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Transcript

The Dog Will See You Now · Revisionist History

0:15
Speaker 1: Bushkin. What's her name?
0:27
Speaker 2: Cooly? Sorry there you got some fun names.
0:29
Speaker 3: K U L.
0:32
Speaker 1: Cooley. It's a Belgian melanoa sleek, lean, dappled gray and black,
0:36
Speaker 1: panting happily on a patch of grass way up in
0:39
Speaker 1: the hills of northeastern Alabama. This dog is probably from hungry, hungry, hungry,
0:44
Speaker 1: and she's.
0:45
Speaker 2: Held ill exactly have her information?
0:50
Speaker 4: Twenty four months or below?
0:52
Speaker 2: Twenty four months or below. We have all that paperwork
0:54
Speaker 2: at the office, but right her own.
0:56
Speaker 1: That is the biggest tongue I've ever seen. We're all
1:00
Speaker 1: standing in front of a cluster of concrete buildings spread
1:03
Speaker 1: over a large, rolling, wooded campus an hour or so
1:07
Speaker 1: from Birmingham, the headcore of an organization called three sixty
1:11
Speaker 1: Canine Group. The whole operation looks like a scaled down
1:15
Speaker 1: army base, only instead of soldiers marching to and fro,
1:19
Speaker 1: there are dogs, dozens and dozens of them, Poppies stumbling playfully,
1:24
Speaker 1: chocolate labs chasing things, German shepherds looking for a job
1:29
Speaker 1: to do and cooling. One of the operation's newest recruits,
1:36
Speaker 1: a teenager in dog years, being put through her paces
1:40
Speaker 1: a robber toy for which she has acquired. A certain
1:43
Speaker 1: affection was taken from her and her job is to
1:47
Speaker 1: find it.
1:48
Speaker 2: You can see, like, where is she slaughtered? Right here,
1:50
Speaker 2: so she called the over here. Turned. Once she turned,
1:53
Speaker 2: she can see.
1:54
Speaker 5: That wokake Ovisually.
1:56
Speaker 1: She has never done an exercise like this before, and
1:59
Speaker 1: the assignment has filled her with enthusiasm.
2:03
Speaker 2: Us.
2:09
Speaker 1: Yes, Coolie is standing in front of one of the cabinets.
2:14
Speaker 1: Tail waggings were but she never toldly was in there.
2:21
Speaker 1: Cooley's a good girl, all right. She follows her nose
2:25
Speaker 1: and we have a lot to learn from her. My
2:30
Speaker 1: name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to the final episode
2:34
Speaker 1: of season six of Revisions History, my podcast about things
2:38
Speaker 1: overlooked and misunderstood. This has been a season devoted to
2:43
Speaker 1: fixing things, college rankings, laundry, the Little Mermaid. We have
2:50
Speaker 1: looked at many burning issues and said we can do better.
2:54
Speaker 1: But there are some problems that we cannot fix on
2:57
Speaker 1: our own. Some problems are so big they can only
3:02
Speaker 1: be solved with the help of another species.
3:13
Speaker 2: Okay, so this is our dark room test.
3:18
Speaker 1: Cooley's undergoing yet another test with the same goal as before,
3:23
Speaker 1: find the hidden toy, only now the lights are off
3:27
Speaker 1: and the toy is not in the first room COOLi enters,
3:30
Speaker 1: but in a second, smaller room off to the side.
3:33
Speaker 2: This also tells us if it takes her a little
3:36
Speaker 2: while to try to find it, how much hunt draft
3:39
Speaker 2: she actually has, so it's not just immediate to make sure,
3:43
Speaker 2: even after she gets tired, even after she's hot, but
3:45
Speaker 2: she still wants that toy enough to be.
3:47
Speaker 3: Looking for it.
3:49
Speaker 1: Cooley bounds in sniff's the first room, everything all four walls.
3:53
Speaker 1: Then she zeros in on the closet. We can't see her,
3:56
Speaker 1: only hear her. Her trainers, Sean and Ashley are grading
3:59
Speaker 1: every step of her performance on a long, detailed checklist.
4:06
Speaker 1: You can hear the difference in a yes when she
4:09
Speaker 1: got it out him and she's gotten out for.
4:13
Speaker 5: Cans.
4:15
Speaker 1: Cooley walked across a mattress, didn't stop, jumped on one
4:18
Speaker 1: end of a makeshift teter totter, didn't phaze her.
4:22
Speaker 2: These are the dogs that people get as pets, and
4:24
Speaker 2: they eat their couch and they're the worst, terrible pets
4:27
Speaker 2: that make the really really good dogs.
4:28
Speaker 6: For the most part, you.
4:31
Speaker 2: Love all of that.
4:33
Speaker 1: She runs down a hallway, sniff sniff a large canvas
4:42
Speaker 1: bag is suspended from the ceiling, ready to drop and
4:45
Speaker 1: block her way, and pulled up to the ceiling, big
4:49
Speaker 1: heavy bag.
4:50
Speaker 5: Three guns.
4:51
Speaker 1: Here she comes. We all jumped when the bag dropped
5:02
Speaker 1: from the ceiling. Cooley didn't. She paused, looked at the bag,
5:07
Speaker 1: sniffed it, and carried on. Dogs noses are something like
5:16
Speaker 1: one hundred thousand times more sensitive than ours. A puppy
5:20
Speaker 1: fresh off the boat can find a hidden toy in
5:23
Speaker 1: a darkened room. Dogs can perform all manner of olfactory
5:28
Speaker 1: tasks using judgment, drive, and discipline. It's their superpower. That's
5:32
Speaker 1: why they are dogs at the airport sniffing luggage, or
5:35
Speaker 1: why it's always a dog who finds the hiker lost
5:37
Speaker 1: in the woods. Spend a little time at three point
5:41
Speaker 1: sixty k nine in the hills of Alabama, and every
5:44
Speaker 1: one of your preconceptions about the genius of dogs will
5:48
Speaker 1: be confirmed.
5:53
Speaker 3: We had a dog, a black lab that we retired,
5:57
Speaker 3: and we allowed the dog. You know, we had a
5:59
Speaker 3: ceremony and we bought we ceremony and we hired you know,
6:03
Speaker 3: there's a local bakery that makes dog friendly cakes, so
6:06
Speaker 3: we had a cake for the dog.
6:08
Speaker 1: We were sitting in the three sixty Knine conference room
6:11
Speaker 1: listening to Jerry Johnson and John Pierce, two of the
6:14
Speaker 1: company's senior executives, two hardcore dog guys, talking about the
6:19
Speaker 1: best they ever saw.
6:21
Speaker 3: And we had the dog in the room and run
6:23
Speaker 3: around and just you know, an off leash and sniffing
6:25
Speaker 3: everybody's super friendly dog. The lady comes in to deliver
6:29
Speaker 3: the cake and she's got on her boyfriend or husband
6:31
Speaker 3: with her and he's standing there hole in the cake
6:33
Speaker 3: and the dog key's running up behind the guy and
6:37
Speaker 3: going behind him and basically like sniffing his rear in
6:40
Speaker 3: and sniffing the back of his uh, you know, his shirt,
6:44
Speaker 3: and won't leave him alone. And I remember who asked him,
6:46
Speaker 3: but finally someone said, all right, yeah, John said, are
6:49
Speaker 3: you carrying a weapon? And he was like, no, I
6:53
Speaker 3: was carrying a weapon. I took it off and left
6:55
Speaker 3: it in the car, just prayer to walking in here.
6:57
Speaker 3: And the guy had, you know, three minutes before taking
7:00
Speaker 3: his gun off and left it in his car, and
7:02
Speaker 3: the dog still found it. And you know, we were
7:04
Speaker 3: having a party.
7:05
Speaker 4: What was that dog's name?
7:06
Speaker 1: That was Cole Cole coolly add them to the long
7:11
Speaker 1: list of Doggie All Stars. But you already knew dogs
7:14
Speaker 1: could do this. Right now, it's time to go further.
7:23
Speaker 1: A few years ago, a labrador named Florin flew in
7:27
Speaker 1: from London to Boston at the invitation of a research
7:31
Speaker 1: scientist at MIT named Andreas Mershen, coming in on a
7:36
Speaker 1: winter's morning for a special one dog exhibition.
7:42
Speaker 6: Flooring. The famous dog flew first class to MIT, so
7:45
Speaker 6: I didn't have time to go through all the hooks,
7:47
Speaker 6: so we had to rent the hotel room, the hotel
7:49
Speaker 6: ballroom right across the street at the Maria.
7:53
Speaker 1: Mershin is a kind of scientific jack of all trades.
7:57
Speaker 1: He's technically a physicist, but as he likes to say,
8:01
Speaker 1: he operates in blissful ignorance of disciplinary boundaries. He's interested
8:07
Speaker 1: in solar panels, quantum effects in molecular biology, not to
8:12
Speaker 1: mention something that I cannot begin to understand called cytoskeletal
8:18
Speaker 1: memory and coding. Mershan got interested in prostate cancer, one
8:23
Speaker 1: of the most common of all cancers. Mershan heard about
8:26
Speaker 1: the work being done by a British researcher named Claire Guest,
8:30
Speaker 1: who had been training dogs to detect diseases the same
8:34
Speaker 1: way we've been training dogs for years to detect explosives,
8:38
Speaker 1: and Merchan and Guest ended up working together, which is
8:41
Speaker 1: what led to Florin guests four year old labrador flying
8:44
Speaker 1: into Boston one cold winter's morning to perform a special
8:49
Speaker 1: sniffing demonstration for the senior leadership of the Prostate Cancer Foundation.
8:55
Speaker 4: So wait, described a scene.
8:56
Speaker 1: This is this is hilarious.
8:58
Speaker 4: You in the ballroom of the Marrion. Yes, how many people?
9:00
Speaker 6: Oh maybe maybe a dozen people maybe if you motif,
9:03
Speaker 6: But that's they're all by invitation. Okay, No. And there's
9:05
Speaker 6: a giant paris on the middle, about seven feet across,
9:08
Speaker 6: which has eight arms, and each arm is a jar
9:12
Speaker 6: glass jar of urine closed off by a metal threat.
9:14
Speaker 6: Everything is standless still. Everything is this in fact that
9:17
Speaker 6: everything is super clean.
9:18
Speaker 1: The jars have all been pre selected from a biological repository.
9:22
Speaker 1: Some are filled with urine from people known to have
9:24
Speaker 1: suffered from prostate cancer. Others are controls. Florin's job is
9:30
Speaker 1: to sniff each jar. If she detects what she believes
9:33
Speaker 1: is a positive sample, she's supposed to stop and stare
9:37
Speaker 1: at the jar before moving on. Were the people from
9:41
Speaker 1: the prostic Foundation skeptical.
9:44
Speaker 6: Oh yes, of course, and as rightly they should be.
9:46
Speaker 6: You must see this to believe it. Nobody should take
9:49
Speaker 6: these kinds of things on just somebody's, especially when we're
9:52
Speaker 6: talking about people's lives here, right.
9:54
Speaker 1: It was early in the morning. Merchen looked at Florin
9:58
Speaker 1: and worried she wasn't up to the task, so they.
10:00
Speaker 6: Had brought flooring the dog on first class. Then the
10:02
Speaker 6: American customs had to by lod dewarm her, give her medicine,
10:06
Speaker 6: so she had to be vomiting. And also some other
10:09
Speaker 6: unpleasantless happened to the poor dog. And there's coffee smells everywhere,
10:12
Speaker 6: by the way, in the myriad people who are serving breakfast.
10:14
Speaker 6: I'm like, oh my god, we're going to confuse this
10:16
Speaker 6: dog now with all the coffee. And she's, you know,
10:18
Speaker 6: jet lagged and dewormed, and this poor dog is not
10:21
Speaker 6: going to perform, and she kicks it out of the park.
10:24
Speaker 1: The people from the Prostate Cancer Foundation are so blown
10:27
Speaker 1: away they end up funding guests and merchants research project
10:31
Speaker 1: to explore the idea that smell might be the best
10:33
Speaker 1: way to diagnose a dangerous cancer.
10:36
Speaker 4: To a layman like me.
10:37
Speaker 1: The idea that a cancer or a virus would have
10:42
Speaker 1: a smell is not intuitive.
10:44
Speaker 6: It's not the disease itself that has the smell. What
10:47
Speaker 6: happens is it changes your body's metabolic pathways, of which
10:49
Speaker 6: you have thousands going on in every cell. There's different
10:52
Speaker 6: things happening. They change, and many of these pathways, many
10:55
Speaker 6: of these processes inside your cells, they have as a
10:59
Speaker 6: byproduct odorance. Odorance are volletilor gant and compounds that tend
11:02
Speaker 6: to fly around and come out of your body. So cancer,
11:05
Speaker 6: for instance, likely leaves an imprint on every emission that
11:10
Speaker 6: you have, from sweat to urine, to saliva to tears,
11:13
Speaker 6: so you name it.
11:14
Speaker 1: Human beings are a site species. Sight is our superpower.
11:20
Speaker 1: The biggest web of sensory connections in our brains is
11:22
Speaker 1: between our cortex and our eyes. We can differentiate colors
11:27
Speaker 1: in a way that few other species can. But as
11:30
Speaker 1: our eyesight evolved to get better, our noses got worse.
11:34
Speaker 1: As the biologist John Bradshaw puts it, there appear to
11:37
Speaker 1: be limits on how much information any brain can process.
11:41
Speaker 1: So if you optimize for seeing, you compromise on smelling.
11:46
Speaker 1: Dogs make the opposite trade off. Their eyes are mediocre,
11:50
Speaker 1: their noses are amazing. To Florin, prostate cancer wasn't a
11:56
Speaker 1: clump of cells. It was an odor. An odor is
11:59
Speaker 1: so distinctive that it made her stop and stare. Let's
12:04
Speaker 1: imagine that you and I both have crostake cancer at
12:08
Speaker 1: the same time. Stage.
12:10
Speaker 4: Is it fair to assume that we.
12:12
Speaker 1: The way in which our bodies smell is our odor
12:16
Speaker 1: is altered by that cancer? Correct might not be the
12:19
Speaker 1: same exactly. So why can the dog generalize for.
12:23
Speaker 6: The same reason that you can generalize the gait You
12:25
Speaker 6: can track my footprints if I teach you what footprints
12:29
Speaker 6: look like on the website and how they're distributed. So
12:32
Speaker 6: the dog learns to identify the footprints on the web
12:34
Speaker 6: site where it's easy to see and easy to see
12:36
Speaker 6: the gate, and then it generalizes, It extrapolates and says, oh,
12:40
Speaker 6: this smells like the stuff that they used to want
12:43
Speaker 6: me to find.
12:44
Speaker 1: Human beings try to screen for prostate cancer by looking
12:48
Speaker 1: for it. Of course we do. We're a species that's
12:50
Speaker 1: in love with sight. We ask men over a certain
12:53
Speaker 1: age to take a blood test to look for something
12:56
Speaker 1: called the prostate specific antigen. And if we see a
13:00
Speaker 1: lot of that antigen. We take a closer look at
13:02
Speaker 1: the prostate itself. We take half a dozen or more
13:05
Speaker 1: little slices of the prostate and look at them under
13:08
Speaker 1: the microscope. We look, and we look again. The problem
13:12
Speaker 1: is that only around a quarter of men who have
13:14
Speaker 1: elevated PSA levels actually end up having prostate cancer. You
13:19
Speaker 1: could have high PSA levels for some other reason. You
13:22
Speaker 1: could also have normal PSA levels and still have prostate cancer.
13:26
Speaker 1: And so the result of all that looking is an
13:28
Speaker 1: enormous amount of error. Lots of men are told they
13:31
Speaker 1: could have a dangerous cancer when they don't, and lots
13:34
Speaker 1: of other men have cancer that gets missed. The prostate
13:38
Speaker 1: screening air rate is so bad that many men avoid
13:41
Speaker 1: it altogether. I'm not getting tested, Are you kidding me?
13:45
Speaker 1: All you have to do is spend a few hours
13:47
Speaker 1: reading the available literature, and you realize that looking for
13:50
Speaker 1: early signs of prostate cancer is a fool's game. It's
13:54
Speaker 1: really really hard. But Florin the dog didn't look. Florin
14:00
Speaker 1: bypassed all that nonsense. Florina just sniffed and did Florin
14:05
Speaker 1: make any mistake? Oh?
14:06
Speaker 6: Sure, of course, if something is one hundred percent right,
14:09
Speaker 6: it's one hundred percent wrong. So yes, there's definitely errors
14:11
Speaker 6: in the samples, and the dog can definitely make errors. However,
14:14
Speaker 6: you should remember this, so do all of our tests.
14:19
Speaker 6: And currently the dogs are better than any test.
14:22
Speaker 1: Notice how he said dogs are better. It's not like
14:26
Speaker 1: Flowing is some kind of super dog the Usain Bolt
14:28
Speaker 1: of the canine world. Lots of dogs could do just
14:32
Speaker 1: what she did.
14:34
Speaker 6: A dog can do better than the tests you trust,
14:37
Speaker 6: and you don't trust the dog, And I'm glad you
14:39
Speaker 6: don't trust the dog. We have to not trust the dog.
14:41
Speaker 6: The dog is teaching us Now. Dogs are definitely error prone,
14:45
Speaker 6: same as everything else. But currently, and this is a
14:48
Speaker 6: mind blowing statistic, of all the diseases that have ever
14:51
Speaker 6: been tried to be identified by trained dog, all of
14:54
Speaker 6: them have succeeded. That is mind blowing. It should be
14:58
Speaker 6: we should be paying attention to this. What the hell
15:00
Speaker 6: is happening where we can't make this thing not work?
15:03
Speaker 6: I mean, shouldn't you be angry at this? I mean,
15:06
Speaker 6: come on, what are we doing?
15:09
Speaker 2: Well?
15:09
Speaker 1: Exactly what are we doing? The chief research scientist for
15:28
Speaker 1: three sixty K nine is a man named Bill Schneider, doctor,
15:32
Speaker 1: William Schneider. Schneider used to work at Fort Dietrich, the
15:36
Speaker 1: army garrison in Maryland where the Pentagon does its top
15:39
Speaker 1: secret biodefense work. Schneider's specialty was plant virology, diseases that
15:45
Speaker 1: affect things like peach or cherry trees.
15:47
Speaker 5: I come from a plant background, but being at Fort Dietrich,
15:52
Speaker 5: I had access to a lot of tools and toys
15:55
Speaker 5: that typical scientists didn't have in their repertoire, and I'd
15:59
Speaker 5: been playing around with those.
16:00
Speaker 1: But then, just like Andreas Mershin over at MIT, Schneider
16:05
Speaker 1: began to hear of the supposedly miraculous powers of dogs,
16:09
Speaker 1: so he decided to hold a sniff off. Fort Dietrich
16:12
Speaker 1: has a special containment facility where they could do an
16:15
Speaker 1: actual head to head challenge comparing detection results between a
16:20
Speaker 1: dog and one of modern science's highest tech tests. Schneider
16:25
Speaker 1: chose as the test case a plant virus called plum
16:29
Speaker 1: pux and bet against the dogs. He was a lab guy,
16:33
Speaker 1: not a dog guy.
16:34
Speaker 5: Yeah, you name it. We had access to it. Gas chromatography,
16:38
Speaker 5: mass spectrometry, all sorts of very deep sequencing, heavy duty
16:44
Speaker 5: nucleic acid analysis. Things that are pretty darn cool actually,
16:49
Speaker 5: and not one single one of them can beat the dogs.
16:52
Speaker 5: In fact, the US Army invested about nineteen billion dollars
16:57
Speaker 5: in trying to find a machine that could detect explosives
17:02
Speaker 5: better than dogs, and in the end, all these projects
17:06
Speaker 5: nothing could come close to what the dogs can do.
17:08
Speaker 5: So I had to convert myself.
17:11
Speaker 1: Bill Schneider, the convert, decided to change careers. He left
17:15
Speaker 1: government work started making sophisticated canine training aids. I come
17:20
Speaker 1: to you, Bill, and I say, Bill, we have a new,
17:23
Speaker 1: highly infectious virus out there.
17:25
Speaker 4: We know almost nothing about it. What do you do next?
17:29
Speaker 5: I say, I need the genomic information. So that's a
17:32
Speaker 5: key step in practically any diagnostics these days, and with
17:37
Speaker 5: good purpose, because when you have genomic information, you can
17:41
Speaker 5: design assays, or in my case, you can design a
17:44
Speaker 5: training aid that will teach a dog to directly detect
17:48
Speaker 5: that you're making a cent. Yes exactly, You're.
17:52
Speaker 4: You're looking at a blueprint and you're saying, ah, ye, gene,
17:56
Speaker 4: this protein, this protein, this protein, this protein. I can
18:00
Speaker 4: construct that in a lab.
18:03
Speaker 5: Yeah.
18:04
Speaker 1: Florin the prostate cancer dog was trained on samples taken
18:08
Speaker 1: directly from people with prostate cancer. Schneider was taking the
18:12
Speaker 1: next step, figuring out a way to extract the scent
18:16
Speaker 1: of the disease itself, refining the process creating customized disease
18:22
Speaker 1: fragrances that could be shipped overnight to dogs anywhere in
18:26
Speaker 1: the world. I'm assuming you're avoiding everything that has to
18:30
Speaker 1: do with actual virulence, contagiousness.
18:33
Speaker 4: It's an inert it's a harmless substance.
18:36
Speaker 5: Yeah, you could eat it if you wanted to. I
18:39
Speaker 5: wouldn't taste all that great, but yeah, it's completely safe,
18:42
Speaker 5: it's completely stable. You can make as much of it
18:45
Speaker 5: as you want.
18:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, now we have a little vial of something that
18:50
Speaker 1: has a characteristic odorit You and I can't smell that.
18:58
Speaker 5: Nope. No, In fact, I would have bet you a
19:01
Speaker 5: lot of money that nothing could smell it, because in
19:04
Speaker 5: our mind, none of these things had sent.
19:09
Speaker 1: The world. Scientists were studying and refining the diagnostic power
19:13
Speaker 1: of dogs. Then COVID nineteen.
19:16
Speaker 7: Happened, breaking news tonight, the coronavirus forcing millions more Americans
19:20
Speaker 7: into virtual lockdown. Over seventy five million people in New York, California, Illinois,
19:25
Speaker 7: and Connecticut ordered to stay at home.
19:28
Speaker 1: Bill Schneider realized that his technique of making these little
19:31
Speaker 1: vials of disease fragrance might prove really useful.
19:36
Speaker 4: There's really reason to believe that COVID might be the
19:38
Speaker 4: exception to this pattern.
19:40
Speaker 5: Not in my mind, no, No. Once I crossed that
19:45
Speaker 5: threshold with the original virus that we've worked on, which
19:47
Speaker 5: was that plumphaks virus, I knew you could translate this,
19:51
Speaker 5: not just to another virus in plants, I can take
19:55
Speaker 5: and transfer that to humans or cattle or swine or
19:59
Speaker 5: chickens or anything, and off you go.
20:04
Speaker 1: COVID first services at the end of twenty nineteen. The
20:08
Speaker 1: novel Coronavirus Genome is published. In early January of twenty twenty,
20:13
Speaker 1: the Who declares a pandemic that spring.
20:16
Speaker 7: And across the country. There's demand for COVID nineteen testing
20:20
Speaker 7: as positive cases are on the rise.
20:22
Speaker 6: Some people have had to wait longer than two weeks
20:25
Speaker 6: to receive results.
20:28
Speaker 1: While the world is in lockdown. In the early summer
20:30
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty, Bill Schneider's lab gets going synthesizing the
20:34
Speaker 1: proteins that make up the smell of SARS COB two.
20:38
Speaker 1: The trainers start training dogs on it. Hardworking, focused, unflappable
20:42
Speaker 1: dogs who really loved the idea of sniffing nine to five.
20:46
Speaker 5: By the time we got to September fifteenth, we were
20:49
Speaker 5: starting to collect clinical samples from people who were confirmed positive,
20:54
Speaker 5: and we were checking the dogs on those clinical samples,
20:56
Speaker 5: and they didn't miss a beat. They were ninety nine
20:58
Speaker 5: percent accurate. And at that point I was very confident
21:02
Speaker 5: that the dogs we were training could detect COVID in
21:07
Speaker 5: people's masks, on their sacks, in sweat and saliva labs.
21:14
Speaker 1: Shepherds Belgian Malona was floppy year pointy year. Doesn't much matter.
21:19
Speaker 1: What matters is that they're a dog. They have a big,
21:21
Speaker 1: powerful nose, and they're perfectly happy to put that magnificent
21:25
Speaker 1: nose to work in the service of helping all of us.
21:29
Speaker 1: They're best friends. Let's think about some of the options
21:40
Speaker 1: we have when detecting a deadly new pathogen as it
21:44
Speaker 1: moves through a human population. One option is what we
21:48
Speaker 1: ended up trying with COVID in the United States. We
21:51
Speaker 1: make you come to a testing site stand in line
21:54
Speaker 1: with a lot of people who also think they might
21:56
Speaker 1: have COVID. Really good idea, by the way, stick a
21:59
Speaker 1: nasty swab up your nose, charge you a couple hundred dollars,
22:02
Speaker 1: use an insanely expensive and complicated and high tech system
22:06
Speaker 1: called PCR to give you an answer that may or
22:09
Speaker 1: may not be useful because it didn't always get to
22:12
Speaker 1: you in time. Remember, sometimes it would take forever to
22:15
Speaker 1: get your test results, sometimes two weeks, and maybe in
22:18
Speaker 1: those two weeks while you were waiting, you were infecting
22:21
Speaker 1: everyone you med. The result of all the cost and
22:24
Speaker 1: inconvenience and hassle and imperfection of Option one was that
22:29
Speaker 1: we've never done enough testing at any stage of the pandemic.
22:32
Speaker 1: And because we didn't do enough testing, the pandemic sword
22:36
Speaker 1: out of control. Someone has a wedding or a Thanksgiving dinner,
22:40
Speaker 1: and in a perfect world everyone would get tested before coming,
22:43
Speaker 1: but of course they don't, and one person ends up
22:46
Speaker 1: infecting ten other people, and maybe one or two of
22:49
Speaker 1: those ten will die. All these horror stories have at
22:54
Speaker 1: their core a failure of disease detection. I emailed Michael
23:03
Speaker 1: Minna at the Harvard School of Public Health, who was
23:06
Speaker 1: one of the big critics of the way we tested
23:07
Speaker 1: for COVID, and this is what he wrote back about
23:10
Speaker 1: the way testing works. It has to do with what
23:13
Speaker 1: epidemiologists called are not, which is the average number of
23:17
Speaker 1: people infected by an infected person. If an epidemic has
23:22
Speaker 1: are not above one, it grows exponentially. If are not
23:26
Speaker 1: falls below one, an epidemic dies out. Here's what Minna wrote.
23:32
Speaker 1: This whole pandemic and all of the massive outbreaks we've
23:36
Speaker 1: seen have been with an or not of about one
23:39
Speaker 1: point three. That means that every ten people infected went
23:44
Speaker 1: on to infect on average thirteen people. Well, in that case,
23:48
Speaker 1: if you have one hundred people infected on day one,
23:52
Speaker 1: then thirty days later you have about six hundred new
23:55
Speaker 1: infections exponential growth end quote. All we had to do
24:02
Speaker 1: to stop the pandemic was to test just enough people
24:06
Speaker 1: and prevent just enough new infections so that those ten
24:10
Speaker 1: newly infected people only infected on average nine other people.
24:16
Speaker 1: We just had to move the needle a little bit,
24:20
Speaker 1: and we couldn't do it. Option one was one of
24:23
Speaker 1: the most criminally stupid acts of public health incompetence in
24:28
Speaker 1: American history. Now imagine another option. Just move to a hypothetical.
24:37
Speaker 1: So I'm a high school, Okay, I want to reopen.
24:40
Speaker 1: We're in the middle of the raging pandemic and I
24:43
Speaker 1: come to you and I say, I want to use
24:45
Speaker 1: your service. Are we talking? How would you tell me
24:48
Speaker 1: how you would fix that up? I'm talking to Jerry Johnson,
24:50
Speaker 1: who runs biodetection at three sixty K nine dog at
24:54
Speaker 1: the front door.
24:54
Speaker 3: Yeah, first fifty kids come in, they stand on their spot,
24:57
Speaker 3: Doc searches them, they go into class. The next fifty
24:59
Speaker 3: comes in. We could do that, you know, relatively quickly,
25:03
Speaker 3: you know, and maybe you have some coming in the gymnasium,
25:05
Speaker 3: some coming in the cafeteria. It's all about having the
25:09
Speaker 3: real estate to get the children lined up.
25:11
Speaker 1: So and you could do that with one dog or
25:13
Speaker 1: two dogs. You would want two dogs, Yeah, particularly if
25:16
Speaker 1: if it's a public health issue and school children doing
25:19
Speaker 1: the dog's be very very thorough. So if the dog's
25:22
Speaker 1: condition to work forty five minutes, we'd want to stop
25:24
Speaker 1: at thirty just to make sure that the dog is
25:27
Speaker 1: not fatiguing at all. A PCR test costs somewhere in
25:31
Speaker 1: the range of one hundred and fifty dollars and you
25:33
Speaker 1: wait forever for the result. The cost of a dog
25:36
Speaker 1: test once you factored in the dog, the training paying
25:40
Speaker 1: the handler is something like two dollars and fifty cents
25:44
Speaker 1: a test, and the dog gives you the answer immediately.
25:48
Speaker 1: So the dog is you got these kids lined up.
25:51
Speaker 1: Dog sniff snifsniff snif sniff finds a dog has a positive, right,
25:55
Speaker 1: what is the dog doing? It just sits just so.
25:58
Speaker 3: When the dog goes downline. What we like to do
25:59
Speaker 3: is we line people up, we have them, we have
26:01
Speaker 3: the dog go down as they're facing forward. The dog
26:04
Speaker 3: goes down the left hand side of the line and
26:08
Speaker 3: it just does it quick. You'll see it's a minimally
26:11
Speaker 3: invasive search. The dog will put its nose on the
26:14
Speaker 3: back of the person's hand. They target the hand if
26:16
Speaker 3: you have otn toad shoes, and might target your feet.
26:18
Speaker 3: But it makes quick contact with the skin. But then
26:22
Speaker 3: it keeps going. The dog won't really break stride. If
26:24
Speaker 3: it gets an odor and there's a presence of virus,
26:26
Speaker 3: then you'll see the dog stop, it'll sniff more, it'll investigate,
26:29
Speaker 3: and then I'll go into the sit response.
26:31
Speaker 1: So that person who's been identified as a dog as
26:34
Speaker 1: positive is then pulled out for secondary screen.
26:36
Speaker 3: They take them a second go the nurse's office and get.
26:38
Speaker 1: A rabbit tast the next time a pandemic hits. We
26:41
Speaker 1: could have dogs at the front door of every school
26:44
Speaker 1: in America. We could have dogs at the front door
26:47
Speaker 1: of restaurants, and dogs in bars, and dogs in train stations,
26:50
Speaker 1: and dogs at the airport. We could have dogs walking
26:54
Speaker 1: down the street checking out everyone on the sidewalk. Your
26:56
Speaker 1: block could bend together and have a dog come every
26:59
Speaker 1: night at dinner time to sniff everyone. You could hire
27:02
Speaker 1: a dog along with caterers at your daughter's wedding or
27:05
Speaker 1: your son's bar mitzvah, or every Sunday morning at church
27:08
Speaker 1: to make sure you aren't holding a super spreader event.
27:12
Speaker 1: Dogs give us the power to move the needle from
27:16
Speaker 1: an are not of one to an are not of
27:19
Speaker 1: something less than one. That is option two, the canine option.
27:29
Speaker 1: But will we go down that path? Forgive me if
27:33
Speaker 1: I'm skeptical, because to take option two, we will need
27:37
Speaker 1: tens of thousands of dogs, and we don't have tens
27:40
Speaker 1: of thousands of dogs trained and ready. And why don't
27:43
Speaker 1: we have a whole national Canine Guard trained and ready,
27:46
Speaker 1: matched up with their handlers for any conceivable future pandemic.
27:50
Speaker 1: A strategic poppy reserve to call on whenever an emergency happens,
27:55
Speaker 1: because at the end of the day, we don't really
27:58
Speaker 1: believe in dogs. We like them as friends, sure, but
28:02
Speaker 1: not as medical diagnosticians. Maybe you remain unconvinced that dogs
28:25
Speaker 1: could prevent the next pandemic. It sounds goofy, I know,
28:28
Speaker 1: panting labradors everywhere. The dog does not wear a white coat.
28:32
Speaker 1: She did not go to medical school or have a
28:34
Speaker 1: row of diplomas on the wall of her doghouse. She
28:38
Speaker 1: just uses her big wet nose. But allow me a brief, final,
28:44
Speaker 1: and hopefully persuasive digression on the indelicate subject of colonoscopies.
28:49
Speaker 1: Have you had one? You should? It might save your life.
28:53
Speaker 1: But if you're over the age of fifty and haven't
28:56
Speaker 1: gotten around to getting one yet, I think I know
28:58
Speaker 1: why they are a pain in the You know what,
29:02
Speaker 1: You can't eat for twenty four hours, then you go
29:04
Speaker 1: to a medical office and suffer the indignity of being
29:07
Speaker 1: impaled on something long and painful. But ten guesses about
29:12
Speaker 1: who is really really good at detecting colon cancer? Yes? Dogs?
29:18
Speaker 1: May I refer you to the following research paper published
29:21
Speaker 1: in the prestigious Journal Gut Volume sixty, issue six, First
29:26
Speaker 1: author Hideto Sonata of the School of Medicine at Kiyushu
29:30
Speaker 1: University in Japan, entitled Coorectal Cancer screening with odor material
29:36
Speaker 1: by canine scent detection, with the conclusion that a dog
29:41
Speaker 1: is just as good as any alternative modern medicine has
29:45
Speaker 1: come up with. When was that paper published January of
29:50
Speaker 1: twenty eleven. That's how long we have known that a
29:53
Speaker 1: dog with a few months of training can come trotting
29:56
Speaker 1: in and save the day. But when you go to
30:00
Speaker 1: your gastro entrologist, do you see a dog waiting there? No,
30:04
Speaker 1: you don't, because we don't believe in smell. We believe
30:07
Speaker 1: in sight. We more faith in the impossibly complicated and
30:12
Speaker 1: expensive and inefficient products of our own technological imagination than
30:17
Speaker 1: we do in the superpowers that nature has bestowed on
30:20
Speaker 1: other animals. We are, as a species narcissists, and with
30:28
Speaker 1: covid our narcissism caught up with us. We don't have
30:42
Speaker 1: to live in an imperfect world. We can fix things.
30:45
Speaker 1: We can mend the broken and upgrade the mediocre, But
30:50
Speaker 1: first we need to get over ourselves. Let coolie and
30:55
Speaker 1: coal and Florin show us The Way to a Better
30:59
Speaker 1: Future Revisionist History is produced by Mea La Belle, Lee
31:16
Speaker 1: Mingistu and Jacob Smith, with Elouise Linton and Annanaye. Our
31:22
Speaker 1: editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Kira, mastering
31:26
Speaker 1: by Flon Williams, and engineering by Martine Gonzalez. Fact checking
31:30
Speaker 1: by Amy Gaines. Special thanks to the Pushkin crew Hetephane,
31:35
Speaker 1: Carl Migliori, Maya Knigg, Daniello lacand Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler,
31:40
Speaker 1: Nicole Morano, Jason Gambrel and of course Jacob Weisberg, and
31:45
Speaker 1: a special thanks to the dogs of Pushkin past and present, Coco, Finn,
31:51
Speaker 1: Dash Potus, Collette, Ninja Dorley, funder Lichtenburg, Linus, Zuzu, Freeway,
31:58
Speaker 1: the Poodle Max, Sparky, Roxy, Rosie Oslo and Mine Biggie
32:05
Speaker 1: Smalls a brilliant, harascible, adorable cat. I know, I know,
32:12
Speaker 1: after all that I'm a cat person. Sorry everyone, see
32:15
Speaker 1: you next season.
32:36
Speaker 6: But is there a road here?
32:37
Speaker 1: Guys? We have to I don't think there's a road here.
32:39
Speaker 4: I think this is this look.
32:43
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, it could be wrong, but it looks like
32:46
Speaker 1: a road.
32:46
Speaker 4: To me, Yeah, it's road.
32:49
Speaker 1: Let's follow for guys, We're going to the land of
32:51
Speaker 1: the nose. How can you not follow your nose? Does
32:54
Speaker 1: a dog? You look on the dogs. Do not look
32:57
Speaker 1: on Google Maps. You're looking at ways, following your nose.
33:03
Speaker 6: That's true.
33:03
Speaker 4: Last season did not have waves.
33:05
Speaker 1: No