Secret puppet masters. I guess i should start out by pointing out that irises are microbes as well. It made sense to call this this is a young, a writer for the atlantic, author of a new book called multitudes of other microbiota microbes of our panel. Here is paul, a Science Writer for the New York Times and other many books including most recently, a planet of viruses. Im an author of a book called pandemic about how microbes cause academics and all of these folks are going to be for sale by barnes noble and will sign them after this session signing table h. I hope you can come join us for more discussion. First, before we start, i would like to ask is anyone here in microbiologist . Okay, weve got four. We cant make anything up. [laughter] i think its really interesting time to talk about microbiology because there is a paradigm shift in recent years. If think back to the late 19th century, we thought about microbes mostly as these intruders we have to target with physical physician, military might. I call that approach microbial xenophobia. It made sense back then in the beginning because its the microbe we could detest. The ones that would grow in a dish in a lab and often the ones we are responsible for tuberculosis and anthrax etc. What we now know through prophets, microbes are everywhere. They are all around us. It is really there planners. So all of our interactions have evolved in the context of a microbial world. Now i know everything from our immune system to boot to dietary preferences, all are linked to the interaction between microbes. We need a new way of thinking about microbial world and our face in it which is why i think the work they do is so important right now to try to get all of us to understand the science and what it means. I think theres a real urgency for that question. I think we can all agree that microbial xenophobia as a paradigm has basically failed. Weve seen increasing emergency, highly resistant bacterial pathogens including some that can resist every class of antibiotics that we can. The chemical onslaught is creating a worse problem in many ways. Over the last few years, we had over 300 pathogens emerge. Mike is eager virus. These are in the original habitats. It is benign in the environment. A couple of years ago, ebola killed 11000 people. In west africa. Well have a conversation with you guys. I want to start with carl, every time we have one of these new microbes on the scene, i feel like our response ranges from powerlessness but on one hand its either panic and hysteria on the other hand, denial and dismissal. Where should we fall on the continuum . Is eager virus its one of these emerging diseases that has gone from being completely unknown to something we talk abt at the water cooler. Within a matter of months. Unfortunately, this is not a new thing. Its starting to become familiar routine we are going through, viruses like mers for example is it emerged in the middle east a few years ago and no one even knew about it before. It makes an interesting when you work on a book about viruses so the First Edition of my book came out in 2011 and when you write a book, you get up as much as you can you help it can take stand the test of time. In 2014 from a manager dropped me an email and said you barely say anything about ebola in this book. I think people are going to want to know about ebola. So i had the opportunity to write about ebola so i updated the book in general so the second edition came out in 2015 and mhr theres going to be ebola. The outbreak or Something Like we have never seen before. Ebola had first emerged in 1976 but relatively small outbreak from just a few of the people affected in various parts of Central Africa and then it looks like in december 2013 from probably the first person to get sick with a new break in west africa. It really didnt sort of become something people were aware of until spring 2014 by october 2014, it hits peak. Actually, it wasnt until june 2016 that the last case was recorded. Weve had just a few months without a case of ebola in west africa. This has been years of an outbreak, way bigger than anything before. Over 20000 cases 11000 people from 40 mortality rate. That is pretty terrifying. I think this is an opportunity to see how Public Health could handle something weve been anticipating for a while and i dont think we did very well at all. The monitoring was terrible, Vaccine Development was ridiculously low. A vaccine that had been in the works for many years but nobody wanted to pay to do more research because it was like ebola. Actually, spring to go on and put the experiment into humans and try to get a vaccine for humans ready and they did testing on it in spring 2015. Way after the peak of the epidemic. A lot of people died and many ducts would have been for the vaccine. Now in the last few flareups, people are getting whats called vaccination for your vaccinate people in the area around an outbreak to sort of break it from spreading further. Thats great, why didnt we have to three years ago . I tried to get as much as i could into the second edition but i do feel like a Third Addition now. Now we are looking at zika virus. That story is familiar and similar to ebola. We know about zika virus back in the 40s, identified in a monkey in uganda and it turned out people in the area had antibodies to seek a virus which suggested they were being exposed to it. People didnt Pay Attention to it, one of many obscure viruses, go into your textbooks and find them. Thats it. It emerged into mosquitoes because of ebola and in 2007, someone registered in outbreak. This was polynesia. Not uganda. Somehow this had gone all the way around the world. There were a couple of more outbreaks relatively small, a few hundred people until last year when they showed up in brazil and then things exploded. As of now, the 2015 outbreak, the one that started last year, 55 printers now that have is eager who didnt have it before. We have a in puerto rico, miami, we have it throughout the new world except for chile and canada. Probably because they are not very good for the mosquitoes that carry it. I dont think people are aware how bad things are already. Even in the United States. In puerto rico, over 17000 cases in puerto rico, theyre not sure how many of these cases of birth defect from eager virus come. Babies felt small brains. In the United States, the latest count is out there are 43 locally acquired cases. This happened just recently they are trying to stop in miami but theres no reason to think its going to work very well this unmoved. How have we done with his zika virus . I dont think weve done terribly well. Here it is in the United States. Theres been Animal Research on vaccines, this is the kind of thing you can vaccinate for but we are probably going to just Start Testing vaccines may be in january. Here in the United States, we cant even put up the money to control this. There are things we can do like Mosquito Control and research and vaccines, congress is stuck in political gains, they are not giving up the money. There find, its estimated cost for caring for these kids that have microcephaly for zika virus, 10 million for a lifetime. Thats what we are looking at. We are being incredibly foolish. We are not even being petty, its just foolish from beginning to end. Thats what we are looking at again and i think the other parallel i find striking is that this shows again how remarkable viruses are. It may give you reason to feel happy, im here to kind of freak you out. Those zika virus has ten genes. Coronavirus has seven. We have immune systems weve evolved for billions of years, they find a way around, they are thriving and spreading all over the world. Whats happening is that there are all these viruses, lots of viruses and marking them and they are spilling out as we are basically moving further and further into the system and disturbing bats, monkeys and other wildlife and fair finding a nice and new up on the post. A couple of weeks ago, a great man died, he led the eradication of smallpox. He got rid of smallpox. Thats way worse than ebola or zika virus. That killed hundreds of millions, maybe billions of people. Wiped us out from the planet. If you have the dedication, we can actually fight these things but we cant just ignore them and pretend they will take care of themselves. He is a bad cop. I think what is interesting is that we are seeing these new pathogens, they come into the human population and at the beginning, it is really horrible. Yeah, im definitely the good cop in this scenario. I dont want to contradict any of the concerns that carl has raised about the book that i wrote, i contain multitudes, is about the more beneficial side of the microbial world and i talked about the book i wrote i contain multitudes is about the microbial side and i talkow abot microbes have been with us for the longest time. We all live in the microbial world and to this day all of us depend on u microbes were health and development. Every human body contains trillions, tens of trillions of bacteria and they help to build our immune system that they digest their food and they protect us from disease and infections and they may even help to shape our behavior, and even viruses. We contain many orders of magnitude more viruses than we have bacterial cells in our body and most of those actually are bacteria a so they arent harmfl to us. They are parts of this teeming ecosystem that was with them zero so even though we can look like her individuals we are in fact very large teeming and thriving worlds. I talk about how these microbes are just passengers. They do really important things in our lives. A lets talknt about humans in the Animal Kingdom. You see all kinds of incredible superpowers that they convey to their host. Theyy allow worms, flatworms to regenerate their entire bodies. There are birds which the paint their eggs in antibacterial paste in microbe rich fluids that help to protect the checks from infections. There are even ones that use viruses and coded within their own dna to defuse the immune system of the caterpillars and in this case the virus can be a useful micro. One thing i wanted to talk about now is a case where humans have actually engineered a relationship between an animal and a microbe to help to improve our health. This ties into one of the stories that carl was talking about. The story begins in 1924 when a couple of microbiologists discovered a new type of material that lived in the cells of insects. They found it in a mosquito which they collected near boston for ages no one knew what this thing was. They didnt know where there was, nor what it did and it took the science is 12 years to give this thing a name. One of them named it after his friend his codiscoverer. It took many decades for anyone to work out what it did but in the 60s and 70s scientists realize that this thing was actually everywhere. It is an anson beatles and Something Like 40 of species of insects and other apricots that are are ready the most diverse and rich in numerous on the planet. You could think of it as one of the best pandemics in the history of life. A particular likes males because its passed from mother to daughter. The males are in use useless. They are transformed into females. Sometimes allows female insects to prove reproduce by cloning themselves so they have no need for males at all. Its a mutualist as it benefits his host ended that looks for example provides what is missing from the blood in acts like a living host. Some caterpillars use it to stop leaves from turning red in the autumn so that they can sit within the leaves and continue to eat even as the world guys around them. But humans have used for it as well. 25 years australian scientists have been trying to introduce this bacterium into a species of insects that it does not normally in fact andnd thats is the pika mosquito which spreads dengue fever, yellow fever and the reason they thought this , one when the tiger mosquito contains it at for some reason becomes really bad at spreading the virus is behind theseom diseases. So wolbachia infected tiger mosquito is a dengue proof or zika proof one. 12 wolbachia is good at manipulating its host in a way that i talked about the end is really good at spreading for a while population. The idea is that if you release a small number of these wolbachia carrying mosquitoes into the wild one of the few generations the entire local wild population should carry this microbe and thus be unable to transmit these important human diseases. This has been tested in the laboratory thats been simulated in mathematical models and was tested in 2011 fort the first time in a couple of australian suburbs where wolbachia infected mosquitoes were resistant to the wild and very quickly in the span of months you saw the prevalence of thisf microbe went from zero to 100 of the mosquitoes in that area. Now the organization that pioneered the approach called eliminate dengue has been testit countries around the world. There is healing up. They are testing testing the apn andil columbia and in asia vietnam. They release mosquitoes that have millions of people to see that approach can indeed work at thats largescale weather the mosquitoes were spread whether wolbachia will dominate as much as they had expected to and crucially whether that can drive down the transmission of the diseases that cause harm. Thepr wolbachia approach has may advantages. Has the backing of the world health organization. It is interesting because it is cheap and probably quite safe unlike insecticides which are toxic and need to be continuously respread. Wolbachia containing mosquitoes be good to go once you release them once and youll may need to release them once. There is no modification. It seems that wolbachia stops the spread of these viruses through many different groups through competing with and that is reassuring because viruses have a habit of running rings around us and no biologists would back an approach assuming evolution will not get the better of us at some point or another but if the back im allows people to resist the viruses o or by a factor for the viruses in many different ways and many different types of viruses would be to evolve which would be hard. Here we have an interesting approach. The point i want to make is all of the curiosity about the more crore real world but in 1920 for the people who discovered wolbachia could not possibly have predicted this was where their sites was going to lead. In fact one of them wolbachia the one who named the bacterium died in the 50s before anyone realized how common it was pretty could not possibly have foreseen where this research would lead to nod in many ways that is the study of the animal microbiome and the microbiome in a nutshell. For the longest time we ignored and neglected microbes thinking it would be irrelevant to us and then we went through period of fearlessness and now we are reaching an era of exploration again and appreciation for realizing the crucial role that they play in a our lives and the entire Animal Kingdom and we are starting to manipulate those partnerships for her own ends. Our attempt is a little bit fumbling and a bit clumsy but there is tremendous potential here and i think thats where the microbiome will lead us in the future and flights the area of science that strikes me so much and why he felt compelled to write a book about it. To instill that sense of curiosity that led to the discovery of wolbachia and everyone. Its interesting, we want to think of microbes in terms of are they good another bad . We are trying to push them into this economy and what you are taught about this the same microbe can behave very differently. Absolute i say in the book theres no such thing as a good or bad my chrome. My chrome start jersey we need to do destroy us germs is i thinkla wrong but also as wrong the idea that they are our friendly bacteria and good microbes. We are just another habitat for them. They have been around for billions of years and we f are another world for them much like soil or a drop of water. Some are beneficial to their hosts and some are both at the same time. I talk about the lawsuit use viruses. The relationship that microbes have with their hosts are very dynamic. They can change on a dime we need ways of containing and keeping those relationships happening. The question is when theres a conflict of interest between the microbes we are encountering likes the guy on smallpox and ebola and what they want to do and what we want to do and you could define that as disease. Happens, right . Gn lets put it this way for anything living inside of Something Else if its activities kill off its host too soon its bad news. The symbion is going to become extinct echoes that earn down its own house but if you can have a big family and say its time to leave the house and find another one and then burned down its okay. So actually these viruses and other pathogens use all the Different Levels of deadliness and sometimes you can see this in the wild. For example some fool decided it would give good idea to introduce rabbits to australia and it tookd off and they said how do we control them . Theres a horribly deadly virus that kills pearce in europe and they said will bring it to australia problem solved. It started killing them offa le crazy and then it started to become more deadly and is still not a good idea for rabbits to get sick with a virus. The virus evolved and essentially adjusted to the deadliness to be able to get the host and thehe most efficient wy for making more viruses. And its hard for us because we think about things ashi being gd in bedei is very sort of an egocentric way that these things are not just evolving over the course of a few years. They are evolving over millions of years in their language does not include it. Viruses can be good for us. In fact none of us literally none of us would have been born without viruses because millions of years in the past our ancestors got infected with viruses and theyy actually basically harnessed some of the virus genes and use them as proteins in the placenta. These are crucial in the placenta. If you knock out the gene so foi example mice with have a similar gene you i could knock out that gene and you cant have kids. Just doesnt work. Recently it was discovered that viruses were harnessed for muscles and their proteins in our muscles that appear to be generated from a virus genes. That is good. But in order to get that good our ancestors probably went through some horrific hiv like epidemic that nearly wiped out the species and then finally we achieved im