Microbes as well but because of the writers we have here, a Science Writer for the atlantic, author of the new book, great new book called multitudes of the microbe i am and those of the panel and here is carl zimmer, Science Writer for the New York Times and author of many books including the recently a planet of viruses. Im the author of a book called pandemics which is about how microbes cause pandemics in the past and in the future and all of these books are going to be for sale by barnes and noble and we will be signing them after the session at the signing table h. , so hope you can come join us for more discussion. First, before we l start, id le to ask if anyone here actually a microbiologist . We cant make anything up. [laughter] i think it is an interesting thing to talk about microbiolo microbiology. We thought about the microbes mostly as the malevolent intruders that have to target the position with military might. They were the ones that would grow in a dish in a lab and those were often the onesis that were responsible for fairly dramatic diseases like tuberculosis etc. But now we know from genetic sequencing and others is that microbes are everywhere. Of course theyve been here a lot longer it is their planet. They were here before we got here so all of our interactions have evolved in the context of the microbial world. So noww we know everything from our immune function to our mood and dietary preferences all are linked to the interactions between microbes so we need a new way of thinking about the microbial world and our place in it which is what i think the work they do is so important right now to get all of us to understand what it means for us and there is an urgency to that question because i think that we can all agree to microbial xenophobia has basically failed. We have seen increasing emergence of highly resistant bacterial pathogens including some that can resist every single class we can possibly throw at it so it is creating a worse problem in many ways and the last 50 years weve had over 300 new pathogens emerge out of nowhere. These are actually in the original habitat, ebola comes out of backout of thatout of bae environment get a couple of years ago its killed 11,000 people in west africa. What we arek going to do is talk for maybe half an hour and then have a conversation with you guys. I just want to start with carl. Every time we have one of thesee on the scene i s feel like the responses range from the expressions of powerlessness on the other hand its denyin handd dismissal so then where should we fall on that. Its one of these emerging diseases. Unfortunately, this is not a new amthing. There are those that have emerged in the middle east that no one even knew about before the u. O euro but can withstande test of time. You barely say anything about ebola in the book and i think people are going to want to know about it. So, i had the opportunity to write about ebola and update but in general. It was something we had never seen before it had emerged in 76 but it was relatively small outbreaks affecting just a few hundred people and various parts of Central Africa and then it looks like in december, 2013 there was probably the first person to get sick with a new outbreak in west africa. Until the spring of 2014 and october 2014 if hit its peak and actually it wasnt until june, 2016 that the last case was recorded so we had a few months in west africa so this has been years of the outbreak bigger than anything before. There were over 28,000 cases so its like a 40 mortality rate. That is pretty terrifying. And i dont know what your thoughts are, but i think this is an opportunity to see how the can handleth something weve been anticipating for a while, and i dont think we did very well at all. It was terrible, the Vaccine Development was ridiculously slow. There was the vaccine that had been in the works for many years, but nobody wanted to pay to do more research on it because it was like we will get sick with ebola. So to put the experiments in and try to get a vaccine ready and started doing testing ohave stat in the spring of 2015 way after the peak of the epidemic. A lot of people died and many would have been avoided with a vaccine. So now just in the last few flareups, people are getting vaccinations where you basically vaccinate people around the area to break it from spreading further. Why didnt he have that three years ago. So i tried to get as much of that as i could into the second edition and i could do a third edition right now. The story is familiar and similar to ebola. We know about is back in the 40s. It was identified in a monkey in uganda and then it turned out people in the area have antibodies which suggested that they were being exposed to it. But people didnt reallyin pay attention. It was one of many obscure viruses. You can go to the textbooks and find thats it. It gradually emerged and there was someone that really register and outbreak and then within polynesia. So, somehow this thing has gotten all the way around the world. There were a couple more outbreaks relatively small with a few hundred people until last year when they showed up in brazil and then things explode. So this outbreak that started last year is in 55 countries n now. They are not very good for those that. I dont know if they are aware how bad things are. In puerto rico it is especially bad with over 17,000 cases a. They are not sure how many of these cases of birth defects that come with have been caught because we are now realizing it causes these babies that develop very small brains. And in theta United States. This has happened just recently. They are trying to sto stop in i but there is no reason to think that its going to work very well. So how has it done with zika, i dontt think weve done well. Here it is in the United States. We are probably going to just Start Testing vaccines in january. We cant even put out the money to control this. Anything we can do with mosquito control, stuck in the political game. We are not even being penny wise. Foolish so that is what we are looking at again and the other parallels i find striking this shows how remarkable they are and they give us the reason to feel happy and warm and cuddly. I am here to just try to freak asu out. It has ten. The ebola virus has seven. We have these immune systems for billions of years and they find a way around it and they are spreading all over the world. Whats happening is the there are all these viruses in the Animal Kingdom and they are basically moving further and further into the systems and disturbing the homes of bats, monkeys and other wildlife and they are finding a new abundant host. Im not entirely fatalistici amc about this. A couple of psycho, a great fan died. He led to the eradication of smallpox. We wiped it off of the planet and if we have the dedication we can actually fight these things, but we cant just ignore them and pretend they are going to take care of themselves. We are going to be kind of Good Cop Bad Cop thing. We are seeing these new pathogens that come into the population and of course the beginning is really horrible. It comes into the population to be susceptible with no immunity and you see all the sickness. But what happens over time we get used to certain viruses and start to live with them and they become part of our ecology, so that is the microglia of research and what its focusing on. Im definitely the good cop inin this scenario. I dont want to contradict any of the concerns that carl has raised with the book that i wrote is the more beneficial side, and i talk about how they have been with us for the longest time. We pulled into microbial growth and to disobey all of us depend on the microbes for all sorts of intimate parts of development and contained tens of trillions of bacteria and they may shape our behavior. There is many orders of magnitude and viruses and most of those actually kill bacteria. It looks like three individuals. They are large and thriving worlds, and i talk about how they are not just passengers. Passengers. They do important things inn our lives. But if you look you see all kinds of incredible superpowersw they convey. They allow worms to regenerate their entire bodies. There are birds that came to their anchors and antibacterial paint and microbe fluids that are even costs david coe wasps in their own dna to kill and diffuse the immune systems or the caterpillars of the target and in this case a virus can be a useful ally. One thing i want to talk about now is the case where humans have actually engineered a relationship between an animal and a microbe. They discovered a new type of bacteria that lived which they collected near boston and for ages no one knew what this was. They didnt know whether it was it did. R what to look at what the bacteria did, but then the 60s and t 70s the scientists started to realize that this was everywhere. It is Something Like 40 of the species and others and given that those are already the most diverse and rich that makes it almost certainly one of the most successful bacteria in the world. What it does sometimes causes harm. It benefits its host and bedbugs for example, it provides what is sort othis sort of missing frome blood. You can continue to eat even as ththe rolethe worlthe role of ys around you. 2t as humans have this as well as over 25 years, the chilean scientists have been trying to introduce this into the species but it does not normally affect and it spreads the fever, yellow fever and zika. The reason theyve done this is twofold. One, when it contains, for some reason it becomes really bad spreading the virus is behind these diseases. So it is effectively zika proof. Also because it is so good at manipulating its host in the ways ive talked about it is really good at spreading through the wild populations with the idea if you release a small number of these mosquitoes into the wild, then when there is a few generations, a few months in our time, the entire local population showed kerry is microbe and be unable to transmit these important human diseases. This has been tested in the laboratory and a simulated and the mathematical models and was tested in 192011 for the first time in a couple australian suburbs of. In the span of months you solve it went fromro zero to 100 of o now the organization of the pioneers this approach has been testing it in Different Countries around the world. They are testing the approach in brazil, t indonesia, vietnam and gearing up to release over the cities that have millions of people to see the same approach can indeed work at the larger scales whether they will spread or will dominate as much as they expected it to and whether that can then drive down the transmission and instance of things that cause harm. I think the approach has a lot of advantages. Its got the backing of the world health organization, the bill and Melinda Gates foundation. Its interesting because b it is cheap and unlike insecticides that need to be continuously re sprayed. These mosquitoes should theoretically be good to go once you release the them once and yu only need to release them once. It seems that it stops the spread of these viruses through many different routes computing with nutrients and the immune system in many ways and that is reassuring because they have a habit of running rings around us and no sensible biologist would back an approach assuming that it wouldnt get the better of us at some point t or another. But if the bacterium allows the insect to resist the viruses then its from many types of resistance. All of this started in the microbial world and back in 1924, the people that discovered this could not possibly have predicted that this was where the science was going to be. He couldnt possibly have foreseen where this would lead to now and in many ways that is the study of the microglia and generals of the longest time we ignored and neglected thinking they would be irrelevant to us and then we went to the period and now we are reachingg the era of exploration and realizing the crucial role they play in our lives and those in the entire Animal Kingdom and we are starting to manipulate those partnerships for our own. There is tremendous potential here and i think that where the areas are that excite me so much and why i feel so compelled to write a book about it, to instill that sense of curiosity. Its interesting that we want to think of them as either adreally good or really bad. We have a sort of dichotomy we are trying to push them into and what you are talking about this they caisthey can behave very dy in different contexts. There is no such thing as good or bad. The whole narrative that they are germs we need to destroy is i think wrong but also wrong is that those that live within us are friendly bacteria or good microbes and really we are just another habitat to them. Theyve been around for billions of years and are in a habit like a lump of soil rich off of wat water. Some are harmful to some or both at the same time. I talked about the caterpillars. Those are bad for the caterpillars but good for the wasps. Relationships are very contextual and dynamic. They can change on a dime and we need ways of keeping those relationships happy. The question then is when there is a conflict of interest between those we are encountering like smallpox and ebola that is what happens in the middleha of that. Sure. Lets put it this way though, anything living inside of something else, if its activities to kill off its host to soon, thats bad news. Its going to become extinct e because it has basically burnd down its own house. But if you can raise a big family and say its time you noleave the house, then you find another one and burn it down, its okay. So the evils in Different Levels and sometimes you can actually see this in the wild. Some fool decided to be a good idea to introduce rabbits to australia. Li they took off and said how are we going to control this and it was a deadly virus that killed those in europe and they said we will bring it to australia, problem solved. It started killing them off like crazy and then started to become less deadly and still not a good idea but they didnt get rid of it. It started evolving. We think of things being good and bad in an egocentric way but these things are evolving and not just over the course of a few years but millions of years and our language doesnt suit it. Literally none of us would have been born without virus is because millions of years in the past were ancestors of infected with viruses and they actually harnessed some of those genes and used them to make proteins in the placenta and these are crucial proteins in the placen placenta. If you knock that out, they cant have kids. It just doesnt work. It was recently discovered they were also harnessed for muscle so basically there are proteins in the muscles that appear to be generated from a virus gene, so thats good. But in order to get that good, our ancestors probably went through some horrific epidemic thats nearly wiped out the species, and then we achieved immunity over them and harnessed a couple of the gene and went on from there so the whole language of good and bad doesnt really capture the strangeness of these things. I talked about those that in fact bacteria and they are called the bacteria is agents. They look like lunar landers with a dome and legs. We have them in our bodies and they are just millions, trillions perhaps stuck waiting to infect bacteria pass by and they hope to keep the population of microbes that live within us under check and they hope to select for this species of those that live within us. Its a nice idea, but i think it also highlights another aspect that we need to keep these populations in mind and to balance the communitys matters whos there and who isnt. You can also get the illness when the communities shift from the healthy state into an unhealthy one where no particular member is responsible for the disease. Its just the entire community has gone out of whack. Maybe you have new species that are not there anymore or you lost some critical defensive ones. Its been linked to changes in the microglia of whether it is diabetes or allergies or asthma, heart disease. This principle but its not one the infectious organism but it is a shift in the community, that i think is important and we will learn more about that in the decades to come. It is the cause and effect that we dont know. Its become such a Huge Industry already so this whole idea you line your god with all of that and somehow it is going to improve your health, but we still dont know if these states have certain microglia changes. So what are the limits of how much we can manipulate the microglia through these. Its very hard. They have all these Health Claims attached to them. By and large when you think about the other conditions linked to the microglia him the evidence could help them is quite weak or at least inconsistent. These are very difficult problems we try to talk about engineering that are 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 so hundreds, thousands of times lower than already exist in our bodies and they were chosen for historical reasons. Its almost like releasing a small number of captive bred animals into the jungle hoping that they survive. That is the logic behind the unorthodox treatment which is exactly what it sounds like. It often involves a blender and some tubing. [laughter] i should have brought profs. This has proven to be effective the infectious bacterium that causes severe hard to treat cases of diarrhea and while the antibiotics can cure a quarter of cases, those in Clinical Trials they have been very effective, but even the street finds you are taking a Massive Community and putting them in with the theoretically diseased communities. The trials because even here it is hard to reset the early stages of understanding the. How then we can manipulate them how to we ge do we get them to h themselves, to be neat to see them with certain foods to give them an advantage n and how will they hit up against them or the immune system theres still so much we have to do despite the successes. At the same time, you are talking aboutt the shift in this fragile balance in the ecosystem. With microbes what we do is count them. I used antibiotics and about 80 of the antibiotics used or farm animals out in the environment and over the place. And then we have a lot of medically unnecessary so we are kind of manipulating it at the same time and i wonder we can do more with the vaccination for sure but what does it mean when we are attacking them on a grandegrandscale as a backgrounw does that provoke some o of the more ethereal and behaviors . It came out in the 1940s and became widespread. People felt like game over. And the people that have discovered antibiotics sent these things could stop working because of evolution, because the bacteria are evolving really fast and you could end up with bacteria that areia resistant ad unfortunately, nothing really happened and now finally we are coming to terms with more and more resistance and it is a struggle because we dont have a lot of new drugs in the pipeline. So, we are starting to get, starting to see over the horizon a situation where you are going to have those that are resistant to everything weve got. So if you get infected with it and they can figure out these different resistance genes, there will be nothing people can do for you and already, its been estimated maybe 700,000 people around the world die of antibiotic resistant infections and that could go up unless we do stuff. Again, i dont mean to be a dark cloud in your day that we can do something about this. We are smart and if they show some dedication, we can solveca the problem. We got rid of smallpox. This is a problem that is solvable. There are things we can d do ife overcome the political resistance for example, stop using antibiotics on farms. Anere is huge resistance to that because we like to give these a. We need to be more creative and one possibility is the viruses. So there are these viruses that infect bacteria into the discovered over a hundred years ago and the doctor that discovered them realized he could kill all the bacteria with these viruses and he said this could be a drug. You could buy these viruses in paris it was being mass produced and it was quite popular. Antibiotics came on the scene because they were just chemicals so there was a shift and really the only place where this kind of approach was continuing to be used so world war ii, stalin soldiers are getting wound up on the battlefront suffering infections and being treated with therapy and in some cases it is working. Since the fall of the soviet union those people came to the United States and has been with us to bring therapy back into european medicine and its been very slow you cant be 100 sure that they are going to kill the bacteria that you want to cure. But there is progress now. Instead of the chemical, youve got a virus and you can do things with them like engineer them so if there is resistance to them you can do experiments and get back to evolve to do a better job of you can engineer them and theres research goingg on with the now. I think it is worth saying there is such an incredible boon to our health they save so many lives but weve used them badly sometimes and there are costs to that. The bacteria that we rely upon is another because the antibiotics are shock and awe as well as those that cause harm so they do shift. People are looking at whether those shifts can harm our health and how longlasting they are because they are resilient and bounce back from these antibiotics words. But too many and you get a problem. Thats why this happens they are almost always caused by antibiotics wiping things out creating space to take hold. People ask me if it tells us it is a bad thing. The solution to saving the bacteria that we rely upon is very much the same as protecting us and scaling back and using them judiciously so we use them when we need to end only when we need to have that involves everything from cultural shifts to dr. s prescriptions to technological shifts to diagnose illnesses early so if you have a viral illness for example. There are interesting applications is largely have been, they are tools designed to destroy each other because after all it is their world. We picked all of the low hanging fruit and stopped being able to discover new ones easily. The bacteria that are in our bodies might be a new source. I wrote about a study how a new potential antibody was discovered about Something Like eight to 10 of people. This one species that seems to do very well against the microbe behind mersa. It might work and it might not. Ithe critical point here is they are sites of battleground and a competition. These are places we constantly shoved food down so we bombard them with nutrients. However it is scarce and resources must you were eating very weirdly. They have to be very competitive and maybe those are the places we need to look for the next generation of good antibiotics. This is the type of thing you can get when you think of humans and other animals in the ecosystem as more than the individuals we are and which part ofog the body is going to e fiercest, when are we most likely. Theres a part in your book you call like the god is like ththe rain forest and the nose s like a the desert. We have a few minutes for questions and there are microphones set up so i hope you will come ask some questions and when you do, say your name first and make it a question but weve also take comments, tuna. I have a question about vaccines and how its great for eradicating smallpox but we stilll have a virus that kills tens of thousands of people. The yellow fever still is raging and how there are so many we dont even know about and there are those weve known about but they were still a problem. The fact that we can train our bodies to be ready for a virus before it comes in to be able to initiate an attack and fight it off is an incredible thing that we can do. But that sort of masks the work that goes into making sure they treat a population effectively so it isnt jus just everybody t inx line. They looked figuring out where it was in the world and figuring out there collaborations with community leaders, taking vaccines on horseback into the remote areas of ethiopia to get the last cases because until you get the last cases, it isnt over. That is where we are dealing with this polio. We could have been done with polio years ago but it is in the unstable places that part but pf pakistanan and nigeria. You have workers that get killed byrs the taliban as part of ther political campaign. There aret builtin problems tt the food virus is a pain in the back because it is constantly churning with. They are mixing and matching together and basically doing their own technology and you get a new strain every year. They are using the basic policy we used in the 1950s like actually trying to grow the vaccine in chicken eggs for example. It takes months to do that so you have to guess. We are entering the flu season and the vaccines were decided on months ago and we just have to hope that they get itto right ad a lot of times they dont so there is a situation to get beyond the vaccine and target the parts that change rapidly try to target the parts that change never. Youre a kid and get a flu shot. That would be great and a lot of other lives would be saved but we are not there yet. I have a question about microbes into the genome. Quite a few years ago when i was in college i learned about a couple of theories have suggested theyt are just pieces of dna incorporated the really important cell types. I wonder if theres any credibility these days to how that might happen. So, mitochondria is definitely right. For anyone that is unfamiliar, all of ourselves contain mitochondria could do to provide us with energy they are essential for u our lives and ud to be bacteria and they became forever stuck there. That much is clear. There is some debate about just how important the origin was to the origin of all of us, so sometimes be leaving that it was in fact the origin of the lineage of the domain of those continue to and perhaps the reason there is the singularity, even though we have taken it, even though we have taken in bacteria and turned it into other things at different times, the reason why sort of primacy of the mitochondria may be that singularly improbable event was critical in allowing life to escape from the confines of bacteria and to go big to develop larger genomes that grow in larger sizes and that is again a we were talking about events that happened billionseaf years ago so they are obviously controversial. But there is nothing now about the origins of the mitochondria. They were bacteria all of us carry within our bodies. What is interesting is when you look at them under a microscope, it is interesting how they are sort of forging a found in a way that is reminiscent of the single so like you might find in the soil that are roaming around and there are some ideas that the behavior of our white blood cells are just using old jeans that we sort of held onto from the sort of single so investors and looking around for bacteria in your blood is not that different from in the soil so there may have been sort of a carryover. I like that idea of sniffing around. Its a great image. Because she is accused of bacteria shes got around seven rounds of bacteria so far so i wondered your thoughts on the consequences of being one of many antibiotics in a short amount of time. It is a tough break. They are investing quite a lot of research into this because of the problem is the. And its hard because if you bombard a heavy doses you do run into problems like this. Sometimes we dont have Better Options but i think the emerging signs will suggest Better Options in the future by way of manipulating. We used the brood for which approach with as many as we can. I was just wondering whether i could actually speculate on the potential or the possibility of another sort of large mitochondria entering into our bodies were a pandemic that might change the species or differentiation of species and if its possible what it might look like in the future possibilities for integration. [laughter] i can work with this. When you are talking about thebo new species basically take the old one and split it into so that process a lot of it is driven by the populations not being able to integrate successfully and there are cases where when you fool around with the microglia mansard getting problems in some cases it might have helped drive the species so imagine there is a new plague and people do get sick with it can only have kids with other people that are thick with it and not with any other ones and all of a sudden you are diverging. Keep that going for 100,000 years and you have a00 new species. So just wait it. I have a question regarding the abuse and reading through. With regards to dating it to livestock given that its most likely necessary for the largescale production that we produce and looking for what thaforward thatis going to proba lot of research because we are not in the habit of this anytime soon for basically my question is is there evidence showing that. Do you find active antibiotic molecules in a significant amount of canon effect humans . What happens is the these animals are being fed antibiotics and have a micro biomass we all do and that these antibiotics challenge every bacteria that encounters them for money if they have the reputation they might be able to survive if they dont, they die. Some overtime, tha, that is goio foster the evolution of these resistant bacteria inside these animals. We are talking about bacteria in the gut. If you go to you shouldnt be eating meat laced with bacteria from an animals got. You could have serious problems. We dont have that problem. The problem is they release the bacteria indicate and wate and r and soil andnd they are trading with other bacteria into the become part of this pool of resistant bacteria and we put so much into these animals that it just a tremendous factor in the rise of antibiotic resistance. So that is how it happens and we need to put a brake on it. Do you look at how those that do not, why do they not end up getting it for example . That isis a good question. I dont think we have a good answer to that. What makes it so good at spreading host to host and why is it in some and not others. Which come from a very different show of the Animal Kingdom, that is also interesting to us because those were called to the tropical disease and if you kill them you might be of the kill the there is still a lot we dont understand, why does it go host to host, does it spread bird enter virtually throughout the population, is it really good at jumping from one host to another, be begins infected by h i think these are all questions, a huge field, the only conference to happens every couple of years or so. So it is a very thriving air of recession. So we have gone from cow poo to slime to fecal transplant and back again. Thank you all for coming, we are out of time. [applause] [inaudible conversations] you are watching a special edition of American History tv, area now during the week while members of congress are working in their districts due to the coronavirus pandemic. Thursday night at eight eastern, the Supreme Court Historical Society holds a discussion with the university of arkansas law professor mark kelly back explain the details of several dissenting opinions delivered between 1810 and 1927. He is introduced by associate Justice Stephen breyer, American History tv now and also watch over the weekend on cspan3
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