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The Current Transcript for June 29, 2022

Host: Nahlah Ayed

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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SOUNDCLIP

It's not how close you are to that age. It's it's how well you remember how it feels to be a kid. My mom is in her eighties, and she remembers exactly how it feels to be a kid. She's kind of my remembering childhood mentor.

NAHLAH AYED: What does it take to stay in touch with your inner child? Gordon Karmen knows. In 30 minutes, we will speak with the author of 100 books whose appeal cuts across generations. And speaking of staying young.

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If you're keeping tabs, we're now up to three levers that can manipulate ageing, starvation, genetic manipulation and removal of sex organs, which, come to think of it, also sound like three levers you might find in the devil's torture chamber.

NA: We'll continue our presentation of the CBC podcast, Unlocking the Fountain, looking at ageing and whether it's possible to avoid it. But we begin today's programme with an eyewitness to a callous attack on a shopping mall in Ukraine. I'm Nahlah Ayed sitting in for Matt Galloway. This is The Current.

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A Ukrainian woman went to buy a computer. Moments later, a missile hit the mall

Guests: Oksana Guida, Inna Sovsun

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It's a question about crime against community. I think it's like systematical shelling civilian infrastructure with which aim? To scare people, to kill people, to make terror in our cities and villages. Actually, it is a common goal from Russian Federation.

NA: That's Iryna Venediktova, the prosecutor general of Ukraine. She's standing by the remains of a shopping mall in the city of Kremenchuck after it was struck by a Russian missile Monday. It's believed a thousand people were trapped inside at the time the mall was engulfed in flames. There are 18 confirmed deaths, dozens injured and more still missing. Yesterday, we spoke with Oksana Guida, a local political activist who is at the shopping centre. She was on the line with Inna Sovsun, a member of the Ukrainian parliament and senior lecturer in political science at the National University of Kyiv, Mohyla Academy in a helped us with the translation. Here is our conversation: Oksana, if I could start with you. How are you doing right now?

OKSANA GUIDA VIA INNA SOVSUN: The feeling today a bit worse than yesterday. She has been 160 metres away from the explosion. And when she heard the first explosion that she opened the doors of her car and then the second explosion came and she heard with the right ear. So she now has problems hearing from that side of her head and headache as well. And she has been diagnosed with a brain trauma here. Hearing is basically problematic right now and her head hurts a lot.

NA: I'm very sorry that you're feeling bad and I thank you for joining us today. So I just want to ask you first, what did you see when the attack happened?

OKSANA GUIDA VIA INNA SOVSUN: So to begin with, she has been at the shopping centre 12 minutes before the attack. She came there with her family. There were buying a new computer. The computer that was supposed to buy was not available. So the salesperson said that they should wait a little bit and they went outside. And as they were leaving the premises of the shopping mall, they heard the sirens, the air raid alerts as they were going out of the building. And then when they went out, they could see that. Then that is where they heard the explosions.

NA: Oksana, did you imagine when you decided to go to that mall that there was going to be any kind of attack like this?

OKSANA GUIDA VIA INNA SOVSUN: She couldn't have imagined that happening. Of course, there were no alerts before that as they were go into the centre. And now when she's thinking back to what happened and what she saw at the shopping centre, two things strike most of all. First of all, there were many young people, young families in the shopping centre at the moment that they were leaving the shopping centre. And also she clearly remembers there were a lot of the majority of the personnel in the shopping centre were young women who have been working there and there have all definitely been inside during the attack. So no one was expecting for this to happen, of course.

NA: I know how difficult it is to talk about this. But I wonder, Oksana, if you could just tell me after the attack happened what you saw? What were people doing outside the mall?

OKSANA GUIDA VIA INNA SOVSUN: What she saw what she saw as she was leaving the premises and when she heard that the strike; at first she heard she heard the attack. Then she saw two small or minor smokes inside the building. And then about and then afterthat, it started to burn and the fire started all over the building. And she has heard from people who have been closer to the building, like literally near the building itself, that from the very beginning when she could only see smoke, all people could feel how hot it was around the building. And it was just crazily hot, she thought. And she saw people running out of the centre, but also she saw some people running inside the centre, apparently trying to save the people who were inside. And unfortunately, we don't know if they managed to do so or not. And also, she knows now that the shop where she has been to, the computer shop, nine people have been burned alive. And that happened with people who have most likely been in the shop when she was there as well. But she had to leave because her computer was not available. And then also, it seems like some of the doors got locked or got stuck because of the fire. So people trying to escape couldn't do so just because the heat destroyed the exits from the buildings as well.

NA: Oksana, I can't imagine what it's like to to know all of this and to live through it. I wonder if you can give me a sense of how people in your city incrementally are doing, given everything that's happened in the last 24 hours.

OKSANA GUIDA VIA INNA SOVSUN: She says that, of course, the situation is the city is devastated. People are devastated. She was going to the doctor today and she was talking to her doctor, explaining what happened to her. And the doctor said that her own neighbour went to the shop yesterday and she hasn't come back almost like that. She was there and she she was not quite found as of yet. So so many people know someone who got stuck in the in the shopping centre and everybody is in shock and the flags are put down and nothing is working. And no cafes, no shops, nothing is operating. And people are visibly in shock about what has happened. Many people know someone who were killed in that attack. Many people have been there. And of course, everybody is just in shock.

NA: Oksana, last thing before I let you go is, you know, you and so many others were at the mall just trying to live your life as the war continues. Do you think it's possible to do that anywhere in Ukraine right now?

OKSANA GUIDA VIA INNA SOVSUN: She says that she's crying and she cannot talk right now. She says that she doesn't know if that would up to that she would have a normal life, but she would definitely have a different life compared to what she had before.

NA: Oksana, I really, really appreciate you talking to us. I'm so sorry about what's happened in common, Chuck. And to you. Please take care of yourself.

OKSANA GUIDA VIA INNA SOVSUN: Thank yoou very much.

NA: Thank you. Thank you. Be careful. Inna, are you okay to continue the conversation?

INNA SOVSUN: Yes, I am.

NA: What are your thoughts listening to what Oksana had to say?

INNA SOVSUN: Well, what I am thinking is that this her actions and how she is feeling, that is what the world needs to hear. That is why the world needs to realise that what we are dealing with here is a terrorist state and Russia needs to be recognised as a terrorist state because it is specifically targeting civilians. As you have heard, there were civilians inside there. There were civilians around there. There were no military targets around whatsoever. So the fact that Russia has gone back, they knew perfectly well what they were doing and they need to be punished for what they have done to Kremenchuck and other cities, all over Ukraine.

NA: It's been said several times by Ukrainian officials and others that Russia is deliberately attacking civilians. What do you make of Russia's assertion that it hit a depot of arms nearby?

INNA SOVSUN: I truly do not think we should listen to what they're saying anymore because that all they would say would be a lie. That is their strategy. I even don't think that they themselves are saying that with a goal to persuade anyone. They're just doing that because they have to say something. They have targetted the train station in [unintelligible] with 52 people killed before. They have destroyed schools. Today, they destroyed school in Kharkiv, my native city. But that is what they do. And I truly do not think that their explanations need to even to be voiced around the world any more, because they just make no sense.

NA: As you say, a building in Kyiv was also hit over the weekend, the first attack in Kyiv in several months. What do you think this says about Moscow's strategy right now?

INNA SOVSUN: Well, indeed, what we have seen in the last couple of days is that their strategy is changing and those air raid attacks and actually right now as we speak, that air raid a little bit about 15 minutes ago in Kyiv and Kyiv region, what we are seeing is this renewed aggression from the air. From the Russian side, we haven't seen so many attacks since the first day of fourth war. So I think what they're doing right now is they're trying to scare people to tell everybody that there is no safe place in Ukraine. At the time when many people were thinking of whether they should come back to the cities where they were from. They now say like, look, it's not safe. You stay away from here. And that it means that we cannot get our economy back running, our lives back running and so on and so forth. They are showing to the world. So they don't care about the sanctions because they're just too week. They don't care about, you know, and the resolutions passed by U.N. They will do whatever they would be allowed to do. And right now, with the G7 meeting and with the NATO meeting, all those world leaders they need to recognize and to rise up to the level of challenge, not by voicing their concern, not by saying that they are extremely outraged by what happened, but by actually increasing the arms supplies to Ukraine.

NA: Well, as you say, the G7 leaders meeting in Germany have pledged to stand by Ukraine as long as it takes. You're saying that's no longer enough?

INNA SOVSUN: It's a nice statement by one to understand what does it mean as long? Because I don't want that to be long. I want that to be short in order to make it short, we need arm supplies not sometime in the future. We need them today because every single day we are losing people. We got an infrastructure damages. Again, we appreciate the efforts that have been put so far.. We truly, do we appreciate the commitment to continue supporting Ukraine, but we need decisions today. We cannot wait months before [unintelligible] arrives.

NA: How would you characterise the world's response so far to this war?

INNA SOVSUN: I think the world to a very big extent has been in denial about the level of threat. I understand why it's after COVID. People want to think that they want back to their normal lives. They don't want to think about anymore trouble, anymore global challenges. And I think that was reflected in the decisions of then of the politicians who have been extremely slow in supplying Ukraine with weapons, or some of them even debating whether Ukraine should be helped in terms of weapons.

NA: The United States has said recently that it intends to provide Ukraine with advanced air defence capabilities. How helpful do you think that would be at this point?

INNA SOVSUN: That is something that we all have been asking for since the first weeks of the war. Do you remember when all of us, the members of Parliament, the president, anyone from Ukraine, in answering the question, what help you need, we will send help us establish a no fly zone. That was the first thing that we have been asking for. And unfortunately, after four months of war, we still haven't got enough help in that direction. And that is what could and should happen, because we are asking to help us establish a air defence system. So we were asking for the fighter jets, but they have not been provided so far. So now Oksana's friend who has been burned alive in that building, they could have lived if our voices were heard a bit earlier. And again, I understand that the world has no obligation to Ukraine to save us. But think about this way. Not a single country would have been able to stand against such a level of threat on its own. So it's not about obligation legally, but I think that it's obligation to to the values we hold dear.

NA: As these attacks mount up and the casualties mount as well. Is there a resentment that's setting in amongst people because there hasn't been the kind of action that you're hoping for?

INNA SOVSUN: I would not say resentment. People are still holding very strong. Much stronger than you could imagine them to hold. Truth be told. Right now, with this attacks from air, going on for three days in a row right now, people are not scared. People aren't trying to run away. People are donated to the army like they have never donated before. So they actually are the spirit of the Ukrainian people is actually higher right now than it was before.

NA: Many pundits are saying that the momentum in this war has shifted to Russia, that Ukraine's military is losing ground. How do you see it?

INNA SOVSUN: Well, if you look at the detailed information from the battlefront, indeed the Ukraine has lost [unintelligible]. We have retreated from the city. We have lost big portions of the territories in Donbass. But as of right now, Ukrainian army is actually starting some counter offensives in the bus and then on the south of Ukraine. So so things happen in both directions. And I cannot say that the trend is clearly one sided and that Russia is clearly winning and Ukrainian side is just retreating. It's actually a much more complicated picture. If you look at the prompter and I believe that Ukrainian army does have the capacity to win if we get the help from the West.

NA: President Zelenskiy told leaders at the G7 meeting that he wants the war ended before winter sets in. And he asked, as you have, for more weapons and further sanctions, why is it important that the war end by wintertime?

INNA SOVSUN: Of course we want the war to end tomorrow. We want the war to end today. That would have been great as well. I think that is a realistic assessment between what how long we can stand, when we potentially can regain our territories, and also the general feeling amongst the population. And of course, the people are committed to help the army, but also people are getting tired. People are running out of money. And that is the biggest problem right now. We come to leave the whole year without the economy basically functioning. So we need to get done with it as soon as possible. And winter time, I think, is realistic assessment of what that can happen on Ukraine's terms. That is what I have heard from other military men and women as well, including my boyfriend. I asked him, When will I see you again? And he said, I will come back before it gets cold because I will need other clothes. That is the feeling over here, that it will last, but hopefully not for years.

NA: How are you holding up?

INNA SOVSUN: That's different from day to day, depending on when how often I can hear from my boyfriend. Sometimes when I don't hear from him for a couple of hours, I get very nervous. Sometimes when things like [unintelligible] happened, I got scared. But I actually relocated my son back to Kyiv region yesterday because he was in the west of Ukraine, but now he's closer to me at my parents place, [unintelligible]. So that is, I think, a sign of a need be and hopeful that it is a bit safer here right now. But then also, I had to put him to bed yesterday night and he said, Mum, the war is closer here. Am I safe here? And trust me, nobody in West children wants to hear something from your child, putting him back to bed. So that is something as I will never forgive Putin and Russians for my son experiencing this fear. But I know that we have to hold on and to keep on fighting. That's the only thing we have to do right now.

NA: I really, really appreciate you talking to us. Thank you. And please stay safe.

INNA SOVSUN: Doing our best. Thank you.

NA: Inna Sovsun is a member of the Ukrainian parliament. She was in Kiev and before that I was speaking with Oksana Guida, a local political activist who was at the Kremenchuck Shopping Centre on Monday.

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NA: The CBC News is next. Then.

SOUNDCLIP

Make writing a part of your life. Make it something that you do every day or almost every day. And the weird thing is, it doesn't matter what kind of writing it is. Blog, keep a journal or a diary. I do none of that. But I always have a story I'm working on. So always have like a whatever. A story, a poem, a graphic novel screenplay. Don't wait for this perfect moment where the stars align and you will just know that you must start writing because that moment is never going to come. The time to write is now.

NA: Some words of wisdom from children's author Gordon Korman. In six minutes, he'll share more advice for aspiring young writers and some sage wisdom for all of us adults in needs of connecting with our inner child. I'm Nahlah Ayed. And you're listening to The Current.

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Author Gordon Korman on how 'the power of humour' can help tell serious stories

Guest: Gordon Korman

NA: Hello. I'm Nahlah Ayed and you're listening to The Current.

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NA: Still to come, we continue our presentation of the CBC podcast, Unlocking the Fountain. Today, we meet the 11 year old scientist who overturned everything we thought we understood about ageing. But first, its story time. If you were a kid in the late seventies or early eighties, you might remember that his book, I Want to Go Home, about a boy trying to escape sleepaway camp. If you were a middle schooler in the 1990s, maybe it was the Twinkie squad about a group of misfits. Maybe you read it by flashlight, long past bedtime and gen-z readers. You might have a book on your shelf from his mastermind series set in a picture perfect town where nothing is as it seems. If you haven't guessed, I'm talking about Canadian author Gordon Korman. His 100th book is out this week, and he's still entertaining young readers like Kingsley in Vancouver.

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KINGSLEY: Hi, my name is Kingsley and I am in grade five, going to grade six, and I really like to read concurrent books. I like a note that dogs, which is pretty funny cause it's like it's school related, but it's about a play and you actually changes up the whole play until like a rapid musical kind of thing. I also like Unplugged because it's all about modern technology and like. A book my age appropriate at school I read like this adventure book called Everest. It's like about who can, like, who's able to climb Mount Everest. Who's, like, able to go and be suitable to climb Mount Everest. And like this young kid who does amazing stuff.

NA: Kingsley is ten years old and he's an astute reader. He's picked up on one of Gordon Kaufman's standout talents.

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KINGSLEY: He writes in The Voice of a Kid and like, he knows a lot about teenage teenage things because I think he's pretty old now since he's wrote his 100th book. He remembers when he was young, maybe.

NA: Gordon Korman's 100th book is called The Fort. He's joining me from his home in Long Island, New York. Good morning.

GORDON KORMAN: Good morning. Thanks for.

NA: Having me. Thanks for being here. So how do you write in the voice of a kid? And as Kingsley says, since you're pretty old now.

GORDON KORMAN: Well, I think I just I think Kingsley kind of nailed it. Right. Like I just kind of remember. I think that it's not how close you are to that age. It's it's how well you remember how it feels to be a kid. My mom is in her eighties, and she remembers exactly how it feels to be a kid. She's kind of my remembering childhood mentor.

NA: What does it feel like for you to have to be able to say that you've written 100 books?

GORDON KORMAN: You know, I at first I didn't think that the milestone itself was going to be that big a deal. But the more the closer I got to that release date, I started to get really excited about it. I wrote my first book for a school assignment when I was in grade seven. And I just feel like today, if I could go back in time to that grade seven class and kind of whisper in the ear of my grade seven self, you know, who's working on book one, One day there will be book 100. I think that would be a kind of mind blowing thing.

NA: That book that you mentioned that you wrote in grade seven, it was published by Scholastic in 1978. So it was 44 years ago. I'm curious how it is that you still find yourself 44 years later, you know, still loving writing. What do you still love about writing?

GORDON KORMAN: I love making stuff up. To me, that's like the coolest part of all of this is that, you know, I'm an only child. And for me, the key to not getting bored as a kid was always being creative, right? I made up games, I made up stories, I had my own hockey league. I kept statistics, you know. And so basically, if I think about my job today, it's exactly that I make stuff up for a living.

NA: So let's talk about your book, The Fort. This is a book about a group of eighth graders who are each struggling with some serious problems at home, but they find solace together in a secret hideout. What is it that made you want to tell this particular story?

GORDON KORMAN: Well, I've always sort of written about kids and groups of friends. And there's something really, really universal about having your place right, your fort, your hideout, your secret kind of meeting place. So I felt like there were a lot of things in this story that just seemed very, very basic to childhood. You know, the idea you know what? If there was a place that was 100% totally yours?

NA: Was there a place for you that was 100% totally yours?

GORDON KORMAN: No.

NA: And you never had a fort?

GORDON KORMAN: I didn't have my own fort. But in the case of the book, I think it's just a really cool fort, too, because, you know, normally it's just sort of, oh, you know, we found like a few logs so that we could move around and create a little enclosure or some kind of a mini cave or something. But the fort is actually a 1980s kind of Cold War era bomb shelter built by the richest guy in town. And nobody else knows about it. But it has, I mean, relative to the fact that it's an underground bomb shelter, all the comforts of home. I mean, it would just be, I think, my dream when I was that age to have a place like that with my friends.

NA: One of the characters in that In the Fort is is abused by by his stepfather. And another comes from a home where there's been drug use. There's a character that's struggling with OCD. You know, these are all real world difficulties that many kids do experience. Why was it important for you to show that in this book?

GORDON KORMAN: Well, you know, I've been all over the place in my writing. I sort of cut my teeth on unfunny books. You know, I loved kind of comedy. And one of the things that I've been exploring is that when you are able to merge really, really serious real world topics with just flat out humour, it just creates a really nice kind of combination of flavours for a story. And I think it's also just a way to take the enormously serious issues that kids deal with in real life and make them more palatable and entertaining as a reading experience.

NA: You've said previously that although laughter may not solve anything, it sure makes the bad stuff a lot easier to take. That's quite a lesson to teach a child.

GORDON KORMAN: I've always been kind of a humour guy, you know. I mean, not just laughing sort of introspectively, but. But kind of rolling on the floor, like, out of control, laughing. So I have always had a great appreciation of the power of humour.

NA: Do you think that kids today read books in the same way they used to, or maybe the same way we used to?

GORDON KORMAN: I mean, maybe not. One of the things I sort of feel now is that kids probably read now more than more than they ever did. Certainly in the book, business is, if anything, stronger than it was back when I when I started. So it's not that I argue with all those rationales that, you know, when you spend 90% of your time staring into your phone all day, you know, obviously that's time that could be spent reading. But I think somehow or another, by hook or by crook, kids are definitely still read it.

NA: Is there anything you do that sort of takes into account the reduced attention span that children might have these days.

GORDON KORMAN: And not really. I don't think I mean. No, nothing, nothing concrete, you know? I mean, maybe my own experiences of visiting schools and seeing my own kids might like I always sort of feel an audience member there when I'm when I'm writing. So maybe over the time that I've been doing this, that sense of audience has changed and that change has been driven by technology and that kind of stuff. But there's no, oh, you can't have an 11 page chapter anymore. These guys are used to seven seconds tiktoks. So it has to be shorter. You know, I don't really think of it that way. I just try to write, you know, the best story I can keep it a page turner. Right. And whether that whether that page turning sources kind of humour or adventure or suspense or characterisation or a combination of all of them. I just write the best book I can.

NA: You mentioned tick tock. A lot of parents these days are worrying about how much screen time that their kids are getting and the impact specifically of social media, not to mention all that's happened during the pandemic and the time that kids spent at home, you know, from school closures and lockdowns. You're a parent, although your children are a little bit older than the readers of your books, I think. What do you think? How are kids doing today?

GORDON KORMAN: I mean, I think they're finding their way. You know, they're dealing with a every generation kind of has its thing. You know, there was the the you know, the generation that had to deal with, you know, the realities of 911. And, you know, I don't know. I mean, every group of kids sort of deals with their unique world landscape. You know, I'm finally back visiting schools in person and meeting my readers in actual assemblies rather than on Zoom, which I love. And they'll say things like, you know, if you're in grade five today, your last sort of normal year of school was as a grade two kid, you know, which let's face it, when you're nine or ten or 11, that's three years is like a really, really long time. I, I wrote a book called Operation Do Over where a kid actually goes back in time five years and gets a do over at middle school. And just like saying to a group of kids, you know, if you go back five years, there is no such word as COVID. Right. If you go back, you know, to 2017 and talk about the pandemic, people are going to be like, dude, what's a pandemic? So clearly, it's affected kids and we're stuck with it. Right? It's not something that we can redo and say, you know, oh, let's let's do this the right way next. But but I think that kids, in spite of the enormous thing that was sort of plopped down in the middle of their childhoods, they are also fortunately really good at finding a way to instantly make it a part of the landscape process and deal with it and move on from it.

NA: As you say, kids can be so resilient, but we all, of course, remember how tough growing up can be. And you started your career when you were still in the midst of that coming of age journey, as you said, 12 years old. But were there lessons about adolescence that you learnt as a parent? I imagine there are maybe one or two that found their way into the stories that you have written over the years.

GORDON KORMAN: Well, I mean, my kids belong to three kind of distinct mini generations. Like being 23 right now is not the same as being 17. You know, you mentioned tiktok. So my 17 year old spends 90% of his time looking at something, usually on tiktok. My 23 year old is not, he's sort of mis tiktok a little bit. You know, he is not that it's not a big part of his life, you know. So those of us who despair about something that's going on in our cultural moment should take some comfort in the fact that our cultural moment is quicker then than we think it is. And so whatever you're bemoaning, if you don't like the present, like wait five minutes and something's going to be different pretty soon.

NA: That's very good advice. Just a few more questions before we let you go. We think of books as such an integral part of childhood, and yet we see across the United States where you live, a resurgence of book banning both from schools and public libraries. How much does that concern you?

GORDON KORMAN: It's rough. I won't lie about that. It's terrible to see. And the fact that it's it's always been a little bit true. You know, you've always heard about, oh, there's this group in Texas and they come up with a list of books that they think shouldn't be in schools, that it's an old, old story. And every year there's Banned Book Week and there's the list of the books that are the most often banned of Mice and Men is usually number one. By the way, I'm not sure why I read it. I don't see what's so terrible about it. But what's scary now, particularly in the United States, is that is that state legislatures are trying to, like, codify it right there. They're trying to come up with these definitions of, well, this can't be in a book. Or if this is in a book, that this must be there, too. And it's putting people in some really weird sort of gymnastics, like, oh, if you present a certain viewpoint, you have to present the alternative viewpoint. And I'm kind of like, why? You know, every book is sort of its own story. And I think that not every book serves the same purpose. Some books just want to be funny and silly and pure escapism. Some books want to tell a really sort of serious story or deliver a serious message. And I think it's it's really awful that a group of well, but in this case, you have to say a really large group of people with a very specific agenda are trying to take over the kind of content that our kids are able to sort of build their their cultural childhood out of it.

NA: What does it feel like for you to have had some of your books banned because you did actually end up on some banned lists?

GORDON KORMAN: I mean, I think that I've been lucky. It has not happened to me as much as it has to other writers. And I can only imagine how it feels. I mean I mean, I think that anything right now with kind of history of racism or LGBT content like that kind of stuff is under fire so much right now. And I, I just heard for those, those writers so much and I certainly hurt for not just those kids, but all kids who are being sort of deprived of of that of those stories. Because in the end, I mean, stories are so important as we sort of construct who we are. But, you know, that I think that you shouldn't, like writers shouldn't live in fear that, you know, my next story is going to be the one that crosses someone in the wrong place and becomes kind of the next cause celeb. That's that's going to that's going to sort of split the split the state or split the country. This can happen, and it's probably more likely to happen today than it was even five years ago. But I try to stay I try to stay positive. You know, organisations like CLA, Canadian Library Association and American Library Association, which is going on their annual meeting right now. These are these are groups that that fight for intellectual freedom and against censorship. So, you know, there are good guys out there, too.

NA: Kingsley, your ten year old fan in Vancouver, had a few questions for you. Here's one more of them.

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KINGSLEY: As a young person interested in learning how to write. What is your best advice for me and my fellow kids?

NA: Gordon Korman.

NA: Well, Kingsley, thank you for that question. So I would say the number one thing to do is make writing a part of your life. Make it something that you do every day or almost every day. And the weird thing is, it doesn't matter what kind of writing it is. Blog. Keep a journal or a diary. I do none of that. But I always have a story I'm working on. You know? So I always have, like, a whatever, a story, a poem, a graphic novel, screenplay. Don't wait for this perfect moment where the stars align and you will just know that you must start writing because that moment is never going to come. The time to write is now.

NA: And the last question is going to go to Kingsley again. Here we go.

SOUNDCLIP

KINGSLEY: Last thing I want to say is, can you please write more books?

NA: You're not stopping at 100, are you?

GORDON KORMAN: Yeah. Kingsley, there's. There's good news. I will definitely keep on writing. This is still fun. And at the risk of sounding corny, I just feel so lucky and in a way, like, blessed that here I am still doing what I did for my grade seven English assignment. So I am definitely going to keep on writing. But one on one is is already under construction and it will not be my last.

NA: Thank you so much, Gordon. But before we let you go, we're hoping that you could read a passage from the fort for us.

GORDON KORMAN: Absolutely. Absolutely. So as you know, the fort is the story of kids who stumble on a Cold War era bomb shelter. And this is from the moment where they're first discovering this crazy place: Jason climbs down and stands blinking and staring. What is this place? He bellows the echo reverberating off the metal walls. C.J. is next, followed eventually by a reluctant Mitchell who looks like he's experiencing at least a Bengal tiger to leap out of the chemical toilet and swallow us whole. Okay, I don't get it, C.J. admits. Nobody lives in this place. Why is it here? Who builds an underground house in the middle of the woods? This is bigger than my dad's apartment Jason puts in. He opens the kitchen cabinet to reveal a stack of elegant china plates and a row of crystal glasses. Nicer to accept the TV. That's a piece of junk. I'm forming an opinion about that. I don't think it's junk. I think it's just old. All TVs were like that before flat screens were invented. See that machine on the shelf underneath it? I think that's a player for videocassettes, like they used to have back in the seventies and eighties. My grandparents have one, Abbott confirms. It's in a box in the basement, but Grandpa will throw it out. I guess it cost a lot when he bought it. Would you get it? I persist. Expensive plates, expensive glasses, expensive rugs, expensive stuff from a long time ago. This place used to belong to some rich guy. Someone who could afford to have it built and hooked up to electricity and filled with all the comforts of home. And the reason it's abandoned is because he's probably dead. Mitchell shudders. I don't want to be in some dead guy's house. It could be haunted. Nonetheless, he died in it, C.J. points out. Evan is kneeling in front of the TV. Wonder if this things works. Where's the remote? There isn't one. Everything was buttons back then. I join in and try to press the on button, which turns out to be a switch you have to twist. There's a click and the screen lightens a little, but there's nothing on it. That's what I notice. The light on the video cassette player. There's a tape in here, I exclaimed and hit play. Finally we get something on the screen. First, a procession of upside down numbers, followed by a weird line of distortion that starts at the bottom of the screen and slowly climbs all the way to the top. This is a really boring show, C.J. announces with a smirk. And suddenly we see a guy, Jason Bellows. The man on the screen is probably in his sixties with white hair and steel rimmed glasses. He wears a fancy three piece suit and sits at a carved desk in what looks like a posh office. There's a rich dude in supplies. He starts to speak, but there isn't any sense. I scramble to twist on the volume and a commanding voice comes over the small speaker. This is a person who's used to being in charge. So if you're watching this, I have to conclude that I'm dead and America is under attack. I won't apologise for the fact that I can't speak Russian or Chinese or the language of whoever is in charge now. I'm sure your translators will figure it out soon enough. Who is that old guy? Jason asked in confusion, Looks kind of familiar. C.J. snaps his fingers. You know what? I think that's been a Delamater. The name means nothing to me. Who's better? Delanie. Evan provides the answer. Founder of Dela Craft Auto Parts. Half the town works there. Or at least they did until the layoffs started, including my mom, Mitchell adds mournfully. Is he dead? I ask. A pretty sure he died a long time ago, Adam replies. But I don't think that's what he's talking about. What's all this stuff about America under attack? The facts are starting to come together in my head. A mysterious underground hideaway, bizarre talk about an invasion and speaking Russian or Chinese. An old fashioned videocassette playing on technology from the seventies or eighties. I know what this place is, I blurt. It's a bomb shelter from the Cold War.

NA: Thank you so much for that. Gordon Korman, it's great to talk to you.

GORDON KORMAN: Thanks so much for having me. I hope you enjoy The Fort.

NA: Gordon Karman is an award winning author who has written 100 children's and young adult fiction titles. He's appeared on the New York Times bestseller list with several of his books. And his new book out this week is called The Fort. Coming up after your regional update, we continue our presentation of the CBC podcast, Unlocking the Fountain, digging into the mysteries of how to live longer and healthier lives. Today we meet a researcher whose discoveries overturned everything we thought we knew about ageing. We learn about the levers that cause ageing to speed up or slow down. And we meet the 11 year old scientist at the centre of it all. I'm Nahlah Ayed and you're listening to The Current.

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Episode three of CBC podcast Unlocking The Fountain

NA: I Nahlah Ayed, And you're listening to The Current this summer on The Current, we're bringing you some of CBC's best podcasts, and this week it's Unlocking the Fountain, a look at ageing and whether it's possible to avoid it. Here is host Keith McArthur with episode three, the 11 Year Old Scientist.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music]

KEITH MCARTHUR: At age six, Laura Deming declared that she was going to do something really important with her life.

LAURA DEMING: So my original goal was to cure cancer.

KEITH MCARTHUR: She grew up in New Zealand, home schooled by ex-pats. Her mother's Korean. Her father, American.

LAURA DEMING: My dad was really into science and the idea that we can learn to understand the role and this is a delightful, joyous thing. So just give me a stack of books.

KEITH MCARTHUR: Deming became obsessed with science, but also with scientists.

LAURA DEMING: I always dreamed of becoming the kind of person who could, like, understand the world as part of their day job. And so, as a kid, I would go up to people like Maxwell and Faraday and Tesla as my idols, like they were my superheroes.

KEITH MCARTHUR: These three were long dead. But there was another scientist, a living, breathing woman that Deming also idolised. American researcher Cynthia Kenyon was famous for identifying a gene that could double the lifespan of worms.

CYNTHIA KENYON: She had like a web page where it was a photo of her. So remember, and she was like laughing in, like, hats, kind of cowboy hat on. And I was just like, this person looks like the coolest person I've ever seen in my life. And they want to be just like her.

KEITH MCARTHUR: Deming reached out to Kenyon.

LAURA DEMING: I just sent her this email that basically said, Hi, my name's Laura Deming. I'm like the CEO of year old kid in New Zealand. And I just really, really want to come visit your lab. I want to, you know, sort of learn more about what you're working on.

KEITH MCARTHUR: Deming had never sent a cold email to one of her science heroes, and she wasn't confident she'd get a response. But she did.

LAURA DEMING: I remember it being very fast, like it was either the same day or in the next couple of days. I think I literally ran screaming into my dad's room and just like freaking out. He was like, What's more, teenager like, freaked me out. And I was just like, my life is like, amazingly change. Like, I can't describe how much that moment was impactful to me. I got that email back.

KEITH MCARTHUR: Not only had Kenyon responded, she invited the 11 year old scientist to visit her lab in California, an overture that would define Deming's future. Because the more Deming read about ageing, the more convinced she became that ageing, not cancer, was humanity's single biggest problem to be solved. She believed ageing could be cured and she was going to do it. I'm Keith McArthur and this is Unlocking the Film, a podcast about the mysteries of ageing and the scientific quest to slow, stop or reverse it.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I tell you that somehow I can stop you from ageing.

VOICE 2: The gist of it seems to be that the two of you had made some kind of breakthrough, discovered the fountain of youth or something.

VOICE 3: I wish you'd tell me how to become young again.

KEITH MCARTHUR: This is episode three. The 11 Year Old Scientist.

[Music]

KEITH MCARTHUR: The Deming family was coming to the United States for a relative's wedding, so they added visiting Kenyan to the itinerary. Cynthia Kenyon's lab was on the then new Mission Bay campus of the University of California in San Francisco.

LAURA DEMING: I can't tell you what it meant like to a kid to kind of like walk into like this palace of science and be surrounded by things that I've been reading about in textbooks and just feel like my life was like beginning. This is like, sort of like this wonderful adventure. And so I remember, like going to the third floor, getting to meet Cynthia. She very kindly took, I think, like a full hour of her day to like walk me through her life. She showed me, like, rooms that were glowing bright green, and I asked her stupid questions, but I mean, basically just sort of like met my hero and fell in love with everything that was this lot that I'd walked into. And I remember going back to the place that we're staying after meeting Cynthia and then writing her email that basically just said, look, like I think you're the most incredible, like, person I've ever met. Can I come, like, wash the glassware in your lab or something like that? To be able to work, you know, with you.

KEITH MCARTHUR: Kenyan said yes, but Deming was just 11 and headed back home to New Zealand with her family. How could she make this happen? Her parents had lived in California before and had mused about moving back. Somehow, Laura convinced them that her opportunity was just the catalyst the family needed. As they prepared for the move. Laura set out to learn as much as she could about why people age. The modern history of ageing research can be traced back to 1917. With the trio of American nutrition scientists. The team used lab rats as well. Lab rats are changing up their diets to discover new vitamins and other nutrients. They also noticed something surprising when they slashed calories to stunt the growth of certain rats. Those rats would live longer than their peers. Over the next 50 years, dozens of studies would come to the same conclusion that caloric restriction could prolong life expectancy on a wide range of animals, from mice and rats to spiders, fish and worms. Nobody knew if it would work on humans and honestly, how many people would even choose to starve themselves for the rest of their lives in exchange for a few more hungry years. But importantly, scientists have proven that they could extend life span and identified a lever to do it. Starvation news. The next big breakthrough came when scientists began mapping DNA and trying to understand the function of different genes. Michael Class identified the first gene associated with ageing in animals. Worms with the longevity variant of the gene lived 65% longer than those with the typical version. Thomas Johnson named the gene age one age one, confident that future researchers would discover more genes related to ageing. And in 1993, one year before Laura Deming was born, Cynthia Kenyon did. By manipulating the daf two gene Kanyon was able to double the lifespan of worms.

LAURA DEMING: You could have a kind of different genetic code and a single genetic code. Change could result in, you know, a2x increase in lifespan. And that was kind of Cynthia's discovery is that this was at all possible. And so what she did for a lot of the next couple decades was unfurl this pathway. Understand what are all the kinds of genes that are related to this original discovery that also make worms live longer?

KEITH MCARTHUR: 12 year old Laura Deming wasn't sure what to expect when she walked into Kenyon's lab for her first day of work.

LAURA DEMING: I showed up the first day and my expectation was like, Look, I will do the most menial tasks available. And instead she like gave me a bunch and like had people who were high enough in her lab to, like, be my mentors and walk me through experiments.

KEITH MCARTHUR: And she started doing real research on important ageing projects.

CYNTHIA KENYON: Laura's first project was to take these worms that live six times as long as normal and to give them fewer calories and see if she could get them to live even longer. And she did.

KEITH MCARTHUR: That's Canyon from a 2011 video produced by the Teal Foundation. Well, the early researchers had worked on age extension in rats. The focus had moved to a tiny, transparent worm. Can you just describe, like, a collagen?

LAURA DEMING: Yeah. So silicones are these incredibly beautiful creatures. They're transparent, so you can shine a light through them and see their innards. And they kind of look like little tubes with a bunch of, like, dots, sort of like blobs of cells that you can see surrounding the tubes. They're tinier than the thickness of your fingernail. They're about thousands of cells in total. Because it's so small, we'll be like, No, what about it?

KEITH MCARTHUR: One of Deming's jobs with these tiny worms was to remove How should I say it? They're naughty bits.

LAURA DEMING: One of the things that we would do is, is try to plate the gonads of worms, take them off longer. And I know that sounds awfully ridiculous, but it's actually interesting. It works quite well. They live about 60% longer than normal. If you do that and the way that you do those, you take a really, really tiny baby worm and that worm has about four cells that end up becoming gonad. You put that word under a microscope and use a laser to eliminate just the middle two of those cells. And so a lot of mileage, incremental time at a certain point was sitting in a dark room for most of the day. Pointing a laser at these, you know, middle to sell them, trying to figure out. And it kind of felt like a video game.

KEITH MCARTHUR: If you're keeping tabs, we're now up to three levers that can manipulate ageing, starvation, genetic manipulation and removal of sex organs, which, come to think of it. Also sound like three levers you might find in the devil's torture chamber. But don't worry, there are less gruesome ageing levers coming and we'll get to those. But first we need to learn, as Laura Deming did, about the role that cells play in ageing. So we'll set our time machine for January 17, 1912. This is the day French surgeon Alexis Correll takes a chicken embryo and removes some cells from its heart. He puts the cells in a flask and feeds them the nutrients they need to divide. Carl will go on to win a Nobel prise for unrelated work on vascular surgery. But all the while, he keeps feeding the cell colony, determined to see how long he can keep it alive. Two decades later. Correll's Cell Colony is still going strong. His experiment attracted attention from scientists around the world because they all thought that the reason chickens and people got old and died was because our cells got old and died. Corals experiment led to a new dogma in life science, one that would be included in every high school biology textbook. For decades. Here's 93 year old researcher Leonard Hayflick.

LEONARD HAYFLICK: The dogma said that all cells grown in culture have the potential to be immortal.

KEITH MCARTHUR: If cells kept dividing indefinitely, cell lines were effectively immortal. But if chicken cells were immortal, why weren't chickens?

LEONARD HAYFLICK: The universal belief was that ageing was caused by extracellular phenomena things like radiation stress and other other agents that were not found within cells but outside of cells.

KEITH MCARTHUR: But Hayflick had always been sceptical of Correll's research, partly because no other scientists had been able to replicate the results. In his late twenties, Hayflick grew his own colony of cells derived from the lungs of human embryos. He was trying to learn more about the connexion between viruses and cancers. Like Correll, he provided the nutrients the cells needed to survive. But after about a year, he noticed something curious.

LEONARD HAYFLICK: After many months of culturing and several of these doesn't foetal tissues, I discovered that one of the cultures had cells in it that were not dividing, which was unusual because they were dividing luxuriantly. In previous weeks and months. And suddenly they stopped dividing. This was a that's funny moment. And I began to explore this problem.

KEITH MCARTHUR: Hayflick abandoned his cancer research to focus on the cell cultures. And the more experiments he did, the more convinced he became that cell division wasn't infinite. In fact, he could quantify it. A new cell would divide 40 or 50 times and then stop. Could Corell's assertion that cells are immortal. Actually be wrong? And so you had done this research and you felt good about the results, but you were nervous about publishing?

LEONARD HAYFLICK: Well, yes, there was concern about that because I had felt that I had torpedoed a 60 year old dogma believed by the leading personalities in the field worldwide. And I was this young, I think, 28 or 29 year old kid.

KEITH MCARTHUR: Before submitting his research for publication, Hayflick sent cells to other researchers to see if they got the same results. And they did. But even then, editors were hesitant to publish something that so pointedly challenged the status quo. One editor wrote in a rejection letter that Hayflick conclusion that Carroll was wrong was, quote, notably rash. Instead, the editor wrapped his arms around Carroll's research, calling it, quote, the largest fact to have come out of tissue culture in the last 50 years. A few months later, Hayflick would overturn that largest fact, publishing his paper in a rival publication. So how did Correll get it so wrong with his chicken cells? Hayflick suspects. Well, foul play.

LEONARD HAYFLICK: Correll was introducing into his cultural chick heart cells. New living chick heart cells at every feeding.

KEITH MCARTHUR: Will probably never know if Correll and his lab assistants knew they were adding live cells to the colonies. Whether this was intentional cheating or just bad science putting out the findings had gone unchallenged for decades. And he Flick knew he couldn't have been the first scientist to get results that challenged Carell's dogma. He was just the first not to blindly explain it away.

LEONARD HAYFLICK: Every cell cultures discovered that their cultures had failed at some time during the culturing period, and some other excuse was invoked for 60 years to explain the failure of cell cultures to survive.

KEITH MCARTHUR: But now that Hayflick had overturned Correll's research, others were quick to follow as their own experiments confirmed that most cells have a maximum number of cell divisions. They would name it the Hayflick limit. It would replace Correll's dogma in biology textbooks and change the way scientists thought about ageing itself.

LEONARD HAYFLICK: I concluded that that entire belief was wrong and that the cause of ageing must exist within cells, and speculated that it had to do with a mechanism that actually counted the number of population doublings that the cells had a memory.

KEITH MCARTHUR: In other words, cells were somehow keeping track of how many times they'd split and how many more divisions were left before they died. It was almost like a built in self-destruct countdown clock. But how that clock worked remained a mystery for now. Two years after moving to San Francisco so Laura Deming could work in Cynthia Kenyon's lab. Her family packed up again and moved east. Laura had been accepted to MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At 14 years old.

LAURA DEMING: So because I had done quite the biology for which I might sort of didn't feel the need to immerse myself in that, but for studying stuff like I wanted to say something I hadn't learnt before. And physics was actually just something that I would fell in love with I thought was absolutely beautiful.

KEITH MCARTHUR: Learning about quantum physics was magical. But Deming's dream of curing ageing that remained strong. So she pulled double duty, taking classes in physics while working at MIT's Ageing Labs. A grad student in one of those labs suggested that Deming apply for the Thiel Fellowship. This grant, created by PayPal founder Peter Thiel, paid people under 20 to drop out of school and build something. Deming applied and Deming was chosen. I mean, of course she was. The Teal Foundation created a video about Deming with visuals of her walking along the Charles River and scribbling notes in an MIT lecture hall. In another shot, she smiles at someone behind the camera and nods confidently as she sums up her life's goal.

LAURA DEMING: I want to cure ageing. I want to make us all live forever.

KEITH MCARTHUR: Her parents are in the video, too.

PARENT: This is one moment where she turns to me. You know, Dad, I think this thing of curing death is harder than I thought it was.

KEITH MCARTHUR: But Deming was determined. She dropped out of MIT and moved back to California to build a company focussed on turning promising ageing science into medicines. Returning to the San Francisco area just made sense. This, after all, was home to some of the biggest discoveries in ageing. And it wasn't just Deming's childhood hero, Cynthia Kenyon across the bay in Berkeley. Australian biologist Elizabeth Blackburn had been building on Leonard Hayflick work. Hayflick, you'll recall, had predicted that there must be some kind of biological mechanism for counting out cell divisions. He just didn't know what it was. Blackburn was part of the team that found the mechanism in a repeating pattern of DNA at the ends of each chromosome. They called these sequences telomeres from the Greek words for and and part. These repetitions were essentially protective caps at the end of each strand. You see, each time a cell divides, it loses some of its DNA and the telomeres. They take the hit. So the important part of the DNA doesn't have to.

ELIZABETH BLACKBURN: Make the protective caps at the ends of your shoelace, and they keep the chromosome from fraying.

KEITH MCARTHUR: Blackburn From a 2019 TEDTalk.

ELIZABETH BLACKBURN: And when that tip gets too short, it falls off. And that worn down telomeres sends a signal to the cells. DNA is no longer being protected. Time to die.

KEITH MCARTHUR: So when do cells stop dividing? When they reach the hayflick limit? And when does that happen? When the telomeres run out.

ELISSA APPEL: If they're long caps, they can help our cells keep dividing over and over. And when the tears get too short, the cells can no longer divide.

KEITH MCARTHUR: That's psychologist Elissa Appel. She's collaborated with Blackburn on dozens of telomere related research papers. Now, generally speaking, the older you are, the more times your cells have divided. The shorter your telomeres. But it's more complicated than that because Blackburn's big discovery was that telomeres don't only get shorter, sometimes they grow longer, adding new DNA in order to extend the number of cell divisions remaining. Adding new DNA. That's something I didn't even know was possible. But in 1985, Blackburn and her colleagues at Berkeley discovered an enzyme that could lengthen telomeres with additional DNA. They name it telomerase and win a Nobel prise for the discovery.

ELISSA APPEL: How many times can the cell divide? How soon do they reach the hayflick limit of what is it? 50 or so divisions now introduce telomerase to the story. It gets complicated, right? Because if you can have a lot of telomerase and rebuild your telomeres, you don't get that hayflick limit at 50. Right. You can override that.

KEITH MCARTHUR: It's amazing.

ELISSA APPEL: It is. It's absolutely amazing. It's you know, our biology is so plastic today.

KEITH MCARTHUR: You can buy telomerase as a supplement over the Internet. And some people take it in the hopes that it will help them live longer. But please don't. Well, it is possible that helpful medicines could someday be developed out of telomerase. What's on the market today is likely dangerous. Too much telomerase causes cells to replicate in an uncontrolled fashion. In fact, cancerous tumours actually activate telomerase in order to grow. Laura Deming.

LAURA DEMING: I remember as a child reading a book about how telomeres caused ageing. And so my first impression of the ageing field was that I had to go fix telomeres in order to help with ageing, and this was very wrong. So I think.

KEITH MCARTHUR: When Deming decided her mission in life was to cure ageing, she thought it would be as a scientist. But now she saw an alternate path using the $100,000 from the Teal Fellowship to help bring promising drugs to market.

LAURA DEMING: I talked to quite a few people who whose job it was to create companies around drugs and to make new drugs. And they didn't really have an idea about ageing science. They kind of realised like, the world is not a perfect place. Like you don't have this beautiful machine that takes every mature discovery and brings it out of a lab and turns it into a drug. Like it's a messy, chaotic place where there's a lot of things that are dropped.

KEITH MCARTHUR: Deming quickly realised that $100,000 wouldn't be nearly enough to start investing. It was barely enough to live for two years in Silicon Valley. So she began meeting with potential investors. And around the time that she was finally old enough to sign legal documents on behalf of her own investment fund, Deming had raised her first 4 million. Her new company, the Longevity Fund, would invest that cash in five ageing related businesses and generated a good return for investors with some of those companies going public on the stock market. And today, at age 28, Demi has established herself as the industry's rainmaker, the go to person for connecting scientists with promising ageing technologies to early stage investors. How excited are you to kind of be at the centre of the space at this point in time?

LAURA DEMING: There's kind of a special feeling that you have when there's a secret that you think most people should know, but they don't. And the field is kind of at that place right now. There's there's all these secrets that are lying out there in plain sight that most people are not aware of. They'll probably change many people's lives, you know, in the next couple decades or at least century. And it's just so extraordinarily exciting to imagine what the next decade should be like and what kinds of things will change in medicine. Not all at once, not quickly, you know, not in like a silver bullet type way, but slowly, subtly and in a very real way.

KEITH MCARTHUR: Researchers have proven that they can prolong life in mice and worms and dozens of other life forms. The final frontier is humanity. Is it is it fair to say that nothing's really been proven in humans yet?

LAURA DEMING: Um, yeah. I would say that's the safest statement.

KEITH MCARTHUR: But that may be about to change. Researchers have identified drugs that seem to safely slow ageing not just in animals, but people, too. And there are companies ready to take them to market. If only they could convince regulators that they're safe and effective. Next time on unlocking the fountain.

LAURA DEMING: What we really want is the first trial to investigate that question of like, can we actually impact lifespan?

VOICE 1: So the question for us is what can we do to prove to the FDA that ageing can be thought of.

VOICE 2: The next big thing on the market? Here is likely to be a drug that combats ageing. It's a big deal because it'll be the first formal trial to test a drug for its property to slow ageing. There's never been anything like that.

NA: We'll continue Keith McArthur's podcast Unlocking the Fountain Tomorrow. That's our programme for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for q. Today. Alexis on Fire is one of the most successful Canadian bands of the last two decades. But in 2011, at the height of their success, the band broke up. Now they've returned with their first album in 13 years. They're on q for a career spanning interview. I'm Nahlah Ayed. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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