[RADIOLAB INTRO]

[applause]

SOREN WHEELER: Hi, everybody! Thank you for coming out tonight. Welcome to our home station, WNYC. Welcome to ...

LATIF NASSER: Hey, I'm Latif Nasser, here with our executive editor Soren Wheeler.

SOREN: Hello, Latif.

LATIF: The only one with the key to the executive bathroom, Radiolab's executive bathroom.

SOREN: [laughs]

LATIF: But I've never been in there myself. But the reason I've pulled Soren out of the executive bathroom here onto the mic is because a little while back here in New York City ...

SOREN: Welcome to our home turf at the Greene Space here.

LATIF: ... you got on stage to do a little live show.

SOREN: I did. It's true.

SOREN: Tonight, we are doing a live taping of a thing we've been playing around with lately.

SOREN: This was the latest in a series of shows that we've been doing with our favorite—and only—ER doctor/reporter Avir Mitra.

LATIF: Right. You may have heard the one I was on stage with him for about CPR.

SOREN: Right.

LATIF: Or the one Lulu did with him about breast milk.

SOREN: Right.

LATIF: And so this time we were like, every once in a while, it's nice to give you some air, to air you out a little bit.

SOREN: Let me out of the closet?

LATIF: Yeah, that's right.

SOREN: And because tonight is a live taping, we will be keeping it loose. We will have some audience interaction, we will have some live guests who can come up ...

LATIF: And part of the reason it was so fun, this one, was because you're an editor and you were just editing him in real time. Like, tweaking, adjusting, you're dialing it in, you're like, "Okay, we're done with this. Let's move on."

SOREN: Yeah.

LATIF: Yeah. It's sort of funny, like you can hear this is what Soren does behind the scenes anyway.

SOREN: I mean, we were actually trying to keep it loose. You know, like, not dialing it in too much, and a little bit of a seat-of-the-pants kind of thing. But also, you know, the show—what the show was about was antibiotic resistance, which ...

LATIF: Sexiest topic.

SOREN: It was—the funny thing about that is it was something that I sort of knew about quite a bit, you know? Like, we get pitches about it. We've done shows about it. You know, I think more generally all of us sort of like catch some passing news bit about it here or there once every couple years and then move on with our lives. But Avir, in his position as a doctor ...

LATIF: Yeah.

SOREN: ... he was able to make it so much more visceral, and honestly a little bit more terrifying. But at the same time, because he's reported it out and looked in all these places and tried to figure out what was going on, he also I think by the end gave—me for sure, and hopefully all of us—like, a sort of a different and maybe even hopeful way of looking at it.

LATIF: Mm-hmm. Well? Let's play it!

SOREN: Okay.

LATIF: Here we go.

SOREN: So help me welcome out Dr. Avir Mitra.

[applause]

AVIR MITRA: Hey, hey!

SOREN: Hey.

AVIR: Thank you. Thank you, guys. Wow! A lot of people. I love that.

SOREN: I gotta say that every story you've ever brought me, I feel like, starts at your job. Like, some—some—somebody walks through your doors at the ER, some, I don't know, injury or disease, or what have you.

AVIR: That is what today is kind of about, but as I was thinking about it, I kind of realized it goes back even further than that. It goes back to 2006, this thing that happened with my dad, actually.

SOREN: Your dad is a doctor, right?

AVIR: Yeah. Yeah, he's a doctor, my mom's a doctor, my grandmom's a doctor. But at the time, I didn't want to be a doctor. I just wanted to be, like, a rock star. That was my dream.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Amit Mitra: You went to med school, then you decided you don't want to be in med school, you want to be a musician. And being an old, practical man as I am, I knew that's not going to work. I told you a thousand times that the difference between a large pizza and a musician is a large pizza feeds a family.]

[laughter]

SOREN: Bold to let this room laugh at you like that.

AVIR: That's why I go to therapy.

SOREN: For sure.

AVIR: But the point is, like, at this time in my life, you know, I was going every day to band practice, hanging out with my buddies, staying up 'til five in the morning. Meanwhile my dad is waking up early. He's going to work at a hospital, and he was seeing this sort of interesting change take place.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Amit Mitra: We had been seeing infected hand patients, hand infection patients, coming all the time to us with various reasons. It could be a small scratch, it could be a pin puncture, and we were treating them basically with 48-hours worth of antibiotic—IV antibiotic or PO antibiotic. And it appears to get resolved easy. And then suddenly we started to see these patients were not really getting better within that short period of time, so we said, "That doesn't make any sense. Why is it so that we're seeing so many patients?" And we started doing some culture for each and every patient who came into the emergency room on a routine basis.]

AVIR: So he's doing this at work, and he sort of comes up with this idea, like, let's do a research project about this, let's see what's going on. So he turns to me, because, you know, English isn't his first language, he doesn't know how to use a computer, I'm a pretty smart kid. So he's like, "Why don't I get you to help me write this paper?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Amit Mitra: You were the only person who has absolutely nothing going on at that stage with the music, et cetera. Instead of sitting idle, I thought if I keep you busy doing some medical papers, later on, if you ever plan to reapply, these papers might help the guys who are looking at your application, saying, "He's not a complete derelict."]

[laughter]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Avir: I wasn't sitting idle, because I was doing music at that time.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Amit Mitra: Well, it's a derelict in the sense you are doing music.]

[laughter]

SOREN: I do feel like I should step in and let you all know Avir was a little bit of a legit rock star. I mean, you had a record, you had gig—you were on Conan O'Brien.

AVIR: That's true, that's true. But this was later, right? At the time, I was broke, I was living in the basement, it was—it was not a good look, I get it, you know? But anyway, back to the topic, you know, what we found in this paper is that these patients were coming in with infections, the bacteria was MRSA.

SOREN: Oh, sure. Like, I feel like MRSA was, like, the late '90s news, super hospital bug.

AVIR: Yeah, MRSA was like a typical bacteria that had become resistant. And it was a thing that had already existed, but it was the type of bug, the type of infection you could get, like, if you were super sick, you know, you're, like, in the hospital for months, and you're getting all these meds, like, but what this paper found is that people were coming in off the street who had, like, never been in a hospital. A kid falls off a skateboard, cut. He's got MRSA. So what we found is that actually this bacteria that lived in one place had sort of like escaped.

SOREN: Hmm.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Amit Mitra: It doesn't stay limited to that patient or limited to that facility. It essentially escapes and then it becomes a risk factor for the general population.]

AVIR: So yeah, you know, I had that experience, I wrote up this paper, and I didn't think much of it because I was like, whatever, I'm in a band. But eventually, you know, I go to med school, now 10 years go by and now I'm actually showing up in the ER as a resident. And at this point, you know, MRSA is just like a common thing. Probably three or four of you have MRSA here. It's, like, just a thing that people have. But I wasn't worried about it because we had a drug called vancomycin which can treat MRSA, so it's not, like, incurable. Now I'm working in the ER, a year goes by, and then it's weird, all of a sudden I start seeing patients who have resistance to vancomycin. So now the vancomycin isn't working. It's like, okay, so at least we have a class of antibiotics called carbapenems, a little bit more rare, but I can use those drugs for those patients.

SOREN: But you have a backup.

AVIR: Yeah, I have that backup. I can use it. But then another year goes by, and then I'm starting to see patients that are resistant to the carbapenems. That's not working anymore. And so then at that point, I have to go to this drug colistin, which is like just this crazy old drug that, like, I don't even want to use.

SOREN: Hmm.

AVIR: It's got a bunch of side effects, and basically I feel like I'm being backed into a corner all of a sudden, which is this simple infection, and now it's like I have to do all this stuff and I have no choice.

SOREN: I gotta say, like, as we've been talking about this, like, obviously I've known about antibiotic resistance, and I'm sure many of us here have but, like, how long have you been a doctor? Ten years?

AVIR: Ten years.

SOREN: It's like, I'm—not that that's not a lot, but it's not a lot.

AVIR: Yeah.

SOREN: And I feel like, you know, you've—in that short time, you have been sitting there literally watching drugs that you could use slip away. I mean, it's sort of like the pace of it. Like, while we've all been distracted by presidential politics or maybe a—you know, a pandemic, like, this has been happening right in front of your eyes.

AVIR: Yeah. No, it honestly is terrifying to, like, go up to work and see this happen. I don't know. It's just scary because it's like if we don't have antibiotics, like, we're not really doctors. Like, you can't get a surgery if you don't have antibiotics. You can't get a C-section. Like, you're basically useless without these drugs, you know? And that's why I kind of start to have these nightmares where it's like, am I just—everything I know about medicine, is it just this, like, little bubble that we're living in?

SOREN: What do you mean by, like, "little bubble?"

AVIR: What I mean is, like, okay, let's zoom way, way out, all right? For hundreds of thousands of years, we've been human beings, and we've been fighting bacteria. But for, like, most of that time, we have been losing. Like, just think about it. Like, back in the day, you get a little simple UTI, like, you die. Have sex with the wrong person? You get disfigured for life. You catch a little cold, turns into a pneumonia. I mean, basically you've gotta move somewhere like Arizona, try your best, or you probably just die. Like, that is the way the world has always been until not that long ago. Like, less than a hundred years ago, Alexander Fleming, he basically just observed that fungi were producing a chemical that was killing bacteria. So he basically just isolated that chemical and ...

SOREN: So that's penicillin, right?

AVIR: That's penicillin. And, like, everything we've done since then has been a variation on that theme. We tweak it a little bit here, find a different fungus there, but it's the same idea, and it's basically this idea that has allowed, like, civilization as I guess we all know it to exist. Like, that's how we've won wars, that's how we live in a city, that's how we're all in this room together and, like, people aren't dying, you know? Everything we do is just based on kind of this idea.

SOREN: And that is the bubble that you feel like is bursting?

AVIR: That's the, like, hundred-year bubble.

SOREN: I mean, does that mean that you actually feel like—what are we looking at in the five, ten years that there are bugs out there that—that no drug works on?

AVIR: Well, maybe I can, like, share a story?

SOREN: Yeah.

AVIR: All right.

SOREN: As your editor, I recommend you do.

[laughter]

AVIR: I know. Can't just be me blathering here.

SOREN: [laughs] No, let's move.

AVIR: All right, all right. So this is Steffanie Strathdee. She's an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of California, San Diego. But here, she's just going on vacation with her husband, Tom, to Egypt.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Steffanie Strathdee: We ended up going at a time when there had been a terrorist attack in Sharm El Sheikh a couple of weeks prior, so all of the people from the West had canceled, and we were the only one on this cruise ship, so it was really kind of a ghostly experience. I remember standing at the front of the boat doing one of those Titanic things, like, "Woo!" And then we had had this lovely seafood tower for dinner, and were looking at the stars, it was really romantic. And then all of a sudden Tom started to turn a bit green and he was losing his stomach contents all night. So I called a doctor to the ship, and the doctor first gave him an intravenous antibiotic and some fluids and said, "Oh, he'll be right as rain by, you know, dinner." And he wasn't. He was worse.]

AVIR: So they get off the ship at this point. They go to a clinic in Egypt where they're trying some other medicines. It's not working. So they actually ship him to a bigger hospital in Germany.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Steffanie Strathdee: Well, he was in an ICU in Frankfurt, where they have some of the best gastroenterologists in the world. But when the culture came back, the doctor said, "I've got some terrible news. This is the worst bacteria on the planet. It's Acinetobacter baumannii." And I went, "What?" And when he said it again, I realized, wait a second, this was an organism that I used to plate on my Petri dishes back at the University of Toronto when I was a student in the 1980s, and all we needed was a lab coat and gloves back then. How can this be the worst bacteria on the planet?]

AVIR: So despite all this treatment, he's getting all these antibiotics, he is getting worse and worse. At this point, he's on a breathing machine. He's getting sicker. So they package him up and send him back home to the University of California, San Diego, the ICU there.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Steffanie Strathdee: I have a chart of all the different antibiotics that it was resistant to right off the top. And I call those the "gorillacillins," that are the heavy duty antibiotics that have to be infused into the patient and that have a lot of toxic side effects. He—he was on all of those in a cocktail, but there was no other alternative. In fact, we didn't even know if these antibiotics were gonna do anything. When I pointed to a whole bunch of them on the wall and the doctor said, you know, "There's nothing that will kill this thing," I said, "Well then why are we treating him with all of these antibiotics?" And they said, "Because we don't know what else to do."]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Avir: This is probably a dumb question, but emotionally, what are you going through at this time?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Steffanie Strathdee: Well, I felt like it was God's cruel joke, that here I am, an infectious disease epidemiologist, and I had no idea that antimicrobial resistance had gotten this bad over the last few decades, that an organism—a "wimpy bacteria," as one of the doctors called it—that has acquired these superpowers and is now, like, killing my husband? Like, what? Like, how can this be? How can an infection that you acquire on vacation, to a guy who's, you know, so healthy that he was crawling backwards down into a pyramid one day, and then two days later he's fighting for his life? Like, this just doesn't happen, does it?]

SOREN: I mean it is—yeah, it's crazy just to think about what she said, that she was—this was a bacteria that she was plating with just gloves, and then it's become this thing that we can do nothing about.

AVIR: Yeah. Yeah, it's scary, man. I mean, like, look, and this was 10 years ago that this happened. I'm showing up to work, and I'm seeing cases like this where no antibiotic works. I gotta mix and mingle different antibiotics to try our best. And I don't know, it's just a scary feeling, because I feel like I'm watching a world war that's happening basically right under our noses and, you know, we're not really paying attention to it.

SOREN: Yeah.

AVIR: But then somehow I'm at the frontlines of this, and I'm like, how did this happen to me? Like, why am I here? I guess that's why I wanted to come here and talk today, because I wanted to sort of zoom out and take a big picture of, like, okay, there's this global war, like, what is really going on here?

SOREN: Well, I mean, so now that we've got you at sort of like a little bit out of doctor mode and into maybe reporter or investigative looker mode, like, back me up a little bit, because you talk about it as a world war.

AVIR: Yeah.

SOREN: Like, give me the layout of—you know, unpack that metaphor for me a bit. Like, what's the battlefield, who are the combatants?

AVIR: Okay.

SOREN: Walk me up to it.

AVIR: Yeah, so we could start with sort of who—who is this battle between, right? Because you got us and humans. And on the one side ...

SOREN: Or us and bacteria.

AVIR: Or us and bacteria. Yes. Yes, I forgot I was human.

[laughter]

AVIR: Us. Team us. I promise I'm human. We're on this side. Think about what we have, right? Like, we're composed of trillions of cells. We have, like, huge brains. We have all these muscles. We have fancy degrees. We have ChatGPT. We have everything. And on the other side, we have bacteria that are, like, single-celled organisms. They don't go to school. They don't know how to read. They don't have brains. They don't even have a single neuron. They don't have any muscles. Like, they—you know, just put them in the air and they'll probably just die.

SOREN: I gotta say, it raises the question, which is sort of like, how in the hell are we losing?

AVIR: No, I know. That's exactly what I think about. And yet I'm sitting at work and watching us lose it, and that's where I get to thinking. And I don't know, I've grown to have a respect for these guys because I'm like, I actually fundamentally think that they're, like, better than us. I really do.

SOREN: In what, like ...?

AVIR: I mean, sure, we have all this stuff, you know, but they can actually just evolve better than we can at a very fundamental level.

SOREN: Well, explain how something can evolve—like, because they got, like, the faster lifespan, they mutate easier? Like, what—how do you evolve better?

AVIR: I could describe it, but I'd rather kind of just show you.

SOREN: Yeah, let's do it.

AVIR: But you guys have to be involved. All right, there's some crowd participation. All right, I'm gonna set up a hypothetical scenario here where we're gonna watch evolution happen. Let's pretend you guys are all humans. And me, Dr. Mitra, I'm gonna try to kill everyone in this room. The way I'm doing it is by ...

SOREN: This is, by the way, not a typical public radio tactic.

AVIR: Right. It's an aggressive donation request.

[laughter]

SOREN: It's like, or else.

AVIR: Yeah. "The only way out is if you donate." No, I'm gonna seal all the windows, everything, and just suck all the oxygen out of the room. So you all are gonna suffocate to death. I'm sorry. I know some of you guys. I apologize. But—and I need a volunteer. I need one volunteer, ideally a single person. All right. What's your name?

DANIELLE: Danielle.

AVIR: Danielle. So sucking out all the oxygen in the room, everybody dying, we got that. But Danielle, she didn't even know this, she has a random mutation where she can hold her breath for 20 minutes. So while everybody else dies, you're gonna live. So let's think about, like, from an evolutionary perspective, if we want this trait—ability to hold your breath—to spread, how is that gonna happen? Well, Danielle has to go on some dates, meet someone that she's into.

SOREN: We don't need a doctor to tell us what has to happen.

[laughter]

AVIR: Right, right. You get the idea.

SOREN: We get the idea.

AVIR: Then maybe that special miracle of birth will happen.

SOREN: Yeah. So, you got—that's human evolution. We gotta wait a while, but that's just human—that's evolution.

AVIR: That's evolution, but it's a specific type of evolution, really. It's called "vertical gene transfer."

SOREN: Vertical, like, down the generations?

AVIR: Like, her genes pass down to the children and grandchildren. They go down the generational tree. So while Danielle has to have sex, bacteria have a sex pilus.

SOREN: So at this point in the show, Avir put up a picture right behind us on stage. And it had these, like, two gray blobs. It's kind of a grainy picture. And there's this tube, like, just like shooting out from one of them, connecting it to the other one on the other side.

[laughter]

AVIR: It's a different thing. This doesn't look like Danielle at all, actually.

SOREN: No.

AVIR: But it turns out ...

SOREN: Or like a date.

AVIR: Exactly. About a billion years ago, bacteria evolved this crazy trick where they're able to just generate a tube out of their bodies and just suck into the bacteria next to them. It doesn't even have to be the same species. It can just create a tube and connect to the person next to them.

SOREN: And they're shooting genes, I assume? Like, that's where ...

AVIR: So they make this tube, and then they can make a copy of some of their genes and just send them over to the person next to them.

SOREN: Wow, that's pretty cool.

AVIR: So that's the sex pilus. And so I kind of want to use this now as an example. Okay, so we're gonna try the same scenario again. Instead of you guys being humans, now you're all bacteria, okay? You all have a sex pilus. So I need to pick someone in the audience. I'm gonna pick—what's your name?

RICH: Rich.

AVIR: Rich. Rich the bacteria, you have a special mutation. Let me explain. In this scenario, all you need to live is light, okay? That's what you need as a bacteria. So let's go ahead and turn all the house lights down. And as these are turning down, you guys are all slowly dying.

SOREN: This is getting weird, yeah.

AVIR: But Rich the bacteria has a special mutation. He didn't even know he had it. He has the ability to make his own light. So Rich, please tell me that you have a little glow stick.

SOREN: Just to explain, by the way, we had actually handed out glow sticks to everybody in the audience as they came in the door. But ...

AVIR: Only Rich, the special bacteria, you can go ahead and turn on that glow stick for us. And hold it up.

SOREN: Yeah, kind of wave it around, let us see it.

AVIR: All right. So using the sex pilus ...

[laughter]

AVIR: Like, no one's ever been to a rave, I guess.

[laughter]

AVIR: All right. So Rich, anyone you tap on the shoulder can then turn on their glow stick. Don't do it yet. Don't do it yet. We're gonna time this, okay? And then once you—you know, once you get tapped, you can turn on your glow stick and you can tap people around you.

SOREN: Yeah, when you get tapped, also spread the tap.

AVIR: And let's see how long it takes for this trait to spread everywhere, okay? On my count. Ready, three, two, one, go.

SOREN: Okay.

AVIR: Hold them up so we can see them. Let's see this happen. Don't turn on your glow stick 'til you get tapped.

SOREN: So Avir and I are standing on stage in the dark. And it was actually pretty cool to watch this happen. You could sort of see Rich's light spread to the next person and the next. And at first it was actually pretty slow and sort of halting.

AVIR: These guys are still dying over here. They're struggling.

SOREN: But then it started to, like, spread pretty quickly. It took a little while to get, like, over to different sections.

AVIR: The VIP section is all dying over here.

SOREN: But really, once it got going, it went fast.

AVIR: Amazing, all right.

SOREN: And suddenly, the whole theater was sort of like a sea of little wiggling lights.

AVIR: All right. Nice! Let's bring the house lights up. Give yourselves a round of applause. That was actually really good.

SOREN: That was amaz—that was great. That was really amazing to watch.

AVIR: You guys are great bacteria. That was so good.

SOREN: Everybody, give yourselves a round of applause.

[applause]

AVIR: So what you just witnessed is actually horizontal gene transfer, right? So while humans have to pass genes down, you guys can pass genes horizontally. You could just pass them to each other.

SOREN: Meanwhile, I think Danielle is still, like, trying to find that date.

AVIR: Right, she's not so sure about the last date she went on. There's gonna be some time, right?

SOREN: I mean, I want you to take your time, but ...

AVIR: Right, exactly. So, you know, you've got to think about that. Look at how fast that spread. And now you take into account that for every single human being on Earth, there are 30 trillion bacteria, okay?

SOREN: Per person?

AVIR: Per person.

SOREN: So that's me, 30 trillion, you 30 trillion, 30 trillion, 30 trillion.

AVIR: Exactly. This is just unbelievable. There's universes of bacteria for every single human being, and all it takes is for, like, one mutation to happen in one of those bacteria, and then that trait is gonna spread like wildfire.

SOREN: So what we're up against is, like, terrifying numbers of blazingly fast and nimble, tiny little enemies.

AVIR: Exactly. It really is, like, our brains versus their sex pilus.

[laughter]

SOREN: [laughs]

AVIR: And their sex pilus is winning, basically.

SOREN: Well, but—okay, but this is actually where I was hoping that our brains might come back in, because okay, sex pilus and trait tricks and we do a drug, they figure out a way around it, but then we come up with a new drug.

AVIR: Well, that's the idea. Problem is, like, we haven't really been coming up with new antibiotics. We sort of fell off a cliff. Like, we haven't come up with a new antibiotic, a significant one, since, like, 1980.

SOREN: Oh, wow!

AVIR: We just don't—we just don't anymore.

SOREN: Why? Why is there not—there's zero new antibiotics since 19—whatever that is? Why?

AVIR: Yeah. It's mostly like an economic issue. You know, you think about how much money it costs to do all these trials to invent a drug. That's gonna cost you like a billion dollars. So that's a lot if we all have to chip in on that, you know? And you're gonna do all this to make a drug. It might work. And if it does, bacteria, just in a matter of, like, two, three years, are gonna figure out a way around it. So it's just kind of like a money-losing proposition for pharmaceutical companies, so they're just not gonna do it.

SOREN: Ah. So that means that you then are literally just sitting around using the same drugs over and over again. Meanwhile, every time you use one, the bacteria has a chance to train up on it and figure a way around it.

AVIR: Yeah. Yeah, and that's how, like, a little trickle of bacterial resistance that's always been around, it's like turning into an avalanche. It's scary. I talked to the WHO. There's a whole chapter of the WHO dedicated to this, and they told me that currently, as of today, one in six infections is resistant to the antibiotic that used to work for it. Like, you have to use something else. And currently today, a million people a year are dying from infections that they used to survive, like, a couple years ago. And obviously, that number's about to get a lot bigger too. So yeah.

SOREN: Do you remember when you were pitching me this story? And I said, "Well, you can't just leave these people depressed and destitute."

[laughter]

AVIR: No, I know.

SOREN: And you remember I said, like, there's—somewhere there's gonna have to be a ray of hope, and I'm thinking now-ish?

AVIR: Okay. Okay, let's see.

SOREN: So with some prodding, Avir did eventually talk about how they're dealing with the rise of antibiotic resistance in hospitals.

AVIR: Like, we have, like, committees that are filled with annoying people that will email me if I do something wrong, or they pull me into a Zoom meeting, or there's, like, all these, like, protocols we've got to follow.

SOREN: Basically making sure that they don't use antibiotics in a way that give the bacteria a chance to evolve, or resist the drug, and then pass that resistance along.

AVIR: You know, we want to treat things only if there's really an infection, and then really kill everything. Like, you know, we don't want there to be, like, any survivors that can live to tell the tale of what happened.

SOREN: But Avir, he did have a little bit more darkness that he wanted to stare at, although I promise it does eventually lead us to a more hopeful space eventually. And that all comes right after this quick break. Stick around.

SOREN: This is Radiolab. I'm Soren Wheeler, and we are back on stage with Dr. Avir Mitra, who is giving us his frontline view of what he calls a world war between us and bacteria. And at this point in the show, Avir told us that as he was reporting all of this out, he realized it wasn't just a problem with him giving antibiotics to a patient in the hospital.

AVIR: Like, we also give them to animals. I don't know why that never occurred to me. But if I had to ask you, like, of all the antibiotics given in the US, what percentage would you say go to humans versus animals?

SOREN: I don't know. I feel like it's one of those things we're not supposed to guess bigger than I would think. But I have no idea. Half? I don't know.

AVIR: It's reasonable, but actually 70 percent of all the antibiotics given are given to animals, not humans.

SOREN: Another way of putting that is that every year here in the US, we humans take about seven pounds of antibiotics, whereas farm animals are given 30 million pounds every year. So basically, cows and pigs and chickens are getting four times the amount of antibiotics that we humans are getting.

AVIR: Yeah, I had no idea.

SOREN: Wow!

AVIR: They are basically just mixing their food with antibiotics. They mix the water. They're drinking water with antibiotics. They, like, spray it on the ground. They inject them with antibiotics. It's just like a real ...

SOREN: So—but this is not, like, just if they get sick.

AVIR: No, no, no. This isn't just if they get sick. It's just very willy-nilly. In many cases, these are the same antibiotics that we use, treating, like, the same infections that we get.

SOREN: So Avir ended up talking to a scientist, a guy named Lance Price. He's the founding director of the Antibiotic Resistance Action Center at George Washington University. But before he was that, he was researching this exact problem, the use of antibiotics on farms. And the thing that he was specifically trying to figure out was: What effect could the use of all these antibiotics on farm animals have on us?

AVIR: So he designs a study, and like all good studies, it involves poop.

SOREN: Of course.

AVIR: It's like a common theme in Radiolab, I feel like.

SOREN: Yes, it comes up a lot.

AVIR: So he designs this study. All right, so what he does, he decides to study the poop of chicken catchers—the person who goes around the chicken farm, and picks up the chickens by their necks with their hands and throws them in the chicken truck when they're, like, ready to get harvested, basically. So they're touching a lot of chickens. So what he does is he measures the bacteria in the poop of these chicken catchers versus the bacteria in the poop of, like, regular people like, you know, you and I.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lance Price: So we cultured all this poo, and then we analyzed the data. And the one thing that popped out, like, really strong was gentamicin resistance. And so it turned out that the chicken catchers had 32 times the risk for carrying gentamicin-resistant E. coli as their peers.]

AVIR: So basically these chickens, before they even hatch, they would poke a hole in the egg and inject that egg with gentamicin. Then the chickens would grow up, they're being fed gentamicin, like, left, right, center. And so the E. coli that live in the gentamicin were eventually learning from this, becoming resistant to the gentamicin. Those bacteria were jumping from the chickens onto the hands of the chicken catchers, into the mouths of the chicken catchers, enough to the degree where they're literally shitting out resistant bacteria.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lance Price: And look, if you're an epidemiologist and you get three times the difference, you're doing cartwheels down the hall, right? So you're like, "I found something! Look at this, it's miraculous!" But this was 32 times, and I just said we've gotta be doing something wrong, right? So we looked at the numbers over and over, and—and it was—it was clean.]

SOREN: So the person handling a chicken is 32 times more likely to have a resistant form of E. coli in their bodies than someone who's not handling a chicken?

AVIR: Yeah, exactly. And then—then they find out that okay, these chicken catchers are going home, that resistant bacteria is getting into their children. Then they find that those bacteria are spreading through the schools of the children. They later find out that if you're driving behind that chicken truck carrying chickens, those bacteria are getting off of the truck in through your air vents and landing in the cars behind them onto the people behind it. It's like—it's truly insane, and then when you really just sit back and think about it, like, then these chickens go die, they get packaged up with the bacteria in them and they get sent to, like, all of our houses, really.

SOREN: Do you remember when, like, 10 minutes ago I was like, can we, like, do the turn-to-hope thing?

[laughter]

AVIR: No, I know. I know. But, like, look, this is—to me, this is exciting. This is good because, like, I'm spending my whole life in the ER, like, trying to be super anal. Like, no, you're not getting any azithromycin. Like, I'm not giving you a Z-Pak. But really, like, this is where the real battle is happening. I've been on the wrong battlefront the whole time.

SOREN: Well, but so then what—I mean, okay, what's your next move? Like, you're gonna call up Big Chicken?

AVIR: Well, I did the Radiolab thing. Yes, that's actually exactly what—I started emailing people. I was doing—I was trying to do the Radiolab thing. So I emailed Tyson Chicken, and they weren't into me. But I kept looking, I kept looking. Eventually, I was able to find one guy who is a higher-up at a chicken company, big deal guy.

SOREN: Okay.

AVIR: And he actually agreed to talk to me.

SOREN: Great.

AVIR: So let's bring him up. This is Bruce Stewart-Brown. He's the chief medical officer at Perdue Chicken.

SOREN: Bruce.

BRUCE STEWART-BROWN: Nice to see everybody.

SOREN: Thank you for coming. Thank you for agreeing to talk about this.

SOREN: I want to just break in and say that I actually had figured that this was gonna be the point in his reporting where Avir would hit a wall. And so it really felt like a—sort of strange but very cool opportunity to sit down and talk to somebody who's on the inside of one of the biggest chicken producers in the country.

BRUCE STEWART-BROWN: Yeah, so I'm a veterinarian, and I started at Perdue in 1998 as a field veterinarian, and just kind of getting used to how commercial chicken was raised, and the process of being a veterinarian specifically for chickens. And in 2002, we got in a room together and talked about the fact that concerns around antibiotic use had hit the radar for us. And that means that people were calling in or writing and saying, "Look, I heard you—you guys use a lot of antibiotics in chickens." And they wondered why. And in this meeting then, Jim used—Jim Perdue is a third-generation CEO, a chairman of the company at the time, and Jim is going, "First of all, tell me why we use all those antibiotics, and then second, tell me how we can not use all those antibiotics. Let's make it a project. And start now."

SOREN: Let me—let me ask you, at that moment in time when you're—when the big cheese has showed up and said we're gonna do this, what's your reaction?

BRUCE STEWART-BROWN: I'm going, "Oh, man, we have—we have got to change everything." If you just pulled out the antibiotics, you are likely gonna have to treat quite a few chickens. And that's not right. That's not a great thing.

SOREN: So what do you end up doing to make up—if you're going to take the antibiotics out, what do you have to do to make up for that?

BRUCE STEWART-BROWN: First thing is you have to redefine "clean." You have to decide, in our case, we thought this egg was clean, it's gotta be cleaner. So there's four ways chicken companies were using antibiotics, including us. One is it was going in every egg as—as a ...

SOREN: Like, injected into the egg?

BRUCE STEWART-BROWN: Injected into the egg with a vaccine to keep the vaccine clean as you vaccinate. You have this tremendous opportunity in chicken to vaccinate the embryo. It's amazing, honestly, that you can get the vaccine started, you know, in an embryo. But you do poke a hole in the egg. And the egg did come out of the rear end of a hen.

[laughter]

BRUCE STEWART-BROWN: Which is the same place, you know, manure comes out of. So it can be dirty, and the idea was, keep it clean with the antibiotic. Okay, that's the first ...

SOREN: So cleaning chicken cloaca is step number one?

BRUCE STEWART-BROWN: Yeah, well—but the other parts were there was antibiotics in the feed. Every bite of feed from day old had an antibiotic in it in those days, even though they weren't sick, just in case they might be. And it helps their gut stay healthy through all the challenges. So we were putting antibiotics in the feed for that.

AVIR: And then when I—when I went down to the farm, I'm seeing that the things they used to feed these birds were other animal parts. And so that gives them gastrointestinal illnesses because it's like, you know, kind of gross food, and so then they gotta use the antibiotics, so then they decide to, like, change the feed.

BRUCE STEWART-BROWN: Yeah we had to change—we had to look at the feed a whole new way, take the antibiotics out, take the animal byproducts out—because those are irritants—put in probiotics, good bacteria, things that help the digestion, the digestive tract of a chicken operate optimally. Same thing, you know, you're probably all familiar with the good bug thing. It's really big.

SOREN: So is this all like—is it, you're going along, is it working? Does it seem like you're getting somewhere? I don't know, maybe there's some other things you had to do, too, but ...?

BRUCE STEWART-BROWN: Yeah. Well, we did have to work on the chicken house. And the change in feed, the change in approach to feed was a big deal. The cleaner eggs was a big deal. But changing the way you care for chickens became the thing. Raise these chickens in a way that even if nobody cared you used antibiotics, you wouldn't use them. The whole thing became about caring for chickens in a way that you'd never—let a chicken be a chicken. Put things in the chicken house so they can get up off the floor. Let them exercise, put some windows in the chicken houses back in the chicken house. The traditional industrial chicken house has zero windows, and it's all artificial light. Put some windows back in, expand the floor space to something above the floor. Chickens like to do three things. They like to climb, they like to perch, and they like to hide. And in a traditional chicken house, they don't get to do much of any of that. And so get that back in there, take the stressors away from the way you raise chickens as much as you can and learn all the time.

SOREN: Can I get you to like—I mean, over how long did this take, and maybe where did you land? Where are we at now?

BRUCE STEWART-BROWN: Yeah, so 2016, we were done. The only ...

SOREN: Wait, "done" means what?

BRUCE STEWART-BROWN: All the antibiotics were out of the feed, out of the eggs, not using any antibiotics for anything other than treating sick flocks.

[applause]

SOREN: Thank you for the chicken, and thank you for coming up here and talking to us. All right, everybody. That—I mean, it is, actually, imagining the chicken leaving its well-lit coop to go out to its little sort of playground exercise area with maybe, like, a probiotic parfait in hand, it's delightful, other than the fact that we are eventually gonna slaughter and eat them.

AVIR: Right. Right. Right.

SOREN: And I gotta say, you know, like, also to take in consideration just what, like, the overall—the animal industry is doing, should we be doing it, the climate ...

AVIR: Of course. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. It's like there—you know, there's a lot of problems with eating meat in general. You know, you can think about climate change. You can think about ethics. And this doesn't solve all of that. But certainly in just a proof of concept, you know, to me it's interesting. Like, the antibiotics were sort of masking cruel treatment towards these animals. Like, you can treat them however you want, but if you pump them with enough antibiotics, they live. And once you remove those antibiotics, all of a sudden, you're sort of seeing the truth of what you're doing. And if you treat them better, they're healthier, you're healthier, what we do to them comes back to us. I don't know.

SOREN: Yeah.

AVIR: It's kind of an interesting proof of concept. I'm into it.

SOREN: Yeah, I guess I'm just, like, back thinking about the war because, like, let's say that everybody went full Bruce, and there's maybe a cow Bruce and a pig Bruce.

AVIR: Turkey Bruce.

SOREN: But even then, like, yeah, like, given the way you've described what's going on globally, I mean, is even that any kind of decisive move on our part?

AVIR: Right.

SOREN: Or are we ...?

AVIR: The way I see it, everything that Bruce is doing, that's sort of playing great defense, right?

SOREN: Yeah.

AVIR: Like, let's stop training these guys to get better. But I agree. You know, at some point we have to go on offense, like any good war. And so I do have one more story I want to share with you guys that kind of takes us there. And honestly, I think this is the part that gives me really the most hope, the most excitement.

SOREN: All right, good.

AVIR: But to get there, we're gonna have to go back to, like, a dark place. It's been the theme of the night. But we gotta go back to Steffanie Strathdee.

SOREN: Who went with her husband Tom, and then Tom gets sick. Okay.

AVIR: Exactly.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stephanie Strathdee: So one day the doctors came to me and said, "You know, Steff, you realize that Tom's on life support, right?" His—he's on a ventilator to keep his lungs working, he's on three medications called pressors to keep his heart working, and now his kidneys are blinking on and off. So that's the trifecta where we stop talking about organs that are having problems working. We're talking about whole systems, whole body systems. I'm going, "Okay, okay. Like, speak to me." And they said, "Well, do you want to start kidney dialysis?" And so what they were really asking me is do I want to pull the plug? And that moment was just like, I can't believe this is happening, you know? When you have your advance directives and you—you know, you sit down with your partner and you write a will, and, you know, he had said to me, "Hey, you know, if I'm ever, like, brain dead, please, like, you know, pull the plug."]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stephanie Strathdee: But this situation, it was his brain that was alive, it was his body that was dying, and I had no idea what he would want me to do. So the doctors are looking at me and they're saying, "Okay, you know, what do you want to do?" And I said, "Okay, I think we should ask Tom what he wants to do," and then they said, "Well, he's in a coma, Steff. Like how—how is he gonna communicate?" I said, "Well, you know, let's see. Let's just see."]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stephanie Strathdee: So I had this conversation with Tom that you just never think that you're gonna have to have with somebody, and I said, "Hey, honey. I know you're fighting really hard and you have to be really tired, but I need to know if you want to live. And if you want to live, I need you to tell me by squeezing my hand, and I will leave no stone unturned." And I remember that moment like it was just yesterday. I still get chills just talking about it. I waited for a whole minute, and I thought, oh my God, he's not gonna squeeze my hand. And then all of a sudden he squeezed really hard. And I thought, oh yeah! Like, you know, I pumped my little blue-gloved fist in the air. And then I thought, oh crap! Like, what am I gonna do now? I'm not a doctor.]

SOREN: I mean, the question in the room here—for me at least—is what did she do next?

AVIR: Yeah, well, we can ask her.

[applause]

SOREN: All right. We will get Steff's story and what happened to Tom next, right after this quick break.

SOREN: Hey, it's Radiolab. I'm Soren Wheeler, back on stage with Avir Mitra. And we'd been hearing the story of Steffanie Strathdee and her husband, who was suffering from a bacterial infection that no antibiotic drugs seemed to be able to treat. And at this point in the show, we actually got Steffanie up on stage to share with all of us what exactly she had to do next.

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: Hey, everybody. I can't believe I'm on Radiolab! I'm geeking out!

SOREN: Thank you for coming. I'm gonna just go in with the first one, the big question that we're all left with, I think: What do you do next?

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: Well, I was terrified. I mean, some of the top infectious disease physicians are at University of California, San Diego. They were our colleagues caring for Tom. And—but, you know, I was his wife, and I wanted him to live. And I thought, okay, like, if he dies, I want to know that I did my very, very best. So I'm an AIDS researcher by training, and I learned as an AIDS researcher that there are experimental treatments that got studied while we were doing clinical trials. And there should be some experimental treatments that we could use to save Tom. So I hit the research. I went on PubMed, which is a search engine that the National Library of Medicine makes it freely available. And I entered the keywords Acinetobacter baumannii—the superbug that was killing him—alternative treatments. And up pops something called "bacteriophage therapy," or phage therapy for short.

SOREN: Phage—and what is bacteriophage—or what's a phage?

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: Bacteriophage are viruses that have naturally evolved to attack bacteria. They're the oldest, most populous organism on the planet, and they—they kill bacteria.

AVIR: So are you saying just like how, like, I can catch a cold, like a bacteria can catch its own cold type of thing?

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: Yeah! Well, what was weird is that I learned about bacteriophage when I was a student at the University of Toronto back in 1986. Like, it was just mentioned in class, but I never knew that they had ever been used to treat, like, bacterial infections. But they were discovered before penicillin. It's just that they had been, you know, popularized in the former Soviet Union, and that was seen as kind of Russian medicine and fell out of favor in the West.

SOREN: Okay, so the idea then is that you're gonna put a virus into Tom to fight the bacteria. And are there—is it like, oh, when you're doing the PubMed Googling, it's like, here's the one to use? Like, what are you coming up with?

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: Yeah. Well, that was the other problem. Well, first I got—my colleagues at the University of California, San Diego said, "Wow, what an interesting and intriguing idea. If you can find phage that are a match for Tom's bacterial isolate, we'll call the FDA and see if they'll give us permission to give it to him on a compassionate basis because he's gonna die." But turns out there's, like, 10 million trillion, trillion phages on the planet. Like, that's more than all the stars in the sky. So that was even more daunting. And luckily, I was able to find researchers that agreed to help, with the help of Dr. Chip Schooley, the head of infectious diseases at the time at the University of California, San Diego. You know, we found people—and even the US Navy, who had been sourcing phages from the bilges of ships around the world.

SOREN: From, like, the inside of the—underneath the ship?

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: Yeah, yeah.

SOREN: They're, like, scraping off viruses?

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: But, you know, the best place to actually go for phage is where there's a lot of bacteria. And you know where there's a lot of bacteria, Soren?

SOREN: I feel like this is going back to poop.

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: It's going back to poop.

[laughter]

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: So it turns out that sewage and barnyard waste and duck pond waste, that kind of stuff, the stuff from, like, the farms that Bruce was talking about, that's a perfect place to source phage. So within a couple of weeks from my first email asking total strangers for help to the day that we treated Tom with these viruses that attacked bacteria, it was only three weeks.

SOREN: Three weeks of people tromping through the sewers and scraping the bottom of Navy boats and, like, sending like ...?

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: Well, some of these were already samples that were in labs, but literally, yeah, you know? So, you know, I couldn't believe that we were doing this but, you know, like Tom's in a coma. I said, you don't believe, like, we're gonna be, like, pumping, like, you know, like, purified shit into you to see if you're gonna live. Like, it's just like, I can't believe this is my life, but that's essentially what we did.

SOREN: And that was then—did you say three weeks later?

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: Three weeks. That's all it took. Like, compare that to an antibiotic that takes 10 to 15 years to develop and a price tag of a billion dollars or more.

SOREN: Yeah.

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: But, you know ...

SOREN: So ...

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: So that's what we did. We—it was the scariest day of my life, but me and Tom's two daughters said, "Okay, let's do it. He's—you know ..."

SOREN: And is it sent in an injection, an IV?

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: First, we put them in the catheters in his abdomen, because that was the closest to the source of the infection, which was in his gut. And then we injected them. And it was a billion phages per dose every two hours. And two to three days later, he was, like, within hours of dying, I was told. He lifted his head off the pillow, opened his eyes and kissed his daughter's hand. Carly was on shift that day. And everybody in the ICU freaked out. There were people cheering. There were people crying. I was crying, too. It was the happiest day of our lives.

[applause]

SOREN: Wow! How much do you know about, like—I mean, the virus goes in and attacks the bacteria but, like, how do you—how much do you know about why this is so effective, or what's actually happening in there or how this is going down? Like, what—what's actually going on inside the body?

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: Well, in Tom's case, there was something else that was a bit of an opportunistic kind of situation, because a couple of the phages were synergistic with one of the antibiotics.

SOREN: What does that mean? How is a virus synergistic with a ...?

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: Well, okay. Let me explain this. Okay, so you're a bacteria, okay?

SOREN: Okay.

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: And I'm a phage, and Avir is the antibiotic, okay? And we're both trying to kill you, all right? Okay?

SOREN: [laughs] Why does this keep happening?

[laughter]

AVIR: Typical day at the office for Soren.

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: Now you're a bacteria.

SOREN: So much death and—okay.

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: You do not have a brain in this example, okay? Like, I don't know about regular life.

AVIR: Just in this example?

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: But you have to make a genetic decision about who you would rather face: him or me? And I'm scarier than he is, okay?

SOREN: Okay.

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: You do not want to have to deal with phage.

SOREN: I don't.

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: So I have to take off your shirt. Now—okay.

SOREN: Nobody wants that.

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: Now I know that this is not that kind of show, people. But your shirt is—is your slimy biofilm layer, okay? That's your superpower.

AVIR: It's his resistance basically, right?

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: But that's where the receptor for the phage is is on your shirt.

SOREN: Okay, so if I get rid of my biofilm shirt receptor, you can't attach.

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: That's right. And so I—I die. But in doing so, you have made yourself susceptible to Avir's—the antibiotic.

SOREN: Because he loves nothing more than a shirtless ...

[laughter]

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: So he kills you. He gets you.

SOREN: So it's a one-two punch kind of thing.

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: That's right.

SOREN: Or even if one starts to work, you can—but does that mean that, like, when you use phage therapy, not only do you have a new way of getting at this bug, you've unresistance-ed it. Like, you've dialed back the resistance that it developed over the years of whatever, and now, is it—now a bacteria can actually be newly susceptible to a drug that was ...?

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: That's right. So, you know, phage therapy is now going through clinical trials all around the world. It's—phage is all the rage, people. But ...

AVIR: She's not gonna say this but actually she is the one, like, setting up all these clinics all over the place.

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: No, no, no.

AVIR: Yes, she is.

[applause]

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: Well, at the University of California, San Diego, we do have what became the first dedicated phage therapy center called the Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics or IPATH, so we do provide phage therapy to people that have no ...

AVIR: That's what I said.

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: But—but, there's many, many around the world now, and of course I didn't do this all by myself. There's been ...

SOREN: I mean, but I hear a lot happening, but I also have to wonder a little bit, like, why, like I didn't know more about this already, why Avir wasn't already thinking about this as something he might have to use. Like, why isn't this already happening everywhere?

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: Yeah. Well, you know, when COVID came on the scene everybody, you know, felt it right away, right? It was a pandemic that hit hard, hit fast. With antimicrobial resistance, it's a slow burn, so you don't really know or feel it unless it hits you in your personal life, like you're Avir, you're an emergency room doctor, or you're his dad and, you know, you're seeing patients that used to be treatable that aren't treatable anymore, or you're me, like, whose husband is suddenly dying. And, you know, we have kind of let this creep up on us. But, you know, also with COVID, we had four vaccines or five vaccines developed within a year, right? And so if we had the political will to move phage therapy forward, we could be doing a lot more than we are. So those trials are getting done now, but the pace is not fast enough to overcome the pace at which resistance is spreading.

SOREN: Can I ask you the sort of like embarrassingly typical question that a Radiolab person might ask?

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: With your shirt on. Yeah.

[laughter]

SOREN: So in the moment that Tom came back, like, I don't know, talk to me about how that felt. I mean, I feel like there's relief. I heard joy. But is there pride? Like, I don't know. Give me a little bit on that.

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: Well, I think that Tom deserves a lot of credit in this, too, because that man had so much resilience to bounce back. And, you know, he had been in the hospital nine months. He'd lost a hundred pounds. He lost all of his muscle mass. He had to learn how to walk, how to talk, how to do everything all over again. And now he's the face of evidence-based hope.

SOREN: Yeah.

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: You know?

SOREN: That's an amazing thought. Thank you, Steffanie.

[applause]

SOREN: Thank you for sharing your story with us. Thanks for being here tonight.

STEFFANIE STRATHDEE: Thank you. Thanks for having me, everybody.

AVIR: So cool. Wow!

SOREN: All right, Avir. So we've been through a lot together.

AVIR: Yeah. Thanks for coming on this journey of trauma with me, guys. I appreciate it.

SOREN: But I—you know, like, starting from a place of sort of like seeing this happen in front of your eyes, dealing with it on a day-to-day basis, turning to try to sort of start and understand it and do the reporter thing, or at least the research thing, and finding all what you found and sharing all that with us, I guess I am a little bit curious just like where you're at now. Like, are you still in therapy, or ...?

AVIR: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I mean, you know, I still have a shift tomorrow, so I still gotta go to work. You know, I still gotta see this stuff, so it's still there. But I guess I don't know. I mean, thinking about all this stuff makes me think about the whole thing a little bit differently.

SOREN: How so?

AVIR: I mean, okay, let's think about it. Like, when I was first thinking about it, I'm thinking, it's humans versus bacteria, you know? And I'm at the middle of this. It's all about me and, like, that kind of thing. And as I'm thinking about it more, it's like it's not, really. It's humans, bacteria, there's animals—animals probably playing a bigger role than humans. And then if you think about it some more, it's like, wow, all our antibiotics, our whole weaponry comes from fungi, because they've been battling bacteria for longer than we've even been around. And now I'm listening to Steffanie, it's like, oh, there's this whole class of viruses that's been fighting bacteria for longer than the fungi have been around. So I don't know, I guess I'm just looking at the shape of this a little bit differently. It's like, there's a lot of players here, and if anything, we're just like the newest kid on the block.

SOREN: But it does also then feel so much more—it feels like maybe overwhelmingly complex.

AVIR: Yes, it is. But I don't know. I guess in a weird way, like, I'm realizing we're so young as a species, there's so much we don't know. There's so much left to learn, and I don't know, I just think there's hope in that.

SOREN: Yeah, I can see that.

AVIR: Well, I guess before we go, I just wanted to play one more quote, because I feel like the show can't end without hearing this. I did talk to Tom, and I just wanted you guys to hear him. I asked him if he remembered by any chance that moment where Steffanie squeezed his hand and asked him if he wanted to live.

SOREN: And this is—he's in a coma, and she ...

AVIR: Right. At this time he's in a coma. He's completely out of it. He's on the verge of death. And Steffanie asked him, do you want to live?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tom Patterson: At that moment, I thought I was a snake in a canyon curled up under a bush. And there is a wooden platform that visitors could come and view me from. And they would look down and I would look up, and I could see people through this haze of my milky eyes. It would be hot sometimes, sometimes it was cold. When the night came, I was really alone, disintegrating molecule by molecule, you know, just kind of sinking down bit by bit. My vision, because it was blurred by this—the milkiness over my eyes, I couldn't see her, but I could hear her in the distance.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tom Patterson: She said, "I know you've been through a lot, and I know that it's hard. And if you want to let go, it's okay, you can go." There was kind of a pause that I had, and I realized I was a snake. I tried to figure out how to squeeze her hand, because I was desperate to squeeze her hand, but I didn't know how without hands. So I thought and thought, and then I thought, "Well, I'm a snake. I can wrap my body around her hand and squeeze." So that's what I did.]

SOREN: Thank you, Avir.

AVIR: Thank you guys.

[applause]

SOREN: Of course, also a big thanks to Lance and Tom, who gave us their time and talked to us. And Avir's dad for being willing to throw shade at his son.

[laughter]

LATIF: Well, thank you, Soren for, you know, being on stage, helping out Avir, pushing him around, editing him in real time, making all that happen.

SOREN: Obviously, I had a lot of fun doing it. A couple quick thanks. Thanks to Tom Philpott, Stephen Roach, Kate Shaw, Kerri McClimen, Alex Wong and Maryn McKenna. This episode was reported by Avir Mitra. It was produced by Jessica Yung and fact-checked by Natalie Middleton.

SOREN: The live show itself took place at WNYC's Greene Space Performance Center. And thank you, of course, to the staff there who make those kinds of events work. Also the folks on the Radiolab team who helped us make it happen: Sarah Sandbach, Natalia Ramirez, Anisa Vietze, David Gebel, Tanya Chawla, Harry Fortuna and Jeremy Bloom.

SOREN: I also want to mention that we actually did a first run of this show down in Little Rock, Arkansas, on Little Rock Public Radio. The public radio station down there invited us down to be part of their annual celebration. And it was a ton of fun. So thanks a bunch to Little Rock Public Radio, and in particular to Grace Zafasi, Jonathan Seaborn and Sarah Buford.

SOREN: And that's it. So we will just go out as we do with most of our live shows by letting one of the listeners from the audience come up and read the Radiolab credits.

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm AJ. I'm from Jersey, and here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandbach is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Mona Madgavkar, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Anisa Vietze, Arianne Wack, Molly Webster and Jessica Yung, with help from Rebecca Rand.]

[applause]

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Danielle from Madrid. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

 

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