YouTube Science Star Derek Muller Confronts PFAS “Forever Chemicals”—In His Own Blood
Derek Muller attends the 2020 Breakthrough Prize Ceremony at NASA Ames Research Center on November 3, 2019 in Mountain View, California.
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When Muller graduated, he was torn between pursuing filmmaking and science. He wanted to be “uniquely useful,” he says. “I felt like if I went into science, maybe I would be a swappable cog in some sort of machine.” But he also feared that pursuing film might have him running coffees in Los Angeles in hopes of making the right connection and getting a break. He took a full scholarship in engineering physics at Queen’s University in Ontario and then decamped to Sydney, Australia, to pursue film—only to learn that the Australian Film, Television and Radio School admits just a handful of students per program each year. Lacking a portfolio, he wandered into the University of Sydney’s physics department in hopes of a tutoring gig and stayed to do a doctorate on how people learn—or fail to. In classes, he noticed that students often nodded appreciatively but retained almost nothing. “If you perform a demonstration and don’t force the class to make a prediction,” he says, “they’ll learn about as much as if they never saw the demonstration at all.”
Muller’s doctoral thesis compared two instructional video styles, which were viewed by undergraduates at the University of Sydney. The first featured an actor delivering a polished, textbook explanation of Newton’s laws. Participants described this version as easy to follow. The second portrayed a student repeatedly stumbling over the laws while a tutor tried to set him straight. Most viewers found this depiction confusing. But when tested on the concepts, participants who called the textbook account “clear” scored no better than they had before watching it. By contrast, those who watched the “confusing” video improved significantly. Muller’s takeaway was that learning requires friction—and that a student’s first confident error may be the strongest lever a teacher can pull. “Some level of discomfort seems to be essential,” Muller says. “That’s when learning can really take place.”
Nigel Kuan, a high school physics teacher, who met Muller while studying at the University of Sydney and later collaborated on several Veritasium videos, says Muller’s emphasis on using people’s misconceptions to teach science has influenced his own approach. “I actually recommend the videos to newer teachers,” he says. One in particular, called Why Do You Make People Look Stupid?, stands out to Kuan as best representing Muller’s pedagogic style. It opens with Muller arriving at a café table and saying, “Hey, YouTube, you said you wanted to talk. What’s up?” Across from him also sits Muller, wearing a white YouTube T-shirt and the type of reflective aviator glasses favored by law enforcement. “YouTube Muller” accuses Muller of making people look stupid and shows clips in which the latter watches as individuals fumble through incorrect scientific explanations. YouTube Muller then quotes viewer comments—many laden with expletives—that called Muller “condescending” and “pretentious” and asks, “Why does your face light up with glee every time you hear a misconception?” This video, it turns out, is no different from those in which Muller invites people to explain what water is or where trees get their mass. But now the fallacy to be disproved is not about science but about him: that, in his own words, he “delights in humiliating other people.” Muller, of course, returns to his core idea: people learn better if they confront their own misconceptions.
Casper Mebius, who joined Veritasium as an intern in 2023 and now writes, directs and produces episodes, recalls his first meeting with Muller, who, “instead of interrupting me or cutting me short, just literally let me talk through the whole thing for 40 minutes.” Mebius soon learned this wasn’t unusual. Muller often patiently listens through meetings with his team. “Then he just makes one comment, and it’s like he’s throwing a dart and hitting the bull’s-eye,” Mebius says. In this way, Muller is still teaching—letting others lay out their predictions and take the risks necessary for learning. But at times, his emphasis on the pedagogical value of risk-taking goes further, as when he swam in shade balls (softball-size plastic spheres that float on reservoirs to block sunlight) after a manufacturer warned him not to, explored Fukushima’s radioactive zone and had a bucket of pennies dumped on him from a helicopter to prove that they couldn’t kill him.
How One Company Secretly Poisoned the Planet is perhaps Veritasium’s boldest attempt yet to do so. Gregor Čavlović, a producer and director at Veritasium who co-wrote it with Muller, learned about PFAS while researching a previous project. The new video, which received more viewer watch hours on its first day than any other video in Veritasium’s history, layers one mystery atop another: from why fridges were killing people in Chicago in 1929 to why cattle drinking from streams in West Virginia began dying in the 1990s to how the dangers of PFAS were hidden even as chemical corporations made billions. “I think something important to note is how young and scarce research on PFAS is,” Čavlović says.
In the video, as Muller and Čavlović discuss the many ways that PFAS have infiltrated our lives—such as via nonstick cookware, waterproof clothes and stain-resistant carpets—the story becomes increasingly unsettling. It follows West Virgina farmer Wilbur Earl Tennant, who watched more than 150 of his cows slowly die, and environmental lawyer Robert Bilott, who read through 60,000 corporate documents to reveal the risks of contamination. It describes how PFAS have contaminated not just household well water but also snow in the arctic and rain on the Tibetan Plateau. And it culminates with Muller testing his own blood for the forever chemicals. Levels of one of the PFAS chemicals in his blood, he discovers, is twice the national average, and another is six times higher than the average. His combined total places him close to the limit at which U.S. science and health advisory groups recommend screenings for PFAS-related diseases. Based on the contamination levels in many U.S. water sources, Čavlović and Muller deduce that the latter could have reached those blood levels merely by drinking tap water from various sources in and around Los Angeles. This is usually the moment in Veritasium videos where Muller shows his delight in solving a mystery, but this time the look on his face is one of dismay.
The video also points out the Trump administration’s threats to newly established EPA rules to limit PFAS in drinking water. “An important point for the video was not just to inform people about how potentially harmful these chemicals are but also to tell them what academic and governmental institutions are doing to help regulate this,” Čavlović says. “But it was by pure chance that the video was published the same day that the EPA actually decided to pull back some of these regulations.”
The company he built operates nomadically, though Muller, his wife—planetary scientist Raquel Nuno—and their four children call Lisbon, Portugal, home at the moment. Parenting, he reflects, is beautifully poetic. “You get to exist in the same interaction that you’ve already had as a child, but now you’re on the other side of it,” he says. When his son asked why a rainbow is an arc, Muller felt the old itch to replace quick answers with deeper voyages. He created the video Why No Two People See the Same Rainbow to explain droplet geometry, refraction, optical caustics and the human penchant for stopping one level short of a true explanation. In this sense, the man accused of making people look stupid is chasing a rarer spectacle: the instant they look enlightened. And as Muller’s story proves, embracing confusion can lead not only to deeper understanding but also to extraordinary outcomes and the courage to take on ever greater challenges. After all, Veritasium itself was born when Muller decided to stop playing it safe.
Deni Ellis Béchard is Scientific American’s senior tech reporter. He is author of 10 books and has received a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, a Midwest Book Award and a Nautilus Book Award for investigative journalism. He holds two master’s degrees in literature, as well as a master’s degree in biology from Harvard University. His most recent novel, We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine, explores the ways that artificial intelligence could transform humanity. You can follow him on X, Instagram and Bluesky @denibechard.
Source: www.scientificamerican.com