[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today we—we're doing a show about bugs.

ROBERT: That's right.

JAD: Insects.

ROBERT: Bugs. These are adorable bugs in their own creepy, horrible, crawling and annoying way.

JAD: Right. But the thing that distinguishes the two bugs at the center of the two stories we're gonna tell is that they have done damage on such a level that they transcend other bugs.

ROBERT: That's right.

JAD: They are transcendentally annoying.

ROBERT: And we have to begin with everyone's perennial favorite, of course.

JAD: The mosquito. And here to tell us why, is producer Andy Mills.

ANDY MILLS: Okay. So a while back, I was talking with author Sonia Shah.

SONIA SHAH: I've had a very fraught relationship with mosquitoes for a long time.

ANDY: She actually wrote a book about malaria and mosquitoes ...

SONIA SHAH: Called The Fever.

ANDY: And for her, it all really started when she was a kid.

SONIA SHAH: Well, I grew up visiting India every summer because my family is from there, all my cousins, all my my grandparents, they were all there.

ANDY: Summer vacations.

SONIA SHAH: Summer vacations in India with my cousins. All I wanted to do is fit in.

ANDY: But the mosquitoes would always call her out.

SONIA SHAH: They knew!

ROBERT: There was a Yankee in the group.

SONIA SHAH: They would just focus on me. And so they wouldn't bite my cousins, they would be totally unscathed and I would be, like, covered in welts. I ended up having to sleep under a mosquito net, which is even more kind of isolating under this, like, suffocating net.

ANDY: She says at night when mosquitoes would land on her net, she would think ...

SONIA SHAH: I hate you. I hate you. But at the same time, I'm not allowed to do anything to them.

ANDY: And here's when you get to the fraught part, because Sonia and her family belong to this religion, called Jain Dharma.

SONIA SHAH: It's kind of an extreme nonviolent philosophy. You're not supposed to—you're not supposed to eat meat, obviously. You're not even supposed to eat any root vegetables because then you're killing the whole plant. You're not supposed to walk on grass because if you walk on grass, you can kill little insects. When you pray, you're supposed to wear a mask so you don't breathe in any, like, microbes or insects and inadvertently kill them. So I had to act like I'm totally cool with the mosquitoes around me.

ANDY: But every so often, Sonia says ...

SONIA SHAH: I would see a mosquito land near me, and when I thought no one was looking, I would just sort of mush it with my hand. And I still can feel, like, that tingly feeling on my hand just telling you that story. That tiny body being crushed by my hand. I mean, it just—it makes me feel terrible.

ANDY: And Sonia's ambivalence toward the mosquito, it has stayed with her her entire life, pretty much. Because on the one hand, she knows the mosquitoes have gotten a bad rap.

SONIA SHAH: First of all ...

ANDY: ... they don't really want to suck your blood.

SONIA SHAH: They don't want to risk their lives to get a blood meal. It's the most dangerous thing they're ever gonna do because it's so easy for us to kill them. On top of that, when they fill up with your blood, that blood is several times heavier than their own body weight. So suddenly, they're full of this stuff and they can't fly very well anymore.

ANDY: And on top of that, the only mosquitoes that bite you are the ladies.

SONIA SHAH: And the only reason they do it is because of all the protein in blood, and they use that to nourish their eggs.

ANDY: If they didn't have the protein in that blood, nearly all their babies would die.

SONIA SHAH: So they're really only do—they're not even doing it for food, you know?

ROBERT: So every bite is just good mommying, really.

SONIA SHAH: You could say that.

ROBERT: We have to just put out the message that when you're being swarmed by mosquitoes biting you, that you're just being swarmed by good ladies who are just nurturing.

SONIA SHAH: [laughs]

ROBERT: That might change the attitude.

ANDY: I do not fail to appreciate the charm of the mommy mosquito.

ROBERT: Good.

ANDY: But on the other hand, think of all the misery they have caused human beings.

SONIA SHAH: There's good estimates that get bandied around that one half of all human deaths since the Stone Age have been due to malaria.

JAD: Whoa!

ROBERT: One half!

SONIA SHAH: One half of all human deaths since the Stone Age. So it's had a huge, huge impact on our species. We know this.

ANDY: And for me, this is not just some, like, far away, sad statistical abstraction, right? Like, you know I used to live and work in Sudan. And while I was there, I saw the children's wards at the clinics and hospitals. Like, I saw the kids dying of this disease, all from a mosquito. And kind of where I'm headed with this is that, like, I mean, could this be the creature that we can all agree that we should just get rid of?

ROBERT: You can hope for that, Andy, but it's not gonna happen because mosquitoes are incredibly fertile. They—you could make a little groove on a rainy day in the mud, and they will have babies in that little patch of water.

JAD: It's like a baby party.

ROBERT: They're like a baby party.

JAD: In a footstep.

ROBERT: Exactly. So there is no ...

JAD: Yeah, you can't wipe that out.

SONIA SHAH: Well remember, mosquitoes, you know, they reproduce really fast. A typical mosquito only lives for, like, a week or so. So many, many, many generations are evolving as we're throwing chemicals at them. And as soon as one evolves some way to withstand it a little bit better, that little creature sort of sweeps its genes throughout the population. And that can happen within, like, a few years. Like, so three, five, seven years is kind of the time horizon for when you start using a chemical against the mosquito to when the mosquito population becomes resistant to it.

ANDY: Wow!

SONIA SHAH: It's a problem.

ANDY: But—but what if I told you that we had gotten to the point where we could solve this problem?

ROBERT: Oh, you'll have to show me an example.

ANDY: Oh, that would make me so happy to show you. I sent reporter David Baker down to this small town in eastern Brazil, to check out this factory.

DAVID BAKER: Here is a mosquito factory. Just as we come in, a woman with a kind of electric tennis racket is killing an insect on the wall.

JAD: A mosquito factory?

HADYN PERRY: Yeah, it sounds strange, but the world's largest mosquito factory is in Brazil.

ANDY: This is Hadyn Perry.

HADYN PERRY: Chief executive officer of Oxitec.

ANDY: And by factory, he means that this is a place where people actually breed mosquitoes, a very special kind.

HADYN PERRY: I think at the moment, they're making about four million or so a week.

DAVID BAKER: Oh, dear!

ANDY: After you pass through a couple of airlocks, you enter this massive room.

DAVID BAKER: It's a huge concrete warehouse.

ANDY: Where there are rows and rows of buckets. How this works is that Hadyn and his company in England, they will send the factory workers here a batch of eggs.

ALDO MALAVASI: And then we'll remove the eggs and put it in the water. I am Aldo Malavasi, director of the Medfly and Mosquito Facility in Brazil.

HADYN PERRY: And inside ...

ANDY: ... each of these buckets.

DAVID BAKER: What's that, a gram?

ALDO MALAVASI: How many?

DAVID BAKER: Inside is 80,000 eggs. And they look like they're just tiny, tiny little black dots.

ALDO MALAVASI: After we put the eggs, in about half hour to one hour they start to hatch, and then we have a small larvae.

DAVID BAKER: Now you can see lots of—this is larvae. These are larvae. Lots of mosquito larvae swimming in the water. Whoa.

ANDY: They look like long translucent worms with spikes all over their bodies.

DAVID BAKER: If someone said, "Put your hand in there," I'm not sure if I would.

WORKER: It's beautiful.

DAVID BAKER: [laughs]

ANDY: Now according to Hadyn, when these mosquitoes grow up and become adults, they will look ...

HADYN PERRY: ... completely indistinguishable from normal mosquitoes, except—except that they carry this lethal gene.

ANDY: Hadyn's company has actually put a tiny little extra special, extra deadly gene inside their bodies. Which ...

HADYN PERRY: So here ...

ANDY: ... you can actually see. At a certain point in David's trip, one of the factory workers, they brought over this special UV light and they shined it over the larvae.

DAVID BAKER: Oh, goodness me! It's like something from Alien. It's like wiggling larvae that is full of these kind of globules that are glowing red, like, from inside its body. Those are the genes that are glowing?

ALDO MALAVASI: Yes.

DAVID BAKER: Wow!

ANDY: Hadyn and his company, they have genetically engineered this glowing red gene, so that when it turns on ...

HADYN PERRY: It actually produces a certain protein.

ANDY: Inside of these mosquitoes, the gene starts cranking out these proteins more and more and more and more, until the cell basically goes ...

HADYN PERRY: Out of control, and the insect dies.

ANDY: This is the evil genius part. They turn off this gene temporarily. Then in another room in the factory, they hatch the babies, grow the mosquitoes in these test tubes.

DAVID BAKER: A thousand, perhaps of these plastic tubes. Inside are mosquitoes, loads of them.

ANDY: Then they separate ...

WORKER: Pupae females and males.

DAVID BAKER: Females and males, okay.

ANDY: Then they take just the males ...

HADYN PERRY: Put the males into little pots.

ANDY: They take the pots out into cities and towns. And every few hundred feet ...

HADYN PERRY: They shake these pots out.

ANDY: And release the mosquitoes into the wild.

HADYN PERRY: Those males, they go out there, they are just tuned in to finding females.

ANDY: Remember, those are the ones that bite.

HADYN PERRY: They tune in to the wing beat, and off they go, find a female. They're satisfying their biological urge to mate.

ANDY: Then the female will go off and lay her eggs. The eggs will hatch, and then inside each and every one of those little babies, the gene will turn on, they'll start pumping out those proteins, the cell goes out of control ...

HADYN PERRY: And larvae will die before they become functioning adults. So instead of that female laying a hundred eggs at a time or up to 500 in their lifetime, she lays the same number, but they die. To give an example of the last trial, they were working in a town called Mandacaru. About 3,000 people there.

ANDY: Mandacaru is this small town in Brazil that's had a really terrible time with the disease that the mosquitoes spread there called dengue fever, which can make you ...

HADYN PERRY: ... feel as if your bones are breaking.

ANDY: And it can sometimes cause ...

HADYN PERRY: ... bleeding from the eyes or ears.

ANDY: And in kids, death. In the past decade, what you've seen is cases of dengue going up and up and up.

HADYN PERRY: Yeah.

ANDY: But in 2011 ...

HADYN PERRY: ... they started releasing our males.

ANDY: All across town, they release these mutant males. And then they waited.

HADYN PERRY: And within about six months, they reduced the population of the mosquitoes by 96 percent.

JAD: Wow! 96 percent!

HADYN PERRY: Yeah. In that town. So in six months, you've pretty much eliminated the mosquito population.

ANDY: And this wasn't just some one off thing because the next year, after the rainy season ...

HADYN PERRY: ... instead of seeing that massive explosion of mosquito numbers, which you get every single year, you didn't see any increase at all.

ANDY: Wow!

HADYN PERRY: Because there wasn't a population there to build up.

ANDY: And this? This is just the beginning.

HADYN PERRY: In Brazil, there's been a series of trials ...

ANDY: ... in a bunch of different places.

HADYN PERRY: ... and they're all over 90 percent.

ANDY: As in 90 percent of the population was killed in the first round. And they've released them in different parts of the Cayman Islands.

HADYN PERRY: And again, that was the same idea. We had over 90 percent reduction.

ANDY: They're starting their first trials in Panama. They're in talks with local government officials in India, Malaysia, and the USA.

SONIA SHAH: Yeah.

ANDY: Can we just think about what would the world look like without mosquitoes?

SONIA SHAH: I mean, California, there's hardly any mosquitoes there. It would be like California everywhere. That would be totally awesome.

ROBERT: Both of you are acting like the only thing that happens with these animals is they make humans—and particularly human children—sick.

SONIA SHAH: It's not them, it's the parasite.

ROBERT: Right.

ANDY: But they're the ones—they're the ones who are spreading it. And so if our idea is you stop the mosquito, you stop the malaria, then I ...

ROBERT: It might stop a few other things, that's all I'm saying. Just call David.

ANDY: So we did. That's a really good mosquito impression, actually.

JAD: Is that David?

ROBERT: That's David.

ANDY: That's David.

ANDY: We called David.

DAVID QUAMMEN: I'm David Quammen. I'm a science writer based in Bozeman, Montana.

ANDY: The reason that Robert wanted us to call him this time is because a long, long time ago ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: Many, many, many years ago ...

ANDY: ... David wrote an article for Outside Magazine ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: ... titled "Sympathy for the Devil ..."

ANDY: ... that wrestled with the following question:

DAVID QUAMMEN: What, if anything, are the redeeming merits of the mosquito? These critters have a lot to answer for, but is that the whole story? Should we therefore dismiss them?

ANDY: Or destroy them?

DAVID QUAMMEN: Or destroy them, eradicate them?

JAD: Did you come up with things to say about this?

DAVID QUAMMEN: Well, wasn't easy, but I did, yeah. I read, read and ...

ANDY: And while he read, he said he did turn up some interesting facts. For example, there is this mosquito that lives up in the Arctic ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: Aedes nigripes.

ANDY: ... which ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: ... pollinates Arctic orchids and spreads no disease to anybody.

ANDY: Which is nice, but then David made the following argument:

DAVID QUAMMEN: Because of their pestiferous disease vectoring ...

ROBERT: Pestiferous disease vectoring, whoa!

DAVID QUAMMEN: ... they have made tropical forests very, very difficult for humans to inhabit, to colonize over the last 10,000 years.

ANDY: Because every time that we would try and go into those forests, we would get swarmed by mosquitoes and we'd run away.

DAVID QUAMMEN: And therefore, they have played an important role in bringing those forests forward relatively intact into the 20th and 21st centuries. If there were no difficulties, diseases, threats to the people living in those forests, then those forests would have been turned into settlements, cities, farmlands, much more extensively and much earlier than they have been and are now being. I call them nature's Viet Cong because they are ...

JAD: [laughs]

DAVID QUAMMEN: ... they are the resistance fighters on behalf of the rainforest.

ROBERT: Well, why don't we make it harder for you? Why don't we make you imagine that it's springtime or early summer in Alaska, that there's tundra melting everywhere, that there are hordes and hordes and clouds of mosquitoes, and they're forming a permanent sort of cloud around you. And then Andy Mills comes up and offers you the opportunity to eliminate them completely from the planet. And he makes this offer as they are stabbing you in the wrist, face, cheek and ear, you would do what?

DAVID QUAMMEN: I would do these two things: first, I would unzip the mosquito net of the tent and I would say, "Andy, for God's sake, let's have this conversation in the tent." And we would jump in the tent, zip that thing. Now I'd say, "Okay, now Andy, we can think about this clearly." And one of the things I'd say was, "Well, look, if we're up here, just two humans in the middle of this Alaskan tundra, and there are these millions and millions of mosquitoes swarming around us to get our blood, obviously, we're a small factor on this landscape, and they're a big factor in some way. So if we were to press a button and eradicate them instantly, it's very difficult to know their load-bearing significance in the ecosystem because they're playing lots of different roles as parasites, as competitors, as prey.

ANDY: But one of the things that Sonia Shah told me is that they actually don't play a big role in the ecosystem.

SONIA SHAH: I mean, I really tried hard when I was writing this book to get a mosquito biologist to explain to me that mosquitoes were useful, that they had some sort of ecological role to play that was important. And no one would admit that they had any role at all. They'd say they're not a useful nutrition for bats or fish or any of the other, like, predators of mosquitoes because their biomass is so small that, you know, those creatures would be fine without mosquitoes. Like, everyone would be fine without mosquitoes.

DAVID QUAMMEN: She might be right about that, but that's not the only ecological dimension we're talking about. That does not prove ...

JAD: What other dimension might there be, just as a "for example?"

DAVID QUAMMEN: Competition. They might be competing with other insects. Then if you eliminate the mosquitoes, then suddenly filaria flies become much more abundant.

ANDY: Oh!

DAVID QUAMMEN: I mean, when you talk about trying to foresee the consequences of completely eradicating any one species, we just don't know.

ROBERT: The real deep thought here is if you're going to destroy, the only obligation you owe to yourself is to know what you're killing.

DAVID QUAMMEN: Absolutely. And by that, I mean, yes, to know absolutely the dimensions, the implications of what you're doing.

ANDY: And what I'm weighing on here, Quammen, is that, like, I too have been to some of these sub-Saharan parts of Africa, and I just was floored that we have a curable disease, and how many, like, 12-, 13-, 14-year-old kids were holed up in this ward, you know?

DAVID QUAMMEN: Well, I agree with you that that's urgently compelling and important, and I feel the same way that something needs to be done. And it's true to some extent ...

ANDY: In the end after all the debate, I've ended up at this kind of middle ground.

HADYN PERRY: Well, I think what we aim to do, actually ...

ANDY: Hadyn Perry put it to me like this: we don't have to kill them all everywhere—and in fact, maybe we shouldn't—but we can kill them where we live.

HADYN PERRY: Eliminate them in our major urban cities and towns, that they no longer pose a threat.

ANDY: We can draw a line and say, "You know what? You stay out in the woods, we'll stay here," because the diseases that they're spreading, they will go away if the mosquito goes away for long enough. Because if we get better—like, in America, we don't get malaria hardly ever because there's no one with malaria that a mosquito would bite and then give that malaria to someone else.

ROBERT: Oh!

JAD: Ah!

ANDY: We have a ton of anopheles mosquitoes, and we have less than a thousand cases of malaria a year. Almost all those cases are somebody like myself who gets sick in Africa, comes back here. And why is that? Because we hit zero. Well, I mean, close to zero in our cities and towns. Once people stopped having malaria here, mosquitoes stopped getting it and giving it to other people.

SONIA SHAH: We just have to kind of place the boundary a little bit better. The mosquitoes can still do their thing, we can do our thing.

ANDY: So you don't hate them anymore is what you're saying.

SONIA SHAH: I think there's a way to live harmoniously with the mosquitoes. I mean, we do it in this country, right? I mean, we have mosquitoes, and we control their populations in many ways, but we also get bit.

ROBERT: Special thanks to Andy Mills, of course, who learned bug tolerance through Radiolab.

ANDY: [laughs]

JAD: Also a very special thanks to David Baker, who went above and beyond in the pursuit of mutant mosquitoes. And also big thanks to writer Sonia Shah.

ROBERT: But we are not yet done because after the break, we have another story of another bug which, not quite the curse on humanity that mosquitoes are, but this bug ends up being for one particular woman, not merely a curse, but a curse with a little dash of blessing attached.

JAD: Yeah. We'll be right back.

[LISTENER: This is Michael Burrows from Portland, Oregon. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Jad.

ROBERT: Robert.

JAD: Radiolab. For this next story, a much more personal tale of being haunted—not hunted, haunted by a bug.

AMY PEARL: Good. I'm getting—this is making me nervous. Maybe I should get my EpiPen.

DAN PASHMAN: Are you allergic to radio greatness?

AMY PEARL: Not that I know of. I haven't been really exposed to it yet.

DAN PASHMAN: [laughs]

AMY PEARL: Anyway, let's go!

ROBERT: It starts with a conversation between Dan Pashman.

DAN PASHMAN: Okay.

ROBERT: Host of a podcast here at WNYC called The Sporkful. It's about food. And Amy Pearl.

DAN PASHMAN: Amy?

AMY PEARL: Yes.

ROBERT: A digital producer here at the station who likes food.

AMY PEARL: Mmm.

ROBERT: And the conversation they had was about something that happened to Amy, which she never expected, certainly didn't want, and yet, it could happen to any of us at any time.

DAN PASHMAN: So years ago, before any of this happened to you, just tell me what was your relationship with meat?

AMY PEARL: Well, you know how when you're little and your mom is like, "You can have any special dinner for your birthday?" My dinner was meatballs. And she was like, "Except meatballs. They're so hard to make." So it was pot roast.

DAN PASHMAN: [laughs]

AMY PEARL: And then Peter Luger, you know Peter Luger's?

DAN PASHMAN: Famous steakhouse in Brooklyn.

AMY PEARL: Yeah. I used to go there quite often, and I live there. And I have a Peter Luger credit card. I was very into Peter Luger. I was living in Williamsburg, and it just—it opened at, like one o'clock every day, and you could just walk in at one. They had an amazing bar. There's no tablecloths on the table. These old German waiters, they'd bring out your porterhouse for three. They'd put a little plate upside down and then put the big platter on top of it so it's tilted, and all the juice runs to the end. And then they, like, have this special double spoon thing that they somehow, like, scoop juice onto your steak. And oh, so good!

AMY PEARL: And also, like, the smell of burning fat from a hamburger.

DAN PASHMAN: What about hot dogs?

AMY PEARL: Oh my God. I love hot dogs so much. Like, having a weenie roast out in the open air, it's just—it's like the—oh, God, it's so good!

DAN PASHMAN: What changed?

AMY PEARL: Oh my God. It was terrible. It was—what happened was I was having this beautiful—it was springtime, I was having a beautiful leg of lamb with some neighbors and we, like, put it on the grill, and it was just a delicious, beautiful dinner. And I had served with it some ramps that I foraged in my mom's yard.

ROBERT: A ramp, by the way, is just a wild onion.

AMY PEARL: So we had this delicious meal and then, you know, I went home and I was going to sleep at, like, midnight, like, a few hours later. And I just felt weird. I was like, "Ooh, God. Something's wrong. I feel, like, really anxious, like something's wrong with me." And I went in the bathroom and I, like, look in the mirror, and my face was, like, all weird looking and I was like, I kept laying down and be like, "I'll just sleep it off, whatever it is." But every time I laid down, I felt like I was gonna faint. So, I was like, prop myself up. And I was like, "Ugh!" God, I was having terrible, like, stomach cramps and just like a weird feeling of impending doom, you know?

AMY PEARL: But just like anybody, I'm just like, "Just get a good night's sleep. This will pass." I, like, splashed a little water on my face. I mean, I don't know what made me think this, but I thought, like, maybe a snail, a tiny snail was on one of the ramps that I ate, and it was, like, poisoning me somehow.

AMY PEARL: I called my friends in the morning and I was like, "Hey, how you guys doing? How was dinner?" And they were like, "Oh, it was so great!" And I was like, "Really? It was so great? Nothing weird? Like ..."

DAN PASHMAN: [laughs] No horrific panic attacks?

AMY PEARL: And they were like—and they were like, "Oh, that was so lovely. Thank you so much. Let's do it again. Blah, blah, blah." And I was like, "Wow, I really had a rough night." But I didn't think anything of it, and I went on with my life, you know? Just like whatever. And then about a week or two later, I made some cheeseburgers. And I ate a cheeseburger, and I was watching Goodbye Mr. Chips, a really tear-jerking movie and a good book, too. And about a couple of hours after I ate, I, like, started to feel really weird. Again, I was, like, feeling like I was—like I had to stand up. I was like, "I think I'm gonna faint. I feel really lightheaded. I can't catch my breath. I feel, like, really woozy." But any time I laid down, I really felt like I was gonna faint. So I was, like, trying to say sitting upright, and I was like, "Oh my God, this is very similar." And I ran into the bathroom and I was, like, looking in the mirror, and lo and behold, I had hives all over my stomach, and then they started coming out on my hands. And I was like, "Oh my God, something's happening." And at one point I did get up and unlock my door, because I did feel like I'm gonna pass out, call an ambulance and then they're not gonna be able to get in. So I mean, I was a little bit afraid of what was happening.

AMY PEARL: And when I woke up in the morning, the first thing I did was Google "Sudden meat allergy," because I was like, "This seems like an allergy," and the only thing that was the same was meat. And I'm going through and, like, the second thing that came up was this article that was like, "Florida Man Has Sudden Meat Allergy." I was like, "Oh my God, I think is it possible I could have this?" And so I made an appointment with my doctor. I brought in the article. I'm like, "I'm going to be this person, but I can do it." You know, the person who goes to their doctor with something I found on the internet.

DAN PASHMAN: [laughs]

AMY PEARL: So I brought the article. It was in my pocket and, like, I was too chicken. I went—when I was paying the receptionist, I pulled it out and gave it to the receptionist, and I was like, "Could you give this to the doctor?" So that was, like, the best I could do. And then I did call my doctor and had a conversation with him on the phone asking him if I could get tested. And he was like, "No, there's no such thing as a meat allergy. Blah, blah, blah."

PETER SMITH: So some people think allergies are just, like, in your head.

ROBERT: This is science writer Peter Smith. We got in touch with him after we heard Amy's story because Peter is an investigator of many things including strange allergies.

PETER SMITH: And people are like, mushrooms hurt them or they think ...

LATIF NASSER: Wi-fi hurts them.

PETER SMITH: Yeah, wi-fi hurts them. And I don't know ...

ROBERT: And when our producer Latif Nasser and I got into the studio and we told him about Amy's story. He said ...

PETER SMITH: Yeah. All right.

ROBERT: I know exactly who you need to talk to.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: Hello?

LATIF: Yeah, hi!

PETER SMITH: Thomas Platts-Mills.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: This is Thomas Platts-Mills. That's right.

LATIF: How are you?

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: I'm very well.

ROBERT: Dr. Platts-Mills is down at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He's a professor, and he works at an allergy clinic.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: In an allergy clinic, we are constantly sifting through stories, which not only you don't believe, but are actually nonsense. It's simply ...

ROBERT: And he told us in the last 10 years or so, he started hearing lots of stories just like Amy's.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: Right.

ROBERT: Somebody shows up at the office convinced that they're allergic all of a sudden for no apparent reason to red meat. Every single time he heard the story, he would tell the patient exactly what Amy's doctor told her.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: No.

ROBERT: No way.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: No, no, no.

ROBERT: It's not possible.

ROBERT: So what was wrong with these complaints, you know, in an orthodox medical way?

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: Oh, everything.

ROBERT: Everything?

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: Adults don't become allergic to something they've eaten for 40 years out of the blue, and certainly not red meat

ROBERT: So you're basically saying to these patients, "I think you must be making this up."

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: I don't use language like that. [laughs] I say, "There, there."

ROBERT: I was trying to give you your inner voice.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: Oh, you don't want to know what doctors are thinking in their inner voices. You know, you often think in the middle of an interview, "Is it possible that he's got, you know, some ghastly disease?"

LATIF: Mad cow.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: Yeah, you know?

ROBERT: The point is that when he'd hear a story like Amy's, he just ...

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: Didn't believe it.

ROBERT: But then, everything changed. Thanks, oddly enough, to a cancer drug.

PETER SMITH: This new cancer drug called cetuximab.

[NEWS CLIP: In New York today, Martha Stewart was indicted on criminal charges relating to ...]

ROBERT: This is the very drug that got Martha Stewart in all that trouble for insider trading.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: You remember that? And went to jail for six months?

ROBERT: Yeah.

ROBERT: Anyway, very promising, exciting new drug. But then ...

PETER SMITH: Doctors were giving people this injection, and they would just like, end up on the floor of the doctor's office.

ROBERT: In shock?

PETER SMITH: Yeah, they would be in anaphylactic shock.

ROBERT: Their hearts would start beating faster, they'd get short of breath, they'd get stomach cramps. Their immune system would start to overreact to something new and alien that came in with the drug. Basically, a classic allergic reaction.

PETER SMITH: So the mystery lands on Thomas Platts-Mills's desk.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: Yes. So we were asked to look at cetuximab.

ROBERT: To see if they could figure out what was causing the reaction.

PETER SMITH: And he tests two groups of blood: a control sample, and then people that have this allergy.

ROBERT: And he quickly zeroed in on a particular molecule, a sugar that was part of the drug.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: This sugar, galactose-alpha-1, 3. Galactose or alpha-gal.

ROBERT: Alpha-gal?

PETER SMITH: Yeah.

ROBERT: As in a particularly great lady?

PETER SMITH: [laughs]

LATIF: Yeah, it's like alpha male, but alpha female didn't quite have a ring to it.

ROBERT: Anyway, it seemed like alpha-gal was the culprit.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: Yeah, and if you told me four years earlier that there's a whole lot of people out there who are allergic to this sugar, I'd have thought you would smoking, you know, vaping again.

ROBERT: Because not only does this sugar alpha-gal show up in the cancer drug, and this is where we get back to Amy, it also shows up in the blood of mammals.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: All non-primate mammals.

ROBERT: So every time you eat ...

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: ... lamb ...

ROBERT: ... or ...

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: ... beef, goat, camel.

ROBERT: Even ...

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: Tripe.

ROBERT: Or ...

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: Pig's kidneys.

ROBERT: You're also eating alpha-gal.

AMY PEARL: So I'm reading this article and it says, like, it's this thing called alpha galactose or alpha-gal or whatever.

ROBERT: So it made no sense that someone like Amy, who'd been eating meat all her life would suddenly somehow be allergic to alpha-gal.

AMY PEARL: This was so stupid.

ROBERT: So one day ...

AMY PEARL: It's getting to be barbecue season. I usually have, like, a couple of barbecues where I just do a whole pork butt and a brisket, and I was like, very wanted to do that. And I was like, "I'm just gonna not eat meat and not even know?" So I was like, "Forget it. My doctor won't test me. I'm gonna test myself." So I was like, "I'm not gonna do it alone. I'll do it with my mom." My poor mom. [laughs] And so I went up to my mom's and she's, like, really into food too. So she was like, "Oh, this is so exciting! I got two porterhouse steaks on sale at Stu's.

DAN PASHMAN: [laughs] Did you explain to her what you were testing?

AMY PEARL: Yeah, I did, because I had talked a little bit about it with her. So, like, fire up the grill, do the porterhouse. I even think I, like, Instagrammed it as a joke. Like, "Ha ha ha. This might be the last time you hear from me." But, you know, we're having a nice summer day, just me and my mom having our steak. I only ate, like, a couple bites because I was slightly nervous. And I was, like, sitting in the grass with my dog and reading a book and trying to think, like, do I feel normal? Which, try it, folks. It's hard to figure out. When you start asking yourself, "Do I feel normal? Does this—am I breathing? Does my stomach hurt? Is something wrong?" And I was like, after a while I was like, "I feel pretty good."

AMY PEARL: And the neighbor came over and was, like, chatting with us, and it was in the middle of that conversation where I was like, "I kind of feel like I have to go to the bathroom. But maybe I just have to go to the bathroom." So I went to the bathroom, and I was sitting there and I was like, "Oh God, something feels bad. I'm—" and then I was like, "Oh God, I definitely—this is not right. Something's wrong." And I went in to get the Benadryl, and I took the Benadryl and I went on my bed in the guest room at my mom's house. I was, like, sitting on there and I was like, "I just don't feel right. Maybe if I just take a deep breath. I'll just stand up. Maybe I'll just put my hands over my head like this. Oh, that does feel slightly better, I think." Then I was finally like, "I think we should go to the hospital."

AMY PEARL: And I went outside. I was like, "Mom, I think you have to drive me to the hospital." She was, like, talking to her neighbor like, "What? Oh my God, honey. What? Oh, let me go change my clothes." Change my clothes. Like, Mom, you know, she's not wearing the hospital-level clothes. So I'm like, "Okay, Hurry up, mom. Mom, are you ready? Mom?" And then I was like, while she was changing her clothes, I suddenly was like, "Oh my God." Got my wallet out and my cell phone and I, like, threw it towards my mom's bedroom door. And I was like, "Here's my insurance card. Call an ambulance! And I just, like, hit the floor.

AMY PEARL: Eventually the ambulance arrives and I got stabilized. I was strapped to the thing. I was in the emergency room. Like, they were shooting me full of, I don't know what, epinephrine and adrenaline. And the little, like, 12-year-old emergency room doctor runs in and he was like, "I looked it up on the internet. Alpha-gal. Fascinating!" "What? That's terrible. I've never heard of that. Could it be true?" "Yes, it's true." Like, they're all having this discussion there. Then when I went back to my doctor after that I was like, "Hey just got out of the emergency room because they tested me for alpha-gal and I'm allergic to meat."

ROBERT: So this is an allergy.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: Yeah.

LATIF: So all of a sudden, you're looking at the quote, "crazies," and they're not so quote, "crazy" anymore.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: Absolutely. We suddenly had a blood test. And of course, what turned out is all these patients who'd been telling us this story were allergic to alpha-gal.

PETER SMITH: But ...

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: But ...

PETER SMITH: ... it's still like a mystery.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: Right. There are patients ...

ROBERT: Thomas Platts-Mills couldn't figure out why people like Amy, who had lived for 40 years eating porterhouse steaks at Peter Luger's with a credit card, why would she suddenly develop an allergy now?

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: So we were looking for anything that could explain it.

PETER SMITH: It could be a mold. It could be a nematode.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: A worm or a fungus.

ROBERT: But then he looked again and noticed that all the people who had had bad reactions to the cancer drug ...

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: They were in a particular area of the country. It was Virginia, North Carolina, Southern Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas. No cases in Salt Lake City. No cases in Denver. Just smatterings down the West.

ROBERT: So he turned to his technician Jake and he said ...

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: I said, "You've got to Google every map you can find and say what matches that area?

ROBERT: Creatures or diseases that appear wherever the allergy appears. So Jake starts Googling.

PETER SMITH: Googling and Googling and Googling. And ...

ROBERT: And eventually, he comes across a map that ...

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: Matches where the cases are very beautifully. The maximum area for Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

PETER SMITH: So he made this little map and it's like the shaded dark areas of the country are places with Rocky Mountain spotted fever. And then there's like some stars where, you know, this allergy had appeared.

LATIF: Yeah.

PETER SMITH: And they overlap.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: Ah, very interesting.

PETER SMITH: And then all of a sudden it clicks. Rocky Mountain spotted fever is a tick-borne disease.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: This is the distribution of the lone star tick.

ROBERT: A little before this, it turns out an allergist down in Australia, Sheryl van Nunen ...

SHERYL VAN NUNEN: First name Sheryl. S-H-E-R-Y-L. Van Nunen. V-A-N and then N-U-N-E-N. And I'm from the Tick-Induced Allergies, Research and Awareness Center in Sydney, Australia.

ROBERT: She says she was now being visited by all kinds of people who claim suddenly to be allergic to meat.

SHERYL VAN NUNEN: And whenever I take a history, so for example, I'd ask them was there a family history of rhinitis, eczema, asthma, stinging insect allergy, and they'd say they've all been bitten by ticks.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: When we started asking patients, we suddenly heard the stories just out the kazoo.

ROBERT: But at this point, Dr. Platts-Mills, all he has is a map, some stories and a hunch.

LATIF: Right.

PETER SMITH: So ...

ROBERT: So what does he do?

PETER SMITH: He decides—well, he decides to test it on himself.

ROBERT: Oh my God!

PETER SMITH: He sort of like denies that he did it intentionally.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: I know I had no intention.

PETER SMITH: I mean, he—I think he also likes to walk and amble and think about things.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: Right.

PETER SMITH: So he goes for a long walk along the Blue Ridge Mountains.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: And I knew I wanted to be off trail because I'm actually rather allergic to humans.

LATIF: [laughs]

ROBERT: So he's walking and walking and walking, and along the way ...

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: Ah.

ROBERT: ... he bumps into a whole bunch of ticks.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: And if you walk into a nest of those things ...

LATIF: Oh my God, this sounds like a nightmare.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: Yeah, absolutely. I got 200 seed ticks.

PETER SMITH: Oh boy.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: And then in November of that year, I was taken out to dinner. And the lamb chops were particularly delicious, and the French wine was delicious. And six hours later, I woke up covered in hives.

PETER SMITH: He's got an allergy to red meat.

ROBERT: All just because of a ...

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: Tick bite.

PETER SMITH: Tick bite.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: That's right.

ROBERT: We'll bite you right back after this.

[SARAH: Hi, this is Sarah calling from Asheville, North Carolina. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred. P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Jad.

ROBERT: Robert.

JAD: Radiolab.

ROBERT: Now we go back to Amy just when she's discovered that the allergy to meat that she's developed comes from a tick bite.

AMY PEARL: A tick bite? Hang on a second. Because, like, a few weeks before all this started happening, as I said, I was foraging for ramps in my mom's backyard, and I had a tick on my arm.

ROBERT: Now it turns out that not only was that tick bite a terrible thing for Amy, it was a kind of double tragedy.

GRAHAM HICKLING: Hidden from view amongst the trees and in the undergrowth ...

ROBERT: And I think it's only right at this point to back up ...

GRAHAM HICKLING: ... is a fascinating world of wonders.

ROBERT: ... and consider the story from the tick's point of view.

GRAHAM HICKLING: Okay, so I'm Graham Hickling. I am a wildlife disease ecologist at the University of Tennessee.

ROBERT: So I was wondering if you could help us tell the story of, in this case, of the lone star tick that bit Amy.

GRAHAM HICKLING: Oh, yeah, sure. So they start off in this little pile of eggs, perhaps a mass of 2,000 eggs under the leaves.

ROBERT: The proud mom who just gave birth ...

GRAHAM HICKLING: At that point, she's just a kind of a withered husk.

ROBERT: Meaning dead. But anyway ...

GRAHAM HICKLING: A few weeks later, those eggs will hatch and this mass of 2,000 baby ticks emerge from under the leaves.

ROBERT: And could I see them with my naked eye?

GRAHAM HICKLING: If you ran into a mass of them all up together, you would feel like you've got a little smudge of dirt, and then the dirt starts walking.

ROBERT: [laughs]

GRAHAM HICKLING: And so they'll just climb up and they'll, you know, potentially all be on the same leaf or the same twig looking for something to feed on.

ROBERT: Now one teeny little tiny problem for these teeny little tiny ticks ...

GRAHAM HICKLING: Is that they dry out.

ROBERT: So when they come up from under the leaves, they come up ...

GRAHAM HICKLING: ... briefly ...

ROBERT: ... and then they go back down, get a little water, come back up, get thirsty, go back down ...

GRAHAM HICKLING: ... and rehydrate.

LATIF: So they, like, commute?

GRAHAM HICKLING: Exactly. And we refer to the behavior as "questing."

LATIF: Oh, questing!

ROBERT: Questing.

ROBERT: So if you were one of these little baby ticks up questing for food ...

GRAHAM HICKLING: While you're up there, you are essentially Velcro.

ROBERT: Because on each one of your little legs ...

GRAHAM HICKLING: You have little kind of hook-like structures. And so you're flat against the leaf.

ROBERT: Sort of sniffing in the air with your two little front legs.

GRAHAM HICKLING: That can detect CO2, heat, movement.

ROBERT: So let's say one day you're sitting there on your leaf, and you pick up the scent of a nearby mouse.

GRAHAM HICKLING: Mice are the potato chips of the ecosystem. Everything eats them.

ROBERT: Which means you might be about to have your very first meal. So you ...

GRAHAM HICKLING: ... basically stand up ...

ROBERT: ... stretch out all your little legs ...

GRAHAM HICKLING: ... and do a tick dance. And so it's kind of interpretive dance-like movements.

ROBERT: ... while you're waiting for that mouse to come just close enough that you can grab onto it. So you're dancing and you're waiting, and you're dancing and you're waiting, and you're dancing and you're waiting, and you're dancing and you're waiting.

GRAHAM HICKLING: To be honest, you are probably going to wait your entire life and die unfulfilled. It's because there are 2,000 of you starting off, and a stable tick population there's only going to be two of you that survive.

ROBERT: Oh my gosh!

ROBERT: So 1,998 little baby ticks are born ...

GRAHAM HICKLING: ... and then that's it for them.

ROBERT: But let's say that you're one of the lucky ones. And one sunny day, there you are hanging out on your little leaf when you detect two incoming mammals. One is a 40-year-old hominid, the other is her dog. So you perk up, you thrust your legs out ...

GRAHAM HICKLING: ... wave, do the tick dance.

ROBERT: And say that you're waving and you're dancing and you're hoping and you're waving and you're dancing and you're hoping and you're waving and you're dancing and you're hoping, and slowly, the dog’s getting closer and closer and closer. And you reach out with one of your tiny little limbs so you can grab on and eat and survive. But ...

AMY PEARL: But the reason that tick ended up on me was I slept in bed with my dog naked.

ROBERT: But how do you know that's when it happened?

AMY PEARL: Because I know that, like, I did a good tick check on myself and I took a shower and everything. And then in the middle of the night, I woke up with an itching sensation. And I went to the bathroom, and I couldn't really see what was on—like, something was on the back of my arm, and it was a tick.

ROBERT: So as the tick is biting into Amy, what is it giving Amy that's gonna make her allergic to meat?

PETER SMITH: Well, actually, I need to stop you there, Robert.

SHERYL VAN NUNEN: Hmm, difficult one, Robert.

PETER SMITH: I don't know the answer to that. Hmm.

ROBERT: That's Peter Smith, and ...

SHERYL VAN NUNEN: Well ...

ROBERT: ... rejoining us is Sheryl van Nunen, the scientist.

SHERYL VAN NUNEN: It's all up for speculation.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: We don't really know. But here's the theory. So ...

ROBERT: Normally, when you eat a piece of meat, you put alpha-gal in your stomach and your stomach digests it, and it's in your body, and it's no big deal.

SHERYL VAN NUNEN: But the tick cunningly ...

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: ... will drill into you, poke into you ...

SHERYL VAN NUNEN: ... and injects ...

PETER SMITH: ... its saliva.

LATIF: We'll call that "tick spit."

PETER SMITH: ... tick spit into its victims.

ROBERT: Straight into its victim's largest organ ...

PETER SMITH: ... the skin.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: And tick spit has an anti-clotting factor, an anesthetic, anti-inflammatory compounds.

SHERYL VAN NUNEN: And ...

ROBERT: ... we think ...

SHERYL VAN NUNEN: ... the alpha-gal.

ROBERT: Now Peter says the thing about the skin is ...

PETER SMITH: ... the skin is like this enormous, like, surveillance system.

ROBERT: It's always on the lookout for invaders. So when the alpha-gal comes through your skin covered by all that bad, bad tick spit stuff ...

PETER SMITH: That's gonna really, like, set off your immune system.

ROBERT: The immune system freaks out.

PETER SMITH: Like, oh! Uh-uh!

ROBERT: And the alpha-gal, covered now in bad spit almost sort of ...

SHERYL VAN NUNEN: ... by mistake ...

ROBERT: ... gets labeled bad. And now it's on the bad guy watch list. So ...

SHERYL VAN NUNEN: ... therefore ...

ROBERT: ... the next time you eat meat ...

SHERYL VAN NUNEN: ... the meat comes in ...

PETER SMITH: ...and then ...

ROBERT: ... the body unleashes wave upon wave upon wave of chemical attacks ...

PETER SMITH: ... to do battle against this alpha-gal.

ROBERT: And this reaction gets way out of hand. You got so many antibodies multiplying, multiplying, multiplying, multiplying, making you—rather in this case, Amy, feel just horrible.

PETER SMITH: Right.

AMY PEARL: I mean, it's very weird. It sounds like a science fiction movie. It sounds like the beginning of a science fiction at least kids' book. It's just strange.

ROBERT: Which all goes to say that this really is the kind of double tragedy for Amy and her tick.

PETER SMITH: Yeah, because ticks didn't evolve to bite humans.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: Right. We're a mistake.

PETER SMITH: Like, we have opposable thumbs.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: We're either gonna pull them off ...

AMY PEARL: I actually woke my mom up, and she helped get it off.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: ... or if they drop off, they're gonna drop off in an airport terminal, or a Walmart car park or somewhere like that.

ROBERT: Or a shag carpet.

THOMAS PLATTS-MILLS: Or a shag carpet indoors. And—and they're doomed.

ROBERT: And for us, well, we lose something that, historically anyway, is a big part of who we are.

PETER SMITH: Yeah, because we have—we adapted in the grand evolutionary scheme of things to, like, eat flesh, to eat meat.

LATIF: Yeah.

PETER SMITH: Yeah.

AMY PEARL: I mean, I'm actually sitting here picturing a steak. But actually the thing—I mean, hot dogs. Like, wrap ramps around a weenie and roast. Yum, that sounds so good, my mouth's watering. [laughs] Weenies and ramps.

DAN PASHMAN: Yeah.

AMY PEARL: But I am going to my allergist tomorrow because I did—you know, I was reading about this allergy a lot when I first got it, and I read that for some people, the allergy can fade away. So I'm gonna get a blood test to see what my blood level of alpha-gal is. So I'm a little ...

DAN PASHMAN: So what are you hoping for tomorrow?

AMY PEARL: I want to be normal again.

ROBERT: That was the end of the Dan and Amy conversation. She was gonna go to the doctor, get herself tested, find out whatever. So we asked her back in ...

AMY PEARL: Okay.

ROBERT: ... to find out what happened.

AMY PEARL: So I actually did get an appointment with my allergist. So I got the appointment, I got the blood draw, whatever. And a few days later, my doctor called me and she said that my numbers were still really high. And I was like, "Well, how high are they?" And she was like, "Three." And I was like, "Three? That's not high." And she's like, "They're supposed to be, like, one," or something. So they had gone down, but they were still, you know, many times more than they should be. So ...

ROBERT: But when you left and you were waiting for the call, were you waiting with the hope that you would soon be eating a bit of hot dog?

AMY PEARL: I mean, honestly, I was hoping no.

ROBERT: No?

AMY PEARL: No.

ROBERT: Wait a second, you are the big, the great ...

AMY PEARL: No, I was afraid that she would be like, "Oh my God, your numbers are so low. I think you could probably eat meat. Let's do a food challenge." And I would be like, "Ahh!" Because, like, that's such a scary memory. Yeah, I don't—you know, actually just the other night I was eating at an Indian place and I was eating vegetarian but, like, I felt something and I pulled it out, and in the dim light of an Indian restaurant—like, why are they all lit like that? I was like, "Was this bacon?" And I suddenly—you know, like you just get this drop in your stomach and I'm like, "What time is it? Four hours from now if I—" and, you know because there's something about it being delayed that makes it so difficult. It just is like ...

ROBERT: Like a suspense movie where you're the victim.

AMY PEARL: It's like it could happen in the next three hours. Or maybe not. I don't know. The real reason I want to be able to eat meat is so that I will be prepared to eat it in case of emergency. I mean, I went on a canoe trip in the Adirondacks and I was like, "Well, what happens if I get stranded out here? And, like, what if I have to hunt, but I can't even eat meat? I would have to hunt fish. But then when the lake freezes over, what would I eat? I can't survive. Something's wrong with me!" I feel evolutionarily challenged. This is what I think about before I go to bed every night: would I be able to survive if I had just what's on me right now? It's not a real issue, obviously. It's never gonna happen, I live in Brooklyn. But I do, for some reason, I always think, like, I want to be prepared in case. But I don't think I would go back to eating meat, necessarily.

ROBERT: Like, you are still more—more frightened than game, so to speak.

AMY PEARL: Well, also, like, I wish I could be a vegetarian for ethical reasons because it's the factory farming and that kind of stuff, so I feel, like, morally superior now. I can be like, "Well, I don't eat red meat." Of course. I'm forced to not eat it, but at the same time I would if I had the—if I had the willpower, I'd probably go that way anyway. And then also, I think it's great. It's like, we're all evolving to be on this planet, which is getting harder to be on. And we know that meat takes a lot of resources. And, like, now I don't—now I'm not doing that. So, like, the tick is helping me evolve into a better human being.

ROBERT: Like, so one could, instead of thinking of the tick as your teeny weeny irritating enemy, you could think of it as a guiding light, making the world safer to share with your fellow earthlings.

AMY PEARL: Yeah.

DAN PASHMAN: So you may have lost your relationship with meat but at least you have your moral superiority.

AMY PEARL: Yeah. I mean, I am superior.

DAN PASHMAN: [laughs]

AMY PEARL: Yeah.

ROBERT: So huge thanks to Amy Pearl for telling a story which never stopped—never stopped being scary and wonderful. And to the fellow who brought her into the room, Dan Pashman, whose podcast, The Sporkful, it's all about food in every conceivable way. Like, he talks about eating it, preparing it, worrying about it, as you've heard, getting sick from it, getting fat from it, whatever. And you can find his show on iTunes or Stitcher or on the internet at Sporkful.com.

ROBERT: And this story was produced by Annie McEwen and Matt Kielty, with reporting help from Latif Nasser.

JAD: We should say since we did this show, there's been a lot more attention given to this tick and the consequences of its bite.

ROBERT: There have been stories in the New York Times and in USA Today, and a study from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases that has gone and found that some cases of unexplained anaphylaxis can be caused by allergy to alpha-gal.

JAD: Yeah. These are—these would be bites by the lone star tick.

ROBERT: Okay, we have spent so much time in this hour beating up on bugs, it's time to simply flip and understand that these are creatures on Earth, many more of them than there will ever be of us.

JAD: They're winning.

ROBERT: And they're winning.

JAD: They're winning.

ROBERT: So it's only right and only fair to give them a little bit of love. And a couple years ago, I sat down with maybe one of the greatest insect lovers I have ever met. His name was Tom Eisner. He taught up at Cornell University. He figured out how all kinds of animals, little itty bitty ones, talk to each other, make love to each other, make war with each other, struggle with each other. I think he taught us more about insects than maybe anybody—anybody I know. We spoke at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.

ROBERT: Your interest in insects, can you remember when it began?

TOM EISNER: According to my parents, when I first stood on my feet.

ROBERT: Really?

TOM EISNER: All I cared about was bugs. And the beetles, caterpillars, ants, termites, cockroaches. I picked them up. I learned quickly not to put them all in my mouth.

[audience laughs]

TOM EISNER: I kept them in my room. My room was a zoo.

ROBERT: You were born in Berlin.

TOM EISNER: Correct.

ROBERT: From a Jewish family.

TOM EISNER: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: You were about three years old when you left, or thereabouts?

TOM EISNER: Three years old. Went to Spain.

ROBERT: So you went from the Nazis in Berlin to Spain.

TOM EISNER: Yes, and the Spanish Civil War. Fled for France. My parents decided we should really start somewhere else, and we went to South America. And that was an entomological paradise.

TOM EISNER: Every living organism has some sort of odor. You can build these up in your memory, and I used to take a whiff of an insect and classify them in my mind's eye according to what they smelled like. Caterpillar? Ant? Beetle?

ROBERT: [laughs] And do you ever dream of insects?

TOM EISNER: Yeah, I tend to dream that I am an insect.

ROBERT: What does that mean, that you dream that you are an insect? You mean, you were scurrying?

TOM EISNER: Yes.

ROBERT: And walking upside down on the ceiling?

TOM EISNER: Indeed. Even escaping swattings. The weirdest situation that I ever got into in a dream was I dreamed that I was an insect, and I was telling another insect that I would occasionally dream that I'm a human.

[audience laughs]

ROBERT: That's your meta dream.

TOM EISNER: Insects were somehow my great love. I was very much a loner, and if I didn't have a room full of insects, live, I was unhappy.

OLIVER SACKS: No, I— Tom, I wanted to ask you ...

ROBERT: Now at this moment, Oliver Sacks, who was on the stage with us, he asked Tom this question.

OLIVER SACKS: ... whether you feel that insects respond to you? You know, whether—whether you feel them sort of purring, and whether they know that you're gentle and reliable and for them?

TOM EISNER: You know, it's a good question. I don't—I don't presume to read responses on the part of the insect. But the older I get, the more difficult I find it to experiment with them in ways that kill them. Bombardier beetles can live for one, two, up to three years in your lab. You become very attached to them. You give them names. And when they die, it's an event.

TOM EISNER: So you must somehow have moments where you feel that things are going on in that tiny little brain. That they have secrets hidden up their sleeves that they might reveal if you found a common language, I find that I can love nature no matter how distant the individual organisms are from me. But I reach out and hope that I can shorten the distance and create some feeling of co-existence.

ROBERT: Tom Eisner's book is called For the Love of Insects.

JAD: That's really what it's called?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Well, we should go. Check our website, Radiolab.org for more information, and you can always send us an email at Radiolab(@)wnyc.org.

ROBERT: Radiolab is one word.

JAD: Yes it is. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Received Thursday at 9:50 p.m.]

[DAN PASHMAN: This is Dan Pashman from The Sporkful podcast.]

[AMY PEARL: Hi, this is Amy Pearl. I'm allergic to meat.]

[SUSIE VON EGGERS: and I'm Susie Von Eggers, Amy Pearl's mom. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad.]

[AMY PEARL: Jad Abumrad.]

[SUSIE VON EGGERS: Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design.]

[DAN PASHMAN: Soren Wheeler is senior editor.]

[AMY PEARL: Jamie—Jamison York is our senior producer.]

[DAN PASHMAN: Our staff includes Simon Adler.]

[SUSIE VON EGGERS: Brenna Farrell.]

[DAN PASHMAN: David Gebel.]

[AMY PEARL: Matt Kielty.]

[DAN PASHMAN: Robert Krulwich.]

[SUSIE VON EGGERS: Annie McEwen.]

[DAN PASHMAN: Latif Nasser.]

[SUSIE VON EGGERS: Malissa O'Donnell. Or Melissa O'Donnell.]

[DAN PASHMAN: Arianne Wack.]

[AMY PEARL: Arianne Wack.]

[DAN PASHMAN: And Molly Webster.]

[AMY PEARL: With help from Tracie Hunte.]

[DAN PASHMAN: Nigar Fatali.]

[SUSIE VON EGGERS: Phoebe Wang.]

[AMY PEARL: Katie Ferguson.]

[DAN PASHMAN: Alexandra Leigh Young.]

[SUSIE VON EGGERS: W. Harry Fortuna.]

[DAN PASHMAN: And Percia Verlin. Percia Verlin.]

[SUSIE VON EGGERS: Percia Verlin.]

[AMY PEARL: And Percia Verlin!]

[DAN PASHMAN: That's like all the options I could come up with.]

[SUSIE VON EGGERS: Our fact-checkers are Eva Dasher.]

[AMY PEARL: And Michelle Harris.]

[DAN PASHMAN: Yeah. All right. I think I got that one. [laughs]]

[SUSIE VON EGGERS: Bye-bye.]

[DAN PASHMAN: Okay, bye!]

[AMY PEARL: Good night.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

-30-

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