Confronting Zika and other Viruses, with Bill Nye and Laurie Garrett – StarTalk All-Stars

If you want to sleep tonight, skip this episode of StarTalk All-Stars. Bill Nye, Chuck Nice and virus expert Laurie Garrett examine how we’re fighting Zika, Dengue, West Nile, HIV and other viruses – and why the battle may not be going our way.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Bill Nye?

  This is StarTalk.

• 0:09Bill Nye?

  Greetings, greetings. I'm Bill Nye, hosting StarTalk special edition. This is the all-star edition of StarTalk. And this week, not only am I here, and not only is Chuck Nice here, our beloved man about the universe and the planet.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Hey, Bill.

• 0:23Bill Nye?

  But Dr. Laurie Garrett, who's a senior fellow for global health at the Council for Foreign Relations, the oldest think tank in the United States.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  On foreign relations.

• 0:33Bill Nye?

  On foreign relations.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, not for.

• 0:35Bill Nye?

  That's a whole nother thing.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a whole nother thing.

• 0:37Bill Nye?

  Council on Foreign Relations, and you want a Pulitzer Prize chasing Ebola viruses around.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Back in the 90s.

• 0:44Bill Nye?

  Yes, the 1990s, yes.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 0:47Bill Nye?

  See, and now we have Zika, right? And everybody loves to hate the government until it's time to get the Centers for Disease Control to create some magic or magical scientific answer to an infestation, right?

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. This week, I've been twice doing briefings for congressional staffers about Zika, because, of course, it's coming to the United States. It's just not hot enough yet for the mosquitoes.

• 1:15Bill Nye?

  Right.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  We're in our winter, and it's steadily moving up through the Caribbean, moving north. We're going to hear of more cases in Mexico, and then, you know, it's inevitable that when our 80s egypti and 80s algalpictus mosquitoes, which we have, come out of their winter hibernation and start looking for food, we will almost undoubtedly see Zika cases in the United States.

• 1:41Bill Nye?

  For food, it's among which we are home.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  We are home. Yummy, yummy.

• 1:45Bill Nye?

  Yes.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  And the problem that is unique to the United States, that is not shared by most of our southern amigos, is... We do not have national mosquito control.

• 1:57Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  We don't even, in most states, have state mosquito control.

• 2:02Bill Nye?

  No mosquito control, this is DDT.

• 2:04Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Well, no, we're not allowed to use DDT anymore. That's been banned for decades.

• 2:09Bill Nye?

  But I was a kid, it was sprayed on you, on a person.

• 2:11Chuck Nice?

  Isn't that how we got rid of malaria in the United States?

• 2:14Speaker 01

  It is indeed.

• 2:14Chuck Nice?

  The government did massive sprays of DDT.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Actually, the CDC was originally created to control malaria. But the problem is that now it's local. And so, in the United States, we face the NIMBY problem. Not in my backyard. And we face every conspiracy theory imaginable. "Oh, you're coming in and my children will all have pointed heads because of you," or "All my kids will be autistic because of you," or whatever. And it's going to be, I've warned members of Congress, it's going to be very, very difficult for us to control our mosquitoes in the United States for political reasons. And the worst-case scenario is if it gets involved in the presidential election campaign in some way, then we can all just kiss it all goodbye and assume we're all gonna get Zika.

• 3:02Bill Nye?

  Why is that? Why do you say that?

• 3:03Speaker 01

  Well, I'm exaggerating.

• 3:04Bill Nye?

  Well, just a little.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, because the mosquitoes are not in every state. The further north you go, the lower the mosquito population is because they can only tolerate a certain temperature range. They like it.

• 3:15Bill Nye?

  But as the world gets warmer...

• 3:16Speaker 01

  As the world gets hotter, we are seeing more mosquitoes in areas where they had not previously existed.

• 3:23Bill Nye?

  Well, with all that said, this is Cosmic Query Edition of All-Star Star Talk.

• 3:29Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 3:30Bill Nye?

  And Dr. Laurie Garrett just set up a charming scenario that I hope gives us all pause. And Chuck, Dr. Nice, you're gonna give us, read us the first query from the cosmos.

• 3:43Chuck Nice?

  Yes, yes, I am. And, you know, it's amazing, we have questions from all over the internet. And you'd be surprised how many people are really concerned about Zika. So, let's go to Greg Fixer on Facebook, who wants to know, "With Zika's primary vector as the mosquito, what is the WHO's current anti-mosquito approach besides long sleeves, bug spray, and hoping like hell the mosquito just doesn't bite me or have Zika?"

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:09Bill Nye?

  WHO's World Health Organization.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:12Bill Nye?

  And also, Doctor, for me, the civilian, what is the relationship between the World Health Organization, our Centers for Disease Control? And controlling mosquito populations.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Boy, you just asked a $10,000 question. Uh, let's start-

• 4:27Bill Nye?

  Well, this is a very expensive show.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:30Bill Nye?

  And may I please have that in cash?

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Um, let's take the Facebook part of the question first. Um, look, we can't control every single possible way that a virus can be transmitted when it's human-to-human transmission. It's very, very difficult. We have all the human behavioral issues to deal with. Here, in a way, we're lucky. It's a vector-borne disease, meaning there's an intermediary between the humans.

• 4:58Bill Nye?

  You don't just sneeze on somebody to pass Zika.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Exactly. Um, having said that, we do- we are now discovering that there are at least 14 confirmed cases of sexual transmission of Zika. There are at least three-

• 5:13Bill Nye?

  No, no, no, no, what's- And that's human-to-human or mosquito-to-human?

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Human-to-human.

• 5:16Bill Nye?

  I'm joking. Is this smooching? Yeah, I'm sorry, that was a- Is this kissing or something more, uh-

• 5:21Speaker 01

  This is intercourse.

• 5:22Bill Nye?

  More of a commitment, yeah.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  It's in semen.

• 5:24Bill Nye?

  Wow, thanks.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  And, you know, we're finding more and more viruses have somehow adapted to semen, because Ebola, we were having this problem trying to finally end the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Some of the sort of resurrected cases seen long after it looked like the epidemic was over have involved sexual transmission from an individual who survived, and then many months later passes the virus sexually to a female partner.

• 5:53Bill Nye?

  So he has antibody, or she, yeah, he has antibodies to this Ebola.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Yes, and she does not.

• 5:58Bill Nye?

  She does not.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  And the same appears to be true with Zika. And of course, we know it's transmitted from mother to child in utero. And this is not 100% proven, but it is assumed at this point that that is how these babies are being born with the misshapen heads. And we're now seeing a whole chain of other issues showing up in people who've been exposed to Zika. The Guillain-Barre paralysis, which can be anywhere from a very minor sort of change in the walk and gait that you're able to execute, to total body paralysis that can last for months.

• 6:35Bill Nye?

  This is just frightening stuff, terrifying. All the more reason to engage in safe sex.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Well, and indeed, the government of Puerto Rico just announced that they are putting a price freeze on condoms to keep them affordable to the total population.

• 6:51Chuck Nice?

  Oh, thank God you said condoms. I was thinking something totally different when you said price freeze, but, you know, that's just me.

• 6:58Bill Nye?

  You travel in different circles.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  But you asked, so what can you do besides not get bit by mosquitoes? Well, to not get bit by mosquitoes, there are personal protective measures, and then there's society protective measures. The personal overlaps with society because if a lot of people refuse to go along with the program, they're imperiling everybody in their neighborhood by providing...

• 7:23Chuck Nice?

  But I've got rights, man.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've got rights, dude. And the Second Amendment says I can carry a gun, so if you come on my property...

• 7:29Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna shoot a mosquito.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Well, we had Chris Christie, as a candidate for president before he pulled out of the campaign, said in one of the debates that he would use quarantine to control Zika. And I thought, well, if you can figure out how to quarantine mosquitoes, more power to you. But obviously, he was talking about quarantining human beings, which is ludicrous. It has nothing to do with the transmission. What has to happen is everybody, every single person who lives in a state where these mosquitoes flourish in the summertime, needs to look around your property and say, what do I have sitting outside that could hold water and therefore be a breeding site for these mosquitoes? What makes 80s Egyptians especially tough is they can breed in something the size of a thimble.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  So if you have any kind of trash, if somebody in the household threw, you know, a coffee cup outside...

• 8:23Bill Nye?

  The bottom of a milk carton.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  The bottom of a milk carton.

• 8:27Bill Nye?

  Orange juice container.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Things that are innocent.

• 8:30Bill Nye?

  Now, is it possible, doc, to create a vaccine for this?

• 8:34Speaker 01

  A lot of work is going into it right now, but let's keep in mind, it is a very close cousin in terms of how the immune system sees it, sees the Zika virus, to dengue and chikungunya. And we don't have vaccines for those. And when they, one of the reasons they're having such a hard time figuring out the mysteries about Zika is that it cross reacts in antibody tests with dengue.

• 9:01Bill Nye?

  It cross reacts.

• 9:02Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 9:03Bill Nye?

  Antibodies. What does that mean, doctor?

• 9:05Speaker 01

  It means that, it means that if I'm trying to do an, I take a little of your blood and I want to do an antibody test and see, have you ever had Zika? I can't easily tell the difference between have you ever had dengue? Have you ever had chikungunya? Or have you ever had Zika? They cross react. The antibodies, all of them.

• 9:24Bill Nye?

  Still, in North America, in the United States, Canada, or Mexico, there can't be that many people who've had dengue fever.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Right, there aren't.

• 9:32Bill Nye?

  So if you had a positive, you'd be pretty, statistically, you'd be pretty far along.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Right now, perhaps that is our advantage compared to what they're going through in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, and Central America, is that we don't have huge populations dealing with all three viruses at once.

• 9:50Bill Nye?

  So writ large, this is another science problem that is going to be affected by political issues.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  It already is.

• 9:57Bill Nye?

  Yeah. Great, that's great. So Chuck, let's try another query.

• 10:02Chuck Nice?

  Let us move on.

• 10:02Bill Nye?

  That's great, everybody, I mean, that's, that's not great. That's, that's what it's being, it's irony.

• 10:08Chuck Nice?

  Why? I mean, the people in Washington are so smart and so proactive on everything else. Why would they drop the ball on something like this?

• 10:14Bill Nye?

  I mean well. Lead on.

• 10:17Chuck Nice?

  All right, so Randall Zeisler wants to know this. He says, hi, Bill. With Zika virus having been around for over 60 years, we only hear about it when it spreads to pandemic proportions. How many other viruses are out there that are just contained to a certain area that are waiting to spread under the right conditions? Also, what do you think will be the next Zika virus? Well, here's a rosy outlook for you to paint, Laurie.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's, that precise question is what I have focused on for the last, you know, three decades professionally. And We don't know a number. We can't give you an exact count and say, this is how many viruses lurk out there. One of the reasons is that they're all mutating all the time. They adapt at an incredible pace, at whatever we throw at them, including climate change.

• 11:06Bill Nye?

  Because they reproduce so fast.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  So fast. Many of the viruses are reproducing in the order of minutes or hours. And of course, the bacteria are producing on the order of days.

• 11:15Bill Nye?

  And the humans are reproducing on the order of years.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Decades.

• 11:19Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  And so it allows them tremendous advantage to change. And in a way, you can look at any given ecology, whether it's right here, the top, the surface of this seems to be some kind of felt here.

• 11:32Bill Nye?

  Bays.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  There is, there is a biome.

• 11:36Bill Nye?

  Right.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Right? On this surface. We don't see it, but there are a lot of organisms living here. And they-

• 11:42Bill Nye?

  And by the way, people, they're delicious.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  And they, and they range from the big ones, you know, parasites, all the way down to the really tiny ones, phage, which are just little packets of DNA, right?

• 11:55Bill Nye?

  That attack viruses.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  That attack viruses and bacteria.

• 11:58Bill Nye?

  And bacteria.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  And so here's what's happening. It's a giant lending library.

• 12:02Bill Nye?

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  You know, all over here is DNA. And bacteria, if they feel attacked, if I had antibiotics to splash on the surface-

• 12:10Bill Nye?

  The word feel is anthropomorphizing a little bit.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  But if bacteria experience an assault, some sort of a antiseptic I put on this surface, they scour actively their environment for any phage that might have some DNA that they can use to counter-

• 12:28Bill Nye?

  That's a model for us.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 12:31Bill Nye?

  We scour the rainforest and our tummies and everything else, looking for something that will fight this, a given-

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Well, we mostly destroy.

• 12:40Bill Nye?

  Oh, that's great. So by that, I mean, it's not great. So

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Did we answer the question? I don't remember what

• 12:46Bill Nye?

  How many?

• 12:47Speaker 01

  What's the next?

• 12:48Bill Nye?

  There are sixty viruses that caused the cold. There gotta be

• 12:51Speaker 01

  There's a great guy

• 12:52Bill Nye?

  Sixty thousand that we've never heard of.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  There's a great guy up at Columbia University at the medical school named Ian Lipkin, who has proposed a project to actually go out and scour the planet for missing viruses and to identify them.

• 13:06Bill Nye?

  Is this akin to what Craig Venter was doing with his sailboat?

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Well, he was doing total microbiome, not just viruses, and he was just the Seragasso Sea. But now the NIH, our National Institutes of Health, is looking at funding, together with NSF, what they would call the Earth Microbiome Project, to actively go out and scour all kinds of different ecological settings, looking to identify all of the bacteria, viruses, and phage in a given community setting. Now, that poses another problem that I'm actually working on in a new book I'm writing, which is, when is a life form a pathogen? And when is it an innocent bystander?

• 13:51Bill Nye?

  A happy germ.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Or something happily helping you?

• 13:54Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  A symbiote, a commensal, something that actually is digesting your food for you or protecting you by doing combat with other microbes, right? But then suddenly, they will switch and there'll be a pathogen. And we don't know why. We don't completely understand how this happens. It turns out, almost every human being has anthrax in your gut. This is a huge surprise. We only discovered this in the last couple of years. Well, why is anthrax in your gut harmless, but anthrax in the air or on a surface? And as we all learned in 2001 with the mailings to members of Congress and the media, why is that a lethal event? We don't really understand, but in any ecological setting, a plant, an animal, the ocean, the

• 14:38Speaker 01

  air, there's this mix of microbes, which under certain circumstances are at least neutral, if not beneficial, and in other circumstances are dangerous, and we don't really understand it.

• 14:50Bill Nye?

  But you're working on it?

• 14:51Speaker 01

  We're working on it.

• 14:52Bill Nye?

  Now, if we did this, before we get to the next query,

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:55Bill Nye?

  If we did this Earth Microbiome Project,

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 14:59Bill Nye?

  where would the money come from? How would that be funded?

• 15:03Speaker 01

  That's actually in process right now. You probably know the National Science Foundation has a process where

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Groups of scientists can come forward and basically say, "We think this kind of a mega project needs to be done." It has to involve lots of different labs and lots of different scientists and a much bigger budget than a typical grant proposal. A few years ago, a group came forward to the NIH and said, "We need a human microbiome project." And that was done, and it unfolded unbelievable surprises.

• 15:38Bill Nye?

  Like the anthrax.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Like the anthrax, like finding that there are all sorts of ways that we're actively changing our microbiome that involve things like, "Hi, Mr. Nice, I just rubbed your arm, and now I'm gonna rub my arm, and maybe I just transferred some of your microbiome to me."

• 15:57Bill Nye?

  Well, good for you.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  Good for me. I can tell.

• 16:00Bill Nye?

  All right, you two biomas.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  We're gonna biomash here.

• 16:05Bill Nye?

  Fantastic. Careful, it's a family show. All right, Chuck, you got another query.

• 16:12Chuck Nice?

  From Twitter, this is Nate Acevedo, and he's @NateAcevedo, wants to know this. "Research suggests the placenta began with a viral genome by using vaccines. Are we only stunting the advancement of our species?"

• 16:30Bill Nye?

  Wow.

• 16:31Chuck Nice?

  What a crazy question, that's why I read it.

• 16:33Bill Nye?

  Well, it's just, Dr. Garrett, I'm sure you'll give us an earful in this, but that's just taking two nouns and just slamming them. It sounds a little conspiratorial. I just say this all the time about conspiracy theories, everybody, they're lazy. If there only were just six, you know, five dozen people

• 16:54Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 16:55Bill Nye?

  That are controlling, all we gotta do is find those 60 guys or gals, and then we just imprison them or get all their knowledge, and then we'd be set.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I, uh, before I answer this question, let me just tell you, Dan Brown, you know, who wrote, um, Angels and Demons and...

• 17:13Bill Nye?

  Oh, yes. Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  What's the one about the conspiracy about the Pope?

• 17:17Bill Nye?

  Well, the Jesus has a descendant and she's running around.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's, that one. Anyway, super bestseller. Well, his, his most recent book, the premise is that there's an evil biologist at the Council on...

• 17:31Bill Nye?

  She's pointing at herself, if you're listening to the podcast.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  At the Council on Foreign Relations.

• 17:34Chuck Nice?

  Uh-huh.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Who kidnaps the head of WHO and locks her into the basement of the Council on Foreign Relations and, and then carries out some grand scheme involving trying to genetically change all of humanity. And I thought, oh my God, that is the ultimate conspiracy theory. And now it's actually about me, except that, of course, in the book, because they don't believe women do anything, the bad guy had to be turned into a man.

• 17:57Bill Nye?

  Ah. So, before you do that, uh, this is StarTalk, the All-Star Edition with Dr. Laurie Garrett, a Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations, joined once again by our beloved Chuck Nice, and I'm your host, Bill Nye, and we'll be back right after this. Welcome back, welcome back. I'm your host, Bill Nye, here on StarTalk, but not just StarTalk. This is StarTalk All-Star Edition, and our all-stars, of course, include our beloved Chuck Nice, man about the planet. And we're joined this week by Dr. Laurie Garrett, who is a Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations, the, the

• 18:38Bill Nye?

  US's oldest think tank. Now, while you're thinking about, I guess, not about tanks, about big, big ideas.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Some people there think about tanks.

• 18:48Bill Nye?

  As we went to break, a guy, or somebody asked, a cosmic query, inquired...

• 18:54Chuck Nice?

  Are we, uh, by using vaccines, stunting the advancement of our species?

• 19:00Bill Nye?

  Because vacs, because placentas may have come from, uh, virus genes. Yeah.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  What we know, actually, is that... A baby, an infant, a even pre-toddler.

• 19:14Bill Nye?

  I was, I did that for a while.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's funny, we've all kind of been there. We, at that stage in life, they have two jobs. And everything else is done for them. One job is to listen and look at everything and start trying to figure out what is that word mean?

• 19:30Bill Nye?

  Take in data.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Taking in data. And the second is to touch, lick, eat, ingest, everything in their environment. You watch a baby and what does it do with a toy? It sticks it in its mouth, maybe in its ear. It rolls it around, it touches and licks the floor. What is that about? Why would we have evolved to such a thing?

• 19:49Bill Nye?

  I say, everybody, if you concentrate for just a moment, you can remember what a kitchen floor tastes like. If I've said that. I don't have to concentrate, that was this morning.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Oh, nice. Nice, nice.

• 20:03Bill Nye?

  He's down there with his kids, interacting. Yeah, I've got a two-year-old, so.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  But there's a reason for that. And we see the same, of course, in all the primates. And there's a reason for it. We're coating our immune system. You know, our immune system's job at that point is to figure out what is foreign, what is dangerous, and what is me? Because the worst thing you could have is for your own immune system to start attacking you because it doesn't know foreign, and it's confused, and it thinks, you know, you are the problem.

• 20:33Bill Nye?

  It's the immune system we're thinking. I know.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Well.

• 20:36Bill Nye?

  Yeah, I'm with you.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  So, so that, for example, you get asthma because your immune system is overreacting against all sorts of things that it ought not to be reacting against. And sometimes even including elements of your own body.

• 20:50Bill Nye?

  So what'd you say to mothers here in the very clean environments of the United States and Canada? Let your kids play in the dirt.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I would furthermore say, you know, all, a vaccine is an infinitesimal version of that daily experience of absorbing everything in your own environment. The amount of what are called antigens. So, you know, what you, if I touch this tabletop right here. And then put it to my mouth.

• 21:21Chuck Nice?

  Which you just did.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  Which I just did. On that tabletop is a lot of stuff, including proteins. And all those proteins are potentially antigens, which my immune system and antibodies see. Okay, and that's how you program your system. Well, you know, the amount of antigenic exposure a baby has in its environment is orders of magnitude more than what's in a given vaccine.

• 21:47Bill Nye?

  So what about this guy?

• 21:48Chuck Nice?

  No, what so you what you just said to him is, it is exactly the opposite of what he is postulating. It's exactly the opposite. The vaccine doesn't help stunt us. It actually propels us because it's this tiny little thing that it's it's our version of baby putting things in its mouth.

• 22:08Bill Nye?

  Chuck, tell the truth. Testify.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Testify. Well, I mean, look, if you're if you're a parent and you have a, say, 12-month-old child, you have two options in terms of one particular nasty microbe called polio. You can either say, eh, you know, I've kind of decided the odds, my child in its environment as it ages, is very unlikely to be exposed to that virus, so I'm not going to vaccinate. Or you can say, you know, this is a absolutely minuscule exposure, but it will program that child's immune system and for the rest of their life, as they travel the world and drink waters all over the world and are exposed to soils all over the world, any one of which

• 22:54Speaker 01

  could potentially contain polio, my child will grow up fully protected.

• 22:59Bill Nye?

  I remember the polio vaccine was introduced in the 1950s. Is that right? Was it 1960?

• 23:04Speaker 01

  50s. Nezles was the 60s.

• 23:07Bill Nye?

  I went to elementary school with a guy who had polio.

• 23:10Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 23:10Bill Nye?

  And I can tell you, you don't want polio. It's like, it's not in your best interest. And, you know, he was a tough guy and he got through it, but man.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Well, you know who the major opponents of polio vaccine use today are? The number one group that actually kills people?

• 23:25Bill Nye?

  Very well-educated.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  No, for polio, the number one group that's actually murdered more polio vaccinators than there have been children who got polio in the last three, four years, the Taliban.

• 23:38Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 23:38Bill Nye?

  Oh, that's great. One more thing to recommend them.

• 23:42Chuck Nice?

  They're normally so progressive.

• 23:45Bill Nye?

  So everybody, you know, if you're listening, you're listening to StarTalk, you're self-selected, you're interested in science. But I say all the time, science is the best idea humans have had so far. And if you don't like the process of science, we'll come up with something that throws that out. And that will actually have been a right result of the process of science. So this anti-science sentiment we have now in the technologically-developed United States is so troubling. And here it is in election year, and we're facing climate change, and climate change is going to allow the advancement of all these microbes.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  You may remember in our last presidential election, we had a candidate who said on live television that she opposed the use of a human papillomavirus vaccine on the grounds that she was sure that girls got mentally retarded as a result of getting the HPV vaccine. And just this week, we have announcement from independent scientific teams all over the United States, a 64% reduction in cervical carcinoma in young-

• 24:53Bill Nye?

  From a vaccine, preventing cancer from a vaccine.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  From a vaccine.

• 24:57Bill Nye?

  It's not magic, people. It's science. Chuck, read us another query.

• 25:02Chuck Nice?

  Okay, let's take a query from one of our Patreon patrons. Of course, they support us financially, and so therefore, we like to give them a little shout out.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  We take their questions.

• 25:14Chuck Nice?

  That's right. So you want influence, you want to influence people, okay, give us some money. All right.

• 25:20Bill Nye?

  Just a little bit.

• 25:21Chuck Nice?

  Just a little bit. And this is from Kilia Silvis. Okay, Kilia Silvis from Patreon wants to know this. She's actually a scientist from Minnesota. And she says, "Do you support proposals to introduce GMO male mosquitoes that could breed genetic defects that kill or sterilize large populations of human-biting mosquitoes?"

• 25:48Bill Nye?

  She says GMO.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Genetically modified.

• 25:52Chuck Nice?

  Not GMO, just genetically modifying the mosquitoes.

• 25:55Bill Nye?

  Well, not plants and crops. We're modifying the mosquito males.

• 25:59Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 26:00Bill Nye?

  So they're, even though they have sex with the girl mosquitoes, they don't.

• 26:04Chuck Nice?

  They're sterile. So they don't make any baby mosquitoes.

• 26:06Bill Nye?

  Right.

• 26:07Chuck Nice?

  And therefore you can't get fit.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  So, this overlaps with a previous question that I forgot to completely answer. What are the suggested ways of controlling mosquitoes in the face of Zika, Dengue, Chikungunya, yellow fever, and other diseases carried by these mosquito populations? The World Health Organization is very actively, with our Centers for Disease Control, trying to come up with real answers that are proven in the field to work and that involve some of the latest technologies we have available that really go to the cutting edge. Why do we have to go to the cutting edge? Which includes genetically modified mosquitoes, includes mosquitoes infected with a bacteria called Wolbachia, which also sterilizes the male.

• 26:53Bill Nye?

  How do you get a mosquito to get infected with a bacterium?

• 26:56Speaker 01

  We put Wolbachia in the larva.

• 26:58Chuck Nice?

  Ah.

• 26:59Bill Nye?

  How do you do that?

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Well, they're just sitting right there, like a soupy mix on whatever watery surface.

• 27:04Chuck Nice?

  So you find stagnant water, you put the, uh...

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Doesn't need to be stagnant.

• 27:07Chuck Nice?

  Doesn't even need to be stagnant.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  That's the problem with this particular mosquito, Aedes aegypti. It actually likes fresh water.

• 27:12Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my God.

• 27:13Bill Nye?

  You mean if it's in rapids?

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Drinking water.

• 27:15Chuck Nice?

  Drinking water. Oh, my.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  That's the problem. See, the reason we have this explosion and how it's linked to climate change is it really started in northern Brazil in an area that's undergoing an El Nino-driven drought. And so people think, wait, mosquitoes, they breed in water. How would that be connected to a drought? Well, it's because people are storing drinking water and washing water, especially in the favelas, the poorer communities, where they may not have, uh...

• 27:43Bill Nye?

  Running water.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  ...a lot of running water into their homes.

• 27:45Bill Nye?

  Or a municipal system with chlorine and all these other fabulous...

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Or they are storing additional water over and above what they have in the home for washing purposes, for gardening purposes, and so on. And unless they are really sealed tight, these become breeding sites for this mosquito. So, yes, what tools will work?

• 28:07Speaker 01

  First, let's say what doesn't work, because in 1999, we had the bizarre experience that a disease, a virus, native to the Nile Delta, all the way up to the source of the Nile in Sudan.

• 28:21Bill Nye?

  Which is on the other side of the world.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  In a completely different ecology, that virus, which is called West Nile Virus, emerged in the concrete jungle of Queens, New York. Yes.

• 28:34Bill Nye?

  Got on a plane.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  And we're not sure how it got here, who brought it, and so on, but what happened was...

• 28:40Bill Nye?

  It might have been brought by a lot of people, if it's airplanes, over the years.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  It could have been in cargo.

• 28:45Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  A lot of the introductions actually are via cargo. Point is, it ended up that despite very vigorous mosquito control efforts carried out by New York City and state health officials, and... Which freaked a lot of people out, because the government was spraying! And spraying, and asking people to remove breeding sites from the yards, and so on and so forth. Flash forward a few years, and we not only now have West Nile Virus endemic in almost all 50 states, returning every single spring and summer, but it has now reached the point

• 29:25Speaker 01

  where it's endemic and carried by 60 different species of North American mosquitoes, and has been the key reason that we've seen an obliteration of songbirds and crows all across North America, and is the number one infectious disease cause of death for racing horses, because they bite on horses as well as humans. And not that... So, there we were, executing what we think is state-of-the-art, United States mosquito control, and it not only failed, it failed miserably. We now have a permanent new feature in our disease background in the United States.

• 30:03Bill Nye?

  So, could we have done, could the United States have stopped these mosquitoes? It doesn't sound like it.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  We had tremendous ignorance at that time. We didn't imagine that it would readily get taken up by so many indigenous species of North American mosquito. Here's something from Africa, how could that happen? And I think they really underestimated a lot of the life cycle...

• 30:26Bill Nye?

  Who's "they"? Aren't you "they"? Aren't you "them"?

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Well, I don't do the actual field science. That's done by others.

• 30:35Bill Nye?

  Oh, sure. Pass the buck now, Lori.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Well, there's another lesson to learn, and that is, right now, in Hawaii, they're in the grips of a dengue epidemic. And it's carried by the two mosquitoes that we're worried about, Aedes albopictus and Aedes aegypti. The health officials and mosquito abatement officials on the big island in Hawaii have worked very aggressively to try and control this mosquito. But they've had almost 300 cases now of people getting dengue.

• 31:04Bill Nye?

  If you get dengue fever, what do you do? You die, or do you lie low?

• 31:07Speaker 01

  No, and this is another thing that complicates trying to figure out what's going on with Zika. Dengue is a really strange disease. Before World War II, it was almost unheard of that people died of dengue. It was mostly in its extreme form. Here, we called it break-bone fever. Benjamin Rush, who signed the American Declaration of Independence and was one of the early colonial physicians in North America,

• 31:34Speaker 01

  you know, labeled it break-bone fever, and it swept through Philadelphia over and over.

• 31:38Bill Nye?

  Do you get so sick your bones break?

• 31:39Speaker 01

  No, but it feels like they're breaking.

• 31:41Bill Nye?

  Oh.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Just unbelievable pain. That's a little wimpy. Nasty. But it was rarely lethal. What happened in World War II was that, it turns out, there's four different strains of dengue in the world.

• 31:53Bill Nye?

  At least.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  And they're heavily concentrated in Asia. And when we started having troop movements in the Asia-Pacific, and we were moving troops, they're in the Philippine island, and then they're in Guam, and then they're in Hawaii, and then so on and so forth, humans started to be exposed repeatedly to different strains of dengue. And it turns out, if you get exposed to strain one, it's nasty, you feel lousy, but you don't die. Strain two, you feel even lousier, but you probably still don't die. Strain three, you go to viral hemorrhagic fever, and it's sort of like dengue version of Ebola.

• 32:28Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  And it is high mortality, in the neighborhood of 50%. And we don't really have much we can do for you, just as we don't have much we can do for you with Ebola.

• 32:37Bill Nye?

  The people who survive it, they have antibodies, right?

• 32:40Speaker 01

  They do, but-

• 32:40Chuck Nice?

  Why aren't we harvesting the antibodies of the people who survive these? Because there's a lot of people who survived Ebola this time-

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:48Chuck Nice?

  Because of, you know, the World Health Organization moving in and- Why don't we take these people?

• 32:53Speaker 01

  We do, and we have. And the problem is that giving plasma to people, saying, you know, um, "This guy here survived, so we're gonna take his blood and transfuse it to that person," or what have you. So far, these efforts have failed. They have not worked. Um, but there's very, very aggressive work on trying to figure out what's the nature of that antibody response and can we induce it with a vaccine? Back to the vaccines, folks.

• 33:22Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  You know, that really is our ultimate solution-

• 33:26Chuck Nice?

  The vaccine?

• 33:27Speaker 01

  In every of these diseases.

• 33:28Chuck Nice?

  So, and it sounds to me, because all these problems you, uh, have, uh, presented, comes from us moving around the planet. So, the real answer is stay the hell home.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 33:40Chuck Nice?

  Please.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  I'll tell you something, okay? Here, here-

• 33:43Chuck Nice?

  You've told us a lot of things. Tell us another.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  80s egypti, okay?

• 33:47Chuck Nice?

  This is a mosquito-

• 33:48Speaker 01

  This is a mosquito that is the main carrier of all of these key viruses we've been talking about. You know where that came from originally?

• 33:55Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  And how it got to the Americas?

• 33:57Chuck Nice?

  It's named egypti. Okay.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  So, it originally came from Africa.

• 34:01Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  And it got to North America and South America via slave trade.

• 34:07Chuck Nice?

  Oh, of course. Blame the slaves! Of course.

• 34:10Bill Nye?

  Hey, you guys, this has been Star Talk, the all-star edition. We have our beloved Chuck Nice here, a man about the earth, and, uh, Dr. Laurie Garrett, Senior Fellow of the Global Health Council on-

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Or something like that. Council on Foreign Relations-

• 34:27Bill Nye?

  Global Health Council on Foreign Relations, the oldest think tank in the United States. And I've been your, I am your host, Bill Nye, and we'll be back right after this.

• 34:44Bill Nye?

  Chuck, you know what time it is?

• 34:45Chuck Nice?

  As a matter of fact, I do, Bill.

• 34:48Bill Nye?

  It's time for that day in science.

• 34:50Chuck Nice?

  That's right. It's not this day in science. It's that day in science. And that day in science was roughly September the year 1347. Does that ring a bell to you?

• 35:03Bill Nye?

  Yes, it does. It was a while ago. I wasn't there. But that was when the Black Plague, the first signs of the Black Plague showed up in Europe. This would be the bubonic plague. Uh, the first signs were present around the fall of 1347. And in the span of just three years, Chuck, the Black Death killed one-third of all the people in Europe. Imagine one-third of the people you know just dying, disappearing.

• 35:30Chuck Nice?

  If I picked the right people, that would be a good thing.

• 35:32Bill Nye?

  If only we could, you can't. The Black Death stands out as the most dramatic and lifestyle-changing event during this century. And a lot of other stuff went on, but that was a big deal.

• 35:42Chuck Nice?

  That is a big deal. So let me ask you, what do you think culturally? I mean, you know, you're a person as a scientist who pretty much encompasses it all. What today have we taken from the Black Plague or the Black Death? What today have, uh, how does it resonate today?

• 36:03Bill Nye?

  Well, people ask me, "Bill," they say, "nigh, what is the most significant invention of all time?"

• 36:10Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 36:11Bill Nye?

  And people have this some expectation about a smartphone or internal combustion engine or fuel engine. No, it's a sewer.

• 36:20Chuck Nice?

  The sewer?

• 36:21Bill Nye?

  Yes. If you, once you have hygiene, once you have a way to get rid of your waste, then you have a chance of reducing the number of rats running around and the number of fleas, uh, feeding on the rats and infecting you with something like the bubonic plague.

• 36:36Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 36:37Bill Nye?

  That's my, I mean, bear in mind, that's my opinion, but as is so often the case, my opinion's correct.

• 36:45Bill Nye?

  This is where civil engineering goes so far back and people talk about the success of the ancient Romans. They had, uh, clean water for an enormous number of their people.

• 36:56Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 36:56Bill Nye?

  For a lot of their populace. And you gotta have... It's very fashionable right now Chuck, if I may wander off before we get back to something substantive with respect to this particular StarTalk episode. Yes. It's very fashionable now for people who are wealthy to say they're libertarian. True. Right, it seems like it's a fad. But everything's fine, you say, "Well, you should have your own sewer system, you should have your own clean water supply, every person should be wealthy enough to filter their own water and this and that." But what if your neighbor is infected with something? Mm-hmm.

• 37:36Bill Nye?

  And he or she is exhaling, and he or she has rats that have fleas, and you get infected. You don't want that. This is where you have to have a community working together for the public good. You have to have public works and sewers- I was about to say, they call that "public works." And so sewer is the classicest example of that. You know, "Everybody should have their own fire department." But what if your neighbor's roof is on fire and the embers are blowing onto yours and so on? So, disease control writ larger is a classic example of using public works for the public good. Wow. Suppressing these horrible mosquito populations that Dr. Garrett's talking about,

• 38:18Bill Nye?

  and controlling so that everybody who's young gets vaccinated against every disease that we have vaccines for, and spending public resources to develop new vaccines, these are all for the public good, these are public works. And so this thing where people want government to disappear, to be small, get rid of government entitlement, "The government's bad." Right. It's not all bad. I'm sorry, it's not all bad. Yeah, because sewers are pretty dang good. And you want a government-run sewer, and you want the people who run it to take pride in their work, and you want them to be compensated in such a way that they do a good job, and you want to have civil engineers come out of civil engineering school, and

• 39:00Bill Nye?

  you want people, the workers there, to make a good wage and maintain the sewers properly, and this is what makes cities livable and clean and reduces the number of plagues. Nice.

• 39:12Chuck Nice?

  Sewers, who would have ever thought sewers?

• 39:15Bill Nye?

  That's my opinion. Now, while we're at it, you know, we're living at an exciting time.

• 39:20Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 39:21Bill Nye?

  Not just because we could all die of some new infection that Dr. Carrot's talking about, but also, we could discover life on another world. And I say this would change the course of history. This is my opinion.

• 39:32Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 39:33Bill Nye?

  The Black Plague, one out of every three people died.

• 39:37Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 39:37Bill Nye?

  That's just astonishing, right? Uh, but that, uh, we still sing Ring Around the Rosie, which is a rhyme that dates from the 14th century.

• 39:46Chuck Nice?

  That's correct.

• 39:46Bill Nye?

  Goodness. Uh, so it's had a huge effect on us, uh, both literally and culturally. By literally, I mean, uh, we're still, many of us are still alive. Uh, those genes, the people that lived through it passed their genes on. But, um, uh, if we were, that's, uh, shortly thereafter, in centuries' terms, people realized the earth was round.

• 40:06Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:06Bill Nye?

  And went around the sun.

• 40:07Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 40:08Bill Nye?

  People in Europe realized it, run around the sun. And this changed the world. It allowed international commerce.

• 40:13Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 40:14Bill Nye?

  Which led to all these amazing discoveries in science and, uh, commerce and, uh, navigation around the world's oceans. All this is made possible by planetary exploration. If we were to discover life on another world, everybody would think differently about what it means to be a living thing on this planet. Everybody would feel differently about being alive in the cosmos.

• 40:39Chuck Nice?

  So, speaking-

• 40:39Bill Nye?

  Profound, Chuck. Profound.

• 40:41Chuck Nice?

  Speaking of life on another planet, and if we were to discover life on another planet, and let's just say, we were able to encounter that life on another planet. Now, the Black Plague, when people traversed the globe, they exchanged some nasty stuff-

• 40:57Bill Nye?

  Yes.

• 40:57Chuck Nice?

  And one-third of Europe died.

• 40:59Bill Nye?

  Yes.

• 41:00Chuck Nice?

  So now, we meet some people from another planet. Who's gonna kill whom?

• 41:05Bill Nye?

  It's unknown, Captain.

• 41:06Chuck Nice?

  Yeah?

• 41:07Bill Nye?

  Speculation. But I'll give you this. If, if we go to Mars, if we, uh, if we go to Mars, we will contaminate it. If humans walk around on Mars, as diligent as we try to be-

• 41:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 41:18Bill Nye?

  We're gonna contaminate it. But, the surface of Mars is exposed to ultraviolet light. All Martian day, all the time. And it's crazy cold. And it's extraordinarily dry. Yes, there's a little water around, but it is super dry there. So it's very reasonable to me that our spacecraft, which have been on the surface of Mars for years- Are effectively sterile.

• 41:41Chuck Nice?

  Ah.

• 41:42Bill Nye?

  And so, we could, in good conscious, conscience, drive one of them up to one of these weeping walls, these craters that have liquid water flowing out of them, apparently in the Martian summer. And we could, with the instruments that are on, let's say, for example, Bill shooting from the hip.

• 42:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 42:00Bill Nye?

  The Curiosity Rover, or the 2020 Rover, which will have many of the same instruments, launching in what year, Chuck, do you think?

• 42:07Chuck Nice?

  Uh, going to Mars?

• 42:08Bill Nye?

  Yes, the 2020 Rover, what do you think?

• 42:10Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna go, I don't know, 2017.

• 42:13Bill Nye?

  Uh, it's close, 2020. And so, we could make instruments that would drive up to one of these features. Uh, we could leave it on the surface of Mars for a couple of years, just to feel better about sterilization, drive up to one of these features, and perhaps make a discovery that would change the world. And we, the discovery would be very much akin to the discovery of all these microbiomes, all these ecosystems that are alive in our gut, and all the genes that we have that are apparently a result of interaction with viruses here on this planet. It's all of a piece. It's science, Chuck. Basic research to change the world for the betterment of all humankind.

• 42:53Chuck Nice?

  And at that point, change the solar system. We're not just changing the world.

• 42:57Bill Nye?

  That's right.

• 43:02Bill Nye?

  Welcome back, welcome back. I'm your host, Bill Nye, here on StarTalk's special All-Star Edition. And one of our All-Stars, of course, our beloved Chuck Nice, and also Dr. Laurie Garrett, Senior Fellow for Global Health, the Council on Foreign Relations, the oldest think tank in the United States.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  You got it.

• 43:20Bill Nye?

  And we're talking about germs, parasites. And I'll just say, from an evolutionary standpoint, germs and parasites are the bad guys. It's not lions and tigers and bears, that's nothing. It's germs and parasites.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  They're good guys, too. You can't exist without them inside of you. Outnumbering your cells tend to win.

• 43:39Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that sounds like a germ love song. I can't exist without you.

• 43:43Bill Nye?

  You outnumber me 10 to 1.

• 43:47Bill Nye?

  Little germ.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Well, a hundred to one if you count the viruses.

• 43:52Bill Nye?

  Is that, but seriously, that's all? A hundred to one? So how many cells do we have on the order of a trillion?

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's many trillions.

• 43:59Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 43:59Bill Nye?

  Wow.

• 44:00Chuck Nice?

  That's, that's amazing.

• 44:01Bill Nye?

  That is amazing.

• 44:02Chuck Nice?

  Well, you know what?

• 44:03Bill Nye?

  It's a cosmic query. You have a query.

• 44:04Chuck Nice?

  We have another query from our cosmos and um, this is um, Justin uh, Les Nowinski wants to know, what is the nastiest virus we can expect to show up? That would be like a doomsday virus. So is there anything on the books right now? That could possibly?

• 44:27Bill Nye?

  Well, they all are.

• 44:28Chuck Nice?

  I mean, but, but that has the ability to wipe us out. To wipe us out.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  This is the zombie question and I always get the zombie question.

• 44:36Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  Um, is there, is there something out there that will turn everybody into?

• 44:41Bill Nye?

  Brain.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  And so the answer is, well, yes, we already have it. Uh, but it's moving in slow motion. It's HIV.

• 44:50Bill Nye?

  Uh huh.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  Um, in the absence of antiretroviral therapy, HIV is a hundred percent lethal event. The

• 44:56Bill Nye?

  Great.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  The percentage of people that are somehow capable for reasons we don't fully understand to survive and be long-term

• 45:06Speaker 01

  carrying the virus in their bodies without becoming deathly ill is infinitesimal in terms of the large mass of, you know.

• 45:14Bill Nye?

  So if you like to worry about something, human immunodeficiency virus is.

• 45:18Chuck Nice?

  That's it.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  It's proven. It's already happened. It's already out there. Seventy-five million people. Now, the thing is it

• 45:24Chuck Nice?

  Seventy-five million?

• 45:25Speaker 01

  That's since nineteen seventy-nine. But here's the thing, it's in slow motion. It takes ten years to reach a stage of post-infection on average before you develop what is called AIDS.

• 45:38Chuck Nice?

  So not, not to anthropomorphize um, you know, HIV, but it sounds to me like it's the smartest virus ever. Well, if I'm, if I'm going to

• 45:47Bill Nye?

  Design a virus.

• 45:48Chuck Nice?

  Design a virus. If, if, if I'm a virus, I get to live in you for ten years as you're my host before you die. I'm living rent-free for ten years.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Well, I'll give you better because the way it gets away with it is that. HIV is what's called a retrovirus. It makes a reverse copy of itself and sticks it in your DNA. And that's why you can't get rid of it. Because to build an immune response against it, you'd have to attack your own genes.

• 46:14Bill Nye?

  So how do the retrovirus viral therapies work?

• 46:17Speaker 01

  Well, they try to interrupt various aspects of the life cycle inside of a cell of the virus. And there, you take a kind of combination of them and they kind of hit the virus at each of these life cycle stages.

• 46:32Bill Nye?

  By them, you mean these drugs?

• 46:33Speaker 01

  But now, here's the thing. Actually, it turns out, as we finished the Human Genome Project, which was completed in the year 2000, 2001, sequencing the entire human genome, and then since then, analyzed, you know, millions of people's genomes, we're appreciating that a heck of a lot of what we, in our, you know, species arrogance, think is unique to us.

• 46:57Bill Nye?

  Right.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Right? I'm a human. These are my genes, right? Turn out to be originally viruses. So actually, we have been absorbing viral DNA into our DNA as long as we have existed as primate, and probably our ancestral primates, and their ancestral primates, and their ancestral primates were sucking up viral DNA into our genome. And some of it turns out to be very important, and some turns out to do nasty things like cause cancer.

• 47:26Bill Nye?

  Gotcha. So it just depends. So you, I know in nature-

• 47:31Speaker 01

  All the proverbial dice.

• 47:32Bill Nye?

  Right. And so I know in, uh, last year, there was a paper published showing that genes go from one plant to another, carried by viruses. And so genetically modifying plants or crops is not that different from what nature does. And you're saying this whole thing's been going on for millennia, or-

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Well, how do you think it all started? In the microbial soup. You know, the first little bits of genetic material formed and were surrounded by some kind of something that was protein goop to protect them. This, and it-

• 48:05Bill Nye?

  Now, look at us now.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Step by step by step. And here we are, the most elaborate protein goop on the planet.

• 48:10Bill Nye?

  With that said, thank you so much for coming. This has been StarTalk, the all-star edition, and you've been listening to Chuck Nice, our man about the planet. And this week, special insights from Dr. Laurie Garrett, the Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations. And you go around the world telling us about- All these germs and parasites that are out there with whom we have to deal.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  And I just want to say a special thank you, Bill, for the work you do to try and make the people of the world understand how idiotic it is to be anti-science and to absorb bogus theories and notions of how our planet works. You do a great service that we honor.

• 48:52Bill Nye?

  Wow, bring it on.

• 48:53Chuck Nice?

  That is true.

• 48:54Bill Nye?

  Thank you, Lori. This is fantastic.

• 48:55Chuck Nice?

  Say something nice about me, please.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  You're very nice.

• 48:58Bill Nye?

  Both descriptively and by surname. So, thank you all for watching StarTalk, the all-star edition. We will be back again next week. I've been your host, Bill Nye. Let's change the world.