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. 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 we comb 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, 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. Yeah, well, I didn't know that at the time. It's fine. 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. Yeah. 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. It's 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 of it. 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. Yay! 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'd 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? That's right. Is it that it's just too small? That's an interesting thought. I hadn't considered the possibility of a pamphlet. The pamphlet, let's say, two feet by four feet. Blanketing the United States. 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 them. STDs have been with us since the beginning of time, and I don't think they're going anywhere. That's right. That was one of the things. That is the literal beginning of time. He meant the beginning of humans on Earth. The herpes flew out of a star at Earth. Big Bang might have been an orgasm, who knows? We've got to 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, we're StarTalk. Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm here in studio with Eugene Merman. Hello. Eugene, as always, tweeting at Eugene Merman. Yes, it's true. Yes, I follow you, you make me laugh. Thank you. Not every single tweet, but enough till I stay with you. No, but, you know, 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 the spread could have been prevented, I guess. I want to 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, yes. Yeah, 70% of the diseases we're 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, SARS. I like it. 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. There's a lot of punk rockers in danger of getting a bunch of weird diseases. Right, right, so you gotta be 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 have 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. I gotcha. 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 isolate it 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 and trying to make you a vaccine, right? I remember having a conversation at 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. Yeah. 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. 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... No, no, 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 human, oom or therma 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. That happens a lot. 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. And 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, 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 could still make omelets. That's not as bad, like when blood comes out of your face and you die, it sounds worse. Yeah. Off into 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, you keep it like luggage, you know, you never get rid of it, but most people don't die. 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? Is this is, but if you're a zombie, this is sort of like a Ponzi scheme, you know, because eventually you run out of bodies. Right, right, right. Right, you know, 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- 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 sneeze and there you go. And 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, of the Zombie Virus Edition. Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. 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, and looks 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. And 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 human. 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. Infants do that. From infants. 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. Oh, okay. 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've been observed in those stages 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 and- 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. But the other thing that cholera does, which is really interesting, is it causes diarrhea. Yeah. So that lots of viruses spread out into the environment, so that it can find new hosts. Into the water supply and everything. That's what 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. To have a slogan. Yeah, poo to live. Slogan. I'm just trying to help Paul remark it 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. Just top three in order. What is it? 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 work? Well, 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 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. 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 get to 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 it? Actually, 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. 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. They 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? Yes, the Harvard Medical School. And I mean, look, you got to give him a break. I mean, it's not like he went to Yale. 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 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? 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-own, you get it from Stan Lee. You know, viruses are much, much smaller than bacteria, right? Yes. 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, a regular 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 LAPD. 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. A little bit of bio humor there. But most viruses that you care about are the bad kind, I presume. Yes. 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? I'm certainly not going to touch that one directly. So the CDC has, they have 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 got to know where they come in, 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. You know, we haven't looked for viruses in North Korea. Because you can't get there, you 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 of course, I've 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 is- No, I don't, no, 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 gonna 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, when we don't fund research on viruses, we're gonna 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 gotta 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. So. 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 sea water over them and capture it and concentrate it. 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. Yeah, 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. He answered yes to that question. I know. It's true, viruses are great. They're the best. I'm gonna get a bag of viruses and sift through it asking them questions. Okay, so now we need viruses to fight other viruses, maybe. True. Now here's something I always wanted to confirm. We create antibodies to viruses when we're exposed to them at a very low level, correct? That's correct. Okay, 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? Well, 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, yeah, something like 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. Support the, he- Nothing more ominous could be said. Not wear a condom, not wear a condom, 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, doctor, I was about to call you doctor. 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.