[RADIOLAB INTRO]

ROBERT KRULWICH: Hey.

ADRIANNE NOE: Hi.

ROBERT: How are you?

ADRIANNE NOE: I'm fine. How are you, Robert?

ROBERT: Nice to speak to you after all these years.

ADRIANNE NOE: Yes. It's been quite a few years.

ROBERT: I should let you know that Jad Abumrad has just wandered in.

JAD ABUMRAD: Hello.

ADRIANNE NOE: Hi.

ROBERT: And Jad, this is Adrianne Noe.

ADRIANNE NOE: Last name is N-O-E, and I'm director of the National Museum of Health and Medicine.

ROBERT: So you know why we're calling you, right?

ADRIANNE NOE: Yes.

ROBERT: Okay. So let's just spring it on the audience.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: I don't remember how I happened to bump into you. I don't even know how this came up.

ADRIANNE NOE: I think you and I had been co-presenters at a TED conference.

ROBERT: Well, maybe that's what it was.

ADRIANNE NOE: Probably a decade ago. I—we may have been talking about important events in New York or civic architecture, but I—but I do remember perking up at the phrase "Grant's Tomb."

JAD: Grant's tomb? So Robert said something to you about Grant's tomb?

ADRIANNE NOE: Yes.

ROBERT: And then you turned to me and—say it again?

ADRIANNE NOE: "Well, you may know who's buried in Grant's Tomb, but I know what's buried in Grant's tumor."

JAD: Tumor? Christ.

ROBERT: [laughs]

ADRIANNE NOE: Yeah.

ROBERT: You'll see it turns out that at the museum she works at, there is ...

ADRIANNE NOE: A tumor that had been excised from the throat of President Grant in the 1880s.

JAD: Actual tissue from Grant's tumor?

ADRIANNE NOE: Yes, that's right.

JAD: Oops. Yes. Here we are.

ROBERT: We're outside the National Museum of Health and Medicine.

JAD: Hey, wait for me.

ADRIANNE NOE: It is kept behind several locked doors.

BRIAN SPATOLA: So you guys don't have an inkling of what you're about to see if we go in there?

JAD: No.

BRIAN SPATOLA: But it's a, you know, privileged area.

JAD: This is Brian Spatola, he's the collections managerm and he let us down a long hallway.

ROBERT: Through some doors into a back room.

ROBERT: Oh!

JAD: Holy, moly. Oh my God. There's like a, they're twin babies in, in formaldehyde.

ROBERT: Look! Brains. Heads. Torsos.

BRIAN SPATOLA: And majority ...

ROBERT: We haven't even gotten to the tumors.

BRIAN SPATOLA: Right.

JAD: So he led us out of that room and into another one.

ROBERT: And there, sitting on a table and waiting for us ...

JAD: Is this—is this the thing about which we spoke?

BRIAN SPATOLA: It is.

JAD: Was President Ulysses Simpson Grant's tumor.

ROBERT: Oh, wow!

JAD: Lovely.

ROBERT: It was resting in a box that looked, as it happens, exactly like a ...

ADRIANNE NOE: Cigar box.

ROBERT: Uh-oh! [laughs]

JAD: Ooh!

JAD: Which is a little ironic.

ROBERT: This was the guy who never, ever stopped having a cigar in his house.

ADRIANNE NOE: He never stopped having cigars. He smoked as many as 12 cigars a day.

JAD: Wow!

ROBERT: So it was probably the cigars that made the tumor.

ADRIANNE NOE: February of 1885. Tissue was removed, examined and his physicians concluded that he had a squamous cell carcinoma. And ultimately he was treated for pain and died in July of 1885, that same year.

JAD: Oh wow. It's pretty fast.

ADRIANNE NOE: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: So that's what killed President Grant then?

ADRIANNE NOE: Was a tumor. Yes.

ROBERT: I didn't know that.

BRIAN SPATOLA: So you see the staining that they used to bring out the details in the cells?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Is the darkness the tumor?

BRIAN SPATOLA: The darkness is the tumor.

ROBERT: Wow!

ROBERT: The very stuff that, even though President Grant got through Vicksburg, and even though he came east and they—they tried to kill him here. They tried to kill him there. They tried to—then he goes and becomes president. This is what actually killed him.

ADRIANNE NOE: This is what killed him.

JAD: Wow.

ROBERT: Can I touch it?

BRIAN SPATOLA: Um, no.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: We may not be able to touch the actual tumor of the President of the United States, but we can touch on this subject.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: We can grasp this subject. We can examine this subject. Coming up on Radiolab for the next hour. It's totally tumors.

JAD: Oh, come on. Don't call that! Because really what we're gonna talk about are not just any tumors but famous tumors.

ROBERT: Immortal tumors!

JAD: Devil tumors.

ROBERT: Contagious tumors.

JAD: And tumors that speak ...

ROBERT: [whispers] In the voice of God.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich, not to be confused ... [laughs]

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: ... with the big one.

JAD: And I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And this is Radiolab.

JAD: Stay with us. All right. To get things—to get things rolling, this first story is about something that we thought was not possible. That we hoped was not possible.

ROBERT: We learned it from ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: I'll make it work.

JAD: From this guy.

DAVID QUAMMEN: David Quammen. I'm a science journalist.

ROBERT: He's, I think, my favorite in my generation. I think he is the best writer that writes about science.

DAVID QUAMMEN: I specialize in evolutionary biology and travel on assignment to far away places and interesting situations.

ROBERT: All right, so first of all, where are you going to take us? To what part of the world?

DAVID QUAMMEN: I'm gonna take you to Tasmania, which is the island state off the south coast of Australia. You know, you go to Australia and you think of rock and deserts and red dirt and heat, but you keep going south, all the way off the south coast. Suddenly you have these rolling green countrysides. Lots of wallabies, one of a species of kangaroo that are abundant.

ROBERT: Like England countryside with wallabies? Is that the ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: Exactly. With small kangaroos hopping around.

ROBERT: [laughs]

ROBERT: But our story does not actually begin in Tasmania.

JAD: Nope. It starts in Holland.

ROBERT: With the gentleman by the name of ...

CHRISTO BAARS: Christo Baars.

JAD: Is that "Baars" as in B-A-A-R?

CHRISTO BAARS: "Barsh." Yes.

DAVID QUAMMEN: Christo Baars is a wonderfully independent spirited plumber.

JAD: A plumber?

CHRISTO BAARS: Yes.

ROBERT: Huh.

CHRISTO BAARS: Plumbing I do to make a living, and photographing is for me a big hobby.

ROBERT: We don't know just how great a plumber he is, but he's a very good wildlife photographer. And he looks for interesting animals to shoot—with the camera, I mean. So over the years, very often he puts down his range and he travels.

CHRISTO BAARS: Yeah. Well, we don't have that many animals here in Holland. Little bit of road deer and sometimes a fox.

ROBERT: And in the early '90s ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: He goes to take his latest photography sabbatical in Tasmania.

CHRISTO BAARS: I went to Tasmania on—on boat.

JAD: And were you there to take pictures of wallabies or kangaroos?

CHRISTO BAARS: No, no, no, no.

DAVID QUAMMEN: He was there this time to photograph ...

CHRISTO BAARS: Devils.

DAVID QUAMMEN: Tasmanian devils.

CHRISTO BAARS: Yeah. I—I quite like the animals.

JAD: What does—I mean, I know the cartoon, but what does a real Tasmanian devil actually look like?

CHRISTO BAARS: Well, they're about as big as a little pitbull.

DAVID QUAMMEN: But look a little bit more like a bear cub.

JAD: Huh.

DAVID QUAMMEN: White yoke on its chest. Big set of formidable teeth. They'll eat almost anything.

CHRISTO BAARS: Anything. Anything they can find. Platypus ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: Kelp, maggots and ...

CHRISTO BAARS: Fish.

DAVID QUAMMEN: Snakes.

CHRISTO BAARS: Garbage cans.

CHRISTO BAARS: The occasional rubber boot ...

ROBERT: [laughs]

CHRISTO BAARS: You name it.

ROBERT: Anyway, when Christo gets to Tasmania, he drives up the coast. He finds dead animals on the road, you know, roadkill.

CHRISTO BAARS: Roadkill from the road ...

ROBERT: To use as bait.

JAD: What sort of roadkill?

CHRISTO BAARS: Well, kangaroos.

JAD: A little devil can eat a kangaroo?

CHRISTO BAARS: Oh, yeah. When there are three, four, or five together, they eat a big kangaroo. In an hour it's gone.

JAD: Wow.

ROBERT: So he takes the dead kangaroo, drags it to a clearing in the forest. Sets up his photography equipment, very close.

ROBERT: And then what happens?

CHRISTO BAARS: Well, you just wait.

ROBERT: So he waits. And as the night falls, little black shapes begin to creep out of the woods.

CHRISTO BAARS: You can hear them sniffing. And they—they'll find a road kill

[Tasmanian devil sounds]

CHRISTO BAARS: Then they just start eating and fighting with each other. This is quite scary if you don't know what—what you're hearing

ROBERT: As they eat, Christo, standing at a safe distance in the shadows, takes their pictures. Over the years, he's done this over and over and over and he always sees lots of devils.

DAVID QUAMMEN: Devils in front of his lenses.

CHRISTO BAARS: Sometimes 20 devils running around.

DAVID QUAMMEN: Devils in his kitchen ...

CHRISTO BAARS: Are coming to your tent.

DAVID QUAMMEN: Devils everywhere.

ROBERT: But after a bunch of trips something happened. It was Easter 1996, he was in the park watching a dead kangaroo and waiting for the devils to show.

CHRISTO BAARS: But only thing I saw was one devil.

JAD: Just one?

CHRISTO BAARS: Yeah. So I thought, "Ah, I'll try another spot." And another spot, tried it out. Two devils.

DAVID QUAMMEN: They're not gone entirely, but they're scarce. And he notices something strange about one or two of the devils. There was something on the faces.

CHRISTO BAARS: The face, and on the back, and,  on their mouth.

DAVID QUAMMEN: And something that looked like a growth. A large ugly growth.

CHRISTO BAARS: So I thought, "Well, maybe they've been bitten or fighting with each other. A bit swollen up." But it was really big, you know? And blood coming out and ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: This was the first alarm bell.

JAD: So Christo, you were the first to see it?

CHRISTO BAARS: Yes. Yeah.

ROBERT: And this was just the beginning.

[NEWS CLIP: Like a plague out of hell. A dark death is sweeping Tasmania ...]

ROBERT: Television reporters got the story.

[NEWS CLIP: They never confronted anything like this.]

ROBERT: And began reporting that more and more Tasmanian devils had these lumps on their faces.

DAVID QUAMMEN: They fill the eye sockets. They puff out the lips. They infect the gums. It's really sad and hideous.

ROBERT: And whatever they were, they turned out to be lethal.

DAVID QUAMMEN: To jump ahead a little bit, the effect that it's had in the population ...

ROBERT: In some cases, devil populations collapsed by 90 percent.

DAVID QUAMMEN: ... died off.

ROBERT: Very quickly, scientists looked at the disease and determined that it was some kind of ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: Tumor.

ROBERT: Cancer.

DAVID QUAMMEN: A cancerous tumor.

ROBERT: And then the question was what's causing them?

JAD: So what—what—what did they think?

DAVID QUAMMEN: Well, a toxic chemical was guess number one.

ROBERT: Some poison or pesticide from the environment.

DAVID QUAMMEN: Guess number two was a virus.

ROBERT: So they tested in places where the devils live, looking for something toxic or some virus, and they found nothing.

DAVID QUAMMEN: And then, along comes a woman named Anne-Maree Pearse. She looked at some tumors close up, very close up, from 11 different devils.

ROBERT: So she's looking at the first tumor.

DAVID QUAMMEN: And she found that the chromosomes were sort of mangled.

JAD: Which isn't really that strange, because that's what cancer is. It's like your genetic stuff gone screwy.

DAVID QUAMMEN: Right.

ROBERT: But then she looked at the tumor from the next devil.

DAVID QUAMMEN: And she found not just also mangled chromosomes, but chromosomes that were mangled in exactly the same way as they had been in the first devils.

JAD: Hmm.

ROBERT: So now she looks at a third ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: Identical.

ROBERT: And then a fourth ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: Identical.

ROBERT: And then a fifth.

DAVID QUAMMEN: Identical.

ROBERT: All 11 ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: Exactly the same pattern in each.

ROBERT: [menacing] Dun dun dun dun!

JAD: Does that—I—I feel the sensation of awe, but I don't quite have the understanding attached . Does that mean that—that these tumors are all brothers?

DAVID QUAMMEN: What that meant was that these tumors were all genetically identical.

JAD: What?

DAVID QUAMMEN: They were all the same tumor.

JAD: How can they all be the same tumor?

ROBERT: Well, they can't because—because that would mean that these Tasmanian devils caught the cancer from some other Tasmanian devil.

DAVID QUAMMEN: Exactly.

JAD: Wait, what do you mean exactly? You can't catch cancer.

DAVID QUAMMEN: This epidemic of cancer in Tasmanian devils was a crazy impossible tumor that was jumping. It was leaping from one devil to another.

JAD: A leaping tumor?

DAVID QUAMMEN: Yeah, a leaping tumor.

JAD: And this is the point in this tale where we really have to question everything that we thought we knew about cancer. Now most people think of cancer as, like a ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: The situation in which one of your cells starts replicating and doesn't stop. It replicates uncontrollably until it destroys you.

JAD: Okay. So that's like the one cell theory, which is frankly how I thought cancer worked.

CARLO MALEY: Oh, Peter. We have to go ahead to start.

JAD: But then we spoke with this fellow.

CARLO MALEY: Yep.

JAD: His name is Carlo Maley.

CARLO MALEY: Cancer biologist at the Wistar Institute.

JAD: He told us, if you really wanna understand what's happening with the devils, you gotta toss out the one cell theory. Because cancer is not just ...

CARLO MALEY: It's not just a cell going, "Here you are."

JAD: No. It's actually many cells competing ...

CARLO MALEY: Competing for space, competing for resources.

JAD: And in the process driving each other haywire. Like, if you were to somehow go into a tumor, he says, what you would find ...

CARLO MALEY: Is between a billion and a trillion cells in there.

JAD: These are different cells, this huge clump of cells. And they're—they're all fighting it out. Because, you know, space is tight, food is scarce, and what'll happen is in the middle of this melée, you know, as the cells are competing, each individual cell is trying to copy itself. Copy, copy, copy. And somewhere along the way you get—eventually—a copying error. And every so often says Carlo, one of these mistakes will give the new cell a new talent. And in the case of cancer, it usually starts with something pretty simple like the ability to slurp up food faster.

CARLO MALEY: Nutrients like oxygen and glucose.

JAD: And now with this advantage ...

CARLO MALEY: That mutant and all of its progeny will take over that area of the tissue.

JAD: But not for long, because now you got all these mutants and they start to fight. Until randomly again, you get another copying mistake. And maybe this second copying mistake gives the cell the ability to divide faster.

CARLO MALEY: Right.

JAD: So there it is.

CARLO MALEY: Proliferating faster than its neighbors.

JAD: And it takes over.

CARLO MALEY: Growing and displacing the other cells.

JAD: But yeah, it just keeps getting worse, because now you've got these double mutants. They can eat fast, they can divide quickly, and they start to fight until you get a third mutation, then a fourth.

CARLO MALEY: And you just keep ratcheting it up. And eventually, roughly five to 20 mutations ...

JAD: You end up with a cell that is so gnarled, so mutated and so powerful that it can literally spit a kind of acid.

CARLO MALEY: Called a matrix metalloproteinase that allows it to rip through the membrane barriers.

JAD: And this is when you're really in trouble, because now the cell can roam.

CARLO MALEY: And so the cells leave the—the primary tumor. They've gotta dissolve their way into a blood vessel.

JAD: That's a mutation.

CARLO MALEY: Then they've gotta survive in the blood.

JAD: Another mutation.

CARLO MALEY: Then they've gotta stick somewhere else.

JAD: Yet another.

CARLO MALEY: Then they've got to dissolve back through the archaeal lining.

JAD: And another.

CARLO MALEY: Yeah.

JAD: So it sounds like cancer is always evolving to be more cancerous.

CARLO MALEY: It totally is. This also explains why we haven't been able to cure it.

JAD: Why when a person takes chemotherapy drugs, the cancer will go away for a while, but then it'll come back stronger, because the cells have evolved a resistance to those drugs.

CARLO MALEY: When I first got into work on cancer, I was impressed at how malevolent the disease seems. As if it's being designed to kill us.

JAD: So here's my question. This leaping tumor in the devils ...

CARLO MALEY: Mm-hmm?

JAD: Is this a case where the tumor is actually evolving into a new form, like after, say, the 50th mutation or whatever? Like now it—it doesn't just have the ability to travel in a body, but it can somehow leap out of a body through the air and into another body?

CARLO MALEY: Sure. I mean ...

JAD: But I mean, that's really scary.

CARLO MALEY: Yes, it is—it is pretty scary. But—but this is amazingly rare.

JAD: And according to Carlo, demands some pretty special circumstances.

ROBERT: How would—in a Tasmanian devil, would some tumor get from one individual to another? What would—what—How would that happen?

DAVID QUAMMEN: Tasmanian devils, God bless them, bite one another in the face a lot. They're scrambling over carcasses. They're—they're fighting and biting and swallowing and crunching. And the males also bite females during the mating period. He's a little bit of a rough lover. So you have the male and the female biting each other in the face.

JAD: So a devil with a tumor on its face, let's say it's mating with another devil, and it bites that second devil in the face. What exactly happens at that point? Is it just rubbing its tumor against ...?

DAVID QUAMMEN: Okay. When—when you think of these big ugly tumors, think of feta cheese.

JAD: Ew!

DAVID QUAMMEN: And when one devil bites another, there's a tendency for the tumor to crumble ...

JAD: Ugh!

DAVID QUAMMEN: ... and to shed tumor cells that then fall into the wounds on the second devil.

ROBERT: But something here I don't understand. Why wouldn't the immune system of the devils …?

DAVID QUAMMEN: Kill those cells? Prevent those cells from taking root?

JAD: Yeah. Because that's what immune systems do.

DAVID QUAMMEN: And the latest answer is that well, Tasmanian devils don't have as much genetic diversity as you would expect.

ROBERT: What that means, David explained to us, is that the Tasmanian devil population has gotten so inbred, they're so alike at a genetic level, that their immune systems are now confused. They don't know the difference between their own cells and invading cells coming in from other devils.

DAVID QUAMMEN: Exactly.

JAD: Which doesn't actually sound like the tumor is all that powerful. So I asked Carlo Maley ...

CARLO MALEY: Well, you get a mutation that ...

JAD: ...is this really the story of a tumor evolving?

CARLO MALEY: .... is more adaptive.

JAD: Or is it just the story of a tumor getting lucky?

CARLO MALEY: Those—I think those are the same story.

JAD: How do you mean?

CARLO MALEY: I mean, evolution is all about dumb luck.

JAD: The way he explained it, it's dumb luck that the tumor was on the outside of the face. It's dumb luck that they bite each other a lot, that a cell could come along that could shed and fall into a wound. It's all dumb luck. But that, he says, is what makes evolution happen.

CARLO MALEY: That's natural selection right there.

ROBERT: And when you step back, sometimes the results are just ...

JAD: Nuts!

ROBERT: Yeah!

JAD: Just nuts.

DAVID QUAMMEN: And this is the point where we need to talk about a transmissible tumor in—in dogs. Canine transmissible venereal tumor.

JAD: This is a tumor, he says, that's evolved way beyond the one in the devils and way longer.

ROBERT: How long has that been going on?

DAVID QUAMMEN: Well, it's been going on for somewhere between 200 and 2,500 years.

ROBERT: Whoa! Whoa!

JAD: Whoa! Between 200 and 2,500 years?

DAVID QUAMMEN: Yeah. Yes, yes.

JAD: Over two millennia?

DAVID QUAMMEN: Exactly. And if that's the case, then it's the oldest continuous animal cell line in existence on planet Earth.

JAD: You might need to say that again.

ROBERT: [laughs]

DAVID QUAMMEN: [laughs] Okay.

JAD: Because that is just too strange!

DAVID QUAMMEN: It is. It is.

JAD: Even stranger, says David Quammen, when a tumor lives this long, propagates itself this long, you can only really call it one thing.

DAVID QUAMMEN: This tumor is essentially an animal. A parasite. Not a species of parasite, but one individual parasite.

JAD: That may never die.

ROBERT: David Quammen is the author of Song of the Dodo and Natural Acts.

[DAVID QUAMMEN: This is David Quammen calling from tropical Bozeman. Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

[LISTENER: And the National Science Foundation. Radiolab is produced ...]

[LISTENER: By WNYC and distributed by NPR.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End this message.]

 

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