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 wrong is the idea that those with witt within us are from a bacteria are good microbes. Really, we are just another habitat for them. Of theyve been around for billions of world and we are anotherr world for them to inhabit much like a lump of soil or drop of water, so comes in many strains. Some are beneficial to their host, some are not. Some are both at the same time. I talked about the wasps that use viruses to attack caterpillars and obviously those viruses are bad for caterpillars, but good for the wasps, so the relationship that microbes have with their host very dynamic. They can change on a dime and we all need ways containing theon multitude of keeping those relationships happy. So, then the question is when theres a compliment of interest between the microbes we encounter like the zika virus, like smallpox, like ebola and what they were doing what we want to do and you can define that as disease like thats whao happens in the middle. Sure, you mean for any parasites well, through this way for anything living inside something else, if its activities kind of kill off its host too soon thats bad news. I mean, it will become extinct because its basically burned down its own house. You know, if you can raise a big family and and say like its time to move the house and go find another one and then burnho it down it would be okay. So, these viruses and other pathogens evolve to Different Levels of deadliness and sometimes you could actually see this in the wild. So, for example, some fool decided it would be a good idea to introduce rabbits to australia. It took off and they said how are we going to control this and there was this horribly deadly virus that killed the hairs in europe and they said we will bring it to australia, problem solved. Well, it started killing them off like crazy. Then, it started to become less deadly and its still not a good idea for these rabbits to get sick with this virus, but it did not get rid of the rabbits took the virus evolved and essentially its deadliness to be able to get the host with the most efficient way. You know, like its hard for us, we think about things as being good and bad just and very sort of egocentric way, but like these things are evolving and they are not just evolving over the course of a few years. They are evolving over millions of years and our language viruses can be good for us coming in fact, none of us would have been born without viruseses because millions of years in the past our ancestors got infected with viruses and actually basically harnessed some of those viral genes, coopted them, used them to make proteins in the placenta and these are crucial proteins in the placenta if you knock out the gene so that for example my switch up a similar version, if you knock out the gene they cant havek kids. It just doesnt work. Recently, we discovered that viruses were also harnessed for muscle, so basically there arere proteins that are muscle that appear to be generated from a virus gene. Thats good. But in order to get that good our ancestors probably went through some horrific hiv like epidemic that nearly worked at the species and then there was then finally we achieved achieved immunity over them, harnessed a couple of the genes and went on their so whole language of good and bad really capture the real the real strangeness of these little things. Some scientists think thatle antibodies play roman army and system. Attacked without viruses that infect bacteria and they are called bacteriophages and they look a bit like the lunar landers. Theres the idea that we have loads of them in our bodies and some along the lining of the cut and mucus that covers the gut. There are millions, trillions perhaps at these viruses stuck in the music mucus with their legs that into the air waiting to infect vector that has by and help to keep the population microbes that live within us on the check and they help to select the species of microbes that live within us. Yo its a nice idea, but i think it also highlights another aspectto of this world. Thats, we need to keep these populations in mind and the balance of those communities matter, whos there who isnt. Many of the cases that carl talked about like the gut and ebola virus, you can also get illness when communities of microbes shift from helping say into a unhealthy one when no particular member is responsible for the disease, its just that the entire community has gone out of whack and that may be more common than others. Maybe you have new invading species that are there any more and maybe have lost some. You see this all over the place. This might supply the human body, also. Many illnesses that have become more harm common in the 21st century have been linked to changes in viruses whether its diabetes or allergies and asthma or obesity. Its still unclear in many of these cases whether it is the changes leading to the disease or whether there are consequence but, that principle that its not one infectious organism that is but its a shift in the community. That i think is important and we will learn more about that in the decades to come. I think that is interestingu point. The causeandeffect, we still dont know because probiotics has become such a Huge Industry already. So, this whole idea that if you take the good bacteria, the good and new line your cut with alld of that that somehow its going to improve your health, but we still dont know if these disease stage is associated with microbiota changes, but does it cause it or doesnt happen afterwards, so what are the limits of how much we can really manipulate through probiotics. Its very hard, i mean, probiotics have they dont live up to a lot of them, so they seem to be could for cases of infectious diarrhea, but by a large when you think about all of the other conditions linked to the microbiota the evidence of probiotics is kind of weak or at least inconsistent and i think thats because these are very difficult we are talking about trying to engineer entire ecosystems that are as complicated as force or coral reefs. Thats a tough thing to do and we are trying to solve the problem by giving probiotics that contain pretty small quantities of bacteria, so hundreds thousands of times lower that already exist in our body. They were chosen often for historical reasons and its almost like releasing a small number of captive bred animals into the jungle and hoping that they thrive. In many cases they dont, so theres another approach you could try. You could try giving people large communities of microbes that are for the gut and thats of logic behind very unorthodox treatment, which is exactly you take stool from a healthy donor and put it in a sick recipient, often involving a d blender and tubing and they get better [laughter] i should have brought props. [laughter] im not volunteering. This has proven to be really effective at treating an infectious bacterium that causes severe he hard to treat cases of diarrhea and while antibiotics can cure a quarter of cases, fecal transplant has had like 90 success rate. Theyve been very very effective, but even these treatments are you are really doing it ecosystem transplant and take a Massive Community of microbes and putting them in a person with theoretically diseased immune system, even that doesnt work consistently for a lot of these other conditions linked to Irritable Bowel Syndrome work the trialsin of fecal transplants becauseha even here it is hard to reset these worlds within us. We are still in the early stages of understanding how theset, wh ecosystems work like it was there, what determines what. Might microbiota is different from yours to yours to yours and how different we can manipulate them, so when we met put my clothes and how to establish them or do we need to feed them with certain foods . How would they hit up against the nickel microbes where immune system . E to do there are still so much finetuning we have to do despite early successes in this field. At the same time youre talking about these very subtle shifts in this delicate fragile balance in the ecosystem. With microbes and yet what we do is we pound them, actually if you think about it. Our use of antibiotics, but 80 of the antibiotics we use are from farm animals, so thatss just out in the environment alla over the place and then we have a lot of medically unnecessary use of athletics also, so webi kind of manipulate the context at the same time. I wonder, well, you mentioned carl, that we could do more with vaccinations, for sure, but what is it mean when we are attacking microbes on this grand scale as a background level . How does that sort of provoke some of their more virulent behaviors cormac . When antibodies cannot name 40s and road became widespread and people were like game over, we had done it and get even the people who had discovered said like wait, wait, wait these things could stop working because of evolution because 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 and now finally, we are coming to terms with more and more resistance and its a real struggle because we dont have a lot of new drugs in the pipeline. We are starting to get we are starting to see over the horizon a situation where you will have bacteria that are resistant to everything we have got, so you get infected with it and theygu can figure out that you have one of these strains that combines these genes there will be nothing people can do for you and already its been estimatedo maybe 700,000 people around the world diet of antibiotic resistant bacterial infections and that could go up unless we do stuff. Again, dont mean to be a dark cloud in your day, but its like the same sort with smallpox. We can do something about this. We are people and we are smart and if we show dedicated weekends solve this problem. Would solved the smallpox problem and we can solve thisle problem. It is solvable. There are clear cut things we can do if we can overcome political resistance. For example stop using antibiotics on farms. Theres this huge resistance to that because understandably farmers like to give theseic antibodies to animals. They get bigger. No one is quite sure why. More meat, more money. To s you have to set it out against the colossal cost we are all sharing of treating all of the illness from antibiotic resistant bacteria, which is being bred on these farms in part. We also need to be more creative and one possibility is with viruses, so ed mentioned that there are these viruses that ane infect bacteria and they are called bacteriophage and they were discovered over hundred years ago actually felix durell, the doctor who discovered them found them in people who were sick with dysentery and he realized that he could actuallyl kill all of these dysentery causing bacteria with these viruses and he said, this could be a drug. So, actually incredibly, peoplec forget this, but in the 1920s you could buy powder within these viruses in it in paris, i mean, it was being massproduced and it was quite popular. Antibiotics came on scene and they seemed more reliable, more kind of a tractable because they are just chemicals and not almost lifelike viruses are and so there was a shift. Really, the only place where this kind of approach called phage therapy was continued to be used was in the soviet union, so world war ii, stalin soldiers are getting wounded on the battlefront and suffering infections. They are being treated with phage therapy. Theyre getting viruses on their wounds and in some cases itsme working. Since the fall of the soviet union, some of those people came to the United States and have it with the scientists here trying to sort of bring phage therapy back into american and european medicine and its been very slos you can be 100 sure that the viruses you are using will kill the bacteria that you want to cure, but there are there is some progress, so there are some major trials going on now in terms of treating people with infections from burns and so on and the ideas that instead of just one chemical we have a virus and you can do lots of things with viruses like you can engineer them, so if the bacteria starts to evolve, you can do evolution experiments with your virus and get them to evolve to do a better job or maybe you can just maybe puttine an extra gene in there to help them break up these six films that bacteria can form and you can engineer these viruses. There is Research Going on with that now, so this is the creativity we need to fight this fight. Antibiotics have been such an incredible boon to our health. They have saved some lives, but we use them badly sometimes and there are costs to that. Ta antibiotic resistance amongnce m infectious bacteria is one cost the loss of the bacteria we rely upon his another because antibiotics take a very they are unsubtle weapons, shock and on weapons, not precise. They rest destroy the bacteria we rely on as well as that that causes harm, so they do shift the microbiota and all people are looking at whether those ships can harm our health, how longlasting they are. To many of such assaults and you get problems. Thats actually why you see infections happen. They are almost always caused by antibiotics wiping out the native microbes that create space with this weedy invader to take hold. So, people often ask me whetherk the science tells us microbiotas are bad thing. I dont think so. We should not demonize them in the solution to saving the bacteria we rely upon his very much the same, protecting us from these infections. Ibiotics its a just a scaling back on her use of antibiotics and using them need judiciously, so we use them when we need to only when we need to and that involves everything from cultural shift to doctor prescriptions to technological shifts to being able to diagnose illnessesyourn early, so if you have a viral illness were example youre not prescribing people ofit antibiotics because the drugs dont do any good. Microbiota my think has interesting applications in solving that antibody crisis. Antibiotics largely are microbial weapons. They are tools that evolve to destroy each other in intense competition because after all their world and we mind those weapons that we did such a goodh job that we picked the low hanging fruit and then we worship. Dot discovering the new is easily, perhaps the bacteria that was our body mighw be a put judge news source. A few month ago i wrote about a study about how a new potential and erotic was discovered among our nose bacteria about i think Something Like eight to may 10 of people carry this one species that makes a chemical. That seems to do very well against the microbe behind mercer mercer. In my work. It might not. What if they stay to happen before they could to clinic, but the critical point is our bodies fights, they are competition between microbes and some parts of the body that competition might be especially fierce, so areas where we constantly shove food down and bob bombard thae microbes with nutrients. The nose, however, is scanned in resource unless youre eating really weirdly. No nutrients they are. The microbes that live there arn competitive and maybe those are the places we need to look for the next generation of good antibiotics. I think this is the type of thing that you can get when you think of humans and other animals as the ecosystem, as more than they individuals we are in think ecologically, which part of the body will competition beefier system on microbes and where we most likely to find like tomorrows weapons . I think there is a part in your book where you call the gut like a rain forests in the nose is sort of like a desert. Few mt we have a few minutes for questions and their two microphones set up, so i hope you will come ask questions and when you do, just say your name first and make it a question. Hello, im anna. I have a question about vaccines and how they work great for eradicating smallpox, but we still have a virus that kills tens of thousands of people a year and is endemic and we had a vaccine and we have known about a 40000 years, the yellow fever still is raging and how there are some a viruses we dont even know about and we still have viruses we known about the way vaccines. Yeah, vaccines are they are an amazing thing. The fact we can actually train our bodies to be ready for a virus before comes and be able to initiate a really swift attack and basically fight it off is an incredible thing we can do. But, that sort of mast mask a lot of hard work that goes into beijing the vaccine actually treats a publish effectively, so with smallpox it wasnt just like everyone get in line and get the smallpox vaccine. Involved figuring out where smallpox was in the world and going out there, collaborating with community leaders, taking vaccines on horseback into thety remote areas of ethiopia trying to get the very last cases because until you get the very last case its not over and thats what we are dealing with with polio. Polio could have been done with polio 10 years ago, but it is enduring and its in these very unstable places like for example parts of pakistan and nigeria. In pakistan you have vaccine workers who get killed by the caliban just as a way of sort of as part of their political campaign. The virus doesnt care. Its an opportunity for it to take off. There are builtin problems also with vaccines in a sense that the flu virus is a real pain in the neck because it is just constantly turning evolutionary. Every year, there are new mutations arriving, they are mixing and matching together and basically doing their own metro natural biotechnology and you get a new strain every year and a scientist making the vaccines, a lot of them are still using the basic technology we used in the 1950s like actually like trying to grow vaccine in chicken eggs, for example. It takes months to do that, so they accept a guess in advance. E we are entering our flu season right now, just about and the vaccines were decided on months ago and we just have to hope that they got it writes and aey lot of times they dont, so there is a situation where what we really need ultimately and there are people working on this is to get the ons vaccine that just targets the parts of the t virus that changes rapidly and try to target the part that change never, the things that are essentially to being a flu virus. The dream is and i have written about this, the dream is a making a universal flu vaccine. You are a kid. You get a flu shot, maybe a booster wants in life like other vaccines. That would be great and a lot of lives would be saved, but we are not there. Hello. I have a question about the incorporation of microbes into our genome, so if you years ago when i was in college i learned about a couple of theories suggested they are not just pieces of dna incorporated, but to really really important cell types or sub organelles in one of those is Michael Condrey of which provides most of our energy and the other one was our white blood cells. And wondered if there is any credibility these days to those theories on how that might have happened. So, mitochondria is definitely correct. For anyone who is not money with them, all of ourselves contain these little structures which are these being shaped things that provide us with energy, essential for our lives and they used to be bacteria. They are domesticated bacteria that once worked their way into an ancestral cell and became forever stuck there. That much is absolutely clear. One really interesting thing i think about the echo condrey a is there some debate about just how important their origin was to the origin of all about, so some scientists believe that the origin of Michael Condrey a mitochondria was the domain of life that includes all animals, plants, fungi and all of the complex that we can see with their eyes. They all involve only once and perhaps the reason for that singularity even though taken in bacteria and turned them into other cell structures, the reason for the primacy of mitochondria maybe that singly probable if that was very critical and allowing life to escape from the confines of bacteria and to go big, to develop develop larger genomes to develop in larger sizes and again were talking about events that happened billions of years ago and theyre obviously controversial, but there is no controversy the origins of mitochondria. With the white blood cells, i mean, they are just a cells, but whats interesting is when you look at them they under a microscope its interesting how they are forging around in a way that is very reminiscent of early single cell protozoan like what you might find in the soilg roaming around like wrapping bacteria and so on and there are some ideas that the behavior of our white blood cells roaming around inside of our bodies are just using very old genes thatll are held onto from our sort of single cell protozoan ancestors and sniffing a white blood stood cell sniffing around looking for bacteria in your blood is not that different from like a slime mold sniffing around for bacteria in the soil, so it may have been a carryoverm their. I like that idea of a slime mold sniffing around. Great image. I have a friend who recently joined the peace corps and she r has been there about six or seven months and because she is not used to the bacteria there she has had shes been sick and then on about seven rounds of antibiotics, so im wondering what your thoughts were on the longterm consequences of being on that many antibiotics in a relatively short amount of time. Its a tough break. The military actually is investing a lot in this research because of that problem. Like travel associated diarrhea and its hard because if you bombard the body with heavy doses of antibiotics you run into problems. Sometimes we dont have Better Options, unfortunately, but i think that the emerging science will suggest Better Options in the future like ways of manipulating ecosystem within us rather than just use the brute force approach throwing us a drugs as we cant the problem. Hello. I am exact. I was wondering whether i could ask you to speculate on the potential of another sort of like large change event like Michael Condrey a entering into our body or mitochondriat entering into our body by differentiating species and if possible let him i look like, what kind of futuree possibilities for integration whether its by viral or bacterial that could change as grievance split off. Well [laughter] i can work with this. [laughter] first of all, when youre talking about like a new species , speed cheese does not hatch out of a lab. So, the branching process, and a lot of it is driven in nature just by part of it is those populations not been able to interbreed successfully. There are certainly cases where when you with animals where you fool around with a michael biome and you get problems with interbreeding. Community there are case where. The bacteria might help drive a new species, so imagine there is a new plague and people who gett sick with it can only have kids with other people who were sick with it and not have kids with the other ones that all of a sudden you are diverging and keep that going for like a hundred thousand years and you have a new species. So, just wait. Yeah. Yes spirit and i want a credit on that movie based on that. [laughter]. Hello. I have a question regarding antibiotic abuse and leading to its resistance. More specifically in regards tol feeding it to livestock and cattle. Given that most likely necessary for the largescale production of meat that we produce and looking forward it will probably require a lot of research because we will probably not lose the habit of our meet eating anytime soon, so basically my question is, is there evidence showing that in slaughtered meat and beef cattle etc. , do you find active antibody molecules in a significant amount that can affect humans . Doesnt quite work like that. What happens is that these animals are being fed and products, helping animals. They have a micro biome as we all do and these antibiotics challenge every bacteria that encounters them, so many different species is suddenly have this challenge and basically if they have the right mutation they might be able to survive and if they dont they die, summa, so every time that foster the evolution of these resistant bacteria and inside these animals, okay. We are talking about bacteria in the gut. If you you shouldnt be eating meat that is laced with bacteria from animals got. You would have serious problem and we dont have that problem. The problem is that these animals then release these bacteria with their maneuver and make it into the water to make it into the soil. They are trading these resistant genes with other bacteria or they are getting into humans and so on and they become part of this pool of resistant bacteria and we put so many antibiotics into these animals that its just a tremendous factor in the rise of antibiotic resistance, so thats how it happens and thats why we need to put a brake on it. So, i have a question. You are saying its in about 60 40 , okay. Do you look at how because its so prevalent, the species that do not end up getting it. Whited a why do they not end up getting it, for example the tiger mosquito. What is it that makes it good at spreading host to host and why is it in some hosts and not others, why not, for example, at
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