Epidemics & Pandemics
Human Health & the Environment
Class Meetings
Dates: 2026-12-03T16:00:00, 2026-12-08T16:00:00
Assigned Background
Health - The DRC Ebola Outbreak Is Spreading At A Rapid Pace. Why?
Duration: 00:45:54
Released: 2026
Series: 1A
The current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the deadliest in the country’s history.With over 2,500 deaths and more than 5,000 confirmed cases, it’s now the second largest ever worldwide. And it’s spreading at record speed. It’s even outpacing the West Africa outbreak that killed more than 11,000 people between 2014 and 2016.What do we know about why this outbreak is moving so quickly?Find more of our programs online. Listen to 1A sponsor-free by signing up for 1A+ at plus.npr.org/the1a.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy
Preventing Future Pandemics
Duration: 00:59:55
Released: 2026
Series: Big Picture Science
We may not want to think about another pandemic, but, as epidemiologists say, it is once again a “when,” not “if,” scenario. For his latest book, journalist Jon Cohen, who has written extensively about infectious disease for the magazine Science, interviewed top epidemiologists around the world and followed virus hunters into damp and daunting bat caves to assess our pandemic preparedness readiness. Jon and Molly sit down before an audience in Los Angeles to talk about worrisome cuts to science funding and our ability (or inability) to be vigilant and respond quickly to emerging disease. There is good news: we know how to stop outbreaks. The question is, will we put our tools and vast knowledge to use? Guest: Jon Cohen – senior correspondent with Science Magazine, author of “Planning Miracles: How to Prevent Future Pandemics” Reading: The Trump Administration is Dismantling Efforts to Fight the Next Pandemic Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science. You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Optional Material (Dive Deeper)
Podcasts
Adam Kucharski & Proof
Duration: 00:50:05
Released: 2026
Series: This Podcast Will Kill You
Why do we believe what we believe? Is what we believe the truth? How can we convince others of our beliefs? If you’ve ever found yourself pondering these questions, you know that the answers are rarely clear-cut. We need to form beliefs in order to navigate the world, but how skilled are we at evaluating evidence for those beliefs or weighing new data that contradicts them? In this week’s TPWKY book club episode, Adam Kucharski, Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine joins me to discuss latest book, Proof: The Art and Science of Certainty. With this book, Dr. Kucharski presents a compelling and thoughtful examination of the concept of proof, delving into topics ranging from the justice system (what’s a reasonable doubt?) to infectious disease, clinical design to the founding of this country. And he leaves us with a powerful lesson: what convinced you of something might not convince someone else. Tune in for a fascinating conversation! Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/3WwtIAuSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
An Early Start to West Nile Virus Season?
Duration: 00:15:37
Released: 2026
Series: Public Health On Call
About this episode: West Nile virus is the most common mosquito-borne illness in the U.S., and while most people who contract it won’t even know they’re infected, it can be debilitating for older adults and the immunocompromised. In this episode: an expert in insect-borne diseases gives listeners the essential information on West Nile, offers a forecast on this year’s disease season, and answers the most important question: can we just get rid of mosquitoes? Guest: Douglas Norris, PhD, is a professor of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology who studies vector-borne diseases. Host: Lindsay Smith Rogers, MA, is the producer of the Public Health On Call podcast, an editor for Expert Insights, and the director of content strategy for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Show links and related content: CDC Encourages Americans to Stay Mosquito Bite-Free during America’s 250th Independence Day holiday weekend—CDC Early, intense West Nile season may signal a severe year for the mosquito-borne illness, CDC says—CNN How to Prevent Dengue or “Break-Bone Fever”—Public Health On Call (May 2024) Why Are Some Humans’ Scents More Preferable to Mosquitoes?—Public Health On Call (June 2023) Transcript information: Looking for episode transcripts? Open our podcast on the Apple Podcasts app (desktop or mobile) or the Spotify mobile app to access an auto-generated transcript of any episode. Closed captioning is also available for every episode on our YouTube channel. Contact us: Have a question about something you heard? Looking for a transcript? Want to suggest a topic or guest? Contact us via email or visit our website. Follow us: @PublicHealthPod on Bluesky @PublicHealthPod on Instagram @JohnsHopkinsSPH on Facebook @PublicHealthOnCall on YouTube Here’s our RSS feed Note: These podcasts are a conversation between the participants, and do not represent the position of Johns Hopkins University.
An Ebola Outbreak in Central Africa
Duration: 00:13:49
Released: 2026
Series: Public Health On Call
About this episode: A deadly Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda has been declared a global public health emergency by WHO. In this episode: infectious disease epidemiologist Emily Gurley explains why this outbreak is particularly concerning for a region managing existing crises and how public health systems are working to contain transmission and treat patients. Guest: Emily S. Gurley, PhD, MPH, is a professor in Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she focuses on infectious disease and outbreak investigation. Host: Stephanie Desmon, MA, is a former journalist, author, and the director of public relations and communications for the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs. Show links and related content: WHO declares major outbreak of rare Ebola virus species an international emergency—Science US Imposes Ebola Travel Restrictions as CDC Says Risk Remains Low—Newsweek What else to know: The Ebola outbreak in Central Africa will be challenging to control, but decades of experience will help—The Uptake Transcript information: Looking for episode transcripts? Open our podcast on the Apple Podcasts app (desktop or mobile) or the Spotify mobile app to access an auto-generated transcript of any episode. Closed captioning is also available for every episode on our YouTube channel. Contact us: Have a question about something you heard? Looking for a transcript? Want to suggest a topic or guest? Contact us via email or visit our website. Follow us: @PublicHealthPod on Bluesky @PublicHealthPod on Instagram @JohnsHopkinsSPH on Facebook @PublicHealthOnCall on YouTube Here’s our RSS feed Note: These podcasts are a conversation between the participants, and do not represent the position of Johns Hopkins University.
Animal Diseases and Human Health - The Sloth and Screwworm Episode
Duration: 00:21:48
Released: 2026
Series: Public Health On Call
About this episode: Headlines about sick sloths in Florida and the reemergence of the New World screwworm in the southwest are raising concerns about potential animal-to-human spillover of certain diseases. In this episode: an update on gammaherpesvirus at Sloth World, why experts are concerned about new screwworm cases, and what both of these situations may mean for human health. Guest: Dr. Meghan Davis, PhD, MPH, is a veterinarian and chair of the Master of Public Health program at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Host: Lindsay Smith Rogers, MA, is the producer of the Public Health On Call podcast, an editor for Expert Insights, and the director of content strategy for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Show links and related content: Mass Sloth Deaths in Florida Are a Warning About Wildlife Trade and Pandemic Risk, Scientists Say—Inside Climate News USDA Confirms Presence of New World Screwworm in the United States—USDA Could One Health Prevent the Next Pandemic?—Public Health On Call (September 2025) Transcript information: Looking for episode transcripts? Open our podcast on the Apple Podcasts app (desktop or mobile) or the Spotify mobile app to access an auto-generated transcript of any episode. Closed captioning is also available for every episode on our YouTube channel. Contact us: Have a question about something you heard? Looking for a transcript? Want to suggest a topic or guest? Contact us via email or visit our website. Follow us: @PublicHealthPod on Bluesky @PublicHealthPod on Instagram @JohnsHopkinsSPH on Facebook @PublicHealthOnCall on YouTube Here’s our RSS feed Note: These podcasts are a conversation between the participants, and do not represent the position of Johns Hopkins University.
Bird Flu - The Next Pandemic?
Duration: 00:39:58
Released: 2025
Series: Science Vs
Bird flu has been in the headlines for ages, with scientists warning that we could be headed for a pandemic. But we’ve been hearing about this H5N1 virus for so long that it’s kind of starting to feel like the boy who cried wolf. So — what’s really going on with H5N1 bird flu? How scary is it, and how likely is it that we’re going to end up in a bird flu pandemic? We talk to virologists Dr. Seema Lakdawala and Dr. Richard Webby. Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsBirdFlu (00:00) Tons of people are freaked out about H5N1 bird flu (03:38) Why H5N1 bird flu is scary (05:01) Birds are falling out of the sky dead (07:32) Things get weird when bird flu gets into mammals (18:34) What happens when humans start getting this bird flu (23:26) Is bird flu mutating? (29:11) Should I worry about bird flu? (30:50) Do we have anything to fight bird flu? (32:14) We have had some silent cases of bird flu already This episode was produced by Blythe Terrell, with help from Wendy Zukerman, Michelle Dang, Rose Rimler, Meryl Horn and Ekedi Fausther-Keeys. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell with help from Wendy Zukerman. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord and Sam Bair. Fact checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, So Wylie, and Bobby Lord. Thanks so much to all the researchers we spoke to for this episode, including Dr. Louise Moncla, Dr. Ted Elsasser, Dr. John Korslund, Victoria Rosado and Lindsey Adams. Thanks to Jeff DelViscio. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Carl Zimmer & Airborne
Special Episode: Carl Zimmer & Airborne
Duration: 00:49:04
Released: 2025
Series: This Podcast Will Kill You
In the first years of the COVID pandemic, a debate raged: was the virus transmitted via respiratory droplets, or was it airborne? For some, this distinction seemed overly technical, pedantic even. But for others, it represented decades of dismissal and missed opportunities - opportunities that had cost untold lives. In this week’s TPWKY book club episode, renowned science writer and journalist Carl Zimmer joins us to discuss his latest book Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, which uncovers the long-forgotten story of an entire field of study - aerobiology - and the pioneering scientists who discovered life where there was thought to be none. Tune in for a fascinating conversation about why airborne transmission matters and the incredible work that some researchers are doing to breathe new life into its study. Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/3WwtIAuSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Clean Energy Transition Progress - Avian Flu In Cattle And Humans Has Scientists Concerned
Clean Energy Transition Progress | Avian Flu In Cattle And Humans Has Scientists Concerned
Duration: 00:25:12
Released: 2024
Series: Science Friday
Global temperature increases are slowing, electric vehicle sales are growing, and renewable energy is now cheaper than some fossil fuels. Also, in a recent outbreak of avian flu, the virus has jumped from birds to cows, and to one dairy worker. A disease ecologist provides context.Progress Toward A Clean Energy TransitionIn honor of Earth Day, we’re highlighting a few positive trends and some promising solutions to the climate crisis. Globally, a clean energy transition is underway. A recent column in cipher, an online news outlet focused on climate solutions, recapped some encouraging progress, including a rise in electric car sales, a drop in the cost of renewable energy, and a slowing of global temperature increases.SciFri’s John Dankosky is joined by Casey Crownhart, climate reporter at MIT Technology Review, to talk through some climate solutions news and other top science stories of the week, including a record year for wind energy, a proposal to swap out power lines to increase grid capacity, and hibernating bumble bees who can live for a week underwater.Why Avian Flu In Cattle And Humans Has Scientists ConcernedDuring the last few weeks, you may have heard about an ongoing outbreak of avian flu in which the virus has jumped from wild birds and poultry to cattle in eight states, and now to one dairy worker. While transmission to cattle and humans is new, avian flu has been spreading and decimating wild bird populations for years, and has led to many farmers to “depopulate” their poultry stock to contain the spread of the deadly virus, with limited success.Guest host Maggie Koerth is joined by Dr. Nichola Hill, assistant professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts Boston, to talk about how devastating this virus has been to birds across the world, why the jump from birds to mammals is making virologists anxious, and how concerned the rest of us should be.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
CRISPR Mosquitoes
Duration: 00:54:21
Released: 2026
Series: Big Picture Science
The powerful gene editing tool CRISPR is already being tested on animal and plant cells. It has even been used on humans. How might this revolutionary tool change our lives? On the one hand, it could cure inherited diseases and rid the world of malaria-spreading mosquitoes. On the other hand, scientists using it are accelerating evolution and introducing novel genetic combinations that could transform our biological landscape in unforeseen ways. We explore the ramifications of this revolutionary technology. Guests: Nathan Rose – Molecular biologist and head of malaria programs at U.K. based biotech company, Oxitec. Hank Greely – Law professor and director of the Center for Law in the Biosciences at Stanford University and author of “CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans.” Antonio Regalado – Senior Editor for Biomedicine, MIT Technology Review. originally posted April 17, 2023 Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science. You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Cyclospora - Explosive Diarrhea Everywhere
Duration: 00:54:38
Released: 2026
Series: This Podcast Will Kill You
You’ve seen the headlines: a food-borne parasite is infecting people across the US, leaving them chained to the toilet sometimes for weeks on end, as they are ravaged by wave after wave of gastrointestinal upset. What the heck is cyclosporiasis and where did it come from? How scared should we be of our raspberries or lettuce or cilantro? To dish out the answers as fast we could, we put together this fact-filled episode about the biology of Cyclospora cayetanensis, how this parasite makes you sick, when we first learned about it (more recently than you might think), and what we know about this current outbreak (or outbreaks). We also probe how recent changes to foodborne pathogen surveillance on a national scale are contributing to the challenges in understanding the scope and origin of outbreaks such as this. You don’t want to miss this one! Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/3WwtIAuSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Eating the Wild - Bushmeat, Game, and the Fuzzy Line Between Them
Duration: 00:43:06
Released: 2020
Series: Gastropod
It’s a safe bet that your recent media diet has included the words “wet market,” “zoonotic disease,” and “pangolin,” as experts take a pause from discussing COVID-19’s spread and impact to speculate on the virus’s origins. This episode, we’re digging into the larger story behind those words, that of our relationship to eating wild animals: how and why have our attitudes to wild meat shifted over time? Why is it that deer shot by a hunter in the U.S. is game, but monkey caught in the Democratic Republic of Congo is bushmeat? With the help of Gina Rae La Cerva, author of the new book, Feasting Wild, we explore what we gain and lose by eating wild, from the lost primeval forests of Europe to Robin Hood, and from smoked monkey to bird spit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Environmental Microbiology (TESTING WASTEWATER FOR DISEASES) with Amy Kirby
Duration: 01:03:51
Released: 2022
Series: Ologies with Alie Ward
Oh boy. This episode may seeeeem crappy but it is certainly not a waste of your time. We’re not kidding, while the episode is of course wonderful, mostly thanks to our wonderful guests, it is also certainly about poopy wastewater and what we can all learn from it. About those terrific guests: we mostly speak with Dr. Amy E. Kirby, Ph.D., MPH of the frickin’ CDC (yes, that CDC) about the National Wastewater Surveillance System or NWSS. Did you know sewer water is not just a feature of teenage mutant ninja turtle habitats? Epidemiologists have been using the contents of our collectively owned chocolate waterfall to track disease since polio, but it was only in response to COVID-19 that the CDC launched the NWSS “to coordinate and build the nation’s capacity to track the presence of SARS-CoV-2.” So we learn a bit about what all that means, as we talk weird waste, medication levels in the water, whether or not “silent but deadly” is flim flam, and more in this absolutely gushing sluicegate of an ep.BUT WAIT. That’s not all. We got two little extra guests! First up, your ol’ Dadward did a prank call on Amy Narimatsu of Shorerivers.org, so she has a fun little cameo, and we conclude with previous virology guest, Dr. Shannon Bennett, of the California Academy of Sciences to discuss what’s happening with COVID these days, and why it’s important to stay safe for those who still need protection.It’s an absolutely bursting septic tank of an episode so… Hang on to your butts.Follow the CDC on TwitterLearn more about the CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance SystemFollow Dr. Bennett on TwitterA donation was made this week to ShoreRiversSponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Epidemiology (DISEASES) with ‘This Podcast Will Kill You’s’ Erins Welsh & Allmann-Updyke
Duration: 01:30:28
Released: 2018
Series: Ologies with Alie Ward
TWO epidemiologists-named-Erin – and hosts of the stellar This Podcast Will Kill You – chat with Alie about historical horror stories, THE plague, cholera cocktails, flu shots, tick bombs, milkmaids, witch trials and more as they share their infectious enthusiasm for disease ecology. How much should you wash your hands? What’s the best way to flirt with a stranger on a bus? Why are people scared of vaccines? What conspiracy theory enthralls Alie? So many questions with uncomfy, but fascinating, answers.Listen to This Podcast Will Kill YouFollow TPWKY on TwitterMore episode sources & linksBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Steven Ray MorrisTheme song by Nick Thorburn Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Hantavirus - The Real Rat Race
Duration: 01:03:54
Released: 2019
Series: This Podcast Will Kill You
What do Korea, Slovenia, Finland, and the southwestern US all have in common? If you guessed Hantaviruses, you’d be quite correct. Today we bring you all the details on hantaviruses, from the deadly and terrifying hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, to the less lethal but still horrifying hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome. From its long road to discovery, through the infamous 1993 outbreak and up to the present day, you’ll never look at an adorable little deer mouse the same way again. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Health - Searching For The Source Of Cyclospora
Duration: 00:43:30
Released: 2026
Series: 1A
You may have heard of a parasite that’s causing some gastrointestinal distress.Cyclospora has sickened thousands of people across 34 states this summer – more than six times the number reported at this point last year. The CDC has linked a major cluster to shredded iceberg lettuce at Taco Bell in some states. And Taylor Farms de Mexico has now pulled all of its iceberg lettuce from the U.S. market despite an FDA finding that reports that its product contained the parasite were a false positive.We answer your questions about what cyclosporiasis is, how you get it, and why investigators have had such a hard time finding the source.Find more of our programs online. Listen to 1A sponsor-free by signing up for 1A+ at plus.npr.org/the1a.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy
Health - The DRC Ebola Outbreak Is Spreading At A Rapid Pace. Why?
Duration: 00:45:54
Released: 2026
Series: 1A
The current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the deadliest in the country’s history.With over 2,500 deaths and more than 5,000 confirmed cases, it’s now the second largest ever worldwide. And it’s spreading at record speed. It’s even outpacing the West Africa outbreak that killed more than 11,000 people between 2014 and 2016.What do we know about why this outbreak is moving so quickly?Find more of our programs online. Listen to 1A sponsor-free by signing up for 1A+ at plus.npr.org/the1a.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy
How Do You Kill a Mosquito?
Duration: 00:36:25
Released: 2026
Series: Are We Doomed?
Mosquitoes are little jerks. They suck your blood to make more mosquitoes, spread deadly diseases like malaria and dengue, and have killed more humans than any other creature in the history of Earth. But now, we can fight back. Gene-editing technology (CRISPR, gene drives) could temporarily wipe out disease-carrying mosquitoes in whole regions — potentially saving millions of lives. A miracle, but with an unsettling question of its own: Who gets to decide when humanity rewrites nature?Also: radiation-blasted flies, Australian rabbit smoothies, and … Mosquito Jurassic Park.Support Are We Doomed?, get bonus episodes, and more: https://doompod.com/support/ To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy
Hurricane Katrina
Duration: 00:47:42
Released: 2026
Series: Short History Of…
In August 2005, one of the most powerful storms ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico barrelled toward the United States. When Hurricane Katrina finally struck land, it devastated hundreds of miles of shoreline, but the disaster that captured the world’s attention unfolded in one place above all: the city of New Orleans. Within hours of the storm passing, the flood defence levees meant to protect the city broke, and it began to fill with water. What followed the natural disaster was a crisis that raised profound questions about preparedness, inequality, and the ability and willingness of a modern nation to protect one of its own great cities. But why was New Orleans so vulnerable in the first place? What was the response in the wake of the hurricane and flooding? And what did the disaster reveal about the systems of engineering, government and society that were supposed to protect it? This is a Short History Of Hurricane Katrina. A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins. With thanks to Jed Horne, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City. Written by Sean Coleman | Produced by Kate Simants | Production Assistant: Chris McDonald | Exec produced by Katrina Hughes | Sound supervisor: Tom Pink | Sound design by Mirianna Pitman-Latham and Matthew Peaty | Assembly edit by Dorry Macaulay | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Cody Reynolds-Shaw Unlock the next two episodes of Short History Of… right now by subscribing to Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening and early access to shows across the Noiser podcast network, including Real Survival Stories and Sherlock Holmes Short Stories. Just click the subscription banner at the top of the feed, or head to www.noiser.com/subscriptions to get started. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
John Green & Everything Is Tuberculosis
Duration: 00:56:46
Released: 2025
Series: This Podcast Will Kill You
Tuberculosis, or consumption as it was once known, might conjure up images of huge sanitoriums or writers and artists from the late 1800s (Moulin Rouge, anyone?). But this deadly disease is far from an illness of the past. In many parts of the world, tuberculosis remains an insidious killer, despite the fact that we’ve had effective drugs to treat the infection for decades. In this week’s TPWKY book club episode, we’re thrilled to be joined by the one-and-only John Green to chat about his latest book, Everything Is Tuberculosis. Tune in for a fascinating conversation that tours the past, present, and uncertain future of this devastating illness. Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/3WwtIAuSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Oropouche Virus - More than a smidge worrisome
Duration: 01:12:38
Released: 2026
Series: This Podcast Will Kill You
Though discovered relatively recently, Oropouche virus has been making headlines as an emerging vector-borne infectious disease on the rise. Not transmitted by the usual suspects (like ticks and mosquitoes), this virus is instead spread through the bites of midges or no-see-ums. Since these arthropods are already widely distributed and their range is growing thanks to climate change, this is a recipe for potential disaster. In this episode, we take you through the story of Oropouche virus, from how it makes us sick to what the construction of a highway has to do with its discovery, from surprising prevalence statistics to the history of One Health. Tune in for the full scoop on this midge and the virus it carries. Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/3WwtIAuSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Patient Zero
Duration: 01:16:29
Released: 2011
Series: Radiolab
The greatest mysteries have a shadowy figure at the center—someone who sets things in motion and holds the key to how the story unfolds. In epidemiology, this central character is known as Patient Zero—the case at the heart of an outbreak. This hour, Radiolab hunts for Patient Zeroes from all over the map. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Transcript
Patient Zero
SOREN WHEELER: Hey, this is Radiolab. I’m Soren Wheeler, and I have a show for you today that I want to play for a couple reasons. First of all, it’s one of my favorites of all time. And secondly, despite the fact that we produced his story back in 2011, it is weirdly—and unfortunately—perennially relevant. Like, every year. Like, if you’re in the US right now, that would be because of the Cyclospora situation, which is the explosive diarrhea outbreak. But thinking back to COVID or monkeypox or even the most recent Ebola outbreak, anytime one of these diseases makes its way into us humans, the first question is always: How did it start? Like, where did this come from? Or sometimes, like, who did it come from? And that is what this show that I’m gonna play for you today is all about. We produced this one back in 2011. It’s got mysterious, shadowy figures, it’s got a very high-stakes story of a man hunting a chimp in Cameroon, and a probably futile attempt to get to the bottom—or rather the beginning—of the most famous celebratory gesture in human history. So here it is.
[RADIOLAB INTRO]
LYNN LEVY: So have we said where we are on tape yet?
JAD ABUMRAD: Starting us off today are our producers Lynn Levy and Sean Cole.
SEAN COLE: Very pretty day to be on an abandoned island where victims of contagious disease were quarantined. And one in particular who lived here, died here, never believing that she was, in fact, sick and dangerous.
ROBERT KRULWICH: So this is a story that begins when?
SEAN: It—well actually, it starts in 1906. And it doesn’t start on the island, it starts in Oyster Bay.
ROBERT: Oh, nice neighborhood!
SEAN: Very nice. And there was this one rich family on vacation there.
JUDY LEVITT: And their daughter gets sick. She gets sick first.
SEAN: This is Judy Levitt.
JUDY LEVITT: I am a professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin.
SEAN: And she wrote a book about this story. So basically, the girl, the daughter, has a fever. Then her sister comes down with it, and then her mom, and a maid.
JUDY LEVITT: About six out of eleven in the family gets sick.
SEAN: And with this disease, the fever’s just the first part of it.
JUDY LEVITT: Both diarrhea or constipation are reported. So it can go either way, I guess.
JAD: What is it?
SEAN: Typhoid.
ROBERT: Hmm.
JUDY LEVITT: And they couldn’t figure out what had caused the disease, so they called in this sanitary engineer named George Soper.
SEAN: With the Public Health Department. He was the go-to guy for outbreaks like this. Back then, the Department of Public Health was thinking, you know, you’d get sick because of something dirty near you.
ROBERT: In the well or in the pipes.
SEAN: Yeah. So he looks into all of that.
JUDY LEVITT: Did a whole test on the house and the water and everything. Couldn’t find anything, and so…
SEAN: He starts talking to the family.
JUDY LEVITT: And he started quizzing them all, and they…
SEAN: Eventually, he builds up this whole picture of several outbreaks going back years.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: 1900. Mamaroneck. A New York family had a house for the summer…]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: 1902. Dark Harbor, Maine.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: 1904. Seven cases.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Sands Point, New York.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Autumn, 1906.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Winter, 1907. New York City]
SEAN: All these cases. And they all had one thing in common.
ROBERT: What?
SEAN: Each of these families had employed the same cook.
JAD: Really?
ROBERT: Really?
SEAN: Which is funny, because when you cook food you kill the bacteria in the food.
JAD: Yeah!
ROBERT: So it couldn’t be the cook then.
SEAN: But this cook…
JUDY LEVITT: Her most famous dish was Peach Melba, which is ice cream and fresh peaches.
SEAN: Fresh peaches. Raw fruit.
JUDY LEVITT: It was a perfect medium.
SEAN: And the cook’s name was Mary Mallon.
JAD: Mary Mallon. Wait a second, Sean Cole.
ROBERT: Typhoid…
JAD: Typhoid Mary is who we’re talking about.
ROBERT: Oh, so we know this story.
SEAN: No, you don’t know this story.
ROBERT: What do you mean?
SEAN: Everybody thinks they know this story. I thought I knew this story. And then when I looked into it, I realized I didn’t know the first thing about it. And when you look into the details, they tell us some very difficult things about who we were and who we still are in a lot of ways. It’s all in the details, all of the juice and problem.
JAD: Like the peach juice.
ROBERT: The peach juice.
SEAN: Just like the peach juice. Still dealing with…
ROBERT: Wait! I’m Robert Krulwich.
JAD: [laughs]
ROBERT: Go ahead. Go ahead, do your part!
JAD: I’m Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: This is Radiolab. And in this hour…
JAD: A series of stories that all hew to that delicious story archetype we call…
ROBERT: Patient Zero. The first cause.
JAD: We’ll try to trace ideas and trends and massive social traumas like pandemics back to that one person.
ROBERT: Or one critter. Or the other way you could call it is called the “but for.” If you didn’t have this thing, but for this thing, you wouldn’t have the rest of the story.
JAD: I like the but for.
ROBERT: The but for.
JAD: But meanwhile…
ROBERT: Back to the peaches.
SEAN: So George Soper’s like, “I’ve got to find this woman.” And when he finds her…
JUDY LEVITT: She’s in New York City working for another family.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: The laundress had recently been taken to the Presbyterian Hospital with typhoid fever.]
SEAN: This is from an article Soper wrote called The Curious Case of Typhoid Mary.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: And the only child of a family, a lovely daughter was dying of it.]
SEAN: So he goes to the house, walks into the kitchen. Sees this woman, 5’6”, blond hair, blue eyes.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Had a good figure, and might have been called athletic had she not been a little too heavy.]
SEAN: Irish immigrant, 36 years old.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Not particularly clean.]
JUDY LEVITT: And he says, “Mary Mallon, I think you are causing disease in people and I want samples of your urine, feces and blood.” [laughs]
SEAN: [laughs] Good afternoon!
SEAN: And she says…
DAVID ROSNER: What are you accusing me of being sick?
SEAN: Playing the role of Mary is Columbia Public Health Professor David Rosner.
DAVID ROSNER: How dare you? I’m not a sick person.
JAD: What does she do?
DAVID ROSNER: She chases him out of the building.
JUDY LEVITT: With a fork in her hand.
SEAN: A serving fork.
JAD: A serving fork?
SEAN: Yeah.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: I felt rather lucky to escape.]
JAD: But did she have typhoid? I mean, did she outwardly have typhoid?
SEAN: Well, that’s the thing.
DAVID ROSNER: She never had any symptoms. She felt perfectly healthy.
SEAN: She was actually the first documented case in North America of a healthy carrier, which is to say someone who has the disease and is contagious, but never actually feels…
ROBERT: The symptoms?
SEAN: The symptoms. So in one weird way, Soper’s thrilled. Like, he’s only read about this. And then here she is in front of him. But think of how all of this must have sounded to Mary. I mean, some guy from outer space comes into your kitchen and says, “You’re diseased and you’re hurting people.” She must have thought…
DAVID ROSNER: What? I feel fine. I’m living a moral life. I’m not a vagrant. I’m employed. I’m a good, solid citizen. You know, you would be crazed too, wouldn’t you? Even today.
JAD: You’d—you’d probably grab your knife, yeah.
DAVID ROSNER: Yeah, you’d grab your knife.
ROBERT: Well, does he have any evidence though, that she is spreading the disease?
SEAN: Not yet. That’s why he needs her poop.
ROBERT: Ah.
SEAN: So he goes back, finds her at a rooming house. She kicks him out, swears at him.
JUDY LEVITT: She apparently had quite a temper.
SEAN: And then the health department sends in this female doctor…
JUDY LEVITT: By the name of S. Josephine Baker. Maybe she could ask for blood, feces and urine a little more gently than…
SEAN: I just don’t know how you ask for that gently.
SEAN: But she tries. And when it doesn’t work, she comes back a little bit later with cops.
JUDY LEVITT: And they come to the house and Mary Mallon, when she realizes what’s happening disappears.
SEAN: What do you mean, disappears? She just vanishes?
JUDY LEVITT: Just completely vanishes. They end up searching the entire place, and they can’t find her. Finally, I think they’re about to leave when one of them spots…
DAVID ROSNER: … her skirt coming outside of a door.
JUDY LEVITT: It’s a little piece of calico kind of stuck in a doorway.
DAVID ROSNER: They open the door and there she is.
JUDY LEVITT: And so they drag her out and she comes out kicking and screaming and…
DAVID ROSNER: … screaming and kicking.
JUDY LEVITT: It takes all of them to drag her out.
DAVID ROSNER: Protesting.
JUDY LEVITT: They get her in the ambulance and Josephine Baker sits on her. According to her, sits on her.
SEAN: And Baker later said…
JUDY LEVITT: Something like it was like being in a cage with an angry lion.
SEAN: So they take her down to the hospital.
JUDY LEVITT: They tested her feces and urine, and they found that yes, she was in fact a carrier of live typhoid bacilli.
MAN: It’s a weird island. I spent a while on here.
JUDY LEVITT: So they isolate her, and they ultimately move her from Manhattan to North Brother Island.
DAVID ROSNER: And there she is.
SEAN: We went there to just to try to get our heads around what she must have thought.
JAD: What was the island like?
SEAN: Man, everything is completely overgrown.
SEAN: It was really creepy.
ROBERT: Creepy because it was in such dissolution?
SEAN: Yeah. Yeah.
SEAN: Just be careful where you step.
SEAN: On one end, there are all of these medical—former medical buildings, including a giant hospital where they isolated tuberculosis patients. So big, brick, stately building. And then on the other side of the island, there’s smaller wooden buildings that are crushed.
SEAN: This may be where her cottage is.
SEAN: Where her cottage would be if it was still standing, but it’s not standing anymore.
JUDY LEVITT: Well, it was one room. One room. It had a kitchen. It had a, I guess a sleeping area and a sitting area. It probably wasn’t so bad if you didn’t have to stay there. You know, any place is—that you’re not free to leave becomes like a prison.
SEAN: So we’re marching around and then Lynn says to me, “Hey, look at the view.” And…
SEAN: Holy moly! It’s right there.
SEAN: That’s when it really hit me.
SEAN: If this is where her cabin was, then one window of it looked exactly onto Manhattan.
LYNN: She could have seen where she used to live.
SEAN: You can see the traffic on the streets.
SEAN: This was like the most horrible seaside vacation.
JUDY LEVITT: Almost the whole time they had her incarcerated, they took feces three times a week, which is — you know, it’s not pleasant to have to do that. And sometimes she was negative and sometimes she was positive.
JAD: Wait, what?
SEAN: So that’s—that’s another thing that they were figuring out at the time. So she was probably an intermittent carrier.
JAD: What does that mean?
SEAN: The disease is always in her, but sometimes she excretes it and sometimes she doesn’t.
JAD: Oh, that must have been confusing for her.
LYNN: “When I first came here, I was so nervous and almost prostrated with grief and trouble. My eyes began to twitch.”
SEAN: This is from a letter that Mary wrote from the island.
LYNN: “I have, in fact, been a peep show for everybody.”
SEAN: But if you keep reading it, and in fact, it’s addressed to a lawyer, it’s clear that she was fighting this. And she had been sending her own feces samples herself to a private lab in Manhattan. And each one of those was negative.
JAD: Really?
LYNN: “The tuberculosis man would say, ‘There she is, the kidnapped woman.’”
SEAN: Yeah, that is poison ivy.
SEAN: She sues the city and loses. Still, there are all of these questions as to whether any of this is legal. I mean, even George Soper, the guy who hunted her down said it was contrary to the Constitution of the United States to hold her under the circumstance.
JAD: And how long was she on this island for?
SEAN: Three years.
JAD: Wow!
SEAN: And then what changed was a new health commissioner took over.
JUDY LEVITT: And so he says it’s just not right that we keep a healthy woman locked up like this. She was not dangerous to anybody if she didn’t cook.
SEAN: He lets her go.
ROBERT: He lets her go?
SEAN: Yeah, back to Manhattan. But he makes her promise.
JUDY LEVITT: She did promise. She signed an affidavit…
SEAN: Saying she’ll never cook again. And she was released. They gave—they set her up with a job as a laundress and they went, “Here you go, Mary.” And then, you know, they kept track of her for a while.
JAD: Hmm.
SEAN: And then at a certain point they kind of stopped keeping track of her.
JAD: [laughs]
SEAN: [laughs]
ROBERT: Dun dun dun dun! So how many years will go by?
SEAN: Five.
ROBERT: Five.
JAD: What happens next?
SEAN: There’s an outbreak of typhoid.
ROBERT: Oh, boy.
JAD: Where?
ROBERT: Where?
SEAN: At a maternity hospital.
ROBERT: Oh, you’re kidding!
JAD: Oh, wow!
SEAN: Josephine Baker who sat on her in the ambulance before, she says that she goes and pays a visit and walks into the kitchen. And she says the first person that she encountered was Typhoid Mary Mallon. George Soper did some legwork on where Mary had been, and it turned out she had worked at a restaurant, two hotels, an inn and a sanatorium, as well as the hospital. And at least according to his account, two of the people that she made sick during those couple years were children.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: She was now a woman who could not claim innocence. She was known willfully and deliberately to have taken desperate chances with human life. She had abused her privilege. She had broken her parole.]
JUDY LEVITT: So then they put her back on North Brother Island, back in her bungalow. And there she sits.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: She was a dangerous character and must be treated accordingly.]
ROBERT: Absolutely. She’s broke—broke her promise.
JAD: Yeah, I totally agree.
ROBERT: She made a deal and she didn’t keep the deal.
SEAN: But the thing is is that at the time she was sent back to the island, there were hundreds of other healthy carriers identified all over New York, and some of them were cooks.
JAD: What?
ROBERT: Really?
SEAN: Mostly men, by the way. And…
JAD: And they were cooking?
SEAN: Well, they were barred from cooking, but not all of them always listened. And yet Mary was the only one who they isolated in this way.
JAD: Why? Why only her?
SEAN: I think it was more about making people feel safe than actually making them safe.
SEAN: Oh look out for this stair. It’s all crumbled.
SEAN: She was what we needed at the time.
SEAN: We’re in the hospital where the tuberculosis patients were quarantined.
SEAN: This was towards the end of Lynn and my visit to the island.
SEAN: Yeah, these must be the wards.
LYNN: Definitely.
SEAN: Yeah.
LYNN: So when was she here?
SEAN: This is where they brought her after she had a stroke. And this is where she was for the last six years of her life.
LYNN: Did she die in here?
SEAN: Yeah. Yeah.
JAD: Hey, I’m Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I’m Robert. Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab. And today…
ROBERT: It’s patient zero. That’s our subject.
JAD: Yeah, and this next story, whew!
ROBERT: It’s so huge.
JAD: It’s the ultimate patient zero story, really.
ROBERT: Many of us have lived through this. It was—it’s as recent an event—it’s such a recent event that it still hurts and it still bleeds.
JAD: Yeah.
ROBERT: And in it somewhere is a—literally, the—the patient that is called Zero. So this is…
JAD: Yeah. A lot of people are gonna help us tell the story, but starting us off is science writer, Radiolab regular Carl Zimmer.
CARL ZIMMER: So in 1981, doctors for the first time described…
[NEWS CLIP: A mysterious newly-discovered disease…]
CARL ZIMMER: A syndrome.
[NEWS CLIP: … which affects mostly homosexual men.]
CARL ZIMMER: The young men in Los Angeles…
JAD: Were dying.
[NEWS CLIP: The number of cases has been growing faster and faster.]
[NEWS CLIP: So far, more than 80 Americans have died.]
[NEWS CLIP: 258 people have died.]
[NEWS CLIP: 625 people have died.]
JAD: Of course, this is the part we all know. How, from those first few cases in LA, AIDS became one of the deadliest pandemics the world has ever seen.
[NEWS CLIP: More dangerous than the plague of the Middle Ages.]
JAD: But back at the beginning, there was a story that I’ve not been able to shake for the last 30 years. And it’s a story that I want to re-imagine right now.
DAVID QUAMMEN: Right after news of this syndrome started to break…
JAD: That’s science writer David Quammen, who along with Carl will be one of our guides.
CARL ZIMMER: Epidemiologists were trying to figure out where…
[NEWS CLIP: Where did it come from?]
CARL ZIMMER: And they were thinking, like, “Well, maybe it’s a sexually-transmitted disease.”
JAD: So the CDC launches a study.
DAVID QUAMMEN: Of a group of about 30 patients.
JAD: Gay men.
DAVID QUAMMEN: In New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, to see who had had sexual contact with whom.
JAD: How do you—is that just a series of interviews with people?
CARL ZIMMER: Yeah. Please name all the people that you—that you’ve slept with.
JAD: The CDC eventually releases the results of this survey in the form of a diagram.
DAVID QUAMMEN: Like a network drawing with circles representing patients, and then lines representing sexual contact.
JAD: And each patient, each little circle was numbered.
DAVID QUAMMEN: New York, seven. Los Angeles, twelve.
JAD: So you didn’t know who was who, but you could tell immediately when you look at this thing, that of all the 30 or so circles, there was one circle that was special. It had lines coming out in every direction.
DAVID QUAMMEN: Seven or eight emanating from him.
JAD: Like the hub of a wheel, except all the spokes on this wheel connected to other wheels which then shot out and connected to other wheels, fanning outward. And at the center of it all was that one little circle, numbered…
DAVID QUAMMEN: Zero. Number zero.
JAD: As far as we know, that was the first time that you ever get the term ‘patient zero.’
[60 MINUTES CLIP: Patient zero was a man, the central victim and victimizer.]
JAD: This is from a 60 Minutes special in 1988. That year a reporter named Randy Shilts had written a book called And The Band Played On that for the first time revealed the identity of patient zero.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, 60 Minutes: He was a French-Canadian.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, 60 Minutes: A very handsome airline steward.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, 60 Minutes: Named Gaëtan Dugas.]
DAVID QUAMMEN: Gaëtan Dugas.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, 60 Minutes: Patient zero.]
JAD: A few minutes later in the report, Shilts comes on to describe a guy…
[ARCHIVE CLIP, 60 Minutes: A guy who has got unlimited sexual stamina.]
JAD: This sexual athlete who would fly from one hot spot to the next because of his job, having sex with literally thousands of men.
DAVID QUAMMEN: And as he knew he was dying, at least according to Randy Shilts, he became somewhat sinister and malicious. He would sleep with a male partner at a bathhouse in San Francisco or somewhere else. And then when the light came up, according to Randy Shilts, he would say, “I’ve got gay cancer.”
[ARCHIVE CLIP, 60 Minutes: “Now you’re gonna get it too.”]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, 60 Minutes: You talked to him?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, 60 Minutes: I talked to him, yeah.]
JAD: This is Dr. Selma Dritz. She was part of that CDC study.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, 60 Minutes: I told him that he was getting other people sick with it. And he said, “It’s my right to do whatever I want. My civil rights. I do as I please. I’ve got it, why shouldn’t they have it?” I said, “You can kill yourself if you want but you got no right to take somebody else along with you.” And he said, “Screw you,” and walked out.]
DAVID QUAMMEN: Really, a chilling moment.
JAD: And pretty much from that moment on, Gaëtan Dugas…
CARL ZIMMER: He just took on this—this aura as single-handedly causing an epidemic in the United States.
JAD: Now I don’t know about you, but I first bumped into this story in the movie version of And The Band Played On.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, And the Band Played On: My friend, we’re talking about thousands of men whose faces I cannot even remember and you want names.]
JAD: That’s an actor playing Gaëtan Dugas in the movie. Now when I first saw that, AIDS had already infected two and a half million people. And to think that it could all go back to this one guy just seemed unreal.
CARL ZIMMER: It was a—it was a very potent story. There’s no doubt. And—and he gave HIV to a lot of people, there’s no question about that. But what we do know is that he was not patient zero.
JAD: He was not patient zero.
CARL ZIMMER: No.
DAVID QUAMMEN: He was not the beginning point.
CARL ZIMMER: He wasn’t.
JAD: Not even close.
ROBERT: Huh.
JAD: So here’s the question that got me started on this story. Okay, so the gay steward, that was the movie stuck in my head. But what’s the real movie? What movie can we make about the beginning of the AIDS epidemic? Because when you’ve got something so vast that, according to some estimates, will have killed 60 million people by the end of the decade, you need a beginning. You need some way of explaining how this disaster happened—and how it might happen again.
ROBERT: And how exactly do we know that Gaëtan Dugas wasn’t patient zero?
CARL ZIMMER: Well, there are a couple reasons we know it. So—so one thing that people started to do…
JAD: Scientists.
CARL ZIMMER: … was to—they went, started going back and looking at people who had died.
DAVID QUAMMEN: People who died mysteriously…
CARL ZIMMER: … of AIDS-like things.
JAD: In the past.
DAVID QUAMMEN: Might some of them have been early cases?
CARL ZIMMER: And they started finding a lot.
[NEWS CLIP: Robert Rayford had AIDS 12 years before it was recognized in this country in 1981.]
[NEWS CLIP: In 1959, a sailor in Britain died of pneumocystis pneumonia.]
JAD: And so for a while, you had all these new patient zeros.
[NEWS CLIP: In 1961, a nurse in Chicago died of Kaposi’s sarcoma.]
CARL ZIMMER: But the real definitive blow to this whole patient zero nonsense came by actually looking at the virus itself.
JAD: In 1984, same year that Gaëtan Dugas died, scientists isolate the virus.
CARL ZIMMER: HIV.
JAD: Which is really just a little string of genetic code that gets into your body and into your cells and uses your cells to make copies of itself. But here’s the thing.
DAVID QUAMMEN: When it replicates within a single patient, it copies itself imprecisely. It mutates quickly. It changes a lot.
JAD: As the virus duplicates itself inside a person, the dupes often have little copying errors in them, little mutations. And it turns out, those errors? They happen at a predictable rate. You can kind of almost predict how many you’re gonna see in a year or five years. And so the amount of changes that you see out there, the diversity, really, of the viruses in the AIDS population, well that becomes really good information. And so a group of scientists began to look at…
DAVID QUAMMEN: The amount of diversity among HIV patients in the US.
CARL ZIMMER: And other parts of the world.
ROBERT: And the more diversity, the longer the virus has been around.
DAVID QUAMMEN: Right. Right.
CARL ZIMMER: And they could use that kind of like a clock. If you have a virus here and a virus there…
JAD: You could measure how different they are, and you would know that it would take a certain amount of time for them to get that different. And to make a long story short…
CARL ZIMMER: The picture they get is…
JAD: That AIDS entered the United States…
CARL ZIMMER: Around 1966.
DAVID QUAMMEN: At a time when Gaëtan Dugas was still a virginal adolescent.
JAD: From there, scientists were able to trace the virus back to Haiti and from Haiti back to Africa.
CARL ZIMMER: It’s been there the longest. It’s had the longest time to become diverse, to mutate, to evolve. So if you want to really—if you want to get to the real patient zero as it were, the most interesting stuff come—actually comes from Africa. So one way to try to figure out its origins there is to go looking for the virus.
DAVID QUAMMEN: Yep. And that takes us back to ZR 59 and DRC 60. Can we talk about them?
ROBERT: Sure.
JAD: What?
DAVID QUAMMEN: These are the two earliest known HIV-positive human specimens.
JAD: And this is where for me at least, the story gets way bigger than I imagined. Now, the first sample…
DAVID QUAMMEN: ZR 59.
JAD: Came to light in the late-’90s. Somehow, scientists unearthed a very old tube of blood from a hospital in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And when they tested it…
DAVID QUAMMEN: It had HIV. This had been taken from a Bantu man in 1959.
ROBERT: 1959!
DAVID QUAMMEN: Yeah. Nobody knows his name. Nobody even knows, I think, what he died of. And that was the only one for a number of years.
MICHAEL WOROBEY: That was our one glimpse into the kind of deep history of HIV.
JAD: But then along comes that guy, Michael Worobey. He’s an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona. And a few years ago, Michael went back to Kinshasa and found a second HIV sample. He actually found the virus lurking in a tiny bit of human tissue that was preserved in paraffin wax.
MICHAEL WOROBEY: It’s kind of like Han Solo in the Star Wars movie when he’s kind of frozen in that carbonite or whatever that stuff is.
JAD: In this new sample, it was from the same town, Kinshasa, as the first. And also more importantly, from the same time.
MICHAEL WOROBEY: 1960. And with the two of them, then you can kind of go back in time.
JAD: Like we described before, you can measure the differences between the samples, calculate how long it would take for those samples to get that different. And in the end, you can use these two samples to wind the clock all the way back to the virus that started it all. And it turned out…
DAVID QUAMMEN: The most recent common ancestor of those two specimens…
JAD: Goes back to…
DAVID QUAMMEN: … to about 1908.
JAD: 1908. That is when it started in human beings.
ROBERT: What? 1908? Is that what he said?
JAD: Well, roughly.
DAVID QUAMMEN: Give or take a margin of error.
CARL ZIMMER: Early 1900s.
JAD: So around 1908, give or take, something happened.
DAVID QUAMMEN: That’s right. That moment is the spillover.
ROBERT: Spillover.
DAVID QUAMMEN: Spillover’s the term that scientists use to describe the moment when a virus in one species passes into another species.
CARL ZIMMER: You know, new diseases in humans tend to pop up from animals. So people said, “Okay, flu comes from birds. Where does HIV come from?” To get at that answer, you have to look beyond human beings. You have to look at other viruses that are like HIV.
DAVID QUAMMEN: So the search was on.
[NEWS CLIP: The inability to find a similar disease in research animals.]
JAD: Turns out, right about the time that the HIV virus was discovered…
[NEWS CLIP: Scientists at the New England Primate Research Center…]
JAD: Some researchers found a virus like it in macaque monkeys.
[NEWS CLIP: Macaque monkey.]
JAD: In fact, it was so similar that they called it…
CARL ZIMMER: SIV.
DAVID QUAMMEN: Simian immunodeficiency virus.
BEATRICE HAHN: Yes, and that’s where the origin quest started.
JAD: This is Beatrice Hahn.
BEATRICE HAHN: I’m a professor of medicine and microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania.
JAD: And so after they found it in macaques, what happened?
BEATRICE HAHN: It took a couple of years…
JAD: But eventually, she says, they found SIV…
BEATRICE HAHN: In still another primate species, the sooty mangabey.
JAD: And then in a few more.
BEATRICE HAHN: The African green monkeys, mandrills.
JAD: Pretty soon, it was all over the place.
BEATRICE HAHN: There are now I think 40 different species of African monkeys known to have their own version of SIV.
JAD: So then the question was, which one of these monkeys or primates passed it to us?
BEATRICE HAHN: Then, unexpectedly…
JAD: A researcher named Martine…
BEATRICE HAHN: Martine Peters.
DAVID QUAMMEN: At the center in Gabon.
JAD: Decided to test her chimps.
BEATRICE HAHN: Two orphan chimpanzees.
DAVID QUAMMEN: And bingo. She found a very, very close match.
BEATRICE HAHN: A virus that was the closest relative of HIV-1.
JAD: So…
BEATRICE HAHN: Everybody said, “Well, you know…”
DAVID QUAMMEN: It was a chimp.
ROBERT: It was a chimp. Okay.
DAVID QUAMMEN: Yeah, it came from a chimp.
BEATRICE HAHN: Yes.
JAD: But then the question was well, which chimps, or rather where?
DAVID QUAMMEN: Where, exactly?
JAD: So…
DAVID QUAMMEN: Beatrice Hahn and her colleagues started looking at chimps that came from different parts of Western Central Africa.
JAD: Now getting blood samples from chimps in the wild is pretty much…
BEATRICE HAHN: It just isn’t feasible.
JAD: You know, because in the wild they hide the moment they see us.
BEATRICE HAHN: So you get stuck with fecal samples.
CARL ZIMMER: Poop.
BEATRICE HAHN: Yes, poop.
CARL ZIMMER: There’s lots of DNA in there.
JAD: And viruses.
CARL ZIMMER: So they would just go to where the chimpanzees would sleep at night, and they would just, you know, collect some poop.
JAD: Bring it back to the lab, and Beatrice would analyze all the viruses.
BEATRICE HAHN: Over 90 different wild communities.
JAD: From every part of central Africa.
BEATRICE HAHN: Over 7,000 different fecal samples.
JAD: And slowly, they were able to piece together…
BEATRICE HAHN: Which communities were infected and which ones had the closest to HIV-1. That’s when it hit us for the first time.
JAD: What exactly hit you?
BEATRICE HAHN: The geographic origin of these chimps.
JAD: In 2006, her and her colleagues published that the human AIDS virus comes from a group of chimps, a very specific group that live in a very specific place.
DAVID QUAMMEN: This little corner of southeastern Cameroon.
BEATRICE HAHN: Between the Boumba River, the Ngoko River and the Sangha River.
JAD: These chimps were essentially penned in between these three rivers.
DAVID QUAMMEN: It’s an area probably only of a hundred square miles. Not much more than that.
ROBERT: So when we’re looking at what humans have and we’re looking at what all of those chimps in Africa have, the most perfect match is this little territory up there in Cameroon?
DAVID QUAMMEN: Yeah.
BEATRICE HAHN: There is no other virus that is any closer. So that’s that.
JAD: So can you reconstruct the spillover and the who that it spilled over into, as best—you know, as best as we understand it?
DAVID QUAMMEN: You can hypothesize. And the best hypothesis is the cut hunter hypothesis.
JAD: The cut hunter?
ROBERT: The C-U-T hunter?
DAVID QUAMMEN: That’s right. A hunter who gets cut.
JAD: And what can we say about this guy? I mean, is he—what do we know about him?
DAVID QUAMMEN: If we had to guess? If we had to guess, that human was probably a Bantu man living very near the forest or in the forest in southeastern Cameroon. He was hunting. Maybe he had a bow and arrow, maybe he had a spear, and he kills a chimpanzee. Bingo, here’s a big pile of meat. And he starts to butcher it. He’s cutting open the chest cavity. He’s pulling out organs and he cuts himself. And he gets blood-to-blood contact. Chimpanzee blood against his blood. What happens is that the virus in the chimpanzee blood found itself in an environment that was unexpected, that was alien to it, but was not too much different from the biochemical environment it had been in, chimpanzee blood. It could function. And that’s the moment. That’s the moment it begins. That human is patient zero.
JAD: But why then? Why 1908? I mean presumably, people have been hunting chimps for a really long time. Why wouldn’t this guy be patient seven million?
DAVID QUAMMEN: That’s another of the big questions. People certainly in central Africa have been eating monkeys for thousands of years.
JAD: I mean, David says there’s really no way to know, but this could have just been the right virus.
DAVID QUAMMEN: Maybe this particular virus evolved in a way that made it more transmissible in humans.
JAD: Or maybe it just got lucky to come along at precisely the right time.
CARL ZIMMER: What you’re looking at…
JAD: This is Carl again.
CARL ZIMMER: … is a time when this part of Africa was being heavily colonized. The French and the Belgians were building train systems. And populations were on the move. Kinshasa, which was then Leopoldville, it was exploding. It was huge.
DAVID QUAMMEN: The cities were attracting people from the boonies in those days…
JAD: So by 1908, all the virus has to do is get from that tiny village where the cut hunter lived to one of the new cities.
DAVID QUAMMEN: That happens almost certainly by river. I was stirred by the work of Beatrice Hahn and Mike Worobey to see what this scenario looked like on the ground. So I went to southeastern Cameroon and I chartered a little boat, about a 30-foot wooden boat with an outboard motor.
JAD: And he traced the path of the virus.
DAVID QUAMMEN: We went down the Ngoko River, and we stopped at a few villages. There are a couple little villages there, one of which has a market where you can buy monkey meat and crocodile meat.
JAD: And he says it wasn’t hard to imagine how it all might have went down. Perhaps the cut hunter gave the virus to a woman who then passed it on to a fisherman.
DAVID QUAMMEN: Fellow that I called the voyager.
JAD: Who then got in the boat as David did and carried it down the river.
DAVID QUAMMEN: The Sangha River, which is—the Ngoko is a tributary of the Sangha. The Sangha becomes a bigger river 200 meters wide, which then flows to the Congo River, the big river.
JAD: And into the city.
DAVID QUAMMEN: And I imagined him sliding into Brazzaville around 1920. The first HIV-positive man to arrive in an urban center, where there’s a much greater density of humans, where there are prostitutes, a greater fluidity of social and sexual interactions. And that seems to have been the place from which the disease went global.
ROBERT: So that’s how it happened?
DAVID QUAMMEN: Let me add another parentheses. There are essentially 12 major groups of the HIV virus.
JAD: What David means is that 12 different kinds of HIV viruses have spilled over 12 different times.
DAVID QUAMMEN: Eight of them came from monkeys, three of them came from chimps and one came from gorillas.
JAD: Wow.
DAVID QUAMMEN: And of those 12, only one of them is responsible for the global pandemic.
JAD: There are 12 kinds!
DAVID QUAMMEN: Twelve kinds that we know about. It’s probably happened dozens and dozens more times that we don’t know about. So the spillover is not a highly improbable event. In most cases, those spillovers have not resulted in extended chains of disease in humans, let alone global pandemic. In a few cases they’ve resulted in localized disease. And in one case, the sweepstakes-winning strain, HIV-1 group M, has infected 60 million humans around the world and killed 30 million.
JAD: A lot of people to thank for this segment. Thanks to David Quammen, who’s got a book called Spillover, which is all about diseases crossing over from animals to us.
ROBERT: Also, thank you to Carl Zimmer, whose book on viruses is called A Planet of Viruses. And thank you also to him and to Michael Worobey. Their interview was recorded on a podcast from Meet the Scientists. And also to Beatrice Hahn at the University of Pennsylvania.
JAD: And to Katie Slocum from the University of York for letting us use her recordings of chimpanzees.
JAD: Hey, you want to know about my—one of my proudest moments of being a dad?
ROBERT: Yeah.
JAD: Happened this morning.
ROBERT: Yeah?
JAD: So you know how Emil’s a little bit of an introvert, right?
ROBERT: Mm-hmm.
JAD: And we’re sort of worried whether he socializes enough. Well, we were taking him to daycare and we’re—he’s taking his shoes off, and there’s this little boy who’s only there two days a week and he’s not adjusting well. And every time his mother drops him off, she has to literally pry him off her and he’s wailing and you know? So Emil sits down on this little seat to take his shoes off. The mother of this kid puts this little boy next to Emil and he is just crying. Wah! He’s distraught. So then what happens is Emil turns to this little boy, looks at him, sticks out his hand and says, “High-five.”
ROBERT: [laughs]
JAD: “High-five.” Out of nowhere.
JON MOOALLEM: That is amazing. Yeah, because it’s like, they’re out in their own society, you know?
JAD: Okay, so let’s do the introductions. I’m Jad.
ROBERT: I’m Robert.
JAD: This is Radiolab. We’re calling this show…
ROBERT: Patient Zero.
JAD: Yeah. And for this next segment, no more patients.
ROBERT: No more diseases.
JAD: Exactly.
ROBERT: Let’s focus instead on invention. On the people who bring new ideas into the world.
JAD: Yeah, the zeros behind the ideas. That doesn’t quite sound right. You know what I mean.
ROBERT: Yeah.
JAD: And that guy you just heard?
JON MOOALLEM: Hi. My name is Jon Mooallem. I’m a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine.
JAD: He’s got his own high-five story to tell, though it’s not about his daughter.
JON MOOALLEM: We have—I think we have kids around the same age.
JAD: Or her first high-five. It’s actually about the first high-five ever.
JON MOOALLEM: Yeah.
JAD: Ever?
JON MOOALLEM: Yeah.
JAD: See, one morning a few years ago…
JON MOOALLEM: 2007 or 2008.
JAD: Jon turned on his computer, opened up his email and found…
JON MOOALLEM: A press release about the—the true undisputed inventor of the high-five coming, you know, out finally.
JAD: Who was the press release from?
JON MOOALLEM: National High-Five Day, which is a kind of a joke holiday that was invented by a group of high school friends, I think.
ROBERT: And they told the story?
JON MOOALLEM: They told the story of Lamont Sleets. College basketball player at Murray State in Kentucky.
ROBERT: And the story in the press release went something like this. Sleets’s father fought in…
JON MOOALLEM: Vietnam. as part of the 1st Battalion 5th Infantry, which was nicknamed The Five. And they used to greet each other by holding up their hand and saying, “Five” as a kind of prideful thing. And when Lamont was younger, they would all sort of hang out at the house in Kentucky, and he couldn’t keep all their names straight. So when they’d walk in the door and they’d go “Five,” he would just sort of smack their hand and he’d go, “Hi, Five.”
JAD: Oh, like “Hi” like, “Hello, five.”
JON MOOALLEM: Hello, Five. Yeah. Hi comma Five. You know, he has small hands, he liked to put them up against the big hands of the Five guys. And it was years later that he started playing college basketball at Murray State and started high-fiving all his teammates. He really never stopped high-fiving, it was just something he did. But when he went around playing away games, other teams picked it up and it sort of spread out. So he was sort of both the inventor of the high-five and the kind of Johnny Appleseed of the high-five at the same time.
JAD: And within a few weeks of Jon getting this press release…
ROBERT: The story was everywhere.
JAD: Went kind of viral.
JON MOOALLEM: It wound up sort of all over the internet. There were some local newspapers who, you know, picked it up. You know, Murray State suddenly became very proud of the fact that they were the home of the high-five. It became sort of part of the institutional lore in the athletic department there.
JAD: And then you read this and you thought what?
JON MOOALLEM: I thought, how sad.
JAD: How sad? Why how sad?
JON MOOALLEM: Because I knew the story of Glenn Burke.
JAD: Turns out Jon had already been poking around into this question of who invented the high-five, and he had stumbled on this photograph.
JON MOOALLEM: You know, maybe I don’t have it.
JAD: Black and white picture.
JON MOOALLEM: Oh, yeah. Here we go.
JAD: Two baseball players facing each other. Afros, huge smiles, and their hands are in the air right about to connect.
JAD: Which one of these is Glenn Burke?
JON MOOALLEM: So Burke’s—Burke’s the guy in the warm-up jacket. I think he’s even got his hat on backwards.
JAD: Glenn Burke was a center fielder for the LA Dodgers in the ’70s. Big guy.
JON MOOALLEM: He says he had 17-inch biceps. So I’ll take his—I’ll take his word for that.
JAD: The other guy in the picture is Dusty Baker. He’s an outfielder. But you can tell in the picture just from the way that Glenn is sort of throwing his whole body forward that he’s the one initiating the gesture.
JON MOOALLEM: I mean, this is a guy who was, you know, the soul of the Dodgers clubhouse.
LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: He just had that type of charisma.
ROBERT: This is Lutha Burke Davis, Glenn’s sister.
LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: With Glenn it was like he would always be on the stage. I often said he should have been a comedian.
JON MOOALLEM: He was always dancing around in the—in the clubhouse. He used to do Richard Pryor stand-up routines just from memory.
LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: He just genuinely loved people.
ROBERT: So much so she says, that in the year that picture was taken, the Dodgers made him their sort of public face of the team.
LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: He was their Ambassador of Goodwill.
ROBERT: He’s the guy they’d send out to all the press events.
LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: You know, like meet the youngsters, or…
ROBERT: That sort of thing.
JON MOOALLEM: Here’s the story about this picture.
JAD: What was the date?
JON MOOALLEM: October 5, poetically enough, 1977.
JAD: It’s the playoffs. Dodgers versus the Phillies. Game four. Bases are loaded.
JON MOOALLEM: Dusty Baker…
ROBERT: Steps to the plate…
JON MOOALLEM: And grand slam.
JAD: Crowd goes nuts.
ROBERT: Baker does his victory lap.
JAD: And just as he’s…
JON MOOALLEM: You know, rounding third, coming to the plate.
ROBERT: Burke comes racing out of the dugout…
JON MOOALLEM: And he’s got his arm really high up, and Baker…
JAD: Sees him, instinctively raises his arm, and before you know it…
JON MOOALLEM: Burke and Baker smack hands.
JAD: Bam! There it was.
LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: The sportscasters that were, you know, announcing the game, said they had never seen that done in sports before.
JON MOOALLEM: And from there on, the Dodgers started high-fiving and everyone else started high-fiving.
LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: The high-five…
JAD: Became a thing.
LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: Mm-hmm.
JAD: And it all began with that one moment.
JON MOOALLEM: The platonic high-five right there.
ROBERT: Unfortunately, that moment…
JON MOOALLEM: That was actually both the beginning and also almost the end of Burke’s career.
JAD: It’s not that he wasn’t good. He was actually really good, even in his rookie season.
JON MOOALLEM: He was being talked about as the next Willie Mays by the Dodgers organization.
ROBERT: But…
JON MOOALLEM: He was gay. And he tried to keep that a secret while he was playing. Dusty Baker actually had kept trying to set him up with his wife’s cousins, and Burke never want—never liked any of them. And Baker’s completely confused because he knew, you know, these were these were really good-looking women, apparently. So there were rumors circulating, and the rumors reached the front office of the LA Dodgers. And—and one day, Burke was called in by management and they offered him $75,000 to get married.
JAD: What?
ROBERT: $75,000.
JAD: To get married?
ROBERT: Huh.
JAD: What is this, like the mob or something?
JON MOOALLEM: Well, exactly. I mean, they didn’t regularly offer their players money to get—to get married. And Burke’s response apparently was—he said, “I suppose you mean to a woman.”
ROBERT: [laughs]
JON MOOALLEM: Shortly after that, the Dodgers traded him to the Oakland A’s for a player who everyone acknowledged was completely inferior.
LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: That was confusing for us, and I know it had to be confusing for him.
JON MOOALLEM: It was shocking to everyone. No one understood why he was traded.
JAD: And you think it was because he was gay?
JON MOOALLEM: Yeah. Yeah.
LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: You know, baseball is the all-American sport.
JAD: Yeah.
LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: But, you know, at least he was still gonna be able to play ball. Or at least he thought.
JON MOOALLEM: He ends up in Oakland. Doesn’t get very much playing time.
ROBERT: And when he did get on the field, it wasn’t very pleasant.
LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: He used to get heckled a lot, you know, from people in the bleachers and…
ROBERT: And even worse, according to a couple of different people his coach…
LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: Billy Martin.
ROBERT: Would often introduce Glenn Burke this way.
LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: This is Glenn Burke, the faggot.
JAD: Really?
LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: Yeah.
JON MOOALLEM: And so Glenn Burke retires.
JAD: Wow, and he was only, like, 26 or something, right?
LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: Yes. He was young.
JON MOOALLEM: Within a year of his rookie season. Just walks away.
JAD: God, that’s like a aborted career.
JON MOOALLEM: Exactly. From there, he ends up in the Castro District in San Francisco, which is the big gay neighborhood.
JAD: And things go okay for a while.
ROBERT: But then one day when he’s crossing the street…
LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: Three teenaged girls in their mother’s car…
JAD: Come barreling down the road.
LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: And they hit him and broke his leg in three places.
JAD: Oh, man.
LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: And that kind of ended everything when that happened.
ROBERT: He starts taking painkillers. One thing leads to another.
JON MOOALLEM: He gets hooked on crack. Can’t hold a job. He goes broke.
JAD: Ends up living…
LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: On the street.
JON MOOALLEM: And in 1994, Burke is diagnosed with—with HIV or AIDS. I guess AIDS at that point.
LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: He ended up coming to live with me. A lot of times he didn’t sleep well at night, and we would sit up and talk. Put on music. And I danced, and he’d move his arms around because he was in the bed. He was bedridden.
JAD: And so you took care of him ’til he died?
LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: Yeah.
JAD: And Glenn Burke died in 1995.
ROBERT: But what he’s left with at this point is he’s left with the original high-five, right? That’s his claim.
JON MOOALLEM: Yes. Yes. That defined him, to some people at least at the end. And he—and he believed it. A reporter had asked him, you know, if it was true about the high-five and he said, “Yeah, think about the feeling you get when you give someone the high-five. I had that feeling before everybody else did.”
JAD: Huh. So what did you do when you got this press release?
JON MOOALLEM: So I called National High-Five Day, because I wanted to talk to Lamont Sleets. Even though I was sad, it seemed like okay, here’s another person’s prideful accomplishment. Let’s get his story.
GREG HARRELL-EDGE: Hello? Hello?
JAD: Eventually…
GREG HARRELL-EDGE: Hey, there we go.
JAD: He gets this guy on the phone.
GREG HARRELL-EDGE: My name is Greg Harrell-Edge.
JAD: Greg is one of the founders, and he and Jon gets talking. And Jon asks him the sensible first question.
JON MOOALLEM: Is the Lamont Sleets story true?
ROBERT: He figured it was, but he thought he should at least ask. He’s a reporter.
JON MOOALLEM: And there was a pause, and he said, “No.”
GREG HARRELL-EDGE: Frankly, we’ve been waiting for someone to ask. We thought no one would ever ask.
JON MOOALLEM: It’s not true.
GREG HARRELL-EDGE: This is something that we had made up. We wanted to see if the media would—would run with it.
ROBERT: They made the whole thing up.
JON MOOALLEM: They made the whole thing up, and then they just went to go cast their protagonist.
GREG HARRELL-EDGE: So we sat down. We picked Murray State. That’s just kind of a great-sounding school. It pops up in the NCAA tournament every few years.
JON MOOALLEM: And they came across this guy Lamont Sleets.
JAD: Why him?
GREG HARRELL-EDGE: Well, it was pretty close to random.
JON MOOALLEM: They then told me they had received an email from Lamont Sleets’s wife.
GREG HARRELL-EDGE: Absolutely. His wife emailed us and said some of the details that you have are flat out wrong.
JAD: That implies that some of the things you’ve said are right, though.
JON MOOALLEM: But Lamont thinks he probably did invent the high-five.
JAD: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What about Glenn?
LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: I was kind of like, hmm, kind of a bit blown away, you know?
JON MOOALLEM: Yeah, you know, here was this guy who is proud of this, and these guys just kind of stripped it away from him?
JAD: Do you feel a little guilty? That I mean like, okay, it’s a high-five. It’s kind of a silly thing. On the other hand, this guy’s life, the way he died. Do you feel like you robbed him?
GREG HARRELL-EDGE: We do feel—we do feel—we wish that we had done things slightly differently in—in putting together this sort of collegiate prank. But we didn’t really know of Glenn Burke at that time.
JAD: Greg says they hadn’t heard of the Glenn Burke story when they pulled this prank, and now that they know it, they really feel bad. In fact, they’re now organizing a charity event they’re calling…
GREG HARRELL-EDGE: The National High-Five-Athon.
JAD: Which will raise money for charity, including one chosen by Glenn Burke’s sister Lutha.
LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: I’m very proud. Any time I see somebody do a high-five, it just really makes me happy.
JAD: And that seemed like a good end to the story.
JON MOOALLEM: But…
ROBERT: No. Because then Jon told us that…
JAD: If you really honestly want to get to the bottom of who invented the high-five? I mean, we didn’t think we wanted to but now there were in it, what the hell. Well, you’ve got to go beyond Glenn Burke’s story.
JON MOOALLEM: I’ve wanted you to believe that he was a hero at this point, right? So maybe I should tell you a little bit about Derek Smith, right?
ROBERT: Even though Glenn Burke died believing that the high-five was his legacy, at more or less the same moment that he invented it, a guy named Derek Smith, a basketball player for the Louisville Cardinals was at practice…
JON MOOALLEM: And a guy named Wiley Brown went up to Derek Smith and was going to give him just a ordinary low-five, and Derek Smith looked him in the eye. This is what Wiley Brown told me. Derek Smith looked him in the eye and said, “No. Up high.” That year’s Louisville team, they were—they were known as the Doctors of Dunk. You know, they’re a high-flying team. They played above the rim.
JAD: And Jon says when Louisville played in the 1980 NCAA finals…
JON MOOALLEM: I haven’t seen it, but apparently the broadcaster referred actually to the high-five handshake.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Giving the high-five handshake. High-fives!]
JON MOOALLEM: He felt compelled to explain it to America.
JAD: Wow, and did—at the moment that Derek Smith did it—did an asteroid fall on his head or something?
JON MOOALLEM: Well in 1996, I believe. In the ’90s, he had an undiagnosed heart condition and he just died all of a sudden on a cruise ship.
JAD: What?
JON MOOALLEM: Yes, and he said explicitly to Wiley Brown, “This is something I’m gonna be remembered for. You know, our kids and our grandkids are gonna talk about this.” And in fact, their kids and grandkids do talk about it.
JAD: And they’re probably very proud. But…
KATHY GREGORY: Hello, it’s Kathy.
ROBERT: Then we ran into this woman.
KATHY GREGORY: Fire away.
JAD: This is Kathy Gregory. She coached women’s volleyball in the 1960s, years before Glenn Burke and Derek Smith. And she says with her girls…
KATHY GREGORY: Everyone did it. All the time. So I do believe that it was volleyball that first started it.
JAD: And interestingly, she says they would high-five more when a player screwed up.
KATHY GREGORY: Yes. No, no, it isn’t just about celebration.
JAD: Because really, when do you need a high-five?
KATHY GREGORY: Of course, it’s more when you’re down.
JON MOOALLEM: Yeah, it makes people so happy.
JAD: So women’s volleyball. There you go.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Breathless: Non, ce n’est pas fini.]
ROBERT: Non, ce n’est pas fini! Because then our producer Lynn Levy also discovered that in the movie Breathless in 1955, at exactly one hour, 18 minutes into the film, you will see two Frenchmen do a very distinct haute cinq.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Breathless: Amigo!]
ROBERT: Right there!
JAD: [laughs] Isn’t this all, like, an indication to you that it—it’s maybe—it’s one of those things that probably was there at the dawn of man?
JON MOOALLEM: Because it, like, gives pleasure?
JAD: Yeah, it’s just like a…
JON MOOALLEM: Like, from an evolutionary point of view?
ROBERT: No, I don’t think so. I think—I think this has the feeling of something that was born. I mean, who in this room wants Glenn Burke to be the original guy?
JAD: Just raise your hand. Me.
JON MOOALLEM: Me.
ROBERT: Me.
JAD: It’s a better story!
ROBERT: So look at what’s happening here. Every time we look for the original of anything, be it a disease, a contagion, a gesture, we find more than one. So what do you do in this situation?
JAD: I think, you know what you do is you just choose. You say which one is the better story. Let’s just go with the best high-five. Forget the first. The best.
ROBERT: And I think we can do that. Lets just call it Glenn Burke.
JAD: Glenn Burke invented the high-five.
ROBERT: Done.
JAD: All right. High-five. Hive-five.
[high-five slap]
ROBERT: [laughs]
[LISTENER: Hi, I’m Josh, and I’m from Plainfield, New Jersey, and here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandbach is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Mona Madgavkar, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Natalia Ramirez, Joanna Strogatz, Anisa Vietze, Arianne Wack, Molly Webster and Jessica Yung, with help from Gabby Santas and Maia Appleby Melamed. Our fact-checkers are Nora Belblidia, Hilary Elkins, Rachel Gross, Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton and Sophie Samiee.]
[LISTENER: Hi. I’m Maddie and I’m from Frederick, Maryland. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]
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Should we reengineer the world’s deadliest animal?
Duration: 00:11:59
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The most ferocious predator for us humans is actually quite small: the mosquito. They are hungry for blood, spreading diseases like malaria, yellow fever and dengue – and picking up new ones all the time. But what if we could wipe out the mosquito? Gene-editing technology could do it, potentially saving millions of lives. But it comes with serious potential for risk. Which begs the question: Should we get to decide when humanity rewrites nature? Here to discuss that is Ben Bradford, the host of a new podcast distributed by the NPR Network: Are We Doomed?Interested in more science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org.Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy
Transcript
SPEAKER: You’re listening to Short Wave from NPR.
EMILY KWONG: The most ferocious predator for us humans is actually quite small.
[BUZZING]
KWONG: It’s the mosquito. They are hungry for blood and spreading diseases all the time, including serious ones, like malaria, yellow fever, and dengue. But what if we could wipe out the mosquito, We have the technology to do it. But should we? Here to discuss that is Ben Bradford, the host of a new podcast distributed by the NPR Network. It’s called Are We Doomed?
BEN BRADFORD: It is. Hi, Emily.
KWONG: So, Ben, your podcast Are We Doomed? covers a lot, from killer AI to nuclear weapons and, of course, the bloodthirsty micropredators I want to talk about today. How do you feel about mosquitoes, by the way?
BRADFORD: I think they’re gross, and I think they’re rude. And you mentioned, Emily, new gene-editing techniques could allow us to eradicate our little insect nemesis, potentially saving millions of lives.
KWONG: Yes. I learned that from you, from your show.
BRADFORD: Yeah, thank you.
KWONG: The tech is here.
BRADFORD: Yeah. Thank you. And it would be amazing. But also, in that technology is something inherently more dangerous. I talked to Kevin Esvelt, who is a biologist now at the MIT Media Lab.
KEVIN ESVELT: And if you can engineer a mosquito so it can’t spread disease, you could engineer a mosquito so it always spreads disease.
[CONTEMPLATIVE MUSIC]
KWONG: Today on the show, the technology that allows us to kill the mosquito comes with all kinds of complications.
BRADFORD: So what does it mean to try to change an entire species? Who gets to decide? What might the ripple effects be? How do you test it? How do you protect it?
KWONG: Easy questions, you know. You’re listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.
[CONTEMPLATIVE MUSIC]
KWONG: OK, Short Wavers. I’m here with Ben Bradford, who’s just done all this reporting on have to save millions of people from malaria by wiping out the mosquito. Ben, how does that even work?
BRADFORD: Yeah. So let’s go back to early last decade. Scientists developed a new form of gene editing, which you may know as CRISPR. It’s this way of scalpelling out a tiny strand of DNA. And you kind of like suture in a new trait. It doesn’t quite look like that, but that’s essentially what’s happening. And so with CRISPR, you can cure a genetic disease or engineer a cow to grow without horns, both things that they have done in labs.
KWONG: Wow.
BRADFORD: But Kevin Esvelt, this biologist now at the MIT Media Lab, had his own realization.
ESVELT: Turns out, it doesn’t just let you engineer organisms in the lab. It lets you let them go, and the engineered trait will spread to most of the ones in the wild. That’s incredibly exciting.
BRADFORD: Kevin is the person who figured out you could CRISPR a creature, do this little DNA surgery, so it always passes along the gene that you put into it. And so with CRISPR, the idea is you can create a mosquito that, for instance, always has males, and then its offspring will always have males. And so you put it into an area, and it extinguishes all these species carrying malaria in that area.
KWONG: Because there aren’t females to mate with.
BRADFORD: Yeah. And so to do this, you, of course, have to engineer a mosquito from hell. In the show, we called him Jerry.
JERRY: Hi.
[MACHINERY WHIRRING]
[SPLAT]
BRADFORD: To clarify, Jerry’s mission is actually not to murder all mosquitoes, because they’re just trying to target in an area with malaria. And that’s because mosquitoes are ecologically important.
KWONG: They are important to the environment. It’s true.
BRADFORD: I didn’t know that, but they are. And it was disappointing. They’re pollinators and birds–
KWONG: Wow.
BRADFORD: –and spiders, yeah, all kinds of critters eat them.
KWONG: Yeah. It would be reckless to wipe out mosquitoes entirely. But when it comes to Jerry, the mosquito from hell, he’s just meant to wipe out the mosquitoes that carry malaria in a certain region. But then the question becomes, how do you do that without affecting birds and spiders?
BRADFORD: So the idea is to offer birds and spiders a different kind of mosquito to snack on, one that doesn’t transmit malaria, because there’s a whole bunch of different types of mosquito species. And even better or worse, Kevin says, we don’t need to take out the malaria-carrying mosquitoes forever, even.
KWONG: Right. You say in the show, they just need to, quote, \“go on a sabbatical.\”
BRADFORD: Yeah. That’s right. We just need them to, like, disappear for a little while.
ESVELT: Malaria transmission requires humans, and it requires mosquitoes. So this is a back-and-forth transmission chain.
BRADFORD: So if the mosquitoes go on sabbatical for long enough, for the malaria to die out in the humans that the mosquitoes pick up the malaria from and transmit it between, then when the mosquitoes come back, the malaria is gone, and there’s just nothing for them to transmit.
KWONG: This plan is bold. It’s like, use CRISPR, make mosquito. Mosquito Jerry, though, only makes sons. And then the malaria mosquitoes will be wiped out, but not for too long, because that would be bad.
BRADFORD: Just enough.
KWONG: Just a sabbatical.
BRADFORD: Yeah. And so it turns out that there’s a whole bunch of steps that you kind of have to follow if you’re going to do this in a way where you, one, test that the thing actually is going to work, and two, test that it’s not going to work too well and go around the world and create a whole bunch of problems.
KWONG: So how do you even go about testing this?
BRADFORD: Well, you need an area where you’re going to put out your mosquitoes into the wild, kind of a cordoned-off area where they’re going to be on their own. And basically, what we’re describing is a mosquito Jurassic Park. And then that leads to other questions, which is, how do you stop what happens in every Jurassic Park movie?
KWONG: Uh, the dinosaurs get out.
BRADFORD: And so, of course, this is the challenge. And we know what we’re trying to avoid, because we’ve seen it in history.
KWONG: Let’s listen to a section of the episode that talks about how this can all go wrong.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
BRADFORD: Take a tangent with me to the shores of Australia and New Zealand in the late 1800s. European ships landed, bringing sailors and soldiers and felons and rabbits. Europeans brought rabbits over for food and hunting, snacks and sport. Of course, the rabbits quickly escaped and bred all over both islands and became a scourge on an environment totally unprepared for them. They eat everything. New Zealanders looked to fight back. They brought over ferrets and weasels to sic on the rabbits. And when that failed, ferrets and weasels became more invasive species. Skip to the 1990s. Neighboring Australia, largely by accident, unleashed an only partially tested biological weapon against its rabbits.
SPEAKER: This nasty virus that wiped out, like, 2/3 of all rabbits or more.
BRADFORD: New Zealand had been considering using this virus as well, but it wanted more testing first.
SPEAKER 1: New Zealand government said, we’re not sure of safety and so forth. So for now, you’re forbidden to import this virus into New Zealand.
BRADFORD: So what do you think happened at this point? New Zealand farmers, losing millions of dollars as rabbits destroyed their crops, began taking little vacations to Australia to go hunting for infected rabbits.
SPEAKER 1: And they smuggled in diced up, infected rabbit parts from Australia illegally.
BRADFORD: They liquefied the body parts into virus-laden smoothies, which they spread on their fields. Bam. New Zealand had the rabbit virus.
SPEAKER 1: And what’s the government going to do?
SPEAKER 2: When it’s out, it’s out.
BRADFORD: This is Kevin’s fear. If we do create a mosquito Jurassic Park to test Jerry, which we have to do to make sure he works and doesn’t cause a ripple effect of unknown ecological destruction, Kevin says some New Zealand farmers are going to steal one of our mosquitoes.
ESVELT: Of course someone would do that, and they would tell themselves a perfect story in which they’re the hero, right?
BRADFORD: If Jerry gets out, we don’t know what harm he would cause because we haven’t field tested. Consider the possibilities. Jerry and his descendants could travel around the world. These mosquitoes would spawn only males wherever they go, leading to globally extinguishing all of his species. Worse, what if it turns out Jerry can mate with another type of mosquito and he passes along his all-boys gene to one of them? What if that one can mate with another species, and so on? Maybe that gene travels throughout all types of mosquito and does eradicate them entirely. What if birds and spiders and flowers can’t adapt to that loss, and it creates a domino effect of environmental destruction? Then we’ve got a problem.
[RELAXING MUSIC]
[END PLAYBACK]
KWONG: This approach, you know, clearly comes with so many unintended consequences. You say on the show, the point is to insert a trait that spreads like wildfire, and wildfire is hard to stop.
BRADFORD: Yeah. And so that is the main argument against doing this thing, this technology, which is basically called an engineered gene drive. And so there are people who think we should, you know, pack this up, seal it away, never do it.
KWONG: And a gene drive in nature is when, like, a trait kind of naturally evolves to get passed on.
BRADFORD: It gets really good at being passed through its offspring.
KWONG: But here, humans are interfering to make that happen.
BRADFORD: Here, we’re making it happen. Yeah. That’s sort of the debate. But, of course, the stakes are, do you get rid of malaria? Do you get rid of dengue fever? And so when I talked to Kevin, the person who kind of figured out, hey, we could do this, his biggest concern is that an accidental, untested release of, let’s say, Jerry, poisons the whole discourse around this and any attempt to do it.
ESVELT: We know what happens when there’s a backlash to technology. We’re seeing it right now for vaccines and other things. And we saw it even in biomedicine with something like gene therapy, where a single death in a poorly planned clinical trial that led to tragedy set back the entire field by more than a decade. More than a decade is more than 5 million dead children.
KWONG: That’s a lot of pressure. Because, you know, mosquito-borne diseases cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people every year. But on the other hand, you don’t want to roll out a gene drive project too quickly because something could go terribly wrong.
BRADFORD: And you can hear, in our episode, that pressure that Kevin feels because of that. And so it does. It creates all of these hurdles, all of these kind of like little puzzles that you need to solve to be able to do that. You know, we need to test our mosquitoes, like Jerry, to make sure he doesn’t cause unintended consequences. You have to do this sort of like field test your Jurassic Park. But how do you do the Jurassic Park without risking those consequences, where someone’s going to steal him or he’s going to get out? I mean, they fly, for God’s sakes. So, like, what are you going to do?
KWONG: It is such a puzzle. And in your episode, you talk about some ways to work the puzzle, to actually, like, take what’s theoretical and make it happen in the real world.
BRADFORD: These guys are so smart. They’re so smart.
KWONG: What is your takeaway from all this when it comes to the ethics of a gene drive for mosquitoes, but really, also for any species?
BRADFORD: Yeah. I think that the possibilities here are really exciting. I mean, malaria is terrible. And the mosquito has killed more people than any other creature on the Earth. And so you start thinking about how we can solve that for our species. That’s amazing. But, you know, I will say, you know someone else on our team, our animator, who was watching this episode and doing our animation for it– and he heard it and was like, this is insane. We should never do this.
KWONG: Mm. Ben Bradford, your podcast Are We Doomed? is out now. Thank you so much for coming into Short Wave.
BRADFORD: Thank you for having me.
KWONG: Check out the show. It’s really good. You can find it all the places you typically get your podcasts. And also, if you haven’t already, download the NPR app. My bosses really want you to do it, and you will honestly get great journalism from it. Thank you. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kwesi Lee was the audio engineer. I’m Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Short Wave from NPR.
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Duration: 00:14:17
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Duration: 00:14:24
Released: 2023
Series: Short Wave
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