But now, what about. Delighted to finally welcome back, David Quammen to share with David Quammen 16 previous books include tangled tree the song of the dodo, the reluctance. Mr. Darwin and spillover, which was a finalist. The National Book critics circle award and a recipient of the premio la tarrio mark in rome. Hes written for the new yorker magazine, the atlantic national, and outside among others, and is a three time winner of the National Magazine kwame and shares a home here in bozeman with his wife. Betsy gave cronin. And you should check out her book author americans i am and they also have two wonderful russian wolfhounds who werent able make an appearance this evening. So without further ado david welcome. Thank you thank you thank very much jessica. Hello friends and neighbors. Hello. Friends and neighbors and its really good to be back at the at country bookshelf. Thank you, jessica. Thank you. Country bookshelf bookshelf. Of those are disposable. Its to be back. What did i do with my glasses . Ill never mind them. Im going to talk you a bit about whats in this book and why its in there. The content, the virus, the characters. But first, i want to a little bit about how it was written tell you a little bit of the story. January 2020, we remember can we remember january 20 training just starting to get some news about this peculiar pneumonia syndrome in wuhan, china may be caused by virus, may be transmissible among humans. I first paid attention to it on january 13th because i belong to a an Infectious Disease listserv Alert Network called promed and have belonged to it for ten or 15 years. And so i was working on spillover and this is a network there are about 80,000 people that subscribe and it sends you an email every time a child coughs in saigon. Not quite that, but every time a gets sick of a suspicious disease inside on. Every time a water buffalo in malaysia has lumpy skin disease. So every time. Five birds fall dead on the coast, australia, every time an outbreak of unusual occurs somewhere you get emails, you get about ten, 15 of these things a day. So you delete them. You delete them because not interested in lumpy skin disease and not interested in this or that you dont believe the delete the ones that youre interested in. So i went back after and looked at my un deleted emails from pro med from. 2020 and i found one on january 13th about this unusual syndrome in wuhan and for the first time it mentioned the word virus and i delete it because. That was an alarm bell for me and for a lot of other people that this virus could be very, very serious could be the next pandemic so i was scheduled to go to australia to do on the book that i was working on at the time for simon and schuster. My dear, a book about as an evolutionary phenomenon. And i was going to spend time with tasmanian devil biologists because the tasmanian devil has fallen prey to. A cataclysmically weird, unfortunate, genuinely contagious cancer that has been wiping out the population across the island of tasmania, the Southern Island of australia. So i was going to so february 7th or so i flew to tasmania before i went i got an email from an editor in the op ed section, the New York Times, a woman in hong kong. She was based in hong kong. Id never dealt with her before. I did things op eds for the New York Times and she emailed me and hey, quammen isnt about time you did another oped for us about you feel like, for instance maybe this weird in wuhan, china . And i said yes, i do. I want to do an op ed on that because this could be next big one. So i wrote an op ed for the times and it ran on january 28th, 2020, saying i cant remember what the title was as it ran saying this thing in wuhan. The scientists know tell us could be very, very serious. It could be a pandemic virus. And then i flew to tasmania and went out in the bush with devil biologists. I was staying at a hotel in hobart and when i wasnt out with the devil biologists, i saw that my email was just lighting up with requests from media, various parts of the world saying. Hey, op ed guy, hey spillover guy, would you talk to us about this new virus Australian Broadcast Company radio china television, television. You know npr. I think. I cant remember outfits in various different places. So i spent half my time in australia, in tasmania being, you know, a talking head, being media guy flapping his jaw about this new virus and other half with the devil. Biologists and then. March 2nd i got on a plane to come back to bozeman. I had masks with me because before i left february 6th, it occurred to me that you might not be able to get on a plane by march 2nd without a mask, but i didnt need them. Nobody was wearing them except a very few people around the los angeles airport wearing. So i got home on march 2nd and then by that time things were starting to break and everybody was recognizing this thing is big and all over the world by that time are getting and quite a number are dying. Everybody sees that even the show by that point might have acknowledged that it was a pandemic. I cant remember exactly when they said that. But it was clear this was a big this is a pandemic. Parenthetically march 2nd, 2020. I got to bozeman and i stayed home. Then for a year for, two years i got through 20, 20 on one tank of gas. I didnt leave Gallatin County except for two times. I was a poll watcher. Townsend and i went to a Memorial Service in deep creek in the paradise valley. Otherwise, i was here in the house with betsy isolating with our dogs. Cat snake and being, you know, affected by the pandemic. But about that time i heard from my Simon Schuster saying, david, that book about cancer is an evolutionary phenomenon which you just kind of push that to the back of your desk and. Give us a book about the pandemic. And i thought, oh. Theyre going to be a lot of books about the every publisher is going to want a book about the pandemic. But simon and schuster wanted theirs to be for me, one of my operating principles has always been write books about things other people are not writing books about this did not meet situation but i realized that it was not an opportunity it was sort of a duty or obliga option. So i thought about it very for four or 5 seconds. And then i said, yeah, ill do that. And they said, fine, heres a nice new contract, sign it. And do us a book on the pandemic. So i signed me 20, 20 and and they said in the contract, we want the book by. December 31st, 2021, tight deadline usually. It takes me five or six years to do a book. So they wanted book in what was going to be just a little bit more a year and a half. And they had good reasons because knew there going to be lots of other books. They knew this an urgent situation. They wanted to get the book done. They wanted to get the book out. So heres a big contract but you got to write this thing now fast. But december 31st, 2021. So i had no idea how i was going to write this book. Not only did i to come up with an original sort of book on a subject that lots other people were going to be writing books about, but i had to do it without following my other cardinal principle when writing books, which is go there. If youre going to write a book thats about partly about gorillas dying of ebola virus in the congo forest, go there. If its about, you know, bats and viruses in caves in china, go there, climb through the caves, which is i did that sort of thing for spillover ten years ago. I couldnt do that this time. I thought at one point, how soon can i on a plane for wuhan ha ha. Not soon at all. I still dont think i get into wuhan right now, so i couldnt travel and i had to write a unique book. And i had a i had a stern deadline of december 31st, 20, 21. So i did what anyone would do if faced a stern deadline to get a book written. I scheduled for double Knee Replacement surgery. And i the summer of 2020 doing that. And i wrote a couple of feature on the edge of the pen for the new yorker, and i wrote a couple op bids for the for the New York Times. But mostly i sat with ice on my knee trying to figure out how in the hell am i going to write this book . How am i going to research it, first of all . And then how am i going to write it in time and around christmas . Just after christmas, i think of 2020, i an idea of how i could do it, which consisted in essentially two parts. First of all, i would write a book about the virus, not about the medical crisis, not about the political crisis, not about the Public Health crisis, but about the virus. This virus the virus that causes covid 19 a virus officially as sarscov two. My main character would be the virus i would write about the origins and of this virus and its ferocious journey through the human population as. It achieved great evolutionary success and was the first part of it. The second part i decided was i would that by writing also about the scientists who study this virus the world the smartest evolutionary virology epidemiologists, veterinary virologist and others that i could find around the world, studying this virus. And they would be and i even put a label on one of my filing cabinets they would be my greek they would be the voices that would help me tell the story i would gather their voices and i would tell the story of the virus with voices. And i thought ill ill email them and ask them to do extended interviews with me by zoom or ill get 60 or 70 of the worlds top virologists to talk to me about this virus, their work on it, their views on it, but also their lives as people during, the pandemic, their lives, lab leaders and teachers and parents and children, elderly parents and what were their like during the pandemic as . Well, as how did they see this virus and what have they learned about so. I think i sent my first email request out on december eighth of 2020, and i started doing these zoom interviews extended zoom interviews. I asked them for an hour and a half each, which is a big ask of busy people. I you to give me an hour and a half. I want you to talk. I want to ask you about your life as a person during the pandemic as well as your work, your views of this virus and all the technical. And i will do the homework and read all your journal papers before i talk to you. And i will make sure that i double check everything with you so that things are accurate at the end. And they started saying yes, a few of them said no. A couple of them ignored me. But most of them said yes. So i started doing the interviews in. Early january 2021. I made a whole list of the people my wish list of these around the world, these brilliant men and women and i ended with 95, not 60 or 70. So in First Six Months of 2021, i did these interviews. I interviewed these 95 scientists around, the world from eminent people, george gallo, director general of the china cdc, carlos morel of, highly respected disease ecologist based in rio de janeiro. Tony fauci, Barney Graham at the Vaccine Research, the fellow who led the what became the moderne vaccine effort, eddie holmes brilliant, brilliant molecular evolutionary virologist in sydney, australia, who i knew my work on spillover ten years ago and some some completely unknown, but brilliant scientists, graduate students in edinburgh and glasgow who were working on this virus while they set their phd work aside because their professor asked them to do. That couple of young women, edinburgh, verity hill and anya otoole, who were doing brilliant, helping create a system of, tracing the variants by way of abundant, abundant genome that the United Kingdom was doing, leading the whole world in sequencing genomes of samples of the virus as they came from different people so that they developed a picture of what was happening they invented the study of various eyes because they saw the alpha variant coming up out of southeast england into london in the early days of when was that its hard to keep track of in these timelines probably early 2021 verity hill and tanya otoole i talked to them because i emailed their their professor a very eminent virologist named andrew rambo and to his credit he said now dont interview me. I dont want to talk to you. Talk to my grad students, talk to verity talked to anya, so i to them did these long with them got a lot of benefit from then i went back to him and said i talked to your grad students that was great idea. Can i talk to you to please. So he did he he gave me his time. So so thats what i did. And after six months of that, i had these interviews. God bless gloria thede of prey, my transcriber for 30 years was transcribing these things, you know, 30 pages from this person, 35 pages from that person. These are piling up and. But i knew i had to start soon. So in the middle of june, i had these interviews and i started writing and i wrote hard and i hit send on. 18th and simon and schuster, editor and the publisher there, jonathan, sort of said, what if youre two weeks early . What kind of a what kind of an author are you . But they loved the book and then it went into production. And i did a lot of Fact Checking late 20, 21 and early this and now the book is out and sylvia so a little bit of now ill talk about a little bit about whats actually in the book. So the virus is the central character. As i said, and i already a few things about this virus and about viruses in general from previous work and from what scientists revealing. First of all, i knew that everything comes from somewhere and scary new viruses in humans come from wild thats where they come from. Viruses are not are not cellular creatures. Theyre genetic parasites. They have to live in cellular creatures. They have no metabolism. They just have some machinery. So viruses can only replicate themselves by infecting the cells of, cellular creatures, animals, plants, bacteria, other microbes and hijacking their machinery, making copies of themselves, and then coming busting out. So new virus in humans. Question its a mystery story. Everybody likes mystery stories, right . Its a mystery story. First question is new virus in came from an animal what animal which . Animal where and how how did this get started started . And we dont we didnt know at that point. We didnt know. Second thing was we knew by that time this virus was a coronavirus. So ill talk a little bit about how that news came out. But coronavirus coronavirus is a family of viruses. They belong to a certain large group of viruses called the rna viruses, meaning that their genome is not dna. The old faithful double helix molecule that we learned about in high school that has stability and proofreading ability. It replicates itself, it corrects the mistakes it tends to be stable dna viruses tend not to evolve that quickly because they have a stable genome are any viruses generally with a single strand of this other information molecule. So the genetic molecule rna it it replicates itself it makes a lot of mistakes and in most those mistakes dont get repaired. Coronaviruses have a little bit of a repair mechanism, but still more mutation, more changes, more random mistake when they copy their genomes, therefore more raw material for darwinian evolution because darwinian evolution on the raw material of variation within populations competition, Natural Selection, adaptation, evolution, boom, boom, boom thats darwin 101. So rna viruses are good at that because they make a lot of mistakes when they copy their genomes. So this an rna virus, its going to have to evolve evolve. It evolves in two ways not to get to deep into the weeds, it evolves by making mistakes one letter at a time in its thousand letter genome its called mutation. Making one letter mistake. And it also by recombination which is swapping of segments with, other viruses. So if two viruses are infecting the same bat at the same time and theyre in the same of a bat at the same and start replicating their genomes at the same time. Theres a possibility that they can get tangled, that the replicating mechanism can sort of be bumped off of one template under the other template might go for, you know, a thousand letters or more copying genome into the the genome that its producing and then be bounced back. So splicing so its not unusual at all for a coronavirus genome to be a pastiche of 95 from this virus and, 5 from that virus. Thats what we knew. The experts knew about coronaviruses, but few other things we knew there was news very early that there was a virus fairly similar to this that had been discovered. A scientist named zhengli shi, a woman in wuhan at the Wuhan Institute of virology, 96. 2 identical to this virus as it in wuhan. And in january of 2020, 96. 2 similar. So people said, i even overstated this when i was in australia flapping my jaw that oh, this is very, very similar. This proves that it came from a bat. Well, not quite 96 similarity for coronaviruses implies 40 or 50 years of diverged. Its divergent evolution. So thats a pretty significant. So two different viruses that started off from the same ancestor may have continued their lineage in two different bat populations once isolated from each other for 40 or 50 years. And the result just by random mutation, if not adaptation to different circumstance, would be that they might be 4 different. So so we knew that there was this one virus, but this not this the virus. Ill give it a name. Rat g 13. That was the close match. Rat g 13 actually theres supposed to im supposed to call it ratg13, but i like calling it rat g 13, so rat g was the closest but not that close still suggested that this virus came from bats in particular from horseshoe bats particular kind of small insects versus bat. And there were two curious features in this genome which the people who look at genomes the molecular evolutionary virologists can look at and say thats odd havent seen that in this particular kind coronavirus before this narrow of coronaviruses the like coronaviruses start stars like better never mind that but then there is theres theres a sub genus subgenus of of the family coronavirus that this virus belongs to. And nobody had ever seen these two features in a coronavirus of subgenus before. None of this going to be on the quiz at the end of the at the end of the lecture, there was a receptor binding domain, which is a patch you know the coronaviruses got the spikes that stick like clothes sticking out of a big tam right and those spikes are how the coronaviruses latches on to cells to infect them to latch hold get in them replicate itself and and continue to do its damage. So the