Extended Classic: Zombie Apocalypse (Part 1)

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History right here in New York City, where I also serve as director of the Hayden Planetarium. This week, my co-host is the one, the only Eugene Mermin. Eugene, welcome back. Hello, great to be back. You like my co-host so often now. I know. Like, is that a good thing or not, I don't know. I think it's a great thing for both of us, and for the world, mostly the world and then us. You know, this show topic is long overdue. You know what this is gonna be about? The zombie apocalypse. Yes, the living coming back to life. Well. Or never quite dying enough. To be not dead enough. Yeah. And, you know, zombies, I have to admit, I'm a little surprised how popular the genre has become. How popular zombies are. Yeah, I don't understand it. I mean, it's not like- Well, are zombies the dead risen, or are they simply sort of very sick people who bite and are powerful? So rather than me being the one who answers that, we thought I'd like check with others who've thought long and hard about this and- Sean Penn. We'll get to that in just a moment, because zombies, in fact, have been analogized to viruses, the spread of disease. And if you think of a disease, not as a human being wanted to bite you with their limbs falling off, but as the vector delivering vessel of a way to get sick. As a tiny, invisible human being the size of a virus. One way to do it. So, you know, so we combed the land and we needed to find the most virus fluent person we could. And we came up with Dr. Ian Lipkin. Dr. welcome to StarTalk Radio. A pleasure to be here. I gotta read your title. You are like professor of epidemiology, neurology and pathology at Columbia University. And you also direct the Center for Infection and Immunity, which is a lab focused on microbe hunting and chronic diseases. That, that, you know, and now I noticed you didn't shake hands with anyone when you walked in here. I don't know what Petri dish you've been digging in before you arrived. Yeah, at first I thought it was to save yourself, but now I realize it's to save me. To save human beings from yourself. And you're also director of the Northeast Bio Defense Center. I didn't even know such a thing existed. What is that? That's part of our role, is to make sure you don't know who we are. That's right. But you're bio defending me, I would hope. You ever consult on the movie Contagion? Yes, many times. What, did you do your homework before you came here? No, I'm just guessing. I mean, look at the thing. Okay, so you're not only professor, we study this stuff, but you've been tapped by pop culture for this expertise. So how did Contagion do as a movie? Did they get it right? It did well, it did well. No, no, I meant, I mean, scientifically, did they? It did well scientifically too, I mean. If you say so yourself. Well, you know, I didn't have any of the back end, if that's what you're asking, but I was paid. Always get the back end. Well, I didn't know that at the time, I know now, but actually it was fairly accurate. We did not tackle zombies. No, not in the movie, but we wanted to find out why they relate to each other at all. In fact, for this show, I have you, as my sort of expert in-house scientist commentator, on an interview that I captured with Max Brooks, who, if you're into sort of who's genetically related to whom out there, he's the son of Mel Brooks, it turns out. One of the top Brooks's in the world. And I didn't know this guy is like one of the world's experts on zombies. And it was my interview with him where I first learned of this sort of sociocultural analog between zombies and disease. And I bumped into him when we were at Comic-Con 2012 in San Diego, crazy place, as crazy as I had ever imagined it to be. But let's pick up with my interview with Max Brooks and we've got Dr. Lipkin here to help us react to it. Just to put Max Brooks on your radar, he's the author of the book, The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z, which is an oral history of the zombie war. And in fact, that book is becoming a movie titled World War Z starring guess who? Matt Damon. That's a close enough, Brad Pitt, one of the leading men of the day. Let's check out my first clip and see where he takes us and leaves us in this story. I based the zombie virus on AIDS. On the transmitability. On the transmitability, because I wanted to make it very hard to get, just like AIDS was very hard to get. And therefore from a storytelling point of view, the mistakes were made by us. Because the truth is, let's face it, if in 1980 Reagan had gone on TV and said, my fellow Americans, there's a disease that's real hard to get, but if you get it, it's going to be really bad. Here's 10 things you can do to avoid it. Boom, AIDS would have been a paragraph in a medical journal. So it's just some exotic cases. Right, it would have been, oh, remember that weird disease in the 80s? We called it grid. So I wanted to make it about our mistakes. You're saying we could have rendered AIDS extinct. We could have made AIDS extinct with a pamphlet. That's how we could have stopped it. Because we're not talking about influenza we're not talking about Ebola Reston. We're talking about something that's really hard to get. Like airborne viruses, sneeze-borne viruses. It's not cholera, it's not waterborne. It's so hard to get, but through our mistakes as a society, we let the genie out of the bottle. So this formed an infectious disease model for you. Yeah, that was purely my model. Because I'm 40 years old, so I'm a child of the AIDS generation. Okay, so there's a zombie virus, I guess. Right, there's a zombie virus, it's out there. You just declare it, and then you could treat it like it's a biological weapon, in a sense. Right, and my attitude is I'm not as interested in the origins as I am in the reaction. Because quite frankly, I don't care where AIDS came from. I love green monkeys, good for you guys. But what I care about is how we reacted to it. Doctor, this is the first time I had heard zombies analogize to infectious disease, and he went right out and implicated sort of AIDS as something that could have been stopped on the spot. And I think I had heard that in some other circles, but you live in this. How do you see that assessment? Well, if only that were true. Oh, okay, so it was a little oversimplified. So in 1981 to 84, I was in San Francisco when this virus first appeared. First of all, it took us a while to figure out what it was. And that's also true. You're groping in the dark, right, right. We have no idea. And we were looking at whether or not people had overexposure to different types of drugs. And we had the wrong virus a couple of times and we finally figured out what it was. But even then, I don't think a pamphlet would have changed the course. What if the pamphlet was huge? What if, is it that it's just too small? That's an interesting thought. I hadn't considered the possibility of a pamphlet. A pamphlet, let's say two feet by four feet. Blanketing the United States. No, your issue is not that it wasn't red enough, but that even a pamphlet that was red perfectly would not have worked. Because people already knew about STDs and they didn't care about those. STDs have been with us since the beginning of time and I don't think they're going anywhere. That was one of the things. That is the literal beginning of time. He meant the beginning of humans on Earth. Okay, and then herpes flew out of a star at Earth. Big Bang might have been an orgasm, who knows? They, we gotta take a quick break. Thanks God. We'll come right back with Dr. Lipkin and my co-host Eugene Murmur. We're talking about zombies, we're talking about viruses. Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm here in studio with Eugene Merman. Eugene, as always, tweeting at Eugene Merman. Yes. Yes, I follow you. You make me laugh. Thank you. Not every single tweet, but enough till I stay with you. Exactly, and I learn from you almost every time. Joining me straight from Columbia, Columbia University, Dr. Ian Lipkin, who studies viruses. This is what this man does. And does he bathe every hour? I don't know. Is he a walker? I don't know where he's been or where he's going, but he's an expert on this stuff. And we left the last segment with my interview with Max Roach, and Max Roach, that's the guy from Little Rascals. Sure, Max Brooks. Max Brooks. Zombie expert. He's a zombie expert, and we analogize zombies to the AIDS virus. And you were concerned about how he oversimplifies this, how rapidly it could have been, the spread could have been prevented, I guess. Look, I wanna go on record as saying that I'm very concerned about zombies. Okay, excellent. Yes, they keep me up at night. Excellent, the only apocalypse any of us should ever actually worry about. You've heard it here first. So, I guess a big challenge, you were in San Francisco when AIDS broke out, and a big challenge there is finding the patient zero, I guess, right? And at some point, this came from animals, right? I mean. Yes, 70% of these. Animals other than humans, yeah. Yeah, 70% of the diseases were concerned about these emerging diseases come from animals. Like mad cow, I guess they. Well, mad cow disease, West Nile virus, influenza, rabies. SARS. SARS. SARS is an acronym for what? Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. Okay, that means you don't really know that's. You kind of said it a little slowly, where you were like, I could define it right now for everyone. No, but man, it doesn't have a fancy name yet. You're just spelling it out. It's a pretty good name. Yeah. It's catchy, it's catchy. I would have a band with that name if I had to play music. So all diseases aren't spread the same way, clearly. And this must have been part of your greatest challenges at the beginning of this. Yeah, so there are diseases that are spread through the blood supply, respiratory tract, fecal material, urine, all kinds of ways. And people do weird stuff with human excrement. People do very weird stuff. Right. There's a lot of punk rockers in danger of getting a bunch of weird diseases. Right, right. So you guys are on your toes for this. But the most efficient one is always blood. That's the best. I mean, if I was gonna give someone a disease. If you wanna be a virus. But the other one, of course, is sexually transmitted diseases and they frequently has a lot of overlap. Because people, you know. Yeah, but people don't exchange blood every day. No, that's true. As a typical. Because they don't make bonds every day. But they certainly do exchange other bodily fluids. Name four. For sure. Just kidding, please don't. So how did you go about finding, so the first AIDS was isolated when? The virus. Well, so the virus was discovered in 83. But I didn't discover that virus. That was discovered really by. No one's blaming you. By my French team. So I was an observer. But I was impressed by the fact that it took us so long to figure out what it was. How long had it been infecting people before you guys isolated it? Oh, the first documented case of HIV infection goes back to 59. But it really surfaced in a major way in 80, 81. So you went back to 59 once you knew what to look for and then you looked at the journals of symptoms. It's the royal we. So I didn't do any of that work. It's science. It's science, yeah. Medical science. Yes, my buddies, yeah. You're a brethren in the community. Yes, yes. So, all right, so the earliest case is once you dig through the books in 1959. But it starts showing a big in early 80s, obviously. Correct. You're isolated in 83. Then what do you do? Along with new wave, not blaming, just saying. Well, then the first thing you wanna try to do is to develop a diagnostic test so you can figure out who has it, who doesn't yet have symptoms. And you can protect the blood supply, so you can test blood. Oh, for blood donors, of course. Yeah, exactly, for blood donors. And then everybody starts focusing, trying to make you a vaccine, right? I remember having a conversation in E4 with some senior virologists who said to me, you shouldn't work on HIV, Ian. We're gonna solve this one with a vaccine within the next six months. So this is now 20 plus years later, and we're still nowhere near a vaccine. So why were they overconfident? They just had too high ideals too high, or did they think they were smarter? They thought they were smarter than they actually were. This was really new. I mean, nobody really had seen a virus that had the ability to change its shape so dramatically, so quickly. Shape shifting virus. A shape shifting virus. But I'm glad they were cocky about how quickly they could solve it nonetheless. They're like, I've never seen this before, but I'm pretty sure I can definitely solve this. That is really cocky. And so AIDS, from what I can tell about this, from what I could tell, what made it hard is that you get infected, but you don't know you're infected for a little while. So there's this period where you keep infecting people before you even know you're susceptible. Exactly right. And that period is years, like decades. It can be. Well, let's pick up my interview with Max Brooks, who has analogized for us the zombie apocalypse with this spread of virus. And my whole conversation with him was infused with these kinds of references. And like I said, we met up with him at Comic-Con 2012 in San Diego. Yes. Let's check out what more he has to say. In my stories, you have to get bitten or the virus has to get in your bloodstream. You get sick, you die, then you wake up again. As a zombie. Your body has been carjacked by the zombie virus. Wait a minute, if I'm bitten by a zombie, it won't kill me. I have to wait to die for some other cause. It will kill you. It will kill me. It will kill you within hours or days, but you're going down. By the way, there's been about 110 billion people who have ever lived. Not all those people are eligible zombies because they're bone. Oh, no, no, no, no, you gotta be fresh. It's not like suddenly the graveyards of the world are gonna erupt forth. Oh, how fresh? Alive. They gotta be alive and then die and then come back. So really fresh. Really fresh. Like embalmed fresh. Not even that. If a zombie walks into a morgue, sounds like a joke. Yeah. Zombie walks into a morgue. Zombie walks into a morgue, for some reason starts biting dead bodies. Those dead bodies aren't gonna come back to life. They're gone. Once you die, you die. Literally, if I'm running from a zombie and he's about to eat me and I suddenly have a heart attack and die and then he bites me, I ain't coming back. Okay, so zombies crawling out of graves is the wrong image that you're... Especially because, let's face it, how many people today are buried, especially in America, in these zinc boxes? Oh, even if it was a wooden box, they're not getting out. No, that's like a cemetery. Able-bodied, you know, a woman can get out of a box, that's it. That's it. No, I always say a cemetery is one of the safest places to be because all the dead bodies are basically locked up in safes. Okay, so we shouldn't fear cemeteries anymore. Don't fear cemeteries. Okay, so just to clarify, you're a zombie chasing me, you bite me, I become a zombie, period. Right, I bite you. And all my muscles are intact. Right, step one, I'm a zombie, I'm chasing you. Step two, I bite you. Step three, you get away and you go, oh, I got away, oh, but I got this nasty bite. Step three, you get sick and die. Step four, you wake up as a zombie. And what's the time between dying and waking up? It depends on how badly I've bitten you. If I've, let's say, tore out a major blood vessel, you're gonna die very soon, but if I scratch you, it may take days. Gotcha, and so when I saw, I don't, forgive me, I don't even remember what movie it is because there's so many zombie films out there. So one of them was, their best friend got a scratch and they knew he was a goner. And so he said, shoot me in the head now. So there's an interesting dynamic tension because they're for your friend and they're not yet a zombie. And that to me is what's so powerful because it builds the drama. In the storytelling. It's like, oh my God, I mean, it's sort of like, you know, you go into the doctor's office and he tells you, you got something and you're not gonna recover from it, but you've got six months to live. You'll have six months, but you won't really be living. Right, you'll be thinking about dying. Every day. Every day. So at my interview with Max Brooks there. So Dr. Lipkin, you, the fundamental variance here is that some diseases have a longer incubation time where you are dangerous to others whether or not you know it. And that's gotta be the worst kind of virus there is. Well, it depends. I mean, we have this. I don't know, Ebola sounds pretty bad too. You're like, you have years where you can still make omelets. That's not as bad, like when blood comes out your face and you die, sounds worse. Yeah. Offer it to me. There are some viruses that cause very little disease but they spread very rapidly and very easily. And there's some viruses, I think, Eddie Murphy talked about herpes simplex, you know. You keep it forever like luggage. Keep it like luggage, you know. You never get rid of it. But most people don't die. Yeah, and Beverly Hills Cop. People don't normally die from herpes. And Ebola is definitely a bad one to have. My major concern with his- What's your least favorite? But if you're a zombie, this is sort of like a Ponzi scheme, because eventually you run out of bodies. Right, right, right. So you bite somebody, you bite somebody and eventually- It's a self-defeating virus. Yeah, it's a self-defeating virus. I'm just particularly concerned because once you know you are infected, then a responsible person could keep their distance or- They could. If you don't know you're infected- Just like AIDS. And you are infected, that makes you especially dangerous in society. Isn't that correct? It is true. So, viruses have different lifestyles. Some kill their host very rapidly or they kill some portion of the host, like the respiratory tract, flu viruses, things like this. But because they can always find another victim easily, they survive. They evolve and they take over and they do quite well. And they float out of your body through the air and they sneeze and there you go. And now when some of them are spread in fecal material and so forth. You're like, it's all- We gotta take another break. You're listening to StarTalk Radio, the zombie virus edition, we'll be right back. Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. You know, you can find us on the web at www.startalkradio.net. We're also likable on Facebook. Eugene, are we likable? I think so, yeah. Good, I'm just confirming that. Totally likable. We're here with Dr. Ian Lipkin, who's a professor of everything virally nasty at Columbia. I don't know if that's on his business card, but- It probably says something clearer, unless it's scary. Thanks for being on StarTalk. We're analyzing sort of a zombie apocalypse, but analogizing that to the spread of viruses. And we've got clips from my interview with Max Brooks, who's in fact, he wrote the book on which, zombie apocalypse stories have been based. If somebody catches this interview in the wrong place, they're going to think that you are really getting information about actual zombies. Actual zombies. On how to actually survive. They just have to listen from the beginning. Yeah, well- That's called the rewind button. I look forward to the four that don't. Let's go straight to my clip with Max Brooks. And we talk about how you spread viruses, not through sex, not through kissing or other traditional bodily fluids, but by the simple bite. Let's find out what he said. Sexy bite. Why is the zombie compelled to bite you? Why do they even care? It's their biological imperative to spread the virus. Through the eating, they're not ingesting nutrition, but it is an act that is familiar to their DNA. They already know how to eat, and that's the best way to spread the virus is to bite. So they're a perfect viral organism in that respect. They are a walking play. They have no other point but to spread what they are. They're literally a virus. Okay, so why does it seem like in some movies I've seen where zombies attack a person and it looks like they'd want to eat them, like vultures around a carcass? Because more than one of them don't have to attack the same woman. Right, no, no, and they are, they are eating. They're not smart enough to know that if you eat too much of the person, it won't be mobile enough to keep going. But there's nothing more primal in the human mind than to eat, than to bring food to your mouth. That's it, we know that from infants. Infants do that. From infants. And they bring it to your mouth even if it's not food. Exactly, and therefore the virus doesn't have to teach the zombie to do that. So doctor, AIDS is transmitted sexually, but it's a blood exchange at some level, correct? At some level, yeah. All right, so if you have AIDS and you bite someone, you can give them AIDS through your bite, in principle? No. No. No. Not even a little. What if you bite their ding dong? Just curious. That's the after hours show. We can try that. So, but clearly though rabies is among those that are bite transmitted, right? That's the way it's typically transmitted. So it's a saliva to blood, I guess. So the virus grows very, very high levels in the salivary glands, so it's in the saliva. And one of the things that happens as animals get into the later stages of rabies is that they have difficulty swallowing and they also become very aggressive and they bite other animals, not to eat them, but again, just because they're aggressive. So this feature of the virus changing the behavior of the host is in the service of the survival of the virus. Yes. That's certainly a way of looking at it. If people had rabies, would they want to bite people? Yeah, that's a good question. Well, that hasn't, you know, there aren't a lot of people who have been observed in those stage of rabies. Like rabies colonies, right? Most of the time, yeah, most of the time, that's something we should do with prisoners, just to see. That's right. Okay, Eugene. Most of the time, it's like just dogs. Just an idea. So that's interesting. So had that virus triggered dogs to rest peacefully in the corner, then the rabies virus would render itself extinct. Probably so. Wow. So all the variations of the rabies virus, the one that makes you want to bite other dogs or other mammals, that's the virus that propagates itself. That's the evolutionary sound. So the virus, for a virus to succeed, it can't kill all of the hosts before, and it certainly can't kill the host in which it's living until it has an opportunity. Because it's rude? Until it has an opportunity to jump into a new one. Yes, you have to live long enough to spread it. Right, exactly. Otherwise it will die out. Because I heard that, that's true about cholera, for example. If cholera is too effective, you can't even move to another place. And infect someone with it. So the virus kills you and nobody else. It's gotta just have a little bit of time delay. Yeah. But the other thing that, that cholera does, which is really, which is really interesting is it, it causes diarrhea. Yeah. So that, so that lots of viruses spread out into the environment so that it can find new hosts. Into the water supply and everything. And it's purposefully doing. Right, so. Well, I guess the cholera that made you constipated. Would die. Wouldn't do very well either. But the cholera that made you poo lives. That's it's slogan if it had a chance. Poo to live. To have a slogan. Yeah, poo to live. Slogan. I'm just trying to help cholera market itself. I can't get that in my head now. Viruses with slogans. Yeah, because eventually they're gonna have to fight each other once they kill us all. So professionally, what viruses are you guys most worried about today? It's the 21st century. Does top three in order, what is it? HIV. HIV, still. Still for me is the big one. That's too bad, I mean it's still out there. Is it something like Ebola or things that like make you bleed out of your face if you look at someone or however, how does it? Well, if you're, if you're asking me what bothers me most in terms of the state of the world, it really is HIV. And number two would be influenza. And number three would be the one I don't know about. Because we're seeing new things all the time. And one of the greatest sources of unknown viruses is other mammals. And that's a reminder how genetically we're related, we're related to them because if you can jump species, as far as the virus is concerned, it's just another kind of mammal, right? It's not. That's correct. We're not gonna ever catch Dutch Elm disease. I have a question. I know you said. Hold that for the break. After the break, you're listening to StarTalk Radio. We're talking about viruses, we're talking about zombies. We're talking about getting bitten and dying. We'll be right back. Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. You know, we tweet at StarTalk Radio. Check it out. You'll find out where all our live shows are and when we're on the air, when we're not, who our guests are. Go ahead and follow us there. Now, today's subject is zombies, viruses. So I've got the zombie expert in clips that we obtained from my last trip to- You recorded him at Comic-Con. At Comic-Con. And so I got that side of it, and I got the viral side of it with Dr. Ian Lipkin from up at Columbia University, one of the world's experts on viruses and how they transmit. And could you just give us some Virus 101 here? Are they alive and what the hell are they? Just, you know, in 30 seconds, can you do- In 30 seconds? Why don't we start off with the Max Brooks clip? Because he's going to talk about the science of zombies, and then we can talk about the science of the virus. I'm looking forward to this. Coming right after that. Sure, let's do it. Let's hit that clip with Max Brooks. Check it out. Now, I assume you saw that research paper on zombies that came out maybe a year ago or so. It treated zombies in a predator-prey calculation. Did that get a lot of mileage in your circles? Oh, yeah, well, no. What I love is that you're starting to get genuine thinkers. You're starting to get genuine academics and smart people who are really looking at a zombie plague from an academic point of view. There was a Canadian mathematician who did a model, a mathematical model of how the zombie virus would spread. I thought it was brilliant. I think that was the paper I saw. Yes, yes. There's a gentleman from Harvard, Dr. Steve Schlozman, who wrote a book on the brain patterns of zombies. And he described- Now, what is now? Come on, is this from the medical school, the Harvard Medical School? The Harvard Medical School. And I mean, look, you gotta give him a break. I mean, it's not like he went to Yale. All right, so what is he imagining is the brain pattern? Well, he describes it as the crocodile brain. He describes that the frontal lobes of the zombies have deteriorated and the higher brain functions have gone with them and it's the lower brain functions, the more basic. Basic survival. Right. Eat. Eat and move, which is what a crocodile brain is and that's why he calls it that. Is that why crocodiles don't have foreheads? That's an excellent, I've never asked one. I've never gotten close enough to ask one. Dr. Lipkin, what is a virus? I'm still trying to get my brain around a crocodile brain. A virus is a piece of genetic information that's wrapped up in protein. We used to call the, a very famous virologist once referred to a virus as a piece of bad news wrapped up in a protein coat. What they do is they inject. It's evil beef jerky. Evil, very evil beef jerky. Why can't you have good viruses? You can have good viruses. All right then, so don't implicate the entire group. What's the best virus? Is there one that makes you super strong or you can fly? Yeah, how about a virus that makes us smarter? Why don't you come up with one of those? Or like a spider who is also a man. Just an example. That's terrific. I'll get right to work on it. I'm sure Columbia would be excited about the intellectual property with that one. Yes, if you make an actual Spider-Man, you then re-owns, you get it from Stan Lee. You know, viruses are much, much smaller than bacteria, right, like a thousandth the size or something. So there's some large ones now that have been discovered recently that you can actually visualize under a microscope. Like an antelope or a human foot? Of a hangnail, because that's what the rest of us do under a microscope. But with, if you can, but they're so small. Most of them are very, very small. That creates one of the challenges of dealing with them, I guess. So what they do is they go into a cell and they hijack the machinery of the cell. And they turn the cell over to their own design. So they start making genes and proteins and basically hijacking the cell. They're not only evil, they're diabolical. They are diabolical. They're the Saddam Hussein of whatever that would be in an alibi. No, Brian Mallow, who's called a science comedian, one of my favorite jokes of his was, a virus walks into a bar. The bartender says, sorry, we don't serve viruses. So the virus turns him into a bartender that does and then orders his drink. Little bit of bio humor there. So, but most viruses that you care about are the bad kind, I presume. And so what does the CDC do, the Center for Disease Control? Are they protecting us or is it only you with your organization up there? No, I'm certainly not gonna touch that one directly. So the CDC has, they have had a mandate to protect us against all sorts of things, including tracking viruses all over the world, bacteria, ensuring the safety of the food supply. Tracking viruses, so you gotta know where they're coming, where they're going, so you can put a gate there, presumably, I mean a metaphorical gate. Yeah, we have to be able to figure out where they're coming from, where they're going, how they're evolving. North Korea. Right, you know, we haven't looked for viruses in North Korea. Because you can't get there, can't touch this. An interesting idea. Let's go, the three of us in my jet. So there could be viruses brewing that you know nothing about because they haven't actually spread to noticeable places yet. We estimate that there's somewhere between 500,000 and a million viruses that are yet to be discovered. Well, get to work, man. So it's a growth industry. When we come back to StarTalk radio, right now, I mean, we're learning about the biology of viruses and why they're bad and I didn't know that there were some good viruses. I know, I can't wait to find out about two good viruses. We're talking with Ian Lipkin and I've of course got Eugene Merman for StarTalk. Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. By the way, I also tweet the universe. Don't expect them to contain current events, although they occasionally do. It's mostly cosmic brain droppings, really. That's all it is. I've got Eugene Mermin here, my co-host, and the continued clips from my interview from Comic Con with Max Brooks, who's the world's leading authority on the non-existent thing called zombies, which we've analogized to the spread of disease. Self-appointed, but agreed. Self-appointed. I've got Dr. Ian Lipkin here from Columbia. And let's go straight to my final clip with Max Brooks. I think he was talking about, if you know you're gonna die, what does that do? What anxieties descend upon you? Let's find out. So why is it that the zombies are always, they look like they're in pain, as though they had died a horrible death? Right, well, for me, the slouching thing, from a storyteller point of view, it builds the drama of anxiety. Because you know, the difference between fear and anxiety. No, I don't, no, tell me, tell me. Well, for me, it's the difference. I know literally, but surely there's a storytelling. Well, in my mind, the difference between, the reason I don't do fast zombies, it's the difference between getting shot and getting cancer. You're attacked by a fast zombie, you'll be dead before you know it. But slow zombies, you can outrun them. It's a tortoise in the hair. But you know they're coming. You board up the windows and doors of your house, and they're banging. So it's all about exploiting the anxiety as you tell your story. Yes, it's about pulling out that anxiety, those sleepless nights of knowing that it's coming for you. That's diabolical. You're an evil man. I'm just expressing my own obsessive-compulsive neuroses. Because every time I see zombies struggling down the street, I say to myself, why don't we make a zombie that can run and outrun you? But that's no fun. No, and they do. And there's plenty of fast zombie movies. But to me, that's not scary because it's over. You're done. It's the difference also, like, when you skydive, you say, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. Boom, you're on the ground. When you scuba dive, there's plenty of time to think of all the ways you can die. So if you are so much faster than zombies, why do they always catch up to people? You underestimate them. You always think, I'm going to sprint, and then you tire yourself out, and you go take a nap. And you get some distance, and they're over the horizon. And you get complacent. And then you go take a nap, and you wake up, and you're being eaten. This whole zombie thing could be solved by simply going to Martha's Vineyard. Is that right? I've been there once, but I, so Dr. Lipkin, do we underestimate the threat of viruses in our culture? I'm sure you don't underestimate them, because you work with them daily. But do you think other people are too complacent, and it'll catch up with us? Well, if we don't fund research on viruses, we're going to be in difficult straits. We'll all vote to fund it. Are there any good viruses, and what do they do? Yeah, yeah, so we heard about bad viruses. There's got to be some, all viruses can't be bad. No, no, there are several. There are people who are now using viruses to introduce genes for people who have disorders like Alzheimer's and diabetes and Parkinson's. And using viruses to make vaccines, and there's a very cool story. Viruses are cleverer than we are about how to make that happen. Well, we engineer them. We put things into them and use them as delivery vehicles. Right, because they know how to get in a virus and mess with the DNA in ways that we can't. Right, and they can produce some product that's useful. And there are people who are using viruses now to purify things like gold and to make electric circuits. So they're being used now for nanotechnology. So viruses are very interesting. So this is the basis. You can use a virus to make better gold. Sounds safe. You can make viruses that will specifically bind to gold or platinum, and you can flow seawater over them and capture it and concentrate it. Wow. Yeah. So viruses is our future. And you've never, you ever steal a virus and put it in someone's soup, not like a deadly one, but just like, I don't like you and I'm going to make you sick for a minute. They tend to die in soup. Well, maybe a gazpacho then. I'll help you think of a solution. So a virus, so that's extraordinary. So the future of virologist is one not only of curing disease, but of transforming life. Where alchemy left off, virology picks up. Apparently. Yes. He answered yes to that question. I know. It's true. Viruses are great. They're the best. I'm going to get a bag of viruses and sift through it asking the questions. Okay. So now we need viruses to fight other viruses maybe. True. Now here's something I always wanted to sort of confirm. We create antibodies to viruses when we're exposed to them at a very low level, correct? That's correct. So why doesn't that work for every virus that we've ever found? Because there are some viruses that we haven't seen before, so we can't mount immune responses to them. Now, fortunately, we have recently discovered, and you should tell Max Brooks about this, a virus that kills zombies, and we plan to disseminate this virus. What's the virus? Is it like spinach? Is it a fake virus or is it a real virus that prevents people from coming back from the dead? But I promise we're not gonna do this prior to the release of his movie. Oh, yeah, there you go. You do it after and then everyone goes to interview him for how to cure the zombie. I'm sure the movie has its own solution, like cutting people's heads off and things. Yeah, something, a nice simple solution, blow up the head, everyone's fine. So doctors, anything, we're running low on time, anything that you need to tell us, tell our listeners, from the point of view of someone who plays with deadly viruses daily. Support our work. Yeah, support. Nothing more ominous could be said. Not wear a condom, not wear a condom, not, not wash your hands. Everyone knows to wear a condom, everyone funds someone trying to cure wearing a condom. That's what he's saying. You give me money, you don't need any more condoms. Thank you, Dr. I was about to call you Dr. Thank you, Dr. Lipkin for being on StarTalk Radio. A pleasure. Now we know how to kill zombies and stay more healthy. You've been listening, Eugene, you're always good. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio brought to you in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. As always, I bid you to keep looking up. When we come back, we'll have special guest, Steven Soter, who co-wrote both Cosmos series with Ann, and also Bill Nye, the Science Guy. All three of us happened to have been impacted directly by Carl Sagan. Hear more about how and why when we come back. Welcome to the Cosmic Crib section of StarTalk Radio. We're here in my office at the Hayden Planetarium, where during the Cosmic Crib segment, we just chew the fat, whatever that fat is. But it's usually Cosmic Fat. It's more of a gristle. Gristle. It has connective tissue. That's the voice of Bill Nye. Bill, thanks for coming in to the Cosmic Crib. And also I have Steven Soter. Steve Soter, thanks for coming in. He's a friend and a colleague. He's worked on both Cosmoses. Is that the plural of Cosmos? Cosmai. 1980, he was co-writer with Andrew Ian and Carl Sagan. And he was co-writer in Cosmos' Space Time Odyssey, which I had the privilege of hosting. So just want to get back to you, because we're just chilling here. So Bill, you are CEO of The Planetary Society, co-founded many moons ago by Carl Sagan himself. Yeah, in the winter of 1979, 1980. So people like to say 1980. I got it in the mail. That was the state of the art. You got a letter. Hey, you want to join The Planetary Society. It's a world organization. But it was a letter, so there was no voice in it. You made up that voice. Yeah, I did. And so it was sounded cool. That was the voice you imagined the letter would have. It's radio voice. It sounded exciting. So you joined The Planetary Society and now you are CEO of it. So I've been a member since 1980. And just give me a two sentence mission statement. Well, what we do is advance space science and exploration, empowering citizens of the world to know the cosmos and our place within it. There it is. And this is a lot of the spirit that Carl Sagan brought to his work professionally and the public. The key word for me is advancing space science, advancing exploration. And this is something that's on my mind a lot right now is we're stuck in a space program that either is doing the same thing it's done for a long time or is doing science, is going out with specific science goals to make measurements. Predetermined science goals. Instruments designed to do a specific thing, measure specific things, which is a worthy undertaking to be sure. But there's some great value and this is what we're trying to bring to the world now. There's great value in just exploration. Go out there and just look, look, observe and take measurements. It sounds like I think it was Einstein who said research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. So at some point you want to go out there and just not even have an objective, just explore. Well, the objective would be to take as many pictures as you can, to measure as much radiation as you can, to measure as many temperatures as you can, to measure. Measure stuff. But that's observation. That's what you would do if you had your five senses engaged. Yeah, yeah. Or senses in addition to those provided by the methods and tools of science. Yeah, like we can see in the infrared instruments. Exactly, exactly. And so my claim is, and I talk about this, Carl Sagan alluded to it a little bit, but if we were to discover evidence of life elsewhere, it would utterly change the world. Now this, I'd really like to hear Steve Soter's view of this. In our day. So part of it is, in there is kind of the romance discovered. Absolutely. And this is, and all of Sagan's writings are filled with this, coming and going. And so Steve, you've been a collaborator with Carl on major projects. So how would you say, what was the split in terms of romance versus content, versus, how did that like shake out? Well, the romance was there, but it was always firmly rooted in the science, in the reality. So you're saying, but that requires some kind of teasing out of it. Cuz a whole lot of scientists don't know how to speak romantically about their topic. Which makes me wonder about them. No, seriously, don't you, when you make a discovery, this is another phrase I use continually now, is joy of discovery. When you feel that joy of discovery, that's when you want to, that's when your passion comes out, that's when you want to explore further. And what was Carl Sagan's edict? When you're in love. When you're in love, you want to tell the world. Tell the world, right. No, that's perfect for him. That describes it. I'm not sure I'd go with the word edict, but I follow you. Edict is in the sense of commandment. Too many of those words describing those kind of phrases. It's an inspiring sentence thing. Right, thingy, right. So Steve, can you compare the first cosmos to the second? Well, the technology has changed, so. But in terms of creating it, writing it, thinking it up, there's got to be a lot that's the same. Yes, in terms of the subjects? No, in terms of goals. Let me ask you this. Steve, was it your idea to do Eratosthenes? This is the original cosmos? I don't remember. It may have been. I wouldn't be surprised. The first person to measure the Earth. To within maybe 4%. He got it within a few percent. With shadows of sticks, may I say, dude. Yeah, this was good. This was good. To measure the circumference. Demonstrating that Earth is a spherical object. Yes, not just demonstrating that it's a sphere, which a lot of people already knew because you could see its circular shadow on the moon during an eclipse. Wait, wait, wait, wait, just to be clear. A disk will leave a circular shadow on the moon as well. A flat disk. Only if it was presented. Hold on, hold on, hold on. A disk will leave a circular shadow provided the sunlight is angled in the right way. But in every eclipse, every single eclipse, no matter the configuration, you got it. The only thing that leaves a circular shadow and always is a sphere. Correct. So a lot of educated people then knew that the Earth was a sphere. But he measured the size, which is a more stupendous achievement. Based on a note. Measuring shadows. I'm walking down the street. You know, I noticed where I live on the longest day of the year, Sticks cast no shadow and I see the bottom of the wells. Your friend, Stranger. So that mumbled note is, of course, where must the sun be if you're going to see the bottom of a well? It has to be exactly directly overhead. Otherwise, every other angle is illuminating the side of the well and not the bottom of the well. And so he's got this in the back of his head. So in one part of the earth, this happens on one day of the year. No, I'm going to wait for the longest day of the year. I'm going to walk outside. I'm going to take a look at that. Yeah, yeah, he's got to be thinking. Yeah, the whole, in the background. So that must mean that all the devices that distract us daily are not good for this kind of discovery. I'm sorry, what? So here's, there are people right now, and I'd love to get your comment. This is a tangent. People who are obsessed with, with meditation and getting this laser focus on a flame, a candle flame or what have you. I thought people who meditate are more introspective than extrospective. That was my sense of it. My, what I was going to claim or argue or wonder about is what's going on in the background? That's how I think Eratosthenes worked this problem. That note stuck with them for months, who knows, maybe years, and it was back there. Just kind of, why would that be just while he's eating dinner and thinking about it? But it's one thing to describe a story such as this. But it's another thing for the storytelling to carry depth of emotion. There are scenes then and even in the current cosmos where I tear up. And I can't be the only one out there for whom this is occurring. And so Anne, of course, is a big force in this because you talked to Anne. I tear up almost no matter what she's talking about. But you guys, so just through Steven Soter and the other astronomers at Cornell like Steve Squires and Jamie Lloyd, Jim Bell, I've been asked to do the astronomy lecture. I'll do one astronomy lecture and I say to myself, the class lasts until 1205, right? 1115 to 1205. I start to tear up. Because I'm in the same room. The seats are upholstered in the same color. Everything's the same as when I was there. There's some fancy push buttons at the chairs that didn't exist. But man, it just gets to me every time. Emotional buttons, I mean, there are a lot of ways to do that, obviously. In one particular case, as I don't know how much the public knows that Ann and Carl, Ann Drillian and Carl Sagan, fell in love during the making of the original Cosmos. That's right. Okay, and so now you are the third leg in this collaboration. And I think they can't have been easy. Well, actually, they disappeared for about two weeks during the initial project meetings for the Cosmos. They were in Paris, deliriously in love. Okay, can't stop the love. Love is, if it's happening... So the production team was meeting in Los Angeles and they were on the big table and they were all looking at me and they said, well, Steve, what is this going to be about? So you were in charge for two weeks of Cosmos. No, but Steve, you organize things. You have a vision, right? Some of it. Steve, you know what my problem is with you? When I say what do you know about this? You say, only if you know everything about it, will you say that you know something about it. That's my problem. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you know something about something, you say you don't know anything about it. Anyway, in his absence... That protects you. In Paul's absence, I then threw out a few ideas that I thought may be the kind of thing he wanted to be in the show. Some of those actually got into the show. Like what? Well, can we cut for a second? Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Mm-hmm. Thank you. Yeah. We'll cut that. All right. We got top people working on this. Go on. Well, like one was the story of flat land, imagining the fourth dimension. Let me... people living in two dimensions flat land. Right, right. The Edwin Abbott story. Yeah, 1880s story about people living in a two-dimensional world who can't imagine a third dimension. And it was a metaphor for us living in a three-dimensional world who cannot imagine a fourth dimension. But we can see its shadows if we're very clever and think about what they might look like. Just as... This is kind of stuff that blows people's minds. Yes, yes. And so Carl met with that and told that story. I'm glad that story was in there because it was played well. And that was good. So in the current cosmos, which of the historical stories are you most proud of for putting in? Cosmos as Space Time Odyssey. Can we have another break? Okay, what's your question? Did you turn it back on? I didn't understand. We got all of that, right? I just thought you turned it off. No, I didn't. I was almost going to turn it off. I was just going to add time. Katie, I mean Leslie. You look like Katie Perry completely. What, are you keeping track of time? We've got about another 30 seconds here. Okay, so you ready? There are a lot of them, but one... Okay, it's ready. I'll re-ask the question. So, what are you most proud of in the current cosmos as co-writer? Well, quite a few things, but one was getting in the story of Ibn al-Haytham, who was a thousand years ago an Arabic scientist living in the Middle East, who was the first to understand how we see, how we form images in the eye. That sight is not an active phenomenon, it's a passive phenomenon. Before then, people had thought that we sent out kind of like radar beams to feel the environment and they would bounce back. We felt by touching, but no, he realized that it was completely passive. And he's actually on one of the monetary notes in Iraq. Yes, he was, yeah. But in the course of writing this and doing a little research, we discovered that he also made the first articulation of the scientific method, the experimental method, and of a caution that you should not just listen to what the authorities of the past have said, but look at what the real world is telling you. And to also question your own prejudices, to be aware of your own predispositions because they could bias you in a direction that will lead you away from the truth. This is 1600 years before Francis Bacon writes about this in his philosophical writing. This is about 1000 AD, so we had to put that in. Oh, sorry, this is about 600 years before Francis Bacon kicks this in. Right. And this was at a time when the Arabic world was the center of science. And then, of course, it all fell apart. Well, I'm glad we did that story. I felt good about that. Guys, we're out of time. The crib conversation has got to end. We cannot do this forever. Thanks for including me. Let's change the world, people. This is Neil deGrasse Tyson signing off from The Cosmic Crib.