Book tv. Org. The tv, 48 hours of nonfiction books and authors. Now, we kick off the weekend with a panel on viruses from last months brooklyn book festival. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] you are in a panel called microbes, viruses, and destiny this is a discussion in which we will reveal how microbes our our secret puppetmaster. As a Science Writer i should start out by pointing out that the virus are microbes as well, but it made sense to call this microbes, viruses, and destiny because of the two writers we have here. This is ed yong, a Science Writer for the atlantic, author of a new book, contain mulitiudes the microbes within us and a grander view of life. Here is carl zimmer, a Science Writer for the New York Times and author of many books including most recently a planet of viruses. Im sonia shah and an author of a book called the pandemic. All of these books will be for sale by barnes noble and we will be sending them after this session at science table h. Hope you can join us for more discussion there. Before we start i would like to ask, does anyone here is anyone here actually a microbiologist . We have four of them. So, we cant make anything up. [laughter] correct you can correct us if we get anything wrong that will just be me. They never get anything wrong. I think its a really interesting time to talk about microbiology because there has been a paradigm shift in recent years. If you think back to the late 19th century, at least, we thought about microbes mostly ac these malevolent intruders that we sort of have to target with surgical precision with military might and i kind of call that approach microbial xenophobia and it made sense back them in the beginning because the first microbes we can actually detectu or the ones that would grow in addition a lab and of those were often the ones that were responsible for fairly dramatic diseases like tuberculosis and anthrax and so on, but what we now know through new methods is that microbes are everywhere, all around us. They have been here for a lot longer. Its really there planet, 4 billion years. They were here before we got here, so our interactions havef evolved in the context of a mobile world. So, now, we know everything from our immune functions to our mood to our dietary preferences, all their links to the interactions between microbes. We really need a new way of thinking about the microbial world and our place in it, which is why i think the word work that carl and i do is so important to try to get us to understand the science and what it means for us and i think there is a real urgency in that question because i think we can all agree that microbial zero phobia is a paradigm has basically failed. We have seen increasing emergence of highly resistantpa, bacterial pathogens including some can resist every single class of antibiotics that we can throw at it, so that chemical onslaught is actually created in a worse problem in many ways. Over the last 50 years we have had over fate 300 new pathogens emerge out of nowhere like that people a virus, like the zika virus and these are microbes that actually in their original habitat, ebola virus comes out of that, its actually benign in its environment and you couple of years ago that ebola virus killed 11000 people in west africa, so we will talkh a bit appear for maybe half an hour and the have a conversation with you guys. I just want to start with carl. Every time we have one of these new microbes on the scene, i feel like our response ranges from either and theyre both expressions of powerlessness and away, but either panic and hysteria or on the other hand its denial and dismissal, so tell us about the zika virus and where should we fall on that continuum . So, the zika virus is one of these sort of emerging diseases that has gone from being sort of completely unknown to something that we just talk about at the water cooler. Within a matter of months. Unfortunately, this is not anything. This is starting to become a familiar routine we are going through with viruses like mers v that emerged in the middle east a few years ago that no one knew about before. It makes it sort of interesting when the you are working on a book about viruses, so the First Edition of my book, a planet of viruses exit command 2011 and when you write a book youd sort of try to get uptodate as much as you can and hope it can withstand the test of time and within in 2014, my editor got me an email and said he barely say anything about the people what virus in book and i think people want to know about ebola, so i have the opportunity to write about ebola and sort of update the book in general, so theon second edition cannot 2015 and i made sure there would be ebola. That Ebola Outbreak was Something Like we had never seen before. Rst emer ebola had first emerged in 1976, but it was a relatively small outbreak. Affecting only a few hundred people in various parts of Central Africa and then its looks like in december, up 2013t there was the first person to get sick with a new outbreak in west africa and it really didnt sort of become something people were aware of until the spring of 2014, and by october, 2014, it had peaked. Actually, it wasnt until 2016,l that the last case was recorded, so we have had just a few months without a case of ebola in west africa, so this has been yearsou of an outbreak there, way bigger than anything before. There were over 20000 cases, over 11000 people died, like 40 mortality rate. Thats pretty terrifying. I mean, i dont know what your thoughts are, but i think this was kind of an opportunity to see how modern Public Health could handle something we had been anticipating for a while i dont think we did very well at all. The monitoring was terrible. The Vaccine Development was ridiculously slow. There has been a vet vaccine in the works for many years, but no one wanted to pay to do more research on it because it was sort of like, well, who gets ebola and so actually there was a great like spurring to go on actually put the experience experience into humans and try to get a vaccine for humans ready and actually startedou really doing serious testing on in the spring of 2015, weight after the peak of the academic. In a lot of people died and mana of those deaths would been avoided with a vaccine, so now just in these last few flareups people are getting vaccinations where you vaccinate in the area thats great, why didnt we have that three years ago. I try to get as much as i couldve that into the second edition, but i really do feel like i could do a third edition right now because now were looking at the zika virus in the story of the virus is really familiar and similar to ebola. Actually, we knew about the zika virus back in the 40s. It was identified in a monkey in uganda. Then, turned out that people in the area had antibodies to theer zika virus, which is suggested that they were being exposed to it. People really didnt Pay Attention to it. It was mainly, many, manyat are obscure viruses. It sort of gradually emerged and transmitted by mosquitoes as opposed to ebola and was owing 2007, that someone actually like really registered an outbreak and this was in polynesia, not uganda. So, somehow this thing had gotten all the way around the world. There were a couple more outbreaks, relatively small involving a few hundred people and so last year when it showed up in brazil and then things just exploded, so as of now this 2015 outbreak, the one that started last year, is in 55 countries now with zika virus they didnt have it before. We have in puerto rico, miami now. We have it throughout the new world except for chile, you quiet and canada problem because they are not very good for the mosquitoes that carry it. I dont think people are aware enough about how things are already in this outbreak. K. Even in the United States, so from puerto rico it is especially bad with already 17000 cases in puerto rico. They are not sure how many of these is he we now realizesl it causes these babies to develop very small brain and in the United States the latest count is that were 43 locally acquired cases and this has just happened recently and so they are trying to sub in miami, but theres no reason to think that it will work very well. This thing is on the move. T so, how have we done with the zika virus . I dont think it is terribly well living here it is in the United States. There has been Animal Research on the vaccine. This is the kind of things you can vaccinate for, but we will probably just Start Testing vaccines may be in january and here in the United States we are not we cant even put out the money to control this, i mean, there are things we can do like mosquito control, research and vaccine. Converses stuck in political gains and not giving out the money. Th bear in mind, lifetime cost of caring for these kids that has birth effects is 10 million for a lifetime, so thats what we are looking at, so we are being incredibly penny wise and pound foolish, not even penny wise, just foolish. W thats what we are looking at and i think the other parallel that i find really striking here is that this adjuster shows yet again how remarkable viruses are ed may give us a reason to feel happy and warm and cuddly about the microbial world. Im here to just kind of freak you out. Think about it. The zika virus has 10 genes. The ebola virus has seven genesi and they are running rings around us. They have this ring system that our ancestors evolved for billions of years. They find a way around it. They are thriving and spreading all over the world. Lets happening is that there are all 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 these zika virus systems and disturbing bats, monkeys and other wildlife and they are finding a very nice new abundant posting as an im not totally i mean, just a couple weeks ago a great man died. He led the eradication of smallpox. We got rid of smallpox, which honestly is way worse than people or the zika virus. That killed hundreds of millions, maybe billions of people and we wiped it out from the planet. If we have the dedication with connection fight these things, but we cant just ignore them and pretend they will take caree of themselves. So, we will do kind of a Good Cop Bad Cop thing. Hes the bad cop. O very bad cop. Ed will tell us good side, but whats interesting is we see these new microbes coming to the human population and of course the beginning is really horribl like the zika virus comes in and the population is totally susceptible with no immunity in dc on this, but what happens over time . Over time, we get used to certain viruses and live with them in a start to become part of our ecology and thats what the Microbiota Research that you have been covering is really focusing on. I think i am definitely the code good cop in this scenario. Nt patella to contradict any of the concerns that carl has raised, but the book that i wrote is about more beneficial side of the microbial world and i talk about how microbes have been with us for the longest time. We evolved in microbial world and to this day all of us depend on microbes for all sorts of passes is of our existence. Every human body contains trillions of bacteria and they help to build and calibrate our immune system. They digest our food and actually protect us from disease and infection. They may even help to shape her behavior and even viruses, we contain many orders of magnitude more viruses then we have bacterial cells in our body. Most of those actually infecting kill bacteria, so they are parts of this teeming ecosystem that lives within us. We look like three individuals,e but we are in fact three large teaming thriving worlds and i talk about how these microbes arent just pathogens. They do really important things in our lives. Which address and the roles they play in humans, but if you look brighter at the Animal Kingdom you see all kinds of incredible superpowers they convey to their host. They allow worms, flat worlds to regenerate their entire bodies. There are birds which paints their eggs in antibacterial paste, in microbe rich fluid that helps to protect the chicks within from infection. There are even wasps that use viruses encoded within their own dna to diffuse the immune systems of the caterpillars that they target and 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 animal and a microbe to help us, to improve our health. This actually ties into one of the stories that karl was i talking about. Of this story begins in 1924, become a microbiologist covered it discovered a new type of bacteria that lived in the cells of insects. They found in a mosquito, brown mosquito which they collected near boston and for ages no one knew what this thing was. They didnt know if it was, and into the scientists 12 years to even give the thing a name and one of them named after his friend, while back you and it took many decades for anyone to work out what it did, but in the 60s and 70s scientists suddenly realize this thing was everywhere. Its an aunts, beatles, in a Something Like 40 of species of insects have given those are already the most diverse and rich in numerous animals on the planet to that makes it almost certain he one of the most successful bacteria in the world you could think of it as one of the greatest pandemics in the history of life. It varies from host to host. Sometimes its a peer site and causes harm particularly to males because its passed down from mothers two daughters. Sometimes kills them out right entrance forms them into females. Sometimes it allows the female injured the female institute . A sexually. It can benefit it host. In bed bugs, for example, it provides index like an oddbalp [inaudible] some kind of bowlers sit within the leaves and continue to eatat even as the world goes and eyes are on the. Humans have a use for this as well. 25 years and scientists have in to introduce this bacteria into eight species of insects that does not normally infect and that insect is the tiger mosquito, which spreads dengue fever, yellow fever and the zika virus. Of the reason they have done this is twofold. One, when the tiger mosquito contains this if for some reason is really bad at spreading the virus is behind these diseases, so tiger mosquito is effectively a dengue proof one or perhaps a zika virus proof one also. O. It the bacteria because its also could at manipulating its host is really really good at spreading through a wild population. The ideas that if you release a small number of these bacteria carrying mosquitoes in the world that within a few generations of their time the entire local wild population 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 as it was tested and i think 2011, in the first time in australia where the bacteria infected mosquitoes were released into the wild and very quickly in the span of q q months you sought that the prevalence of this microbe went from zero to 100 in the mosquitoes in that area. Now, the organization that pioneered the approach called eliminate dengue has been testing it in Different Countries around the world. They are scaling up and going global. They are testing the approach in brazil, colombia, indonesia and vietnam. They are gearing up to releasing the mosquitoes to see if the same approach can indeed work at the larger scales whether those mosquitoes will spread. Whether it will dominate as much as they expected to and crucially whether that will then drive down the transmission and instance of these diseases that cause harm. I think the approach has a lot of advantages. It has the backing of the world health organization, and its interesting because its cheap and probably quite safe, unlike say insecticide which is toxic and need to be continuously re spread. These mosquitoes should theoretically be good to go once you release them once and you only need release them as. Theres no modificationer involved, so its the cells community who perhaps reject the time approaches and it seems that the bacteria stops the spread of these viruses through many different routes, through competing with nutrients, stimulating the immune system, many ways. That is reassuring because as carl said viruses have a habit of running rings around us and no sensible evolution biologist would back approach assuming that evolution will not get the better of us at some point or another. But, if the bacterium allows it to resist the viruses are to be about effect of those viruses in many different ways, as many different types of resistance you would theoretically need to evolve, which would be hard. So, here we have a really interesting approach currently being tried. The points i want to make is that all of this story with some basic curiosity about the microbial world. Back in 1924, the people that discovered the bacteria could possibly have predicted this was where it would end up. And one one of them, the man who lent his name to thisn bacteria and died in the 50s before anyone realized how common it was, he could not possibly have perceived where this research would lead to now and in many ways that is the study of the animal microbiology in general. For the longest times were ignored and neglected microbes thinking they would be irrelevant to us and then we went through a period of fearing them and now, we are reaching an era of exploration again and appreciation of realizing the crucial roles they play in ourn lives and those of the entire Animal Kingdom and we have started to manipulate those partnerships for our own and our attempts of doing so are still fumbling, but there is tremendous potential here and i think thats where the science of the microbiology is in the future and whites an area that excites me so much and why felt compelled to write the book. So, its interesting that to try to we want to think of microbes in terms of are they good or are they bad with this sort of dichotomy there trying to push them into and what you are talking about is the microbes can behave different link. Absolutely. The book says theres no such thing as a good or bad microbe. Microbes are germs we need to destroy or villains. Think this is wrong, but also wro