Virus that caused the covid pandemic. Host what is the scientific of the serengeti with your definition of a spillover . Friend nick nichols is guest it is the incident when a photographer . Of course. I would go off to wild places disease pathogen, for instance a and Great Stories about virus, passes from its nonhuman creatures and ecosystems and conservation and the people doing the work and living there. Now, i have taken 21 of those host into its first human but articles and use them as the them. Viruses can only live in cellular creatures, can only basis for a book that i hope is replicate in animals, plants or a unifying book. Some other kind of cellular i have created a lot of new creature. When a new virus appears in humans, it had to come from some reporting on these stories, other living creature, almost certainly an animal, probably a written a new forward and mammal or bird. Afterward talking about what we mean by wildness on this planet when the virus passes from the nonhuman animal into its first and what we mean by there being a heartbeat to the great wild human, that is the moment of spillover. Host hardly common . Places that are still intact, connected, functional. Are they common . Guest more common than we and they produced this book, the recognize. Heartbeat of the wild. Host somebody you read about in we have been recognizing more and more as they occur. The book is leon wilson. Whenever there is a new virus it has to come from somewhere guest he was a wonderful man. And there has been a drumbeat of these cases, spillovers of new viruses into humans, since the early 1960s. A terrific scientist, wonderful possibly because there are more writer. Humans on the planet coming into a charming and generous man, a contact with more animals and also because we are able to detect them more, we are studying them closely. Host can you tell us what is on strong in runs on me and my the cover of the book . Guest there is a primate, i thinking about conservation, strong influence. When i wrote about evolution and extinction on the islands, that think it is a baboon, unleashing was to a great degree inspired a terrifying screech. By the particular a the art was done by a Famous Artist for book covers and when particular ecological theory that ed wilson developed was i saw it, i thought that is robert macarthur, great fabulous, that is strong. Theoretical ecologies. But what is jane goodall going to say the next time i see her . I was fortunate to become friends with ed wilson over the she has forgiven me. Course of my interest in his work. Host when does a spillover i was asked to be the editor of become a contagion . The library of the americas in guest if a virus passes from a two volumes best of ed wilson, nonhuman host into a human and causes infection in the human, which came out about a year ago. That is step one. A lot of viruses might spill from a nonhuman animal and not we miss him greatly. Be able to infect human cells. He died on Christmas Day of if it catches hold and affects the human, that is a spillover. 2021, anything. I think. If it passes from the human to another human and another human, that is an outbreak. Host one minute left. If somebody wanted to meet you it is transmitting from human to human, it has either had the introduce himself to your work, was the one book they should capacity in advance or quickly read . Develops the capacity. Guest peter, youre being too. If it spreads to 10,000 people across the country, you call it cruel. An epidemic. Around the world, call it a i would say breathless is a pandemic. Host as a longtime scientific investigative journalist, where book on the coronavirus and the did covid19 come from . Guest we do not yet know for sense of it that i hope would be sure. There is a lot of evidence very valuable into the future pointing toward a natural for people what is to understand this pandemic. Spillover. Heartbeat of the wild is close to my heart. We know that coronavirus of this if i had to mention it, i guess sort live commonly in horseshoe one more, it would be either the bats in Southern China and other parts of southeast asia. There are viruses similar to song of the dodo my most ambitious book or the chimp this that have been found in in the river, which is my smallest book. Horseshoe bats in those places and in Southern China. This is about the ecological there are other forms of origins of the aids virus. Evidence that strongly suggest this virus originated in a bat, host it is your best seller. Why would you not mention that . Probably passed into an intermediate animal that was part of the wildlife for food it came out in 20 oh. Trade in Southern China, got to the city of wuhan and was in 2012. Guest it did. That market, and infected i am proud of it. People. Thereby creating the pattern remember what we said . That we see. Host [laughter] of course, people say we think it was a lab leak. Author, journalist David Quammen you have got to investigate whether it was a virus that was has been our guest for the past worked on in a laboratory, two hours. Guest either engineered it seems that possibility has been dismissed, or manipulated to some degree and accidentally leaked from a laboratory. Can we forget about that . Scientists are investigating, there is some theoretical possibility. But the ponderings of empirical evidence seems to me to lie on the side of a natural spillover. I spent the last two months deep into this question, researching the question of the origins and a secondary question related to that for a magazine piece that will come out sometime this summer. It will be in the paperback of my book when it is published. Updating this question, because it is important and we know a lot about it, but we do not know everything about it. And so, we have to keep studying it. We have to study it with science, not politics. Host given your knowledge in this area, are you sympathetic to those who hold the view it is a lab leak . Guest i have talked to a number of them in the course of the last two months. Some of them are very intelligent people. Some of them are trained in science. I am sympathetic to their statement that it cannot be dismissed totally out of hand. We need more evidence on the side of natural spillover. If it is a lab leak, we need a whole lot more evidence because that essentially is a set of narratives without what i would call positive evidence. In my sympathetic . Dashcam ice and pathetic am i sympathetic . Yes. It is important how the pandemic originated, it tells us things that we need to know about how to deal with this pandemic better, deal with the virus better, how to prevent the next pandemic and it is important in our attitudes toward science, the question of whether we need more science on dangerous viruses or less science on dangerous viruses. That is hugely important. We need to settle this with more certainty, but you do not always get certainty when a new virus spills over into humans. Sometimes, it takes a long time to get that certainty. One virus took 41 years. Ebola, it has been 47 years since the first known spillover and we still do not know the animal from which the ebola virus gets into humans. Host you mention your most recent breast seller recent bestseller breathless, iant to quote from that book. Sars provided the most relevant predictor of theanmic future d one scientist who heeded the clue was a chinese for all adjust erologist. Her decades of work on coronavirus began haphazardly during her university years, eventually bringing her to International Renowned within the field and into a harsh spotlight during covid19. Who is she . Guest she is the leader of the coronavirus laboratory. She has 15, 20 years of experience working on coronavirus of that that have the potential to become human pathogens. She has studied them in her laboratory, she has done field collecting viruses and has written papers warning the world about the danger that those viruses could spill into humans and perhaps cause an epidemic or pandemic. She has been issuing that warning for 15 years and now it is sort of a case of attack the messenger. Because she has worked on these viruses, she is a character in some of the narratives about a lab leak possibility, people say she must have been working on a virus in her lab and it leaked from her laboratory and became the pandemic. She must have been working on the progenitor virus, the immediate ancestor of the sarscov2 virus. She has told john cowan and myself she was Never Working on progenitor virus, this virus in her laboratory. Can she prove it . It is hard to prove a negative. But that is where the state of accusations and evidence and circumstance and coincidence stand at this point. Host one more quote. One thing is nearly certain i believe amid the srl of uncertainties, covid19ill not be our last pandemic of the 21st century. It probably will not be the worst. Guest we live in a world of viruses. Every animal, every plant, every bacteria, every fun guy on this planet has its own unique viruses. We are constantly coming into contact with the natural world, exploiting it, extracting resources from it, eating it, burning it. We are cutting down trees and capturing animals and exposing ourselves to new viruses. There are influenza viruses that circulate in birds, they all come from wild aquatic birds. We are hearing about high pathogenicity avian influenza, bird flu. Bird flu could become the next pandemic tomorrow or maybe never. If it acquires a few mutations, a few adaptations that make it capable not just infecting birds and making them sick, and occasionally infecting mammals, seals and sea lions, dolphins, foxes. It has been doing that. It has not yet become a mammal flu capable of transmitting. If it does, with four or five new mutations, then it could become the next terrifying pandemic virus. Or, it might be something else. It might be another coronavirus. It might be a virus of the measles family, it might be of the sort that is not on our radar screen. Theres a certain kind of viruses, singlestranded. They have genomes consisting of rna, which is unstable and makes mistakes when it replicates itself, instead of ones that consist of dna, the double helix, which is stable. Rna viruses are the dangerous ones because they mutate frequently, evolve quickly and have the capacity to jump from one kind of host to another. The influenzas, rna. Host let us go to the subtitle of restless, the scientific race to defeat the deadly virus. What did we do differently when it came to covid19 to get shots in arms . Guest i had an interesting conversation with tony fauci. Some people say well, you really worked quickly. You developed a new vaccine in 60 days, you are doing clinical trials. Within nine months, it was being used in people all over the country. We work quickly because we had done a lot of groundwork. We researched a new kind of vaccine for years, for more than a decade before that. The mrna vaccine concept, that is one of the things we did differently. Tony faucis people were working on the idea of mrna vaccines, which can be modified, developed, customize for a new virus very quickly. Produced and gotten into arms. Millions of lives have been saved by the vaccines we produce. Two of them that i can think of offhand, this kind of vaccine. Also, the Oxford Astrazeneca vaccine from england has been a very effective vaccine, that uses a different kind of vaccine methodology. We developed vaccines more quickly by far than had ever been done before and saved millions of lives. We did not do everything right in terms of dealing with this pandemic. But vaccines we did well, they did well, the scientists. Host how did you get into this line of work . Guest i am still asking myself that question. I started off english major who wanted to be a novelist and published my first novel young because i had a story and was lucky and was capable of executing it reasonably well. 53 years ago i published my first novel. 18 bucks total by now, about one book every three years for 53 years. Despite the fact there were some big gaps early on when i was paying my dues. But i turned to nonfiction in the late 70s and early 80s because i decided the world did not need me to be a novelist. I was a middleclass white kid from a happy childhood in ohio. I did not have deeply experienced, deeply felt stories to tell and knowledge in general of the human condition. I was interested in science and the natural world, so i started writing nonfiction for magazines. I figured out how to become a freelance magazine writer in the late 70s and early 80s, started writing about Natural History than more about biological sciences. Evolutionary biology, conservation biology. Then i started writing books about those subjects and in 1999, National Geographic asked me to take a walk across the congo basin with and explore who was gonna walk for 2000 miles, through the last great forest of the congo basin. National geographic wanted a series of stories on that, so they assigned a great photographer, a colleague of mine, and myself to go with this fellow on sections of his walk do the swamps in forest, crossing the rivers in river sandals and shorts, sleeping on the ground, eating whatever we could carry with help from some African Field assistance. At one point, we walk through 10 days through ebola habitat. We still do not know the reservoir host, the animal in which the ebola virus lurks. We knew it was in this forest because there had been outbreaks in human villages along the edge of this particular forest block. For 10 days, we walked through ebola habitat wondering where the virus was and noticing it was beautiful forest, great gorilla habitat, but there were no guerrillas. No signs of guerrillas, no gorilla poop, no gorilla tracks or nests. The guerrillas were all gone. It is known that gorillas and chimpanzees are susceptible to a bola as well as humans, so this is the place that was spookily empty of guerrillas, probably because of ebola, now we were walking through it. Where was the virus . In an animal somewhere. How did it get to humans . Your interaction in some way. I realized that his ecology and evolutionary biology. Human interaction with wild animals, new virus gets into a new host, ecology. The virus manages to adapt and transmit and become a human pathogen, evolutionary biology. So i realize i have been writing about ecology and evolutionary biology for 20 years, that is my wheelhouse. His scary new viruses that emerge into humans are a subcategory of ecology and evolutionary biology, i can write about that. So i started, i became a virus described beginning at that point. Host i want to read from your book from 2015, a short quote. Aids began with the spillover from one chimp to one human. In oreathe small southeastern wedge of cameroon, arnd 1908, give or take a margin of error. It grew slowly from a spill over to an outbreak to a pandemic. That leaves the third question. How . Guest i tell the story in that book, we do not know the details of the story. We know about the spillover of a new virus from one chimpanzee into one human in the southeastern corner of cameroon around 1908 because of hard science, wonderful hard science that has been done. Placing it in space and time. But how it got from that place to the worlds known only inferentially. I take some risk. I create hypothetical narrative, hypothetical character that i call the voyager and based on a lot of careful research i did on the ground in those places, floating down some of the rivers in dugout canoes talking to people and going to market, i create hypothetical narrative around what others have called the cut hunter hypothesis. A hunter kills a chimpanzee, butchers it. He has a cut on his hand or his back and gets blood to blood contact with the chimpanzee. The chimpanzee virus gets into him. The real patient zero, not the guy who was an Airline Steward out of canada in the book. But the real patient zero was this first person in the southeastern corner of cameron who got blood to blood contact in the virus found it could replicate in him and could transmit from him into others. It worked its way down the river in people to the big cities of the central congo at that time. From those cities, it got amplified in spread to the world. Host 1908, it was not until 1979, 1980 that aids became a thing. Old wide, right . Worldwide, right . Guest right, it was hard to detect. It was moving slowly, killing people slowly. It is a very particular, peculiar kind of virus. It is very fiendishly patient. Life is hard in the congo, life is hard in the southeastern corner of cameroon. I have been there, i promise you that life is hard. People have very few ways to make a living, people struggle. People suffer malaria, people die young. Life expectancy is not high. For those reasons, this phenomenon was invisible for a long time. This very slow virus was transmitting from one human to another, many of those people probably died of other causes for the could have immune failure. But not before they managed to pass the virus along to someone else and the virus spread and was amplified. I tell this story in the book, i do not know if youll me to go into that. But amplified through the blood products industry. Once it got to haiti. How did it get to haiti . When the democratic republic of the congo became independent in 1960, all of the belgian colonial professionals were told to get out and go home. It was understandable. Great initial leader of the newly independent congo, than a fellow who took over in 1965 wanted the colonial professionals gone. So who came in to help the congo and fill the breach . Frenchspeaking africans from other parts of the world, including haiti. Haitian doctors, haitian lawyers, haitian teachers who went as a support mission to the congo and lived there for some years. And had lives wives and girlfriends and acquired the infection, presumably. Then, the haitians went back. He wanted to africanize, the haitians went home and took infection with them. That is why haiti was initially one of the hotspots in the early discovery detection of hivaids, then there were people selling their blood serum in plasma extraction centers in haiti. The blood serum was being extracted and the red cells put back into them, the plasma turned into a product that had a various medical uses and was being shipped up to miami. There was a very large trade in blood plasma from haiti to the united states. This would have been the late 1960s, early 70s. Carrying the virus, presumably to the u. S. And onward to the world. I say presumably out of caution. Some of this is strongly inferential. Host hivaids existed beginning circa 1908 and it survived. We in the west are not aware of it until the late 70s, early 80s. Welcome to book tv, this is the monthly in depth program. This month is David Quammen and we are looking at his body of work as he mentioned earlier, 18 books in total. Here are a