Patient Zero

Mon Nov 14 2011

The greatest mysteries have a shadowy figure at the center—someone who sets things in motion and holds the key to how the story unfolds. In epidemiology, this central character is known as Patient Zero—the case at the heart of an outbreak. This hour, Radiolab hunts for Patient Zeroes from all over the map.

Summary

Radiolab: "Patient Zero" (Nov 14, 2011)

Host: Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich
Producer: WNYC Studios
Theme: Tracing origins—of diseases, ideas, and cultural phenomena—through stories of the elusive "Patient Zero."

Episode Overview

This episode of Radiolab explores the concept of “Patient Zero”—the quest to find the first human, animal, or object to spark a chain reaction, whether it's a deadly disease, a social trend, or even a high five. The hosts journey from harrowing historical outbreaks (like Typhoid Mary and HIV/AIDS) to uplifting, quirky cultural touchstones, examining how we look for origin stories, why they seduce us, and what they can (and can't) really reveal.

Segment 1: Typhoid Mary—The Reluctant Patient Zero

[00:55–30:00]

Key Points & Story Structure

Setting the Scene ([00:55]):
The episode opens on North Brother Island, an abandoned quarantine site for contagious disease victims, focusing on Mary Mallon, aka “Typhoid Mary.”

“It’s a very pretty day to be on an abandoned island where victims of contagious disease were quarantined. And one in particular lived here, died here, never believing that she was, in fact, sick and dangerous.”
The 1906 Oyster Bay Outbreak ([02:30]):
Typhoid fever strikes a wealthy NY family. Despite all sanitary avenues being checked, suspicion falls on the family cook, Mary Mallon, whose specialty is the uncooked Peach Melba dessert.
Discovery of a Healthy Carrier ([06:45]):
Public health engineer George Soper investigates and finds Mary Mallon connected to several prior outbreaks—remarkable because she’s asymptomatic.

“She was actually the first documented case in North America of a healthy carrier, which is to say, someone who has the disease and is contagious, but never actually the symptoms.”
Mary’s Resistance and Capture ([11:00]):
Soper confronts Mary for samples, and she reacts furiously. Dr. S. Josephine Baker, with police, ultimately arrest Mary, who resists violently.

“She chases him out of the building with a fork in her hand… later Josephine Baker said it was like being in a cage with an angry lion.”
Isolation on North Brother Island ([15:00]):
Mary is forcibly quarantined. She submits her own feces to private labs, searching for proof of innocence.

“I have in fact been a peep show for everybody… I have been sending my own feces samples to a private lab… each one of those was negative.” — Mary Mallon’s letter
Legal, Moral, and Social Questions ([18:30]):
Debate erupts over the legality and ethics of Mary’s detention. She sues the city and loses.
Release & Return ([21:25]):
After three years, a new health commissioner releases Mary under the condition she never cooks again. Five years later, after additional outbreaks are traced back to her, she’s found working as a cook and re-quarantined for the rest of her life.

“She was now a woman who could not claim innocence... She had broken her parole.”
Broader Context & Gender ([25:55]):
Hundreds of other “healthy carriers” were known, most not isolated like Mary—raising issues of scapegoating and gender.

“Mary was the only one who they isolated in this way… I think it was more about making people feel safe than actually making them safe.”

Segment 2: AIDS and the Myth of Patient Zero

[30:03–1:06:40]

Key Points & Story Structure

AIDS Emerges ([30:03]):
The narrative shifts to the early days of AIDS—“the ultimate Patient Zero story.” Initial cases appear in 1981; epidemiologists seek the source.
The Network Diagram and the Legend of Gaetan Dugas ([32:45]):
CDC releases a diagram showing sexual contact networks; one man, numerically labeled “0,” is at the center. Journalistic accounts transform Gaetan Dugas, a French-Canadian flight attendant, into the infamous “Patient Zero.”

“At the center of it all was that one little circle numbered 0… that was the first time you ever get the term Patient Zero.”

“He became somewhat sinister and malicious… [he’d say] ‘I’ve got gay cancer. Now you’re gonna get it too.’” — 1988 60 Minutes special ([36:00])
Debunking the Narrative ([40:00]):
Science and virology reveal Dugas was not the first U.S. case—nor close to it. HIV entered the U.S. around 1966, likely via Haiti, and originated much earlier in Africa.

“He was not Patient Zero. No, he was not the beginning point. He wasn’t. Not even close to.” — David Quammen
Tracing the Virus’s True Origins ([43:00]):
Scientists examine old blood/tissue samples from the 1950s and 60s (ZR59, DRC60), using genetic clock techniques to go back to “first” human infection—estimated at 1908, southeastern Cameroon.

“The most recent common ancestor of those two specimens goes back to about 1908. That is when it started in human beings.” — Michael Worobee ([48:45])
The “Cut Hunter Hypothesis” and the Spillover ([50:20]):
The best theory: a Bantu hunter, wounded while butchering a chimp, caught SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus), which became HIV.

“He cuts himself and he gets blood to blood contact… That’s the moment it begins. That human is patient zero.”
Why There? Why Then? ([52:10]):
It’s possible the timing was “lucky”—the right virus, in a perfect colonial context of rapidly urbanizing, mobile populations.

“All the virus has to do is get from that tiny village… to one of the new cities… and into the city. And that seems to have been the place from which the disease went global.” — David Quammen ([54:00])
Further Back: Chimp Zero & the Viral Cocktail ([57:10]):
SIV in chimps comes from multiple monkey viruses recombining inside a single chimp’s cell. Most viral hybrids are dead ends, but eventually, one takes off, and this “hopeful monster” then crosses to humans.

“You get one particular mosaic virus… that landed on the exact right combination of genes that allowed it to evade the chimp’s immune system… and has been this massive and incredibly dramatic sort of tear in the fabric of humanity.” — Nathan Wolfe ([1:01:30])
Multiple Spills, Viruses Always “Knocking” ([1:03:55]):
There are multiple HIVs; only one caused the global pandemic, but “spillover” is a frequent event. Scientists like Nathan Wolfe now monitor for these in real time, using digital surveillance and genetic testing.

“If you want a patient zero, really clear patient zero, it’s some of these individuals that have been infected with these viruses. The real question is: how do we stop patient zeros?” — Nathan Wolfe

Segment 3: The Spread of the High Five—Tracing a Cultural Meme

[1:07:30–1:40:00]

Key Points & Story Structure

The Quest for the First High Five ([1:07:48]):
Writer John Moallam traces a viral press release crediting basketball player Lamont Sleet as the inventor; it turns out to be a hoax dreamed up by a fake “National High Five Day” team purely to test the media’s gullibility.

“Is the Lamont Sleet story true?... There was a pause, and he said: no. Frankly, we’ve been waiting for someone to ask. We thought no one would ever ask. It’s not true. We wanted to see if the media would… run with it.” — Greg Harrelledge ([1:22:10])
The Real Story—Glenn Burke and Dusty Baker ([1:11:30]):
Moallam shares a more credible founding tale: gays rights pioneer and LA Dodgers outfielder Glenn Burke initiates the first known high five with teammate Dusty Baker in 1977. Burke’s personal story is bittersweet—ostracized for being gay, his career and life ended tragically.

“Think about the feeling you get when you give someone the high five. I had that feeling before everybody else did.” — Glenn Burke ([1:19:00])
Counting Other Claims ([1:25:00]):
Competing claims include Derek Smith and Wiley Brown of the 1980 Louisville basketball team, volleyball coach Kathy Gregory in the 1960s, and even a 1955 French movie scene. The hosts and guests reflect on why we long for a single origin, and the fantasy of a clean Patient Zero.
The Real Miracle: Restoring Connection ([1:32:00]):
The most powerful “high five” is not historical, but technological: Tim, a paralyzed man, uses a neural implant to connect a robotic hand to his thoughts and “high fives” his girlfriend for the first time in seven years.

“I was able to put this piece of machinery that looked very similar to a hand on her hand. Not only did I just touch her, but I pushed into her hand. It was weird, too, because the hand was actually warm.” — Tim ([1:35:50])

Segment 4: Who Invented the Cowboy Hat?—The Illusion of a Sole Inventor

[1:40:05–1:51:20]

Key Points & Story Structure

Origin Myths ([1:40:30]):
Science writer Johnny Hughes investigates the cowboy hat’s beginnings, offering three origin stories:
1. The Stetson Story: John B. Stetson designs it in 1865, based on a vision of practicality.
2. Evolution by Community: Cowboys’ habits and needs shape the hat’s design over years—dents, brims, and wear become trends that hatmakers rack up.
3. The Environmental Story: No one “invents” the hat—the environment (weather, prairie, sun) shapes it unconsciously, like natural selection.
“The environment created the hat. The wind created the hat. The rain, the sun, the snow, the weather created those hats.” — Johnny Hughes ([1:47:00])
Reflection on Storytelling and Origin Stories ([1:49:00]):
The hosts discuss how the search for a single creator or first cause is often a narrative convenience, not historical truth, and that real stories are always more tangled.

“As storytellers, we’re always trying to get to moments, get down to the particular person… That’s what we want as storytellers. So in some sense your scenario three is like the death of story. In some sense, it’s the anti story.” — Jad Abumrad

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On scapegoating and Patient Zero:

“We want a tidy story—one person to blame, one hero to credit, one culprit to isolate. But reality's more complicated.” ([Whole episode, recurring theme])
On the gendered politics of Typhoid Mary:

“Mary was the only one... isolated in this way. I think it was more about making people feel safe than actually making them safe.” ([27:30])
On viral evolution's randomness:

“A blue moon after a blue moon after a blue moon.... you get one particular mosaic virus... that allowed it to evade the chimp’s immune system.” — Nathan Wolfe ([1:01:30])
On our appetite for origin stories:

“Who in this room wants the gay guy to be the inventor? I want the gay guy. Yeah... It’s the better story of the two. And something in me says, just go with the narrative winner.” ([1:29:00])
Technological hope:

“It still kind of boggles my mind when I think about it.” — Tim, on experiencing human touch via robot hand ([1:36:00])

Timestamps for Major Segments

00:55–30:00: Typhoid Mary and the origins of the “healthy carrier”
30:03–1:06:40: The AIDS epidemic, Patient Zero myth, and the search for HIV’s true origin
1:07:30–1:40:00: The spread (and myth) of the first high five—sports, hoax, and disability technology
1:40:05–1:51:20: Who invented the cowboy hat?—a meditation on “zero moments” in invention and natural selection

Overall Tone and Style

Radiolab’s trademark is in full force: narrative journalism, curiosity, humor, empathy, and innovative sound design. The hosts maintain a conversational, often playful voice, while thoughtfully confronting deep ethical and philosophical issues.

Conclusion

“Patient Zero” asks whether it is ever really possible—or even desirable—to pin complex events to a single origin. From viruses to baseball celebrations to hats, the truth is always messier, more collective, and shaped as much by context as by individuals. The narrative of “firsts” may comfort us or help us organize the world, but, as Radiolab reminds us, nothing begins in a vacuum.

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Transcript

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Oh, wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab Radio from WNY and npr. So have we said where we are? I ain't on tape yet. Starting us off today are our producers, Lynn Levy and Sean Cole. Very pretty day to be on an abandoned island where victims of contagious disease were quarantined. And one in particular who lived here died here, never believing that she was, in fact, sick and dangerous. So this is a story that begins when. Well, it's actually, it starts in 1906, and it doesn't start on the island. It starts in Oyster Bay. Ooh, nice neighborhood. Very nice. There was this one rich family on vacation there, and their daughter gets sick. She gets sick first. This is Judy Levitt. I am a professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin, and she wrote a book about this story. So basically, the girl, the daughter has a fever. Then her sister comes down with it, and then her mom and a maid, about six out of 11 in the family get sick. And with this disease, the fever is just the first part of it. Both diarrhea or constipation are reported, so it can go either way, I guess. What is it? Typhoid. Hmm. And they couldn't figure out what had caused the disease, so they called in this sanitary engineer named George Soper with the Public Health Department. He was a go to guy for outbreaks like this. Back then, the Department of Public Health was thinking, you know, you get sick because of something dirty near you in the well or in the pipes. Yeah. So he looks into all of that, did a whole test on the house and the water and everything. Couldn't find anything. And so he starts talking to the family and he started quizzing them all, and they remember. Eventually, he builds up this whole picture of several outbreaks going back years. 1900, Mamaronek. A new York family had a house for the summer. 1902. Dark Harbor, Maine. 1904. Seven cases. Sands Point, New York. Autumn 1906. Winter 1907, New York City. All these cases. And they all had one thing in common. What? Each of these families had employed the same cook. Really? Which is funny, because when you cook food, you kill the bacteria in the food. Oh, so it couldn't be the cook then, but this cook, her most famous dish was peach melba, which is ice cream and fresh peaches. Fresh peaches. Raw fruit. That was a perfect medium. And the cook's name was Mary Mallon. Mary Mallon. Mary Mallon. Wait a second. Sean Cole. Typhoid. Typhoid Mary is who we're talking about. Oh, so we know this story. No, you don't know this story. What do you mean? Everybody thinks they know this story. I thought I knew the story, and then when I looked into it, I realized I didn't know the first thing about it. And when you look into the details, they tell us some very difficult things about who we were and. And who we still are. In a lot of ways, it's all in the details. All of the juice and problem. Like in, like the peach juice? Yeah, just like the peach juice we're still dealing with. Wait. I'm Robert Krulwich. Go ahead, go ahead, do your part. I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Radiolab. And in this hour, a series of stories that all hew to that delicious story archetype we call Patient Zero. The first cause will try to trace ideas and trends and massive social traumas like pandemics back to that one person or one critter, or the other way you call it is called the but for. If you didn't have this thing but for this thing, you wouldn't have the rest of the story. I like the but for the but for but. Meanwhile, back to the peaches. So George Soper's like, I've got to find this woman. And when he finds her, she's in New York City working for another family. The laundress had recently been taken to the Presbyterian Hospital with typhoid fever. This is from an article Soper wrote called the Curious Case of Typhoid Mary. And the only child of the family, a lovely daughter, was dying of it. So he goes to the house, walks into the kitchen, sees this woman. Five foot six, blond hair, blue eyes, had a good figure and might have been called athletic had she not been a little too heavy. Irish immigrant, 36, not particularly clean. And he says, mary Mallon, I think you are causing disease in people, and I want samples of your urine, feces and blood. Good afternoon. And she says, what are you accusing me of being sick? Playing the role of Mary is Columbia Public Health Professor David Rosner. How dare you. I'm not a sick person. What does she do? She chases him out of the building with a fork in her hand. A serving fork. A serving for her. Yeah, I felt rather lucky to escape. But did she have typhoid? I mean, did she outwardly have typhoid? Well, that's the thing. She never had any symptoms. She felt perfectly healthy. She was actually the first documented case in North America of a healthy carrier, which is to say, someone who has the disease and is contagious, but never actually the symptoms. The symptoms. So in one weird way, Soper's thrilled, like he's only read about this, and then here she is in front of him. But think of how all of this must have sounded to Mary. I mean, some guy from outer space comes into your kitchen and says, you're diseased and you're hurting people. I mean, she must have thought, what? I feel fine. I'm living a moral life. I'm not a vagrant. I'm employed. I'm a good, solid citizen. You know, you would be crazed, too, wouldn't you? Even today. You'd probably grab your knife. Yeah, yeah, you'd grab your knife. Well, does he have any evidence, though, that she is spreading the disease? Not yet. That's why he needs her poop. So he goes back, finds her at a rooming house, she kicks him out, swears at him. She apparently had quite a temper. And then the health department sends in this female doctor by the name of S. Josephine Baker. Maybe she could ask for blood, feces in urine a little more gently. I just don't know how you ask for that gently. But she tries. And when it doesn't work, she comes back a little bit later with cops, and they come to the house, and Mary Mallon, when she realizes what's happening, disappears. What do you mean, disappears? She just vanishes. Completely vanishes. They end up searching the entire place and they can't find her. Finally, I think they're about to leave when one of them spots her skirt coming outside of a door. It's a little piece of calico kind of stuck in a doorway. They open the door, and there she is. And so they drag her out. And she comes out kicking and screaming and screaming and kicking. It takes all of them to drag her out, protesting. They get her in the ambulance, and Josephine Baker sits on her, according to her. Sits on her. And Baker later said something like it was like being in a cage with an angry lion. So they take her down to the hospital. They tested her feces in urine, and they found that, yes, she was, in fact, a carrier of live typhoid bacilli. It's a weird island, man. I spent a while on him. So they isolate her, and they ultimately move her. Okay, good. From Manhattan to North Brother Island. Let's have a bit of a haunted vibe. Yeah. And there she is. Thanks, man. We went there to. Just to try to get our heads around what she must have thought. What do you think? What was the island like, man? Everything is completely overgrown. It was really creepy. Creepy because it was in such dissolution. Yeah, yeah. Just be careful where you step. On one end, there are all of these medical. Former medical buildings, including a giant hospital where they isolated tuberculosis patients. So a big brick, stately building. And then on the other side of the island, there's smaller wooden buildings that are crushed. This may be where her cottage is, where her cottage would be if it was still standing. But it's not standing anymore. Well, it was one room. One room. It had a kitchen. It had a, I guess, a sleeping area and a sitting area. It probably wasn't so bad if you didn't have to stay there. You know, any places that you're not free to leave becomes like a prison. So we're marching around, and then Lyn says to me, hey, look at the view. And holy moly, take a look at that. It's right there. That's when it really hit me. If this is where her cabin was, then one window of it looked exactly onto Manhattan. She could have seen where she used to live. You can see the traffic on the streets. This was like the most horrible seaside vacation Almost the whole time they had her incarcerated. They took feces three times a week, which is, you know, it's not pleasant to have to do that. And sometimes she was negative, and sometimes she was positive. Wait, what? So that's. That's another thing that they were figuring out at the time. So she was probably an intermittent carrier. What does that mean? The disease is always in her, but sometimes she excretes it and sometimes she doesn't. Oh, that must have been confusing for her. When I first came here, I was so nervous and almost prostrated with grief and trouble. My eyes began to twitch. This is from a letter that Mary wrote from the island. I have, in fact, been a peep show for everybody. But if you keep reading it, and in fact it's addressed to a lawyer, it's clear that she was fighting this. And she had been sending her own feces samples herself to a private lab in Manhattan. And each one of those was negative. Really? The tuberculosis men would say, there she is, the kidnapped woman. Yeah, that is poison ivy. She sues the city and loses. Still, there are all these questions as to whether any of this is legal. I mean, even George Soper, the guy who hunted her down, said it was contrary to the constitution of the United States to hold her under the circumstance. And how long was she on this island for? Three years. Wow. And then what changed was a new health commissioner took over. And so he says, it's just not right that we keep a healthy woman locked up like this. She was not dangerous to anybody. If she didn't cook, he lets her go. He lets her go back to Manhattan, but he makes her promise. She did promise. She signed an affidavit saying she'll never cook again. And she was released. They gave. They set her up with a job as a laundress and they went, here you go, Mary. And then, you know, they kept track of her for a while, and then at a certain point, they kind of stopped keeping track of her. What happened? So how many years will go by? 5. 5. What happens next? There's an outbreak of typhoid. Where? Where? At a maternity hospital. Oh, you're Kidd. Josephine Baker, who sat on her in the ambulance before she says that she goes and pays a visit and walks into the kitchen and she says the first person that she encountered was Typhoid Mary Mallon. George Soper did some legwork on where Mary had been, and it turned out she had worked at a restaurant, two hotels, an inn and a sanatorium as well as the hospital. And at least according to to his account, two of the people that she made sick during those couple years were children. She was now a woman who could not claim innocence. She was known willfully and deliberately to have taken desperate chances with human life. She had abused her privilege. She had broken her parole. So then they put her back on North Brother island, back in her bungalow, and there she sits. She was a dangerous character and must be treated accordingly. Absolutely. She's broke her promise. Yeah, I totally agree. She made a deal and she didn't keep the deal. But the thing is, is that at the time she was sent back to the island, there were hundreds of other healthy carriers identified all over New York. And some of them were cooks. What? Really? Mostly men, by the way. And they were cooking. Well, they were barred from cooking. But not all of them always listened. And yet Mary was the only one who they isolated in this way. Why? Why only her? I think it was more about making people feel safe than actually making them safe. Oh, look out for this stair. It's all crumbled. She was what we needed at the time. We're in the hospital where the tuberculosis patients were quarantined. This was towards the end of Lynn and my visit to the island. Yeah, these must be the wards. Definitely. Yeah. So when was she here? This is where they brought her after she had a stroke. And this is where she was for the last six years of her life. Did she die in here? Yeah. Hi, this is David Rosner. This is Judy Levitt reading this message. Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Enhancing public understanding of science and technology. Science and technology in the modern world World. More information about Sloan@www.sloan.org. radiolab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR. Okay, that's it. Thanks. Bye. Radiolab is supported by Built. Nobody wants to pay rent. But if you have to, Built works to make it more worthwhile. By paying rent. Through Built, you can earn flexible points that can be redeemed toward hundreds of hotels and airlines, a future rent payment, your next lift ride, and more. But it doesn't stop there. You can dine out at your favorite local restaurants and earn additional points, get VI treatment at certain fitness studios and enjoy exclusive experiences just for Built members. Every month, earn points on rent and around your neighborhood, wherever you call home, by going to joinbilt.com Radiolab that's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T.com Radiolab Radiolab is supported by Rippling. 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Snag some of our biggest savings of the season right now, like 25% off select pre lit artificial Christmas trees and get yourself free select dewalt Cobalt or Craftsman tools when you buy a select battery or combo kit before the Black Friday rush. Because everyone loves free stuff, right? Lowes, we help you save valid through 123 while supplies last selection varies by location. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwich. This is Radiolab and today it's Patient Zero. That's our subject. Yeah. And this next story, it's so huge. It's the ultimate Patient Zero story. Really. Many of us have lived through this. It was. It's as recent an event. It's such a recent event that it still hurts and it still bleeds. And in it somewhere is literally the patient that is called zero. So this is. Yeah, a lot of people are gonna help us tell the story, but starting us off is science writer Radiolab regular Carl zimmer. So in 1981, doctors for the first time describe a mysterious, newly discovered disease, a syndrome which affects mostly homosexual men. The young men in Los Angeles were dying the number of cases has been growing faster and faster. So far, more than 80Americans have died. 258 people have died. 625 people have died. Of course, this is the part we all know how. From those first few cases in la, AIDS became one of the deadliest pandemics the world has ever seen, more dangerous than the plague of the Middle Ages. But back at the beginning, there was a story that I've not been able to shake for the last 30 years, and it's a story that I want to reimagine right now. Right after news of this syndrome started to break. That's science writer David Quammen, who along with Carl will be one of our guides. Epidemiologists were trying to figure out where. Where did it come from? And they were thinking, like, well, maybe it's a sexually transmitted disease. So the CDC launches a study of a group of about 30 patients, gay men, in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, to see who had had sexual contact with whom. Is that just a series of interviews with people? Yeah. Please name all the people that you. That you slept with. The CDC eventually releases the results of this survey in the form of a diagram, like a network drawing, with circles representing patients and then lines representing sexual contact. And each patient, each little circle was numbered. New York, 7, Los Angeles, 12. So you didn't know who was who, but you could tell immediately when you look at this thing that of all the 30 or so circles, there was one circle that was special. It had lines coming out in every direction, seven or eight, emanating from him like the hub of a wheel, except all the spokes on this wheel connected to other wheels, which then shot out and connected to other wheels fanning outward. At the center of it all was that one little circle numbered 0, number 0. As far as we know, that was the first time that you ever get the term Patient Zero. Patient Zero was a man, a central victim and victimizer. This is from a 60 Minute special in 1988. That year, a reporter named Randy Schultz had written a book called and the Band Played on that for the first time revealed the identity of patient Zero. He was a French Canadian, a very handsome airline steward named Gaetan Dugas. Gaetan Dugas, Patient Zero. A few minutes later in the report, Schultz comes on to describe a guy who has got unlimited sexual stamina. This sexual athlete who would fly from one hot spot to the next because of his job, having sex with literally thousands of men as he knew he was dying. At least according to Randy Shields. He became somewhat sinister and malicious. He would sleep with a male partner at a bathhouse in San Francisco or somewhere else. And then when the light came up, according to Randy Shiltz, he would say, I've got gay cancer. Now you're gonna get it too. You talk to him? I talk to him, yeah. This is Dr. Selma Dritz. She was part of that CDC study. I told him that he was getting other people sick with it. And he said, it's my right to do whatever I want. My civil rights, I do as I please. I've got it. Why shouldn't they have it? They said, you can kill yourself if you want, but you got no right to take somebody else along with you. And he said, screw you and walked out. Really a chilling moment. And pretty much from that moment on, Gaten Dugas, he just took on this aura as single handedly causing an epidemic in the United States. Now, I don't know about you, but I first bumped into this story in the movie version of in the Band Played on My Friend. We're talking about thousands of men whose faces I cannot even remember. And you want names? That's an actor playing Gate Nuka in the movie. Now, when I first saw that AIDS had already infected two and a half million people, and to think that it could all go back to this one guy just seemed unreal. It was a very potent story, there's no doubt. And he gave HIV to a lot of people, there's no question about that. But what we do know is that he was not Patient Zero. He was not patient Zero. No, he was not the beginning point. He wasn't. Not even close to. So here's the question that got me started on this story. Okay, so the gay steward, that was the movie stuck in my head. But what's the real movie? What movie can we make about the beginning of the AIDS epidemic? Because when you've got something so vast that according to some estimates, will have killed 60 million people by the end of the decade, well, you need a beginning. You need some way of explaining how this disaster happened and how it might happen again. And how exactly do we know that Gaten Dugas wasn't patient zero? Well, there are a couple reasons we know it. So one thing that people started to do, scientists was to. They started going back and looking at people who had died, people who died mysteriously. Aids, like things in the past might. Some of them have been early cases and they started finding a lot. Robert Rayford had AIDS 12 years before it was recognized in this country in 1959. 1959, a sailor in Britain died of pneumocystis pneumonia. And so for a while, you had all these new patient zeros. In 1961, a nurse in Chicago died of Kaposi's sarcoma. But the real definitive blow to this whole patient zero nonsense came by actually looking at the virus itself. In 1984, same year that Gaten Dugas died, scientists isolate the virus hiv, which is really just a little string of genetic code that gets into your body and into your cells and uses your cells to make copies of itself. But here's the thing. When it replicates within a single patient, it copies itself imprecisely. It mutates quickly. It changes a lot. As the virus duplicates itself inside a person, the dupes often have little copying errors in them, little mutations. It turns out those errors, they happen at a predictable rate. You can kind of almost predict how many you're gonna see in a year or five years. And so the amount of changes that you see out there, the diversity really, of the viruses in the AIDS population, well, that becomes really good information. And so a group of scientists began to look at the amount of diversity among HIV patients in the US and other parts of the world. And the more diversity, the longer the virus has been around, Right? Right. And they could use that kind of like a clock. If you have a virus here and a virus there, you could measure how different they are, and you would know that it would take a certain amount of time for them to get that different. And to make a long story short, the picture they get is that AIDS entered the United States around 1966, at a time when Gaetan Degas was still a virginal adolescent. From there, scientists were able to trace the virus back to Haiti and from Haiti back to Africa. It's been there the longest, it's had the longest time to become diverse, to mutate, to evolve. So if you want to really, if you want to get to the real patient zero, as it were, the most interesting stuff actually comes from Africa. So one way to try to figure out its origins there is to go looking for the virus. Yep. And that takes us back to ZR59 and DRC60. Can we talk about them? Sure. What? These are the two earliest known HIV positive human specimens. And this is where, for me, at least, the story gets way bigger than I imagined. Now, the first sample, ZR59, came to light in the late 90s. Somehow, scientists unearthed a very old tube of blood from a hospital in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And when they tested it, it had HIV. This had been taken from a Bantu man in 1959. 1959, yeah. Nobody knows his name. Nobody even knows, I think, what he died of. And that was the only one for a number of years. That was our one glimpse into the kind of deep history of hiv. But then along comes that guy, Michael Worobee. He's an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona. And a few years ago, Michael went back to Kinshasa and found a second HIV sample. He actually found the virus lurking in a tiny bit of human tissue that was preserved in paraffin wax. It's kind of like Han Solo in the Star wars movie when he's kind of frozen in that carbonite or whatever that stuff is in this new sample. It was from the same town, kinshasa, as the first, and also, more importantly, from the same time, 1960. And with the two of them, then, you can kind of go back in time like we described before. You could measure the differences between the samples, calculate how long it would take for those samples to get that different. And in the end, you can use these two samples to wind the clock all the way back to the virus that started it all. And it turned out the most recent common ancestor of those two specimens goes back to. To about 1908. 1908. That is when it started in human beings. What, 1908? Is that what he said? Roughly, give or take a margin of error, early 1900s. Wow. So around 1908, give or take, something happened. That's right. That moment is the spillover. Spillover. Spillover is the term the scientists use to describe the moment when a virus in one species passes into another species. You know, new diseases in humans tend to pop up from animals. So people said, okay, flu comes from birds. Where does HIV come from? To get at that answer, you have to look beyond human beings. You have to look at other viruses that are like hiv. So the search was on the inability to find a similar disease and research animals. Turns out, right about the time that the HIV virus was discovered, scientists at the New England Primate Research center, some researchers found a virus like it in macaque monkeys. In fact, it was so similar that they called it siv. Simian Immunodeficiency Virus. Yes. And that's where the origin quest started. This is Beatrice Hahn. I'm a professor of medicine and microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania. And so after they found it in macaques, what happened? It took a couple of years, but eventually, she says, they found SIV and still another primate species, the sooty mangabe. And then in a few more, the African green monkeys, mandrills. Pretty soon it was all over the place. There are Now, I think, 40 different species of African monkeys known to have their own version of siv. So then the question was, which one of these monkeys or primates passed it to us? Then unexpectedly, a researcher named Martine, Martine Peters at this center in Gabon decided to test her chimps, two orphan chimpanzees. And bingo, she found a very, very close match. A virus that was the closest relative of HIV 1. So everybody said, well, you know, it was a chimp, it was a chimp. Okay, yeah, it came from a chimp. Yes. But then the question was, well, which chimps? Or rather, where? Where? Exactly. So Beatrice Hahn and her colleagues started looking at chimps that came from different parts of western Central Africa. Now, getting blood samples from chimps in the wild is pretty much. It just isn't feasible, you know, because in the wild they hide the moment they see us. So you get stuck with fecal samples. Poop. Oh, yes, poop. There's lots of DNA in there and viruses. So they would just go to where the chimpanzees would sleep at night and they would just, you know, collect some poop, bring it back to the lab. And Beatrice would analyze all the viruses over 90 different wild communities from every part of Central Africa, over 7,000 different fecal samples. And slowly they were able to piece together which communities were infected and which ones had the closest to HIV 1. That's when it hit us for the first time. What exactly hit you? The geographic origin of these chimps. In 2006, her and her colleagues published that the human AIDS virus comes from a group of chimps, a very specific group that live in a very specific place. This little corner of southeastern Cameroon between the Boomba river, the Ngoka river and the Sangha River. These chimps were essentially penned in between these three rivers. It's an area probably only of 100 square miles, not much more than that. Wow. So when we're looking at what humans have, and we're looking at what all of those chimps in Africa have, the most perfect match is this little territory up there in Cameroon. Yeah. There is no other virus that is any closer. So that's that. So can you reconstruct the spillover and the WHO that it spilled over into? As you know, as best as we understand it, you can hypothesize. And the best hypothesis is the Cut Hunter hypothesis. The Cut Hunter The C U T Hunter. That's right. A hunter who gets cut. And what can we say about this guy? I mean, is he. What do we know about him? If we had to guess, if we had to guess, that human was probably a Bantu man living very near the forest or in the forest in southeastern Cameroon. He was hunting. Maybe he had a bow and arrow, maybe he had a spear. And he kills a chimpanzee. Bingo. Here's a big pile of meat and he starts to butcher it. He's cutting open the chest cavity, he's pulling out organs and he cuts himself and he gets blood to blood. Contact chimpanzee blood against his blood. What happens is that the virus in the chimpanzee blood found itself in an environment that was unexpected, that was alien to it, but was not too much different from the biochemical environment it had been. In chimpanzee blood, it could function. And that's the moment. That's the moment it begins. That human is patient zero. But why then? Why 1908? I mean, presumably people have been hunting chimps for a really long time. Why wouldn't this guy be patient? 7 million. That's another of the big questions. People, certainly in central Africa have been eating monkeys for thousands of years. I mean, David says there's really no way to know. But this could have just been the right virus. Maybe this particular virus evolved in a way that made it more transmissible in humans. Or maybe it just got lucky to come along at precisely the right time. What you're looking at, this is Carl again, is a time when this part of Africa was being heavily colonized. The French and the Belgians were building train systems. The populations were on the move. Kinshasa, which was then Leopoldville, it was exploding. It was huge. The cities were attracting people from the boonies in those days. So by 1908, all the virus has to do is get from that tiny village where the cut hunter lived to one of the new cities. That happens almost certainly by river. I was stirred by the work of Beatrice Hahn and Mike Warby to see what this scenario looked like on the ground. So I went to southeastern Cameroon and I chartered a little boat, about a 30 foot wooden boat with an outboard motor. And he traced the path of the virus. We went down the Ngoko river and we stopped at a few villages. There are a couple little villages there, one of which has a market where you can buy monkey meat and crocodile meat. And he says it wasn't hard to imagine how it all might have went down. Perhaps the cut hunter gave the virus to a woman who then passed it on to a fisherman, a fellow that I call the Voyager, who then got in the boat, as David did, and carried it down the river. The Sanga river, which is the. The Ngoko, is a tributary of the Sangha. Sangha becomes a bigger river, 200 meters wide, which then flows to the Congo river, the big river, and into the city. And I imagine him sliding into Brazzaville around 1920. The first HIV positive man to arrive in an urban center where there's a much greater density of humans, where there are prostitutes, a greater fluidity of social and sexual interactions. And that seems to have been the place from which the disease went global. So that's how it happened. We could take it back even farther, actually. What do you mean? Because if you want to make a movie about the start of it, well, this is not the start, because we got it from chimps, right? Right. So you could ask, who was chimp zero? What do we know about chimp zero? Right, Yeah. I mean, everything comes from somewhere. And again, by molecular work, scientists have been able to determine that the chimp virus is actually. It actually comes from two monkey viruses. Two different monkeys, from two completely different species. What, would they have encountered each other somewhere or had a fight? They probably encountered each other in the stomach of a chimp. Meaning what? Well, from the perspective of chimpanzee monkeys, they look tasty. This is Nathan Wolfe, professor in Human biology at Stanford University, and he says to fully understand this part of the patient, or rather chimp zero narrative, you have to grasp how it is that chimps hunt. And this is something he witnessed in the Kibale National Forest in southwestern Uganda. He described to us watching three male chimps converge on a tree full of colobus monkeys, which are these very small black and white monkeys. And one individual managed to grab two juveniles, and then the three individuals all met up and began to eat the monkey while it was still alive. The chimpanzee was going after an organ, you know, that obviously was a tasty morsel that, that he was going after. And the monkey was screaming bloody murder. It is quite disturbing to watch, he says, but one of the things that struck me at that moment was the depth of contact between the blood and body fluids of this monkey and the chimpanzee. The chimps are literally covered in blood. They have blood on their face, in their eyes. And from the virus's perspective, this is spillover heaven. Okay, so the following is the closest that we can get to a zero point in this entire narrative. We don't know where it happened and we don't know exactly the time, say some hundreds of thousands of years ago. From the molecular clock, we know it was less than a million years, that's all we know. But whenever it was, Chimp zero was hunting and it comes upon a monkey called a red cap mangabe. The red cap mangabe, this is a, a larger primate. And these are tree dwelling, little, little guys, tree dwelling, little bit of red fur on their heads. Yes. Chip zero spots one of these monkeys, eats it, and in the process he catches a red cap mangaby version of the AIDS virus. Next, sometime after that first kill, weeks, months, we don't know, maybe it was the same day, Chimp zero comes across across another monkey. And this monkey was called a spotnose guenon. Yes. It's got a spot on its nose, I assume. There you go, very small. One of the tiniest monkeys of all of the old world monkeys. And Chip Zero eats that monkey and gets a spot nosed guenon version of the AIDS virus or the SIV virus inside it. So you've got the red cap mangaby and you've got the spotnose guenon. So you've got a guenon and a mangabe. Two completely different kinds of SIV viruses inside the same chimp. Now, under normal circumstances, according to Nathan, both of these SIV viruses would go nowhere. Because when one of these viruses makes the jump, they go from a place they've adapted to and that they know, to a completely foreign landscape, like a human being dropped off on Mars, maybe without a spacesuit. I mean, they basically are entering a completely alien habitat. The cells don't look the same, the environment is different, and the chimp's immune system would normally kill them. But then once in a blue moon, something crazy happens. These two viruses will end up inside the same cell in the same chimp at the same time, literally. There is a single cell simultaneously infected with both viruses. So suppose on one side of the cell you've got the mangabe virus, and on the other side of the same cell you've got the spotnose guen. What happens is literally inside the cell you have an enzyme, it's called the polymerase enzyme, that's copying genetic information of the viruses. This is what viruses do. They hijack these enzymes to make copies of themselves. Now here's the problem. These enzymes, they're not necessarily that sticky. And while they're in the process of copying one virus, every once in a while, they'll accidentally fall off mid copy and go thwack and latch on to the second virus and just keep on copying. And so what it ends up spitting out is a hybrid like that. Now, this new mosaic probably won't go anywhere because 99.99999999% of the time when these hybrids happen, it's a dead end. The chimp's immune system is pretty sophisticated. It has evolved defenses against these viruses and it will destroy them. But again, once in a blue moon. So this is a blue moon after a blue moon after a blue moon to really get this. Finally, you get one particular mosaic virus between the Mangaby and the Guedon that, through sheer random luck, works. It landed on the exact right combination of genes that allowed it to evade the chimp's immune system. I mean, one of the amazing things to think about is how many. How many hopeful monsters you had to have in order to get that one that actually survived probably trillions. But then, boom, suddenly, in a flash, from these two viruses that can barely survive in the chimp, you get a new virus. A little bit mangaby, little bit guenin, can not only survive in the chimp, but can thrive. In fact, for this baby virus, the chimp is the perfect host. And that was the virus that ended up spreading, jumping over into humans, and has been this massive and incredibly dramatic sort of tear in the fabric of humanity. Let me add another parenthesis. There are essentially 12 major groups of the HIV virus. What David means is that 12 different kinds of HIV viruses have spilled over 12 different times. Eight of them came from monkeys, three of them came from chimps, and one came from gorillas. Wow. And of those 12, only one of them is responsible for the global pandemic. There are 12 kinds. 12 times that we know about has probably happened dozens and dozens more times that we don't know about. So the spillover is not a highly improbable event. These sorts of viruses, they're constantly pinging at us. They're pinging at us and pinging at us. We see it happening all the time. You see it happening all the time. Nathan has set up a series of monitoring stations in places like central Africa, and he and his colleagues have been tracking what he calls the viral chatter in the people who hunt these primates. We collected specimens from the animals that they were hunting. They compared that to blood samples from the hunters themselves, and guess what we found a whole range of new retroviruses that were moving over into these hunters. For example, he's been tracking Something called the simian foamy virus, which is virus in the same family as hiv. And he has seen it hop from an individual gorilla to an individual human. Who killed that gorilla? Yeah. These are almost certainly what we call primary transmission events. Oh, so you really are looking at the potential beginning of something. Yes. So if you want a patient zero, really clear patient zero, it's some of these individuals that have been infected with these viruses. The real question is, how do we stop patient zeros? How do we avoid patient patient one and patient two. Exactly. So Nathan is developing a series of tools like digital surveillance. I mean, some of these places, I work in, some places in Democratic Republic of Congo, you basically have to fly in to get there. No roads, often no electricity. But many of these places, they still have cell phone towers. So Nathan has begun to track cell phone call patterns in these communities. So if he sees a blip of many calls to a medical center within a short period of time, okay, boom. Now we gotta investigate that. We continue to find viruses that are completely novel, and we're looking to determine if these are if these are the next HIV. Because think about it, he says HIV landed in humans in 1908, but we didn't know about it until 1981. We had decades of time when this was a virus before it spread globally. What if we'd been looking for for it? A lot of people to thank for this segment. Thanks to Nathan Wolfe for being Nathan, and he has an awesome new book called the Viral Storm. Also thank you to Carl Zimmer, whose book on viruses is called A Planet of Viruses. And thank you also to him and to Michael Warby. Their interview was recorded on a podcast from Meet the Scientist, which you can find@micro world.org and thanks to David Quammen, who's got a book called Spillover coming out very soon, which is all about diseases crossing over from animals to us. And also to Beatrice Hahn of the University of Pennsylvania and to Katie Slocum from the University of York for letting us use her recordings of chimpanzees. My name is Brennan Novak, and I'm calling from Reykjavik, Iceland, where about half the country believes in elves. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information About Sloan@www.sloan.org. radiolab is sponsored by omgs.com There is new research on pleasure that's actually fascinating. And the site OMG yes. Makes it accessible to everyone. OMG yes shares finding from the largest ever study into women's pleasure and intimacy. In partnership with researchers at Yale and Indiana University, they asked tens of thousands of couples what they wished they'd discovered sooner. They found the patterns in those discoveries. And all that wisdom and pleasure and intimacy is organized as hundreds of short videos, animations and how tos on omgs.com and guess what? Half of OMGS users are men. Hooray for generous lovers. Right? You'll find specific research backed techniques. It's the science of sexual generosity in action. See what they discovered today@omg yes.com that's OMG yes.com. Radiolab is supported by Planet Visionaries, the podcast created in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. The show is hosted by Alex Honnold, who you may recognize from Free Solo, where he climbed El Capitan without ropes. Now he's turning his focus to the biggest challenge of all. Protecting the only planet we've got. Every episode brings you stories that prove climate optimism isn't naive, it's a strategy. The episodes span the globe, from Arctic scientists and Amazon forest guardians to entrepreneurs reimagining fashion and food systems. You'll hear from explorers, scientists, activists, and storytellers who are working to reshape the future in practical, human ways. In one episode, Alex sits down with wildlife photographer Birdie Gregory to discuss how animals can teach humans resiliency, empathy and hope. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Check out Planet Visionaries Listen or watch on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, you want to know about one of my proudest moments of being a dad? Yeah. Happened this morning. Yeah. So you know how Emile's a little bit of an introvert? Right. We were sort of worried whether he socializes enough. Well, we were taking him to daycare and he's taking his shoes off. And there's this little boy who's only there two days a week and he's not adjusting well. And every time his mother drops him off, she has to literally pry him off her. And he's wailing and, you know, so Emile sits down on this little seat to take his shoes off. The mother of this kid puts this little boy next to Emile and he is just crying. He's distraught. So then what happens is Emile turns to this little boy, looks at him, sticks out his hand and says, high five. High five out of nowhere. That is amazing. Yeah, because it's like they're out in their own society, you know? Yeah. Okay, so let's do the introductions. I'm Jad I'm Robert. This is Radiolab. We're calling this show Patient Zero. Yeah. And for this next segment, no more patients, no more diseases. Exactly. Let's focus instead on invention, on the people who bring new ideas into the world. Yeah, the zero is behind the ideas. That doesn't quite sound right. You know what I mean? Yeah. And that guy you just heard. Hi, my name is John Moallam. I'm a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. He's got his own high five story to tell, though it's not about his daughter. We have. I think we have kids around the same age or her first high five. It's actually about the first high five ever. Yeah, ever. Yeah. See, one morning a few years ago, 2007 or 2008, John turned on his computer, opened up his email, and found a press release about the true, undisputed inventor of the high five coming, you know, out. Finally, who is the press release from? National High Five Day, which is a kind of a joke holiday that was invented by a group of high school friends, I think, and they told the story. They told the story of Lamont Sleetz, college basketball player, Murray State in Kentucky. And the story in the press release went something like this. Sleetz's father fought in Vietnam as part of the 1st Battalion, 5th infantry, which was nicknamed 5. And they used to greet each other by holding up their hand and saying Five as a kind of prideful thing. And when Lamont was younger, they would all sort of hang out at the house in Kentucky, and he couldn't keep all their names straight. So when they'd walk in the door and go, Five. He would just sort of smack their hand. They go, hi, Five. Oh, like, hi. Like, hello, Five. Hello, Five. Yeah, hi, comma, Five. You know, he has small hands. He likes to put them up against the big hands of the Five guys. And. And it was years later that he started playing college basketball at Murray State and started high fiving all his teammates. He really never stopped high fiving. It was just something he did. But when he went around playing away games, other teams picked it up and it sort of spread out. So he was sort of both the inventor of the high five and the kind of Johnny Appleseed of the high five at the same time. And within a few weeks of Jon getting this press release, the story was everywhere. Went kind of viral. It wound up sort of all over the Internet. There were some local newspapers who, you know, picked it up. You know, Murray State suddenly became very proud of the fact that they were the home of the high five. It became sort of part of the institutional lore in the athletic department there. And then you read this and you thought what? I thought, how sad. How sad. Why? How sad? Because I knew the story of Glenn Burke. Turns out John had already been poking around into this question of who invented the high five. And he had stumbled on this photograph. You know what? Maybe I don't have it. Black and white picture. Oh yeah, here we go. Two baseball players facing each other. Afros, huge smiles, and their hands are in the air right about to connect. Which one of these is Glenn Burke? Burke's the guy in the warm up jacket. I think he's even got his hat on backwards. Glenn Burke was a center fielder for the LA Dodgers in the 70s. Big guy, he says he had 17 inch biceps, so I'll take his word for that. The other guy in the picture is Dusty Baker. He's an outfielder. But you can tell in the picture just from the way that Glen is sort of throwing his whole body forward that he's the one initiating the gesture. I mean, this is a guy who was, you know, the soul of the Dodgers clubhouse. He just had that type of charisma. This is Luther Burke Davis, Glenn's sister. With Glen, it was like he'd always be on the stage. Often said he should have been a comedian. He was always dancing around in the, in the clubhouse. He used to do Richard Pryor stand up routines just from memory. He just genuinely loved people. So much so she says that in the year that picture was taken, the Dodgers made him the sort of public face of the team. He was their ambassador of goodwill. He's the guy they'd send out to all the press events, you know, like meet the youngsters or people. Here's the story about this picture. What was the date? October 5th, poetically enough. 1977. It's the playoffs. Dodgers versus the Phillies game. Four bases are loaded, Dusty steps to the plate and grand slam. Crowd goes nuts. Baker does his victory lap and just disease, you know, round and third. Coming to the plate. Burke comes racing out of the dugout and he's got his arm really high up. And Baker sees him, instinctively raises his arm, and before you know it, Burke and Baker smack hands. Bam. There it was. The sportscasters that would, you know, announcing the game said they had never seen that done in sports before. And from there on, the Dodgers started high fiving and everyone else started high fiving. The high five became a thing. And it all began with that one moment, the platonic high five Right there. Unfortunately, that moment, that was actually both the beginning and also almost the end of Burke's. It's not that he wasn't good, he was actually really good. Even in his rookie season, he was being talked about as the next Willie Mays by the Dodgers organization. But he was gay and he tried to keep that a secret while he was playing. Dusty Baker actually had kept trying to set him up with his wife's cousins. And Burke never liked any of them. And Baker was completely confused because he knew these were really good looking women, apparently. So there were rumors circulating and the rumors reached the front office of the LA Dodgers and one day Burke was called in by management and they offered him $75,000 to get married. What? 75,000 to get married? What is this, like the mob or something? Well, exactly. I mean, they didn't regularly offer their players money to get married. And Burke's response apparently was he said, I suppose you mean to a woman. Shortly after that, the Dodgers traded into the Oakland days for a player who everyone acknowledged was completely inferior. That was confusing for us and I knew it had to be confusing for him. It was shocking to everyone. No one understood why he was traded. And you think it was because he was gay? Yeah, yeah. You know baseball, this all American sport. Yeah. But you know, at least he was still going to be able to play ball, or at least he thought. He ends up in Oakland, doesn't get very much playing time. And when he did get on the field, it wasn't very pleasant. He used to get heckled a lot, you know, from people in the bleachers and even worse, according to a couple of different people. His coach, Billy Martin would often introduce Glenn Burke this way. This is Glenn Burke, the faggot. Really? Yeah. And so Glenn Burke retires. Wow. And he was only like 26 or something, right? Yes, he was young. Within a year of his rookie season, just walks away. God, that's like a boarded career. Exactly. From there he ends up in the Castro district in San Francisco, which is the big gay neighborhood. And things go okay for a while. But then one day when he's crossing the street, three teenage girls in their mother's car come barreling down the road and they hit him and broke his leg in three places. And that kind of ended everything. When that happened, he starts taking painkillers. One thing leads to another, he gets hooked on crack, can't hold a job, he goes broke, ends up living on the street. And in 1994, Burke is diagnosed with HIV or AIDS, I guess AIDS at That point, he ended up coming to live with me. A lot of times he didn't sleep well at night, and we would sit up and talk, put on music, and I dance. And he move his arms around because he was in the bed. He was bedridden. And so you took care of him until he died? Yeah. Glenn Burke died in 1995. But what he's left with out at this point is he's left with the original high five, Right? That's his claim. Yes. Yes. That defined him to some people, at least at the end. And he. And he believed a reporter had asked him, you know, if it was true about the high five. And he said, yeah, Think about the feeling you get when you give someone the high five. I had that feeling before everybody else did. Huh. So what did you do when you got this press release? So I called National High Five Day because I wanted to talk to Lamont Sleet. Even though I was sad, it seemed like, okay, here's another person's prideful accomplishment. Let's get his story. Hello. Hello. Eventually, hey, there we go. He gets this guy on the phone. My name is Greg Harrelledge. Greg is one of the founders. And he and John get to talking, and John asks him the sensible first question. Is the Lamont Sleet story true? He figured it was, but, you know, he thought he should at least ask. He's a reporter. And there was a pause, and he said, no, frankly, we've been waiting for someone to ask. We thought no one would ever ask. It's not true. This is something that we had made up. We wanted to see if the media would. Would run with it. They made the whole thing up. They made the whole thing up. And then they just went to go cast their protagonist. Yeah. So we sat down, we picked Murray State. That's just kind of a great sounding school. It pops up in the NCAA tournament every few years. And they came across this guy, Lamont Sleet. Why him? Well, it was pretty close to random. They then told me they had received an email from Lamont Sleet's wife. Absolutely. His wife emailed us and said, some of the details that you have are flat out wrong. That implies that some of the things you've said are right, though. But Lamont thinks he probably did invent the high five. Wait, wait, wait, wait. What about Glenn? I was kind of, like, kind of a bit blown away, you know? Yeah. You know, here was this guy who is proud of this, and these guys just kind of stripped it away from him. Do you feel a little guilty Did I mean, like, okay, it's a high five. It's kind of a silly thing. On the other hand, this guy's life, the way he died, do you feel like you robbed him? We do feel. We do feel we wish that we had done things slightly differently and putting together this sort of collegiate prank, but we didn't really know of Glenn Burke at that time. Greg says they hadn't heard of the Glen Burke story when they pulled this prank. And now that they know it, they really feel bad. In fact, they're now organizing a charity event they're calling the National High Fiveathon, which will raise money for charity, including one chosen by Glenn Burke's sister, Lutha. I'm very proud. Anytime I see somebody do a high five, it just really makes me happy. And that seemed like a good end to the story. But no, because then John told us that if you really honestly want to get to the bottom of who invented the high five, I mean, we didn't think we wanted to, but now that we're in it, what the hell? Well, you've got to go beyond Glenn Burke's story. I've wanted you to believe that he was the hero at this point. Right. So maybe I should tell you a little bit about Derek Smith. Even though Glenn Burke died believing that the high five was his legacy, at more or less the same moment that he invented it, a guy named Derek Smith, a basketball player for the Louisville Cardinals, was at practice and a guy named Wiley Brown went up to Derek Smith and was gonna give him just an ordinary low five. And Derek Smith looked him in the eye. This is what Wiley Brown told me. Derek Smith looked him in the eye and said, no. Up high. That year's Louisville team, they were known as the Doctors of Dunk. You know, they're a high flying team. They played above the rim. And John says, when Louisville played in the 1980 NCAA Finals, I haven't seen it, but apparently the broadcaster referred actually to the high five handshake. High fives. He felt compelled to explain it to America. Wow. And at the moment that Derek Smith did it, did an asteroid for fall on his head or something? Well, in 1996, I believe in the 90s, he had an undiagnosed heart condition and he just died all of a sudden on a cruise ship. What? Yes. And he said explicitly to Wiley Brown, this is something I'm gonna be remembered for. You know, our kids and our grandkids are gonna talk about this. And in fact, our kids and grandkids do talk about it. And they're probably very proud. But it was Kathy. Then we ran into this one. Will you laugh? Fire away. This is Kathy Gregory. She coached W.E. women's volleyball in the 1960s, years before Glenn Burke and Derek Smith. And she says with her girls, everyone did it all the time. So I do believe that it was volleyball that first started it. And interestingly, she says they would high five more when a player screwed up. Yes. No, no. It isn't just about celebration, because really, when do you need a high five? Of course, it's more when you're down. Yeah. It makes people so happy. So, women's volleyball, there you go. Because then our producer Lynn Levy also discovered that in the movie breathless in 1955. And exactly one hour, 18 minutes into the film, you will see two Frenchmen do a very distinct haute cinq amigo right there. Isn't this all, like, an indication to you that it's. Maybe it's one of those things that probably was there at the dawn of man because it gives pleasure? Yeah. It's just like, from an evolutionary point of view. No, I don't think so. I think it's a. I think this has the feeling of something that was born. See, now we have to decide. We have to confess. Who in this room wants the gay guy to be the inventor? I want the gay guy. Yeah. Me. I'll raise my hand. Sure. Yeah. It's the better story of the two. And something in me says, just go with the narrative winner. You don't even have the narrative winner. What are you doing here? We didn't even pay you. I was bored at my desk. This is Pat Walters, our producer. You guys clearly failed at finding the first high five. And you're saying you have the best? Yeah. There's no such thing as the best. There is. I'm about to tell you what it is. We've already beaten a dead horse here. All right, what is it? What is it? Hello. Hi. Features. This guy named Tim. Timoth. This is him. Yep. Hello. And that's his girlfriend, Katie. Katie Schaefer. And this little mini story begins in 2004. One July evening. Beautiful night out. Tim's out riding his motorcycle. And about 10 minutes into my ride, the deer jumped out in front of me and he slammed on his brakes and his bike and just kind of, like, skidded. And there was a mailbox just snapped my neck. I woke up. I was laying in the hospital room, and I opened up my eyes and I went to lift my arm up because I had an itchy nose. And my arm wouldn't move. He was paralyzed from the neck down. And so for seven years, Tim hasn't been able to hug his daughter or, for that matter, his girlfriend. You know, we started to date after my accident. I've never been able to hold her hand or reach out and touch me. I mean, I feel that I'm almost in a prison. But fast forward a few years. Tim signs up for an experimental procedure at the University of Pittsburgh. Doctors open his skull, connect wires to the part of his brain that would move his arm if his arm worked. And they connect the wires to a robot arm. Even Katie said or whatever, whenever she saw the wires coming out, she's like, that just looks weird, crazy. And there's a video of one of the first times that Tim actually moves this arm. What you see is him sitting in a chair, doctors kind of watching, and his girlfriend Katie is just in front of him, off to the left a little bit. They hooked me up to the arm, and the machine said, up. Up. Tim kind of grimaces. You know, my brain was sending out that specific type of signal that means up. Yeah. And once the computer was able to read that, the arm started to go up in the air. There you go. Not long after this moment, Katie stands up from the chair that she was sitting in beside Tim and walks over in front of the arm. And without even talking, she held out her hand. And she says, baby, I want to hold your hand. And for a moment, there's this, like, stillness in the room. And then the robot arm jerks forward just like a fraction of an inch. Katie's hand holding up there. That was what target Touch her hand. Then the arm jerks up a little bit more. You can see him going from looking at the arm and then a little bit more to looking at me and then looking at the arm a little bit more until they're touching. When I looked at him, like, I just started tearing up. And then he started tearing up. And in a way, this high five, if you can call it that, it was sort of like the first time they ever touched in space and time. I was able to put this piece of machinery that looked very similar to a hand on her hand. Not only did I just touch her, but I pushed into her hand. It was weird, too, because the hand was actually warm. The hand was warm? Yeah. Like, that's the one thing that I just kept saying to people. Like, it was warm. It wasn't cold. I don't know, it just. It still kind of like boggles my mind when I think about it, We should say thank you to Pat Walters, who. Yeah, that was kind of not bad, Pat Walters. Not bad, not bad. But let's remember, we're after the first. We're not after the best. We're looking for the first. And we're gonna take one big leap before we finish the show and try something really odd. Hi. How you doing? We met a guy. I'm Johnny Hughes. I'm a documentary maker from Britain, Also a science journalist. He's an author. He recently wrote a book called on the Origin of Tepees. And it's about tepees. Why? Well, if I'm being honest, it was because it was a sort of pun. On the Origin of Species. Nothing much rhymes with species. But you see, Johnny wanted to write a book about the origins of ideas, the same way that Darwin wrote his book about the Origin of Species. So I went chasing off after teepees, which brought him to the usa. And then he ended up driving across the country, straight across, going west into the. Onto the Great Plains. As he did, the farms gave way to prairie and then to wide open fields. And it was at that point that he noticed something a little different. There was a distinct change in headgear. Yeah. As soon as you get onto the short grass prairie, right after Bismar, there's a very obvious transition from baseball caps to cowboy hats. And that got him to wondering, like, how did the cowboy hat get to the West? Suddenly, there it is, and he's thinking, who designed it or created it or invented it? And he's decided to do some research. And at first, the answers seemed pretty obvious and actually quite simple. So here's his explanation number one. So the answer, one to the question, who invented the cowboy hat? It's straightforward and it goes like this. 1865, the gold rush, Colorado. Everyone's coming in from all over the world to make their fortune, paying for gold. They bring their hats. So there's a sort of mixture of hats from all different parts of the world. From the north, from the south, from the cities. Quite a ridiculous collection of hats, we might say. You've got silk top hats. No, seriously. Skin color in the Gold Rush. In the Gold Rush, that would be your Abe Lincoln hat. Great. In the east coast cities, pretty useless on the top of Pikes Peak. Why? Because it's. Because it gets blown off by the wind. Blown off, it gets wet. So you've got your A. But you also have raccoon skin hats. The sort of Davy Crockett things. Great. In the winter, but come the summer, they got full of fleas and they made you really hot as well. That's not good. You also had straw hats from the plantations from the south which are, I don't know, kind of flimsy. There would have been some sombreros. Not bad, actually. Yeah. Keep the sun off your eyes, keep you cool. But they have enormous brims. The problem is, when it rains, water just collects and stays on there. There you are in Colorado with lots and lots of hats, but none of them were perfect. All of them were slightly unfit. Enter Mr. John B. Stetson. He was the son of a hat maker in the east coast and he came over looking for his fortune. And the story goes, when he landed in Colorado, he looked around and he immediately saw an opportunity. Went back to the east coast, gathered his thoughts and in a moment of unnatural and inspired inspiration if you can be so inspired, he saw the fully formed cowboy hat in his head. Yeah. So he had the model in his head and what was it? So his model was it needed to have a wide brim to keep the sun and the rain off your head but not as wide as a sombrero because that was impractical. But also much wider than, say, a top hat, which was useless. And it needed to be waterproof because he knew that it was wet over in the West. Needed to have a high dome on top to keep you cool up there. He knew what it ought to be. So after a little hammering and stretching and cutting, he had the perfect hat. And he called it the boss of the planes, which everyone in the west would wanted to be. So picture the scene. Boss of the plains arrives. It's gorgeous. You want one? You threw away your horrible raccoon thing and you went for one of those. It very quickly became a status symbol. That is story number one. Pretty straightforward. Yeah. It was a guy. It's a guy. It's J.B. stetson. He came up with the idea. He was a genius. He got it sold. Okay. What's the problem with that story? Well, the problem with that says Johnny. And he realized at the moment he landed out west and he started to look into this. Close your eyes and imagine, you know, your. Your quintessential cowboy hat. You asked me to do this. Yeah. Please, just do it. Okay. Got it in my head. Is it a high domed, broad brim? Very. It's got a dent in the top. Well, see, the picture that we have in our heads is not what Stetson invented. Really? Why? I mean, what did Stetson's look like? Probably the dullest cowboy hat you could possibly imagine. No rolling at the edge of the brim, no dents on the crown. It had a little ribbon around it. A ribbon? Yeah, it's not very bossy. That's dainty. So Johnny did some more research and he now comes up. This is coming up now theory number two to explain who or what designed the hat. Again, 1865, it's Colorado gold rush time. People are coming in from all over. JB Stetson shows up, he makes the hat. But the hat was very expensive. You couldn't afford more than one. So from then on, for the next 10 years, you would wear it like all the time. You'd be picking up the whole time with the crown. So you'd be pushing these dents into it every time you sort of yee hawed. And you'd also be sleeping on your hats, you'd be folding over the brim. So within a few years, the cowboy heroes, these guys are turning up at the railhead towns with these, what we might call in Britain, knackered boss of the plains hats that looked like a completely different hat than the one they bought in the store. Yeah, they'll be battered and you know, think about this. If you're a young cowboy and you're looking for your first cowboy hat, do you want one that looks like the guy who runs the hardware shop who's got the pretty dainty one? Or do you want the one with a dent in it like your dad, the cowboy. And so hat makers picked up on this and they began producing pre dented, crumpled, knackered hats. Stetson responded as well. You can look through the kind of order books of Stetson and you will see the designs change over time. All of which is to say, if you want to tell the story this way, you can say, yeah, Stetson was there, Stetson played his part. But when it comes to a true cowboy hat, the one we think of when we think of hat, Stetson really didn't invent it, the cowboys did. The entire population of cowboys were instrumental in choosing the future evolution of the cowboy hat. It's almost like the market's deciding which in this case is cowboys. And can I just plant my flag and say that's seems like a very sensible theory. It does. But something about this story number two was still nagging Johnny. Oh, there's more. He's gonna go one more round. Do you wanna come with him? I will go. Here we go. The third answer to the question, who invented the cowboy hat Is no one did. Well, someone did. What I Mean is that there were no mindful decisions going on here. Not even a community of people. People mindfully chose where the cowboy hat was gonna go. Mindfully? Yeah. So what do you suppose he means by mindfully? This is where you get a little bit of science. You know that if you were, say, a mouse and you were living in an environment happily, and then all of a sudden, things turn cold. If you have short hair, you're gonna shiver and then maybe die. My. But if another mouse happens to have longer hair, you know they're going to do better. They're going to do better in life. They're going to have more baby mice. So over time, in this community, you're going to get more and more and more mice with longer and longer hair. Makes sense. Now, these mice, they don't choose the length of their hair. They just have the hair they got. It is the weather, it is the local environment. That's what really shapes these mice. And you can think of the hat in the same way. We're looking at the hat shape itself. The hat shape is changing over time without any forethought. Thanks to that gold rush in the 1860s, you got a whole bunch of very different hats showing up on the Great Plains. And all those hats show up on heads. And those heads and hats are going to have horribly cold winters, searingly hot summers. They're gonna be in the wind, they're gonna be out of doors because the main occupation is gonna be moving cattle across the plains. In this very competitive hat situation, the hat that's gonna survive is the hat that keeps you comfortable, keeps you cool, keeps you dry. In other words, the cowboy hat. Therefore, in this third version of our story, it wasn't Mr. Stetson, it wasn't the cowboys. According to Johnny, the environment created the hat. The wind created the hat. The rain, the sun, the snow, the weather created those hats. Absolutely right. This hat was just bound to appear in that place in that time. It would have been invented by someone because the habitat was there, the environment was right. There's something kind of poetic about the idea that the hat was called the boss of the plane. And if your third movie is correct, then it's really the planes or the boss of the hat or something else. Jad, that's brilliant. I like that one. On the other hand, I'm not sure I like it because, like, I'm just thinking about all the edits that we do as storytellers, like, for the pieces in the show. Like, the thing we're always trying to do is Kind of get to moments and we're to trying, trying to always atomize everything, get down to the particular person who made the particular decision that resulted in the particular change. That's what we want as storytellers. So in some sense your scenario three is like the death of story. In some sense it's the anti story. Feels less glamorous, doesn't it? Well, yeah, it runs. Do you know what? When Darwin came up with the theory, well, when he published his theory of evolution by natural selection, that felt like a death in a way because it felt like you were taking away the creator, this amazing being. You were diminishing life to sort of mindless process. So a lot of people criticized him for the same thing. It's not as romantic, it's not as. Well, it is as awesome. It's just not in the same way. Yeah, and come to think of it, we always end up screwing up our stories. But you know, you start to ask questions and then all of a sudden you're sucked into this thing. Suddenly it's gotten complicated and you have to deal with it. You have to deal with the everythingness of everything. Let's just keep it simple. Once upon a time, Jad and Robert came into a show and said that's the end of it. And you know what? It was. Now see, it's always more complicated than that, isn't it? It's true. I mean, it's never really the end when you think about it. What is an end? You get the funding show, you get the credits, all these things. Hi, radiolab, this is beatrice hahn. Radiolab is produced by jet abumrad. This is quammen. Our staff includes ellen horn, thorin wheeler, pat walters, tim howard, brenna farrell, len levy and sean cole, with help from jonathan mitchell, rachel james and matt kilty. Special thanks to mike feller, chris condean, sydney smith, ben feldman, marva felchen and katie slocum. That's my story and I'm sticking to to it. Okay, you all. Bye bye. Sa.

Patient Zero

Summary

Radiolab: "Patient Zero" (Nov 14, 2011)

Host: Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich Producer: WNYC Studios Theme: Tracing origins—of diseases, ideas, and cultural phenomena—through stories of the elusive "Patient Zero."

Episode Overview

Segment 1: Typhoid Mary—The Reluctant Patient Zero

Key Points & Story Structure

Segment 2: AIDS and the Myth of Patient Zero

Key Points & Story Structure

Segment 3: The Spread of the High Five—Tracing a Cultural Meme

Key Points & Story Structure

Segment 4: Who Invented the Cowboy Hat?—The Illusion of a Sole Inventor

Key Points & Story Structure

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

Timestamps for Major Segments

Overall Tone and Style

Conclusion

Transcript

Summary

Radiolab: "Patient Zero" (Nov 14, 2011)

Host: Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich Producer: WNYC Studios Theme: Tracing origins—of diseases, ideas, and cultural phenomena—through stories of the elusive "Patient Zero."

Episode Overview

Segment 1: Typhoid Mary—The Reluctant Patient Zero

Key Points & Story Structure

Segment 2: AIDS and the Myth of Patient Zero

Key Points & Story Structure

Segment 3: The Spread of the High Five—Tracing a Cultural Meme

Key Points & Story Structure

Segment 4: Who Invented the Cowboy Hat?—The Illusion of a Sole Inventor

Key Points & Story Structure

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

Timestamps for Major Segments

Overall Tone and Style

Conclusion

Host: Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich
Producer: WNYC Studios
Theme: Tracing origins—of diseases, ideas, and cultural phenomena—through stories of the elusive "Patient Zero."

Host: Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich
Producer: WNYC Studios
Theme: Tracing origins—of diseases, ideas, and cultural phenomena—through stories of the elusive "Patient Zero."