Sense to call this microbes, viruses, and destiny because of our writers we have. This is ed yong, site letter for the atlantic, author of a new book called i contain multitudes. Its about the micro biomes, the microbes of our panel title. And carl zimmer a a science wrr for the New York Times and author of many books including most recently a planet of viruses. Im sonia shah, and author of a book called pandemic which is about how microbes cause epidemics in the past and future in all these books will be for sale by barnes noble and will be signed aftery this session at signing table h. Of you guys can, joint us for more discussion there, too. First before we start id like to ask if anyone here actually is aua microbiologist . We have four. We can make anything up. [laughing] you guys correct us if you see nothing a wrong. I think its a really interesting time to talk about microbiology because of theres been a paradigm shift in recent years. If you think back since the late 19th century at least, we have thought about microbes mostly as the malevolent intruders who we sort of have to target with surgical precision with military might. I kind of call that approach microbial xenophobia. And it made sense back then in the beginning because the first microbes we can actually detect were the ones that would grow in a dish and a lab, and those were often the ones that were responsible for fairly dramatic diseases like tuberculosis and anthrax, et cetera. But what we now know through genetic sequencing techniques and other new methods is microbes are everywhere. They are all around us. Of course weve been her for a lot longer because its really their planet, 4 billion years. They were here before we got here. All of our interactions have evolved inll the context of a microbial world. Now we know everything from a our immune functions to our moods to her dietary preferences all are linked to the interaction between microbes. We really need a new way of thinking about the microbial world and our place in it which is what ie think the work that carl and ed do is so important right now to try to get all of us to understand the science and what it means for us. And i think theres a real urgency to that question. Because i think we can all agree that microbial xenophobia as a paradigm has basically failed. Weve seen increasing emergence of highly resistant bacterial pathogens, including some that resist every single class of antibiotics we can possibly throw at it. So that chemical onslaught is creating a worse problem in many ways. And then over a the last years weve had over 200 new pathogens emerge like ebola, zika. Is a microbes that actually in their original habitat, ebola virus comes out abaft, its been nine to the environment and get just a couple of years ago the ebola virus killed 11,000 11,0e in west africa. What were going to do is talk appear for maybe half an hour and then will have the conversation with you guys. I just want to start with carl. Every time we went of these new microbes on the scene i feel like our responses range from either candid expression of perilous nest in a way that when its either panic and hysteria or on the other hand, its sort of denial and dismissal. So tell us about zika fires and when should we call on that continuum . M . Zeke virus is one f these emerging diseases that has gone from being completely unknown to something that we talk about at the water cooler within just a matter of months and unfortunately this is not a new thing and this is starting to become a familiar routine we are going through and there are viruses like for example that emerge in the middle east two years ago no one even knew about before and it makes it interesting when you are working on a book about viruses so the First Edition of my book came out in 2011 and when you write about how to get uptodate as much as you can and hope it can stand the test of time when he 14 my editor said you barely say anything about ebola in this book. I think people will want to know about ebola and so i have the opportunity to write about ebola and update the book in the general so the second edition came out in 2015 and there i made sure that there will be ebola. That Ebola Outbreak was something we had never seen before. Ebola had first emerged in 1976 but it was relatively small outbreak effecting just a few hundred people in various parts of Central Africa and then it looks like in december 2013 there was probably the first person to get sick in the new outbreak that was in west africa and it really didnt sort of become something people were aware of until spring 2014 and then by october 2014 it hit its peak. Actually it wasnt until june 2016 that the last case was recorded so we had just a few months without a case of ebola and west africa and this is been years of an outbreak there way bigger than anything before and there were over 28000 cases over 11000 people died so its 40 mortality rate and that is pretty terrifying. And i mean, i dont know what jims thoughts are on it but this was this was an opportunity to see how modern Public Health could handle we had been anticipating for a while and i dont think we did very well at all. I did monitoring it was terrible. The Vaccine Development was ridiculously slow and there been a deck scene in the works for many years but nobody wanted to pay to do more research on it because people thought well, who gets sick with ebola and so actually there was a great spur into go on and put it the experiments into humans and get a vaccine for human ready but and they started really doing serious testing on it in spring 2015 but way after the peak of the epidemic and a lot of people died and many of those deaths would have been avoided because of the vaccine but just now in the last few flareups people are getting what is called ring vaccination where you vaccinate people in the area around an outbreak to break it from spreading further. That is great but why didnt we have that three years ago . I tried to get as much as i could of that into the second edition but i do feel like i could do a Third Addition right now because now looking at the zeke up virus. The story of this virus is eerily familiar and similar to ebola. We knew about the virus back in the 40s and it was identified in the monkey in uganda and then it turned out that people in the area had antibodies to zeke up which suggested that they were being exposed. But people did not Pay Attention to it and was one of many obscure viruses and you can go into Technology Books and find it and it gradually merged or transmitted by mosquitoes that caused ebola and it was only 2007 that there was someone actually registered and outbreak. This was in polynesia, not uganda. Somehow the thing had gotten all the way around the world. There were a couple more outbreaks and they were relatively small. Then they showed up in brazil and things just exploded. So as of now this 2015 outbreak the one that started last year, 55 countries now that have zika that did not have it before. We have it in puerto rico and in miami now and we havent throughout the new world except for chile, uruguay and canada. Probably because theyre not very good for those mosquitoes that carry it. And i dont think its aware enough of how bad things are already. Even in the United States so from puerto rico its especially back over 17000 cases in puerto rico and we are not sure how many of these cases of birth defects that come with zika have been because, probably in the hundreds because we are not realizing zika causes babies to develop very small brains and in the United States the latest count is that there are 43 locally acquired cases and this just happened recently and so they are trying to stock it in miami but theres no reason to think that it will work very well this thing is on the move. So how have we done with zika . I dont think we done fairly well. Here it is in the United States and there has been Animal Research on vaccines and this is the kind of thing you can vaccinate for but will probably just Start Testing vaccines may be in january. Here in the United States we cant even put out the money to control this. There are things we can do like Mosquito Control and research on vaccines and congress is stuck in political games and is not giving out the money. Bear in mind its been the lifetime cost for caring for these kids that have microcephaly is 10 million for a lifetime. That is what we are looking at. We been incredibly pound foolish, penny wise. Were not even being penny wise. We are being foolish but that is what we are looking at again and i think the other parallel that i find it striking here is that this just shows, yet again, how remarkable viruses are. Ed may give us reasons to feel happy and warm and cuddly about the microbial world but im here to freak you out. [laughter] think about it. The zika virus has ten jeans, ebola has seven jeans and they are running rings around us but we had these immune systems that weve evolved for billions of years and they find a way around it and they are thriving and spreading all over the world. What is happening is that theyre all these these viruses, lots and lots of viruses in the Animal Kingdom and they are spilling out as we are basically moving further and further into the zika system and disturbing the homes of bats and of monkeys and of other wildlife and they are finding a very nice, new abundant toast, it is us. Im not totally fatalistic about this. Just a couple of weeks ago a great man named da henderson died and he led the eradication of smallpox. We got rid of smallpox which honestly was way worse than a ebola or zika. That thing kills hundreds of millions, maybe billions of people and we wiped out from the planets. If we have the dedication we can fight these things but you cant just ignore them and pretend we will take care of themselves. So we will do a good cop, bad cop kind of thing. Hes the bad cop. [laughter] ed will tell us the good side of this but i think what is interesting is that we are seeing these new pathogens, new microbes come into human population and of course, the beginning is horrible like zika virus comes into human population totally susceptible, no immunity and you see all this pathology and sickness but what happens over time . Overtime we get used to certain viruses and start to live with them and they start to become part of our ecology so and that is what the micro Biome Research event covering is focusing on. Yeah, im definitely the good cop in this scenario. I dont want to contradict any of the concerns that carl has raised about the book that i wrote, i contain multitudes, is about the more beneficial side of the microbial world and i talked about how microbes have been with us for the longest time, as some of that we evolved in the microbial world and to this day all of us depend on microbes for all sorts of paths of our existence, immunity development. Every human body contains trillions of, tens of trillions, of bacteria as they help to build and calibrate our immune systems and digest our food and they protect us from disease and infections and they may even help to shape our behavior. Even viruses we contain many orders of magnitude, more viruses than we have bacterial cells in our body and most of those actually infect and kill bacteria so they are not harmful to us but part of this teaming ecosystem that lives within us and even though we hear it look like three individuals we are in fact, three large teaming, thriving world. And i talk about them how these microbes are just passengers but do important things and allies are talked about roles they play in humans and if you look in the Animal Kingdom we see all kinds of incredible superpowers that they convey to their hosts. They allow worms, flatworms, to regenerate their entire body and there are birds called hippos which paints their eggs and antibacterial paste and microgrid fluids that help to protect the chicks within from infection. There are even wasps that use viruses encoded within their own dna to kill or to defuse the Human Systems of the caterpillars that they target. In this case, a virus can be a useful ally. One thing i want to talk about now is a case where humans have actually engineered a relationship between an animal and a microbe to help us and to improve our health. Its fine into one of the stories that carl was talking about and the story begins in 1924 when a couple of microbiologists discovered a new type of bacteria that live in the cells of insects. They found it in a mosquito, mosquito they collected near boston good for ages no one knew what this thing was they did not know whether was common or what it did and it took the scientist 12 years to even get the thing a name in one of the named it after his friend, [inaudible]. It took many decades for anyone to work out what [inaudible] did but in the 60s, 70s suddenly realize the thing was everywhere it is in ants, people, and Something Like 40 of species of insects and other and given that those are already a most diverse and rich and numerous animals on the planet that makey successful bacteria in the world and you can think of it as one of the greatest pandemics in the history of life. What it does is host sometimes is a parasite that causes its host harm because it passes down from [inaudible] sometimes it kills him outright and sometimes it transform them into females and sometimes that allows email insects to reproduce asexually by cloning themselves they have no need for males at all. But sometimes it is an ally and it is a mutual list and benefited its hosts pit in bedbugs, for example, it provides [inaudible] that the blood to drink soda acts like a [inaudible] and some caterpillars use it to stop leaves from turning red in the autumn so they can sit within the leaves and continue to eat even as the world yellows and dies around them. But humans have a use for it as well. For 25 years australian scientists have been trying to introduce this bacterium into a species of insects that it does not normally in fact and that insect is the tiger mosquito which spreads bengay fever, yellow fever and the. The reason they done this is twofold. One, when the tiger mosquito contains while vacuum, its for some reason, becomes really bad at spreading the viruses behind these diseases. An infected tiger mosquito is effectively bengay proof on or the roof 12. It also because it is so good and many bladings house in the way of talked about is really good at spreading through wild population so the idea is if you release a small number of these carrion mosquitoes into the wild that when theres a huge generation which is a few months in our time the entire local should carry this microbe and thus be unable to transmit these important human diseases. This has been tested in the laboratory and simulated and mathematical models and it was tested in, i think, 2011 for the first time in a full australian [inaudible] where wolbachia infected mosquitoes were reduced into the wild and very quickly in the span of months you saw that the prevalence of this microbe went from zero to 100 in the mosquitoes in that area. So they now call this eliminate then gay has been testing it in Different Countries around the world. They are scaling it up and going global and theyre testing the approach in brazil, colombia, indonesia and vietnam and they are gearing up to release these mosquitoes over cities with none of the people to see if that can indeed work at the larger scales whether those mosquitoes will spread and whether wolbachia will dominate as much as they expected to and crucially whether that can then drive down the transmission an instance of these diseases that causes harm. The approach has a lot of advantages and it has got the backing of the world health organization, development of the bill and Linda Gates Foundation and it is interesting because it is cheap and probably quite safe, unlike intech decides which are toxic and need to be continuously respray. Wolbachia containing mosquitoes should theoretically be good to go once you release them once. You only need to release them once but there is no genetic modification so its an easier cells for communities have to reject those approaches. And it seems that wolbachia stops the spread of these viruses through many different groups, through competing with nutrients, stimulating the insects immune system and in many ways. That is reassuring because as carl said, irises have a habit of running rings around us and no sensible evolutionary biologists with assuming that evolution will not get the better of us at some point but if the bacterium allows the insect to resist the viruses or to be a bad inspector for those viruses and have many different types of resistance would theoretically need to evolve which would be hard. So, here we have a really interesting approach that is a solution seeker, who knows but we will wait and see. All of this started with basic curiosity about the microbe world and back in 1924 the people who discovered wolbachia cannot possibly have predicted that this was where that science was going to be. One of them, the man who lent his name to this bacteria died in the 50s before anyone realized how common it was. He cannot possibly have foreseen where this research would lead to now and in many ways it is the study of the animal microbe in a nut shell because for the longest time we ignored and neglected microbes thinking them to be irrelevant to us and then we went through a period of and now we are reaching an era of exploration again and of appreciation and of realizing the crucial role but they play in our lives in of those in the entire Animal Kingdom and we are starting to manipulate those partnerships for our own and. And our attempts at doing so [inaudible] but there humbling but there is tremendous potential here. That is where the funds will lead us in the future. That excites me so much. Curiosity back here on everyone. Interesting, we want to think of microbes are in terms of are they good or bad . A dichotomy we are trying to push them into. You are saying the same microbes can behave differently in different contexts. There is no such thing as a good or bad micro. It is on narrative. Microbes are germs we need to destroy. I think is wrong but also wrong is the idea that those who live with friendly bacteria or good microbes, we are another habitat for them. They have been around for billions of years. We are another world for them like a lump of soil or drop of water. Some are beneficial to their hosts, some are harmful, some are both at the same time. I talked about the wasps, the viruses that are bad for the environment but good for the wasps. Microbes have a relationship with hosts that are very conceptual and dynamic. We all need ways of containing our multitudes, keeping those relationships happy. When there is a conflict of interest between the microbes we are encountering like seek a virus or ebola. We can define that as disease. For any parasite, anything living inside something else. His activities that you love his hosts too soon. It burned down its own house. It is time to leave the house, go find another one and burn it down. Actually these viruses and other pathogens. And we see this in the wild. Some fool decided introduce roberts to australia, they took off. There was a horrible deadly virus, lets bring it to our shiite, problem solved. It is less deadly. The virus evolved and adjusted its deadliness to get the host and most efficient way of making more viruses. It is hard for us, in egocentric way but these are evolving. And millions of years, our language system is soonest. Viruses can be good for us. None of us, literally none of us would have been born without viruses because millions of years in the past our ancestors got infected with viruses and they harnessed some of those viral genes, coopted them, used them to make proteins in the placenta and these are crucial proteins. If you knock out that jean, myself a similar version of this, they cant have kids. It doesnt work. Recently we discovered viruses are also harnessed for muscle. There are proteins in our muscle that appeared to be generated from a virus gene. In order to get that good our ancestors probably went through horrific hiv like epidemic that nearly worked out the species and then finally we achieved immunity over them, harnessed a couple jeans and went from there. The whole language of good and bad doesnt capture the strangeness of these little things. Some scientists in our bodies have viruses might have a play a role in our immune system. I talked about bacteria agents or phages for short. It is a long spindly store, we load them in our bodies and some are along the line or the mucus, there are millions, waiting to infect bacteria that pass by. They keep the population of microbes that live within us and help to select for the species of microbes that live within us. A nice idea but also highlights another aspect of this world that we need to keep these populations in line and the balance matters for who is there and who isnt. The car and ebola, one microbe, one disease but you can also get illness when communities of microbes shift from healthy to unhealthy one, no particular member is responsible for the disease. The entire community has gone out of whack. Some more than others. Youve got new invading species that arent there anymore. And you see this all over the place, in corals that get ill or it might apply to the human body too. Many illness that is that have become more common in the 21st century have been linked to changes in the micro biome whether it is diabetes or allergies and asthma or obesity. It is still unclear in many of these cases whether it changes in what is leading to the disease or whether they are a consequence. The principle, not one infectious organism leading to ill health but a shift in the community, that is important and we will learn more about that in the decades to come. Interesting, your point, the cause and effect we still dont know. Probiotics have become a huge industry. If you take the good bacteria and line your gut with that, somehow that will improve your health but we still dont know if these disease states are associated with certain microbiota changes. Did that cause it or didnt happen after words . What are the limits of how much we can manipulate our micro biome through probiotics . It is very hard. Probiotics have Health Claims attached to them but they dont live up to a lot of them so they seem to be good for some cases of infectious diarrhea but by and large when you think about other conditions linked to the micro biome, the evidence of probiotics can help is kind of week or at least inconsistent and that is because these are difficult problems. We are trying to engineer entire ecosystems as complicated as forests or coral reefs. That is a tough thing to do and we are trying to solve the problem by giving products that contain small quantities of bacteria, hundreds, thousands of times lower than already exist in our bodies, strains that are not well suited to live in our gut. We have chosen for historical reasons almost like releasing a small number of captive bred animals into the jungle and hoping that they thrive. In many cases they dont. There is another approach, you could try giving people large communities of microbes to the body and that is a very unorthodox treatment called equal transplant which is exactly what it sounds like, you take school from healthy donor and put it in the blender and tubeing and you can make it better. [laughter] i should have carl makes a volunteering. This is driven to be effective it treating an infectious bacterium that causes severe hard to treat cases of diarrhea and while antibiotics can cure cases in clinical trials, fecal transplant had 90 success rates. Even these, there is a Massive Community of microbes putting them in. Even that doesnt work consistently for a lot of these other conditions i told you about, inflammatory bowel disease, these diseases, the result of this consistent because even here it is hard to reset these worlds within us. We are at the early stages of understanding how these systems work. What determines why mine is different from yours or yours or yours. How can we manipulate them . How do we get them to establish themselves . Do we need to feed them certain foods to give them an advantage . How will they go against native microbes for the immune systems and there is so much fine tuning we have to do despite the early successes in this field. At the same time, you are talking about subtle shifts, and a fragile kind of balance in an ecosystem with microbes and yet what we do we pound them, think about our use of antibiotics, 80 of the antibody ask we use are for farm animals. The environment all over the place. We have a lot of medically unnecessary antibiotics too so we would be late in the context at the same time and i wonder, you mentioned we could do more with vaccination but what does it mean when we are attacking microbes on a grand scale at the background level. How does that provoke some of the more a lint behaviors . When antibiotics came out in the 1940s, it became widespread, game over. And even the people who discovered it said these things could stop working because of evolution, these bacteria are evolving really fast and you could end up with bacteria that are resistant and unfortunately nothing really happened. There was no big resistance stopping crusade back then. Now finally we are coming to terms with more and more resistance. It is a real struggle because we dont have a lot of new drugs in the pipeline. You are starting to see on the horizon a situation where you are going to have things that are resistance to everything we have got. If you get infected with it and they can figure out the strains that combine these resistance genes, nothing people can do for you. It has been estimated 700,000 people around the world die of antibiotic resistance backs and fixed bacteria infections and that could go up unless we do something. I dont need to be the dark cloud in your day but we can do something about this, we are smart and if we show some dedication we can solve this problem. We can solve problems and this is a problem that is solvable. There are clearcut things we can do if we can overcome political resistance. Stop using antibiotics on farms. A huge resistance to that, farmers give these antibiotics to animals and they get bigger, not sure why, they get bigger, more meat, more money. You have to put that against the colossal costs sharing and treating all the illness from antibiotic resistant bacteria which is being bred in part on these farms and you need to be more creative, one possibility is the viruses. I mentioned there are these viruses that infect bacteria, it was discovered over 100 years ago, felix durell, the doctor who discovered them found them in people sick with dysentery and realized he could kill this and terry causing bacteria with the viruses and he said this could be a drug. People forget this but in the 1920s you could buy powder with these viruses, it was being massproduced and quite popular. Antibiotics came on the scene and seemed more reliable and tractable, almost alive like viruses so there was a shift, anyplace where this kind of approach which continued to be used within the soviet union. World war ii, soldiers getting wounded on the battlefront and suffering infections being treated with phage therapy. In some cases it is working. Since the fall of the soviet union some of those people came to the United States and have been trying to bring phage therapy in european medicine and it has been slow, you cant be 100 sure the viruses are going to kill the bacteria you want to cure but there is progress, major trials in terms of treating people with infections and burns and the idea is instead of just one chemical you have a virus and you can do lots of things with viruses. You can engineer them. If the bacteria starts to evolve resistance to them you can do experiments with viruses, get them to evolve to do a better job or maybe you can put in extra gene to help them break up what the bacteria can form. That is going on now. This is the creativity you need to fight this fight. Antibiotics have been such an incredible boost to our health, saved so many lives but we use them badly and there are costs to that. Antibiotic resistance is one cost. The loss of the bacteria we rely upon is another. They are shock and are weapons, what we rely upon and that causes harm but they shift the micro virus, whether those shifts, how longlasting they were and they bounced back. That is why it happens. They are almost always caused by antibiotics, creating space for the invader to take hold. People ask me the signs of the micro biome tells us they dont think so, we shouldnt demonize them. The solution to saving the bacteria we rely upon is the same as protecting us from drugresistant infections, just scaling back on the use of antibiotics and using them judiciously so we use them when we need to and only when we need to. That involves everything from cultural shifts, doctors prescriptions, to technological shifts, being able to diagnose illnesses early. If you have a viral, not prescribing with antibiotics, doesnt do any good. The micro biome has interesting applications in solving the antibiotic crisis. Antibiotic largely are microbial weapons, tools that bacteria evolve to destroy intense competition because it is their world. We mind those weapons and we did such a good job that we pick the low hanging fruit and start being able to discover new ones very easily. The human micro biome, bacteria live in our bodies might be a new source. A few months ago i wrote about a study how a new potential antibiotic was discovered among our nose bacteria, Something Like 8 percent10 of people carry this one species that makes a chemical that seems to do very well against staphylococcus, the microbe behind m rsa. It might work, it might not. Theres a lot of work that needs to happen. But the critical point is our bodies are battlegrounds, competition between microbes in some parts of the body might be especially fit so the math constantly shoves food down so we bombard the nutrients, easy for micro. The numbers, unless you are reading really weirdly, no nutrients there. The microbes have to be competitive and maybe those are the places we need to look for the next generation of good antibiotics. Molybdenum at the microbe that produces a nasal microbes and this is the type of thing you can get when you think of humans and other animals as ecosystems, more than the individuals that we are in think ecologically, which part of the body is competition going to be fiercest among microbes was where we likely to find tomorrows drugs. Theres a part where you call the get a rain forest in the nose is a desert. There are two microphones set up so i hope you will ask some questions and when you do just say your name first and make it a question and we will take comments too. Hi. I am in a. We have a question about vaccines and if they were great first eradicating smallpox but we have a virus that kills tens of thousands of people year it is endemic and we have the vaccine, the yellow fever is raging and there are so many viruses we dont know about, we have vaccines. Vaccines are an amazing thing. The fact that we can train our bodies to be ready for a virus before it comes and initiate a swift attack and fight it off is an incredible thing that we can do. But that sort of masks a lot of hard work that goes into making sure vaccines treat a population effectively. With smallpox it wasnt just everyone get in line and get your smallpox vaccine. That involved figuring out where smallpox was in the world and collaborating with community leaders, taking vaccines on horseback into remote areas to get the very last cases, that is what we are dealing with polio, we could have been done with polio ten years ago, it is enduring and unstable places, parts of pakistan and nigeria, vaccine workers, part of their political campaign. And that was an opportunity to take off. They are built in problems, flu virus, a real pain in the neck, just constantly turning evolutionarily. New mutations mixing and matching to gather. Scientists making the vaccine, the basic technology we used in the 1950s, trying to grow vaccine in chicken eggs, they had to guess in advance. We are entering the flu season just about and the vaccine, we have to hope they got it right and a lot of times they dont. It is a situation where what we really need is to get beyond vaccine and target the parts of the virus the change rapidly, target the parts the change never 2 things very sensual to being a flu virus in the dream is making a universal flu vaccine and get a booster, and a lot of lives will be saved, we are not there yet. I have a question about microbes in the genome, quite a few years ago i learned about a couple theories that suggest they are not just pieces of dna but two really important cell types, what is mitochondria with energy and the other was a light. Cell, microbes at some point. And how that might have happened. Mitochondria, for anyone not familiar with them, all our cells, being shaped things that they are essential for our lives it used to be bacteria. They are domesticated bacteria that worked into an ancestral cell and became forever stuck there. An interesting thing about mitochondria is there is some debate about how important their origin was to the origin of all of us. Some scientists believe the origin of mitochondria was the origin of the eukaryote, the lineage of the domain of animals, plants, all the complex like you can see. All of those contain eukaryotes, contain mitochondria, all of them evolved only once. Perhaps the reason for that singularity even though we take it, even though we have taken in bacteria and turn them to other cellular structures, that is the reason for the primacy of mitochondria, that singularly improbable event was really critical in allowing life to escape from the confines of bacterial existence, to go big, develop larger genomes and growing larger size. We are talking about events that happened billions of years ago. They are controversial but there is no controversy about the origins of mitochondria. They were bacteria all of us carry former bacteria within our bodies. There were white blood cells, just our cells. What is interesting is when you look at them under a microscope it is interesting how they are foraging around in a way that is reminiscent of early eukaryotes, what you might find in the soil roaming around like grabbing bacteria and so on. There are some ideas that the behavior of our white blood cells are using very old jeans which are held onto from single celled protozoan ancestors. White blood cells sniffing around looking for bacteria in your blood is not that different from a slime mold sniffing around for bacteria in the soil. I like the idea of a slime mold sniffing around, a great image. My name is emily. I have a friend who recently joined the peace corps and has been there 6 or 7 months now and because shes not used all the bacteria there she got sick and has had 7 rounds of antibiotics so far. I was wondering your thoughts on the longterm consequences of being on that many antibiotics in a short time. It is a tough break. The military is investing a lot in this research because of that problem of travel associated diarrhea and it is hard because if you bombard the body with heavy doses of antibiotics you do run into these problems. Sometimes we dont have Better Options but the emerging science of the micro biome will suggest Better Options in the future, ways of manipulating the ecosystems within us rather than using the brute force approach of throwing as many drugs as we can at the problem. I was just wondering if i could ask you to speculate on the possibility of another large change event like mitochondria entering our bodies or a largescale pandemic that might change the species for differentiation of species and whether that is possible and what it might look like. The future possibilities for integration whether it is viral or bacterial, to change us or even split off. Well. [laughter] i can work with this was when talking about a new species, species dont hatch out of a lab. You take an old species and split it in two so that branching process, a lot of it is driven in nature which is by part of it is those population is not being able to interbreed successfully and there are cases when you full around with the micro biome and start getting problems with interbreeding. There are cases where it might have helped drive a new species so imagine a new plague, people who get sick with it can only have kids with other people who were sick with it and cant have kids with the other ones and all of a sudden you are diverging. Keep that going for 100,000 years and youve got a new species. Just wait. And i want a credit on that movie that gets made from that. I have a question about antibiotic abuse leading to resistance. More specifically in regards to feeding it to livestock and cattle which we mostly do, given it is most likely necessary for largescale production of meat the we produce, a lot of research, we are not going to lose the habit of our meat eating anytime soon. My question, is there evidence showing in slaughtered meat. Do you find antibiotic molecules in a significant amount . What happens, these animals have a micro biome as large as we are talking about and these antibiotics challenge every many different species have this challenge. If they have the right mutation and able to survive. That will foster the evolution of resistance bacteria. Inside these animals. If you go, bacteria from an animals got you will have Serious Problems and we dont have that problem. The problem is these animals then eat these bacteria with their mentor and they get in the water in the soil, trading these with other bacteria or getting into humans and so on and become part of this pool of resistant bacteria. We put so many antibiotics into these animals that it is a tremendous factor in the rise of antibiotic resistance. That is how it happens and why we need to put a break on it. I have a question. You are saying it is in 60 , 40 , do you look at it is so prevalent, the species that do not get it why do they not get it . For example the tiger mosquito . I dont think we have a good answer to that yet. What is it that makes it so good at spreading from host to host and why is it in some but not others . Why is it not in other official mammals or arthropods, nematode worms in a Different Branch of the Animal Kingdom it is also interesting to us because they cause severe tropical diseases and you might be able to kill those diseases. Theres something about his biography i dont understand like why is it so good at jumping host to host. Is just because it spreads through the population like i talked about with mosquitoes or because it is good at jumping horizontally, these are all questions but there is a huge field, the conference it happens every couple years, a very thriving area of research that has a lot of questions. We have gone to slime molds and fecal transplants and back again. I hope you come to that. [applause] [inaudible conversations] weeknights this month we are featuring booktv programs showcasing what is available on cspan2. Tonight we feature bestsellers. First journalist Nicholas Kristof on the book tight rope about issues facing the working class in rural america, interviewed by oregon democratic senator jeff merkley. Tara westover recall growing up in the auto mountains in her introduction to formal education at age 17 in her book educated, a memoir. After that, turning point usa founder charlie kirk in his book the maga doctrine on the new conservative agenda. Watch booktv every weekend on cspan2. Cspan has roundtheclock coverage of the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic and it is all available on demand, cspan. Org coronavirus. Watch white house briefings, updates from governors and state officials, track the spread through the us and the world with interactive maps. Watch on demand any time, unfiltered, cspan. Org coronavirus. I would like to introduce john barry, the distinguished author of the rising tide in