Cosmic Queries: Viruses, Outbreaks and Pandemics

Infectious disease expert Laurie Garrett is back with Neil deGrasse Tyson to answer your questions about deadly viruses and current epidemics like H7N9 influenza and MERS-CoV.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History. That's my day job, but by night, I'm your host.

• 0:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've got with me in studio Chuck. Nice Chuck.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Hey Neil, how are you?

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, we did a show on zombies. That was one of our most popular shows. We had Max Brooks on who wrote the story for the movie, the feature movie.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  World War Z.

• 0:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  World War Z.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  World War Z.

• 0:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it was so popular, we thought we should do like a follow-on Q and A to it.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 0:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so we brought in studio, back to StarTalk, Laurie Garrett. Laurie, welcome back to StarTalk. There's Laurie. There she goes. She works, she's with the Council on Foreign Relations and perhaps best known for Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism. And author of the book, The Coming Plague. You're an expert on infectious contagious diseases. What do you like at parties?

• 1:23Speaker 02

  My boss does call me Debbie Downer.

• 1:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Debbie Downer, exactly.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Your book sounds very hopeful.

• 1:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Coming Plague. So, we are in the Cosmic Queries edition of StarTalk and Chuck, you're gonna be reading questions. By the way, normally you read the questions to me.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Yes, I do.

• 1:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because they're on the universe.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But now, we solicited questions on viruses.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Yes, we have.

• 1:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I'm pretty like, not much I could say about that. We had to bring in Laurie for this.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Got a little subject expert here.

• 1:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There we have it. So, let's not waste any time.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Alright.

• 1:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get straight to it. Questions drawn from our listener audience.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fanbase and the listeners from Facebook and everywhere else.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Facebook, Twitter, email.

• 2:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And our footprint. Yeah, so, so go for it.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Alright, let's jump right into this. And this one comes from Facebook and it's Heidi Myers. And Heidi would like to know- Why aren't there any more outbreaks? Billions still live in poor sanitation and cramped quarters cheek to cheek with newcomers from lightly traveled areas. Bush meat is still eaten by many and transportation is even faster than it ever was. It is due to vigilance. Oh, sorry. Is it due to vigilance or are the diseases evolving into endemic conditions faster than they used to?

• 2:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. Her first sentence was.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Why aren't there any more outbreaks?

• 2:42Speaker 02

  And that is incorrect.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  Well, I think she means pandemics.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  That is incorrect.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  Uh, we just have been battling in the last four or five months too.

• 2:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who's we?

• 2:54Speaker 02

  Uh, we, the global community.

• 2:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The global community of disease fighters.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Of disease fighters.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Wow, you guys are like the Justice League of viruses.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  Well, that's what Dan Brown says. Um, yeah, so we've been fighting two. One is, uh, called, uh, sadly H seven N nine. It's a form of influenza that emerged in China seemingly out of nowhere.

• 3:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait. Why do we always blame other countries for the start of influenza? Where's the one? Where's the one that like has America written all over it? Do we call it something else?

• 3:23Speaker 02

  That would have been the H one N one swine flu of two thousand nine.

• 3:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why don't we call that the, the United States virus?

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Well, it was American swine.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Oh, really? Was that the technical name?

• 3:33Speaker 02

  Well.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  American swine? Sounds like a cool new punk group.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  Just don't call it American woman. Okay.

• 3:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so I interrupt. Go on.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  So the H seven N nine is an influenza that emerged in, first seen in Shanghai and it was coincident with in January, 20,000 pig carcasses floating through the Huangpu River, the central river of downtown Shanghai. That'd be like having 20,000 dead pigs come down the East River.

• 4:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so these in Shanghai.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Which by the way would be an environmental improvement upon the East River.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Just saying, just saying.

• 4:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, these are, in the question, by the questioner, referring to squalid areas where there, why aren't there any others?

• 4:16Speaker 02

  That would not be Shanghai.

• 4:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Shanghai is pretty decked out.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  It's a truly advanced, you know, super, hyper-modern city, 23 million people. And, all of a sudden, along comes this virus, the connection to the dead pigs never established, very controversial inside China, because pork is the number one protein source for most Chinese, so we're not going to talk about, you know, what might be in your pork. But, that virus spread all the way up to Beijing and all the way down, close to Hong Kong, and caused havoc, and seems to have stopped because they shut down the live animal markets. However, it also stopped coincident with what is, weather-wise, usually the end of flu season. So, we're all very anxiously waiting for next fall.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  Is this going to come back with ferocity? That one had a very high kill rate, it was around 25, 26%.

• 5:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of the people who got it.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  Of the people who got it. Holy moly. But, that's not as bad as the one we're now very worriedly watching, which has another unfortunate dubbing, it's MERS-CoV, which stands for Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus. Oh, God. Okay, right. But, let's just call it MERS for the sake of argument. This is a virus that is genetically very close cousin to SARS, remember that from 2003?

• 5:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Spread to 31 countries. Still have my mask from the SARS cruise. Still sporting it. He never, never gives up the old antiquated devices. So, oh, I won't go there. So, this MERS virus emerged, it seems to be from Saudi Arabia, it seems to have originated possibly in the Al-Hassa region, which is an oasis in the desert, near Bahrain, in the eastern part of Saudi Arabia.

• 6:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, once again, not squalid areas?

• 6:12Speaker 02

  No. And, a lot of the cases were in downtown Riyadh. Urban, big city, the major port of entry for people flying in and out of Saudi Arabia. What has people very concerned, and there's an emergency summit underway right now in Cairo, called by WHO. World Health Organization. What has the whole Middle East freaked out is that Omra, which kicks off Ramadan, is just a couple of weeks away. That's right. And then in early October, you have the Hajj. On both occasions, you have mass Islamic pilgrimages to Saudi Arabia. So if you've got a respiratory virus that is transmissible. Wow.

• 6:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By air.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  By air and by close contact.

• 6:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like kissing.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Like being in the Hajj, elbow to elbow, going around the tomb of Mohammed repeatedly with millions of people, then you have potential for serious spread. Man, that's a party I don't want to go to. Yeah, well, and the problem is, the Hajj has a long history of being a time for disease to spread, and it is the responsibility of the Saudi state to ensure that this religious pilgrimage is safe for all in the Islamic world.

• 7:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Otherwise, it becomes a communal bath that everyone takes in disease.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  So basically, for Heidi's question, squalid conditions, not all that bad of a thing.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  No, I don't think so.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Don't worry about it.

• 7:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not the problem. Plus, I don't think that's Mohammed's tomb. I think there's a stone inside of there, a sacred stone.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  You're right. I stand corrected.

• 7:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, more on infectious diseases. When StarTalk Radio comes back with Laurie Garrett as our special guest.

• 8:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk Radio, Cosmic Queries Edition, with a special guest, Laurie Garrett, an expert on infectious diseases. Is that what's on your business card, Laurie? Come on now.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 8:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  God, how like, what a downer, turn off. At Pulitzer Prize winning, congratulations on that.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 8:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Chuck, nice, in studio with me. Hey there. You're reading questions that we solicited after we saw the success of our zombie show. Yes. Because zombies are a model for the spread of disease, and the whole show was about the spread of disease. Zombies are very popular. Well, in there, they make good movies, but there's analogies to it that have very real application. When we ended the last segment, you mentioned that during the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, if there's a disease outbreak in that area, and then you have all these Muslims coming from around the world, and then return, if they catch the disease, that is like the ideal way to spread it. That's how you, the textbook way to spread a disease. I just want to say that's not alone amongst the rituals of our, of cultures. In the Catholic Church,

• 9:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  there is, particularly in the South American traditions, you would kiss the foot of the baby Jesus. And then the priests would like wipe it with a cloth, but use the same cloth to wipe it every time, which would then gather whatever mouth germs you might have had. So there's quite, there, there are traditions that are cultural religious that are not necessarily in the best interest of your survival. Right. When there's an outbreak ready to happen.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  I was recently in Burma, and I hiked, did a lot of walking through Buddhist temples. I didn't realize that one of them was a temple that required I climb a mountain, but you had to take your shoes off at the bottom of the mountain. And as you climbed up, you passed a lot of very angry monkeys that had left their leavings along the trail. So by the time you got to the top, a lot of monkey on your feet.

• 10:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  That's your ultimate funky monkey.

• 10:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's worse than monkey on your back. Yes, it is. Monkey, monkey on your feet. I'm gonna call that mountain, mount, never mind.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's how I felt by the end.

• 10:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I'm not doing that. So Chuck, you got another question. We're Cosmic Queries edition here.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 10:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have a call?

• 10:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're gonna go to the call.

• 10:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  We have Beth. Oh, I'm sorry. We have Natalie, who I like to call Beth sometimes, just because I'm like that.

• 10:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was lame. That was a lame comeback on that, just so you know. I'm watching you here. But go on. Natalie?

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, Natalie's the new Beth. So Natalie is on the line, and she has a question.

• 10:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You go, Natalie.

• 10:45Speaker 03

  Hello, Dr. Tyson. I actually had a question about some recent advances in what seems to be virus, let's say, technology, in that it seems a lot of the viruses we encounter now actually originated in other species. And so I was wondering, is this level of species crossing common to viruses? Or is there anything that we're doing as humans to encourage the formation of these multi-species viruses?

• 11:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Awesome question. Oh, thanks, Natalie. So obviously, that's gonna have to go to Laurie Garrett, our infectious disease expert at the table. Laurie, what do you have to say about that?

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Well, very smart question, and both of her posit answers are correct. So we have this process we call zoonosis, and that's the transmission of viruses, or bacteria for that matter, that are typically in one set of species of animals, and then boom, they jump to another.

• 11:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So zoonosis has two O's.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Right, like, oh, it's a zoo. Right.

• 11:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And zodiac comes from that as well, to twelve animals. Yeah, go on.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  Oh, but they spell it wrong. So it should be z-o-d-y. Well, at any rate, zoonosis actually is a very dangerous process, because typically, when a microbe jumps for the first time to a species that has not seen it before, that species has no particular immunity to it, and the virus is very virulent typically in that first leap. And so, for example, I was in the Ebola epidemic in 1995.

• 12:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You scare the hell out of me.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  And that was a virus that had just jumped from bats through chimpanzees to humans. And so it came in, in its initial wave, it was more than 90% lethal. And after it passed through humans for a while, it dumbed down, if you will. It became less and less lethal.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Now, is that dumbing down a result of our defenses, or the virus itself and its replication?

• 12:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, why would a virus ever dumb down?

• 12:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I don't want to say this in a way that sounds like I'm anthropomorphizing and putting a brain into a virus.

• 12:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We love it. We like that. We like that stuff here. I anthropomorphize the whole fricking universe, so you can do it for a virus. Go.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  The virus is, it's in the virus's interest to remain in your species so that you walk around and spread it. Whereas if it gets you so sick that you're immediately flattened out and therefore not particularly likely to infect others, go back to your zombie model. You want the zombies walking around, trying to touch other humans and turning them into zombies.

• 13:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  You don't want a zombie to immediately drop on the floor and not move.

• 13:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it can't be perfectly lethal. It has to only be mildly lethal so you have a chance to spread it. So why doesn't it maximize that sort of let me not kill you immediately factor? For like, I would say, maybe 60 years. Exactly.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  So that would be HIV.

• 13:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ah.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  It is a brilliantly adapted virus to the Homo sapiens species.

• 13:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it doesn't kill you immediately.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  It takes 10 years or more if you're untreated. And during that time, for most of that time, you're contagious to your sexual partners, to your...

• 13:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who don't know.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  Or who don't know. And much of that time, you have no symptoms. So you're unaware that you have a dangerous disease that you can give to others.

• 14:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're the perfect viral carrier.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  It's a perfect viral situation. But, but to go back to Natalie's question, there are, there are two key points here. One is, we are stressing our planet in so many ways that millions of species of creatures that carry viruses and bacteria inside of them are being forced close to human habitation.

• 14:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Displaced. They're displaced.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  They're displaced. Bats are at the top of the list, and bats turn out to be the natural carriers of the MERS virus, the SARS virus, Ebola, Marburg, Lissa, Nipah. We can go down a huge list of...

• 14:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why don't they all die from these diseases?

• 14:41Speaker 02

  Because apparently they...

• 14:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, maybe they do and they don't notice it.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  They're immune to them.

• 14:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, they're immune?

• 14:45Speaker 02

  They seem not to die. They seem to be carriers. They may get sick, but they don't get lethally sick.

• 14:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  And they pass it in, when they chew on fruit and they spit out the pits and so on, the viruses are encased in that spittle, if you will. And then our domestic animals, pigs or horses or what have you, say, whoa, there's some nice cheap food.

• 15:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  And they goes chomping up and they get infected.

• 15:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Were you just imitating the sound of a pig?

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Which, by the way, was pretty good.

• 15:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was actually good. It was a sloppy, sloppy pig, but go on.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  So, she's right that human activities are putting us in greater risk. The other is, of course, we have a huge trade in exotic animals. There's all kinds of people who for all sorts of, I think dumb reasons, like to collect exotic species. And it's usually illegal to both collect and smuggle. So, all of it is sub rosa and therefore not easily, you know, controlled by health officials. And this is the way that, for example, we had prairie dogs dying across the Midwest at one point from a virus that had never before been seen in North America, and it was all because of smuggled animals.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Oh, I thought it was because they were so adorable. They were dying of cuteness.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  I don't know if anybody in Texas would tell you that a prairie dog was cute.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 16:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Nadia, I think we hit that one.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Natalie.

• 16:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I, Natalie, what I called, Nadia, Natalie. Natalie, I think we got that. Did we get that one for you?

• 16:17Speaker 03

  I think so. Thank you very much.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay. The answer is, it's our fault. There you go.

• 16:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for calling in. All right. Hey, Chuck, we got two minutes.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  Okay, let me, let me find one that's very quick.

• 16:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can fit in.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Ants in the rainforest have been known, this is from Madeline Reed Luek, ants in the rainforest have been known to be attacked by a fungus which zombifies the ant and forces it to do unnatural fungus aid behavior. Is it possible for a fungus like this to attack human beings?

• 16:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  Ah, well, I don't know that we've actually seen a fungus that turned people into zombies, but we certainly see fungi that execute all kinds of clever activities to force the behavior of whatever they infect to facilitate spread of their spores.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  And...

• 17:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, there'd be macroscopic viral behavior.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you might argue that's what athlete's foot in a gym is.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Or the, or the particular fungus that causes you to scratch your genitals.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  Oh, now you're sounding like Book of Mormon. There's a particular passage repeatedly in that I can't say on the radio.

• 17:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's if you don't bathe Chuck, okay, just FYI. But okay, so fungi, since they taste good, they have a way to get into all of our bodies.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  Hmm, not all fungi taste good, but there are those that do.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Especially shiitake.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, but yeah, we are surrounded by spores that are bacterial spores, fungal spores. They drift in the air and in some cases, they luck out and land in a proper location in your personal ecology to cause disease.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 18:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's where it is.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  So there we have it. So basically, the answer is yes, one day you will be a zombie made from a fungus.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  There's your answer, Madeline.

• 18:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now that you put it that way. All right, when we come back, more of our infectious disease Q and A, inspired by all the zombie mania. We've got Laurie Garrett in studio, Pulitzer Prize winning expert on infectious disease. We'll be right back.

• 18:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. In my day job, I'm the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. But by night, I'm your host. Why are you laughing Chuck? Just trying to like get the mood going.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  I don't know, but.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  You sound like Barry White.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, I have a slight erection.

• 19:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  TMI on that one.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Yes, so true.

• 19:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So our zombie show was so popular with Max Brooks and talking about just zombies as a model for the spread of infectious diseases, that we had to do an entire Q and A on it. And we've got Laurie Garrett in studio.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 19:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who's a journalist who somehow finds herself in every place where major outbreaks have occurred in the world. I'm not even gonna ask how that happened.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  All I'm gonna say is, I think we found our primary suspect.

• 19:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, what, uh, this is Q and A. So these questions from our readers, uh, from our listeners. So what do you have?

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Okay, so this one comes from, uh, John Vera via Facebook. If we were to make contact with alien life, would it be possible for us to contract diseases from them? If so, would our immune systems be able to adapt to alien diseases, seeing as how we've never encountered them before?

• 20:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  That is such a good question.

• 20:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can I take a first pass at that?

• 20:15Speaker 02

  Okay, go for it.

• 20:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Talking about aliens.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 20:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, here, here's, here's an interesting point, I think.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 20:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In principle, we could catch a disease from aliens, but I think it's highly unlikely.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Really?

• 20:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, because they'd be completely different from us. Typically, this jumping of species from one, it's like there's something similar, sort of, from one species to another, it might have a vertebrate, you know, legs, arms, you know, a head. We don't ever catch, we will never catch Dutch elm disease, okay?

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And trees don't catch the flu, all right, that I know of.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or whooping cough. So the more remote, and like, correct me if I'm wrong, Laurie, the more remote a species is genetically from you, the less likely they're gonna have a disease that can jump to you.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Okay, now.

• 21:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So therefore, aliens would be the maximally remote kind of life to you, because they would have evolved on some other planet with some other DNA, if they had DNA at all.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 21:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Laurie.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  That was awesome. Let's get the, uh, either confirmation or rebuttal from Laurie. Laurie?

• 21:24Speaker 02

  Well, Neil.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  You are partly correct and partly very wrong.

• 21:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, and let me start with the wrong part. Where was I wrong most?

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Well, uh, in 1963, when JFK gave the "Let's Go to the Moon" speech.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you have two. One was in 1961 and another was 1962.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  Okay, thank you. A then-record-young Nobel laureate Joshua Letterbrooke said, "Mr. President, I think we need to have a meeting here because if we go to the moon and we take our human microbes as hitchhikers with us to the moon..."

• 22:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unavoidable.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  To the moon.

• 22:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  And there is any life form at all that we don't know about on the moon, our microbes might kill that life form. And conversely, if there's any life form on the moon, we might bring it back with us. His question spawned a very large effort by NASA to deal with the possibility of One Direction or another spreading disease, which, by the way, was picked up by Michael Crichton and became his famous book, Andromeda String.

• 22:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mmm. One of my favorite books of the era, actually.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  And there is a lot of theoretical talk that life was seeded by asteroids carrying life forms of some type or essential nucleotide elements. So, there's that side. The other side, however, the flip side that is sort of right about your answer, is the experience of Australia. So, as far as we know, the Australian continent had no placental mammals except Homo sapiens until the Europeans came. And so, it was, you know, lots and lots of creatures that carried their babies in pouches and so on.

• 23:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lot of marsupials.

• 23:19Speaker 02

  Lot of marsupials. And the infectious disease rate, from all verbal records, because there are no written ones, of the Aboriginal peoples was very, very low. And indeed, they were said to live extremely long lives into their 90s. Until... The Westerners came and then they were obliterated by one disease after another.

• 23:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Westerners are similar, are same species and so now they can catch the same disease.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  Right, and they brought with them all sorts of mammals.

• 23:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  Dogs and cats and pigs and horses and so on and all of a sudden-

• 23:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stuff that the continent of Australia never saw before.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  Never saw before.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 23:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent example out there.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  So basically, here's the answer. If these aliens are not traveling-

• 24:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is the Chuck Nice summary.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  This is the Chuck Nice summary. If these aliens are not traveling with horses and cows-

• 24:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then we're cool.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  We're fine.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  Or, what was it? Tribbles? The trouble with tribbles?

• 24:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The tribbles, yeah.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  If they bring tribbles, we're in deep doo-doo.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  We're in deep doo-doo if they bring tribbles. So there, there's your answer, John. Well, that was fascinating, I gotta tell ya. And seeing you two actually go back and forth with, made it even better. I'm, I'm all a titter.

• 24:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so this, this concern with the NASA astronauts led to the quarantine of the Apollo, uh, moonwalkers when they came back. You might remember the scene where they're in like a, like a Winnebago or something.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Exactly, yes.

• 24:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there they are sort of waving through the window.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They were analyzed for possible infections, uh, infectious agents. And the duration of time in there got less and less for each subsequent. And we find out, no, the moon is completely hostile to all life. So basically just come back and say hi.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 25:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, more on our special edition Cosmic Queries on Viruses and Infectious Diseases.

• 25:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are back on StarTalk Radio, the Cosmic Queries edition. Chuck Nice, thanks for doing this again.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Always a pleasure.

• 25:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Reliable guy reading these questions out for us.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 25:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, uh, these are all about sort of viruses and infectious diseases spawned by the success of our zombie show.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Could think of zombies as a infectious agent and you got it, there it is.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're a great model for the spread of disease.

• 25:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Great model. And we couldn't have done this with me alone, cause I'm like, I can bring the cosmos to the table, but not infectious diseases. So I've got Pulitzer Prize winning Laurie Garrett. Laurie, thanks for be- this is your second time on StarTalk.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I hope it's the beginning of something big.

• 26:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, cool. As long as you don't carry any infectious agents with you. So Chuck, what's you got another question?

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Yes, I do, and it's actually coming from Chris, who is on the phone.

• 26:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, excellent, excellent. Let's go straight to it. Chris, thanks for calling into Star Talk.

• 26:15Speaker 04

  Cool. Thanks for taking my call.

• 26:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, what do you got?

• 26:18Speaker 04

  Wondering about nanobots. Didn't know if they could be considered a virus or or not because they're not alive, or could they nanobots be controlled to where you guys have just mentioned the zombies, maybe they can be self-aware and turn you into a zombie or?

• 26:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm. So just to clarify, there's been a lot of loose talk with the prefix nano.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nano literally means one billionth.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So a nanosecond is a billionth of a second, and nanometer is a billionth of a meter. And so nanobiology and nanotech technically means things that are the size of a billionth of a meter, very tiny tools, life form, whatever it is you're doing. Lately, I've since seen people talk about nanobots, which are just little robots that crawl around on your desk.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? I mean, they're small, so call them a small bot, but save nano for when you really mean it.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Or an iPod.

• 27:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so Chris's point, of course, is if we can make viruses that we control that are sort of machine, machines, but are small like viruses, we can infect you with something that we manufactured in the lab. So

• 27:23Speaker 02

  Well, there is nanotech that is targeting disease.

• 27:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  And there is a lot of talk about

• 27:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be nanobots for good.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  Yes. The the the positive force of Marvel Comics or what have you. These nano agents, which are still very much in the, I would say, the front end of the research process, it is imagined would target, for example, killing cancer cells.

• 27:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  So they would recognize something on the surface of the cell that said, I'm a cancer cell, and then go in and and kill it with a poison or what have you.

• 27:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But in the hands of the diabolical, evil genius.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  Well, the question really is to ask, is there a way to make a nanobot self-reproducing?

• 28:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The way life would, the way it's a virus.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  If a nanobot could be self-reproducing, then indeed you could have an out-of-control infectious problem.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Because it would have to replicate itself.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  In order for that to happen.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Like a virus would do.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  Like a virus. So then you're really walking the line between what's man-made and what's

• 28:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. At some point, we're not controlling machines, we're controlling biological molecules.

• 28:36Speaker 02

  Well, and then the other thing that is going on-

• 28:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's the difference at that level? There's no difference.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  Well, the other thing that's going on now is that we have this dichotomy of purpose, where people in public health want to know what's going on with viruses in the natural world, so we're ready and we make our countermeasures, our vaccines and what have you. But on the other hand, there's a lot of folks that say, "Well, the best way to answer that question is to do man-made evolution. Let's direct the evolution of viruses in the lab, manipulate them, turn them into monster viruses, and see, you know, what does it take to be a monster virus?" So, um, last year, two different teams-

• 29:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're scaring the crap out of me right now.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  I know. Well, last year, two different teams, one in Wisconsin and one in Rotterdam, indeed made a super killer form of flu in the lab. And a whole lot of people said, "Why in the world would you do such a thing?"

• 29:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, why?

• 29:27Speaker 02

  And those are now sitting in freezers, right?

• 29:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We kept them!

• 29:30Speaker 02

  Last month, not to be outdone by Americans, because, you know, they don't want to be outdone by Americans with anything. The Chinese, a lab in Harbin, made 127 man-made flu viruses, of which five readily spread in the air between guinea pigs and killed them.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  So this is the new cusp that we're on, is, "Oh, we're trying to do it for good. We're trying to see in advance what nature might do." But in the process, you're putting in a freezer our maggeden.

• 29:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People, and people were afraid of physicists. The apologists are the plum crazy.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  You are not lying, man. Oh my god.

• 30:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll take an atom bomb any day over this.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I gotta tell you, in the fraternity of science, you guys are Animal House.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  Well, if you don't like that, check this out.

• 30:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, stop there. No, no, no, no. You got something worse than that?

• 30:20Speaker 02

  Wait, wait, there's more!

• 30:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got 20 seconds. Go.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  Oh, synthetic biology, there's a competition called iGym. In order to compete, high school students and college students- have to make a novel not pre-existing microorganism. In 2012, there were 248 competing teams, meaning 248 previously non-existent microbes, were made by high school and college students.

• 30:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the end of, that's the end.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  It's the end of the world right here, is what you just told us.

• 30:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, more of our special edition infectious disease cosmic queries. We'll see you in a moment.

• 31:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back in the final segment of StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition. As you know, the final segment is the lightning round.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Laurie Garrett, we didn't warn you in advance of this, but your questions cannot last more than five seconds, at most 10. Otherwise, you'll hear a bell and we go on to the next question.

• 31:27Speaker 02

  Yikes.

• 31:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you ready?

• 31:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 31:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is just so we have a lot of backlog questions here. We want to get people on the air here. Are you ready? Chuck?

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Here we go.

• 31:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The question asker. Ready, go.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  From Twitter, this is Noah Stevens, @NoahStevens. If we measure deadliness as the percentage of global population killed, what is the most deadly plague in history?

• 31:47Speaker 02

  The 1918 influenza.

• 31:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Great year, unless you have a...

• 31:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that worse than the plague in the 14th century?

• 31:53Speaker 02

  In terms of total numbers, yes. In terms of percentage of population, plague was the worst.

• 31:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, that's the biggest percent, good. How many people died in 1918?

• 32:01Speaker 02

  It depends on, somewhere between 75 and 100 million.

• 32:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, whoa. Okay, that's twice the number of deaths in the Second World War. Go.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Don't get the sniffles in 1918.

• 32:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Uh, this is from Mahasan Abdullah. In the case of viruses and vaccines, if a disease gets eradicated, okay? Will future generations still have to get vaccinated for those diseases?

• 32:25Speaker 02

  No.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  None.

• 32:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice, good.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 32:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, she's getting the hang of this.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  She's good.

• 32:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She's good.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  All right. So when it's just gone, it's all gone.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  AKA smallpox. We don't vaccinate anymore.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  All right, here you go. From Amanda Paou. This is, okay? What do you think is the most interesting historical plague or epidemic, viral or otherwise, and why is it so fascinating?

• 32:46Speaker 02

  Plague. It completely reshaped Europe forever.

• 32:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The, the politics, the, the.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  The culture, the, the status of the church, the.

• 32:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Which plague had many outbreaks? Which one especially?

• 32:56Speaker 02

  Fourteenth century.

• 32:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The big one. Gotcha.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  The black, uh, black plague, black death, black death.

• 33:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  Now, why it's gotta be a black death?

• 33:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, say that for another show, Chuck.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  People's skin turn black.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. All of a sudden that's a bad thing.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Here we go. This is from, this is from Zach's tells. If a global epidemic broke out in the third world, how long would we expect it to take to reach across the planet? Also, are we more susceptible to a pandemic now because of air and sea travel or less vulnerable due to improvements in the medical community?

• 33:32Speaker 02

  No way to answer the first one because it depends on the dynamics of the spread of the particular microbe. And the second one, of course, we're more vulnerable because we're moving around more.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 33:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So mobility matters greatly.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  And have we actually counteracted that vulnerability through medical technology?

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Well, the better to counter it with surveillance.

• 33:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gotcha.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  So we need an NSA for viruses.

• 33:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 33:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Next.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  This is from Courtney Lake. What is the simplest way you have found to explain herd immunity? Have you ever encountered an anti-vaccination believer to the science of vaccines in your community? Not, not just people who don't believe in vaccines. Is there any science for that?

• 34:11Speaker 02

  There, well, there's plenty of science for why herd immunity helps and works and what happens when it's not working. And we have a measles outbreak out of control in Wales right now. Because the anti-vaccine people won over so much of public opinion that people stopped getting vaccinated.

• 34:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa, Wales.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Wow. So just look to Wales, Courtney. There's your answer.

• 34:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, next.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  From Jared Connor. Could pathogens be spread in the atmosphere? A recent study done by Georgia Tech researchers found that E. coli amongst a great deal of bacteria that formed a sort of bacterial sphere in the upper atmosphere.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  Yes, we now have proof that pathogens, particularly sporulating ones, can spread in clouds and rain down in locations far away.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Oh, man, that is one time you do not want to make it rain.

• 34:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, do you, do you stay inside when that happens?

• 35:00Speaker 02

  Well.

• 35:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't drink rain.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  You don't know it's coming and you don't know it's there.

• 35:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't know for nothing.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Next. Okay, here's a good one from Al Geraldi. We're still in the lightning round. We're still in the lightning round. Man, she's killing it. Better than I ever was. She's killing this.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Come on, baby, you're slowing it down.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  Okay. Okay, what is the minimum size, sorry, from Al Geraldi. What is the minimum size of a population that can support a viral infection? What is support? So in other words, uh, for, for the virus itself to, to be able to continue on its life, what's the minimum number of people you need in a community so it can spread and continue to be a virulent?

• 35:38Speaker 02

  In theory, one, if that, if it's a slow growing microbe and a slow replicating one, for the duration of your life, you can be the host for it.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  Gotcha. So in theory, you could just be a vi- I could be a virus of one, like, like the army. You got it. Nice.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Okay. Next. This is from Richard Fox. Has the link between a chicken virus and obesity been proven?

• 36:04Speaker 02

  First time I ever heard there was a link between a chicken virus and obesity.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  I think it, uh, by chicken virus, he means like a whole chicken and eating one in a sitting. Fried chicken. Let's see if we have one more in here. One more in, one more in. Here we go. Quick. Do the viruses used to transfer gene traits into GMO cores, uh, survive in crops?

• 36:24Speaker 02

  No.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  Bada bing! Bang! Murray Garrett! Damn, she rocked it. Holy. You crushed that lightning round.

• 36:32Speaker 02

  That's all you got? That's all you got?

• 36:34Speaker 01

  Well, I do have more questions. She's calling you out! No, I got, okay, let's try, let's see if you can get this one in. If the human body's temperature rises when it gets a virus, couldn't that be an explanation for what the planet is going through right now? The planet is pretty much created so we couldn't have similarities.

• 36:49Speaker 02

  Your temperature rises because of your immune response. A fever is part of your immune response against a microbe. Not a good analogy to the planet.

• 36:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dude. Except in The Matrix when the Smith said, "You are a virus, virus on the earth." Laurie Garrett, thank you for being on StarTalk Radio and illuminating our inquisitive listeners on infectious disease. That was awesome. And viruses. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio. Chuck, thanks for being here. A pleasure. Laurie, thanks again. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and StarTalk Radio has been supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.