depression's about is when somebody has learned to be helpless. And that's psychologically what stress is all about.

GROSS: Well, what is meant by "learned helplessness"?

SAPOLSKY: Classic idea. This is actually stuff pioneered by psychologists -- University of Pennsylvania, a man named Martin Seligman (ph), in the '60s -- showing essentially if you take these elements of loss of control, loss of predictability, and take it to an extreme with an organism, including humans in experimental studies, you get somebody who not only sits there during the stressful period saying, This is awful. There's nothing I can do about it. There's nothing I can do about it.

This is somebody who, 10 minutes later in a circumstance they do potentially have control over, they sit there and they say, There's nothing I can do about it. It's hopeless. I'm helpless. You have taught that individual to be helpless, to be cognitively distorted, to decide there's nothing they can do.

And that's exactly what a depression is about. You have some individual trauma during development. You have a trauma as an adult. By all logic, you should react to that by saying, This is awful, but you know what? That's not the whole world. And you look at somebody whose sunk in a clinical depression, and this is their whole world. Everything is awful, everything is hopeless.

What do you expect? You have taught them to do this irrational act of generalizing from one stressful event to deciding that that's the whole world.

GROSS: My guest is Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a neuroendocrinologist who studies the effects of stress on the body. We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

GROSS: My guest is Dr. Robert Sapolsky. He studies the effects of stress on the body. He's the author of "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers."

Now, I know that you spent some time in Kenya studying baboons while you were working at an institute of primate research. Did you learn anything about human stress by studying baboons?

SAPOLSKY: Well, that's sure what I keep telling the grant agencies.

GROSS: (laughs)

What I study out there -- this is actually the last 18, 19 years, I've spent part of my summers out in the Serenghetti in East Africa looking at this troupe of baboons. And it's the same wild animals I've been going back to each year, where I can observe them, and I can also dart them, anesthetize them, and while they're down, check their blood pressure and cholesterol levels, and who's ovulating and who's got stress hormone levels through the roof, that sort of thing.

I'm trying to figure out basically who gets the stress-related diseases. And there's a bunch of punch lines there that I think are fabulously appropriate to us as humans. The first one, and the most boring one, is, if you're going to be a baboon, you want to be a high-ranking one. In a stable hierarchy, these are the guys who have the psychological advantages. These are the guys who have the fewest stress-related diseases.

That one is the least applicable to us as humans because the notion of rank as it works for a nonhuman primate has absolutely no mapping onto the human experience. What's really interesting and relevant about these guys are the two other variables, and these are ones having to do with personality.

A male baboon, regardless of his rank, who cannot tell the difference between his worst rival on the planet threatening him from a foot away, and his worst rival on the planet taking a nap at the other side of the forest -- a male baboon who can't tell the difference between those two things is going to have the crummiest physiology you can ever imagine in terms of being vulnerable to stress-related diseases.

This is what type A behavior is. This is hostility. This is seeing everything as a provocation, everything in your face, everything is personal. And these guys have the high blood pressure and the elevated stress hormone levels and the shorter life expectancy.

GROSS: How can you tell whether these are baboons who can't judge whether the big ape is there to attack them or just to take a nap?

SAPOLSKY: Oh, here is how you do it. You look at -- for example, your study subject is sitting there grooming happily somebody else, nice, calm moment. Worst rival on planet shows up, threatens him from a foot away. What's the likelihood over a course of a year and 50 times that this has happened, what's the likelihood that this guy is going to stop grooming and, for example, get into this very tense defensive stance?

OK, pretty good chance of that. Now, look at the same guy when he's grooming, 50 different occasions over the course of the year, when his worst rival shows up and takes a nap at the other end of the field, what's the likelihood that the guy stops grooming and gets into a crazed defensive stance?

Guys who get just as thrown into a tumult by their worst rival taking a nap -- these are the guys with the high blood pressures, et cetera -- essentially are asking how readily are their calm, affiliative social behaviors disrupted by the presence of somebody else. Guys who see all the glasses as half empty, these are the ones who have the stress-related diseases.

So that's one big variable. Can you tell the difference between the big things and the little things? The even more powerful predictor is, do you have social support? And amazingly enough, even for a bunch of baboons running around the Serenghetti, it is not anthropomorphic to talk about ideas like "friends." Some baboons have friends, some don't. Some groom, some are groomed, some sit in contact with other animals, some play with infants, and some are relatively loners. And that's the single best predictor of all these health-related variables.

And you know, in a sense, this is reinventing the wheel. Ninety percent of stress management techniques are built around, Can you tell the difference between the big things and the little things? Can you tell the difference between what you can control and what you can't control? And when the outcome is bad, do you have somebody's shoulder to cry on? Hugely powerful variables.

GROSS: So the loner baboons have more stress-related problems?

SAPOLSKY: Yes, yes, to a very striking extent. And of course, the question immediately becomes, you know, one of these confound issues, Does having less social affiliation mean crummy physiology? Or does crummy physiology get you less social affiliation? And that's not a chicken and egg-type question.

You can actually see what comes first, and it's the social behavior. That's the determining factor. These personality differences are there real early in life, which is one of the neat things about being able to go back to these same animals year after year. You have information on these guys back when they were just hitting adolescence, and now you see what their old ages are like. And it makes a difference.

GROSS: So you could see the social habits forming before you see the stress-related physiological problems?

SAPOLSKY: Yes, yes. And you see the same thing in studies with captive primates, where you can study animals right the first day when you form the group, and then look at them two months later when the hierarchy or when the social relations are sorted out. Behavior comes first.

GROSS: What are some of the connections you'd like to see that aren't much being made yet in medicine between trying to help people reduce their stress while treating them for whatever problems are manifesting?

SAPOLSKY: Probably the most relevant area -- well, two that come to mind. One is to understand individual differences in this regard. You know, for people who are stress physiologists who are now 50, 60 years into thinking that how healthy your stomach walls are and what your blood pressure is and how regular your menstrual cycles are, all of these are sensitive to stress. That's perfectly solid.

What we don't really understand is why some folks are so much better at handling stress than others, and it's going to be issues related to personality and psychological makeup and all that sort of stuff. That's an area where there's a tremendous amount of work that's still needed.

The second area is this funny sort of policy implementation realm, where more scientific research is needed at this point. This is one where we need a medical system where a doctor sitting in their HMO with, you know, 11.23 minutes per patient or else they get penalized, and that sort of schedule -- where a doctor could instead sit there with somebody who's come in complaining about a bunch of somatic symptoms, organic symptoms -- something is wrong with their body -- and would have the mindset and the time and the training to say something like, How's your life going? Do you have any stressful things going on? Are you involved in any risk factors that I can tell you about that are not clever things to be doing? Are there nutritional things you should pay attention to?

You know, this is a subject that has been covered at great length by all sorts of folks out there. The realm of preventative medicine includes stress management. And this is a country that has horrifyingly little respect for doing that and gives its physicians very little training and very little orientation or time to do that sort of thing.

(END AUDIOTAPE)

GROSS: Dr. Robert Sapolsky is a professor at Stanford University and author of "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers." Our interview was recorded last year.

I'm Terry Gross.

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia, PA
Guest: Robert Sapolsky
High: Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. We feature an interview with biologist Robert Sapolsky about the effects of stress on humans and animals. Sapolsky is one of the first researchers to chart the effects of chronic stress, digestive problems and loss of libido, to name just a few. (Rebroadcast from 08/17/98)
Spec: Animals; Health and Medicine; Science

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Copy: Content and programming copyright 1999 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1999 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Achive Interview with Biologist Robert Sapolsky
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