Patient Zero - Updated

Summary

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Radiolab – "Patient Zero (Updated)"

Podcast: Radiolab (WNYC Studios)
Hosts: Jad Abumrad, Robert Krulwich
Date: November 13, 2014
Episode Theme:
Exploring the origins—the "patient zero"—of epidemics (disease and otherwise): focusing on the archetype of the first case, tracing the path from a single individual (or idea) to vast movements, epidemics, or social phenomena. This episode journeys from Typhoid Mary to the origins of HIV/AIDS, contemporary Ebola outbreaks, and even the cultural “patient zero” of the high five.

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I. Introduction: The Fascination with Beginnings

• Radiolab dives into the seductive idea of patient zero: that finding the source of something—be it an epidemic or a trend—will yield insight, containment, or understanding.
• “Patient Zero, the first cause.” – David Quammen (05:47)
• The episode mixes investigative journalism, science, and history, threading stories from the physically quarantined to cultural contagion.

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II. The Story of Typhoid Mary (Mary Mallon) (02:33–16:22)

A. Outbreak in Oyster Bay (~1906)

• A wealthy family falls ill with typhoid; a sanitary engineer, George Soper, is summoned.
• Outbreaks are linked over several years and locations—all employ the same cook: Mary Mallon.

B. Discovery of the First "Healthy Carrier"

• Key Insight: Typhoid Mary was the first documented healthy carrier in North America—a person carrying and spreading disease without symptoms.
• “She was actually the first documented case in North America of a healthy carrier…” – Robert Krulwich (07:34)
• Soper confronts Mary, asking for samples. She refuses, chases him away with a serving fork.

C. Capture and Quarantine

• The health department sends Dr. S. Josephine Baker (and eventually police). Mary hides, is found, dragged out kicking and screaming, and tested.
• Confirmed as a typhoid carrier, she’s isolated on North Brother Island—a quasi-prison, with a view of the city she can’t enter.
• “Any place that you’re not free to leave becomes like a prison.” – Carl Zimmer (10:59)
• Her experience includes fluctuating (intermittent) test results. She sues the city and loses.

D. Legal and Ethical Dilemma

• Questions arise about civil liberties vs. public health. Hundreds of other healthy carriers are identified; only Mary is subjected to lifelong isolation.
• “I think it was more about making people feel safe than actually making them safe.” – Robert Krulwich (15:36)

E. Aftermath and Legacy

• Mary is released on the promise never to cook again, but eventually resumes cooking—causing new outbreaks. She is re-institutionalized and spends her life in isolation.

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III. Patient Zero and the HIV/AIDS Pandemic (20:09–47:25)

A. The Origin Myth: Gaétan Dugas ("Patient Zero")

• Early 1980s: CDC’s cluster study maps sexual contacts between AIDS cases.
• One member, labeled “Patient O” (for “Out of California” in the CDC study), is misinterpreted as “Patient Zero.” This myth is propagated in media and Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On.
• Dugas is wrongly villainized as the origin, “the central victim and victimizer.” (22:40)

B. Disproving the Myth: Scientific Evidence & Viral Genetics

• Advances in genetic analysis—known as the “molecular clock”—reveal HIV entered the U.S. around 1966, years before Dugas was sexually active.
• “So you could measure how different they are and...know that it would take a certain amount of time for them to get that different.” – Jad Abumrad (27:19)
• The real early cases are traced to earlier decades, including individuals in the 1950s and 60s.
• HIV’s origins are traced from the US to Haiti, then to Kinshasa (DR Congo), and ultimately southeastern Cameroon.

C. Tracing to the Real Patient Zero: The “Cut Hunter”

• 1908 (approximate): Scientists hypothesize that a hunter in southeastern Cameroon, while butchering a chimpanzee, contracts Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV)—the ancestor of HIV—from chimp blood.
• Chimpanzees in a small region of Cameroon are pinpointed as the primary source: “An area probably only of 100 square miles” – David Rosner (33:06)
• Large-scale colonial change (railways, cities) facilitates the virus’ jump from the forest to global urban centers.

D. Even Deeper Origins: Chimp Zero & Viral Recombination

• The virus in chimps itself is a hybrid—arising from two monkey viruses within the same chimp, recombined in a “blue moon after a blue moon after a blue moon” event (43:14).
• Viral “spillover” from animal to human is a constant process, not a one-off.

E. On Spillovers and Ongoing Threats

• Nathan Wolfe discusses “viral chatter”—new retroviruses constantly leap from animals to humans.
• “The real question is, how do we stop patient zeros?” – Jad Abumrad (46:10)
• Tools such as digital surveillance and rapid-response epidemiology may mitigate the next pandemic.

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IV. Update: Ebola Spillover (2014) (47:54–57:06)

A. Contextualizing the 2014 Ebola Outbreak

• David Quammen (author of Spillover) discusses the similarities with HIV’s emergence.
• Ebola's known outbreaks date back to 1976; the 2014 outbreak is unprecedented in size due to its emergence in denser populations and proximity to international travel.
• “Ebola burns too hot… it just destroys the body.” – Soren Wheeler (50:33)

B. The Challenge of Containment and Mutation

• Direct contact is required for transmission, but increased case counts mean more opportunities for mutation.
• “As the case count gets higher, it has more opportunities to mutate, and therefore more opportunities to adapt.” – David Rosner (56:21)
• Emphasis on stopping the epidemic at its source before mutation creates broader threat.

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V. Cultural Contagion: The High Five Origin Story (59:40–73:47)

A. The Search for the High Five’s Patient Zero

• A modern example of “patient zero” outside disease: the origin of the high five.
• Reporter John Moallam debunks the viral but apocryphal story that credits basketball player Lamont Sleets.

B. The Real Origin: Glenn Burke and Dusty Baker

• Evidence points to Glenn Burke (LA Dodgers) and Dusty Baker’s celebratory high five on October 5, 1977.
• “He said, ‘Think about the feeling you get when you give someone the high five. I had that feeling before everybody else did.’” – Glenn Burke (68:32)
• Burke, a charismatic but marginalized gay player, is effectively erased by bigotry—his career ends early, and he dies young of AIDS-related complications.

C. The Complications of Tracing Origins

• Multiple competing origin stories: women’s volleyball, NCAA basketball, even a French film from 1955.
• “Every time we look for the original of anything… we find more than one.” – David Quammen (73:31)
• Sometimes, we choose narrative over strict truth: “Let’s just go with the best high five. Forget the first. The best.” – Jad Abumrad (73:47)

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VI. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Typhoid Mary’s Defiance:
  “How dare you. I’m not a sick person.” – David Rosner as Mary Mallon (07:11)

• On the Patient Zero Myth:
  “He was not Patient Zero. Not even close.” – Jad Abumrad (24:55)

• Viral Recombination in Chimps:
  “These two viruses will end up inside the same cell in the same chimp at the same time, literally.” – Nathan Wolfe (41:51)

• The Human Cost of Stigma:
  “This is Glenn Burke, the faggot.” – Billy Martin, as recounted by Carl Zimmer (66:49)

• On Origins & Narratives:
  “Every time we look for the original of anything… we find more than one.” – David Quammen (73:31) “Let’s just go with the best high five. Forget the first. The best.” – Jad Abumrad (73:47)

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VII. Key Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment / Topic | |--------------|----------------------------------------------| | 02:33–16:22 | Typhoid Mary: carrier, quarantine, and legacy| | 20:09–47:25 | HIV/AIDS: Dugas myth, molecular tracing | | 47:54–57:06 | Ebola update: spillover, mutation risks | | 59:40–73:47 | High five: searching for cultural patient zero|

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VIII. Episode Tone & Style

• Candid, investigative, and often reflective—mixing humor (“back to the peaches”), empathy, and awe.
• Frequently voiced in playful, spontaneous conversation, but always grounded in deep research and expert insight.

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IX. Final Takeaways

• Tracing origins is as much about understanding ourselves—our fears, our desire for certainty—as it is about science.
• The quest for “patient zero” often yields ambiguity—whether in pandemics or pop culture.
• Societal responses to blame and stigma (from Typhoid Mary to HIV to Glenn Burke) have profound and lasting consequences.
• Vigilance, humility, and empathy remain vital, whether facing disease or chasing the origins of an idea.

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Recommended Further Reading:

• Spillover by David Quammen
• A Planet of Viruses by Carl Zimmer
• The Viral Storm by Nathan Wolfe

Transcript

[Jad Abumrad]

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[Carl Zimmer]

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[Jad Abumrad]

One day only Thanksgiving Day deals are coming to Lowes.com plus members get early access to online Black Friday doorbuster deals on gifting favorites like the still trending cobalt mini toolbox for just $14.98. Don't miss up to 50% off for one day only. At Lowe's.com we help you save valid 1127 only on Lowe's.com member only doorbusters and midnight Eastern loyalty programs subject to terms and conditions. See lowe's.com terms for details. Subject to check while supplies last. Hey, today we are repoadcasting a show with something extra, an update. This show, which we did a couple years back, is called Patient Zero, which sort of took a look at the origins of things, not surprisingly, disease, but also other things too. And you know, you hear all that. But I wanted to step in and say that in the middle of the show, we're going to slip from looking back at a disease that started a way long time ago to examining a disease that you know as I speak. This is happening right now. Our senior editor, Soren Wheeler will bring you that. In the meantime, here's the show. Wait, you're listening.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

All right.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

All right.

[Soren Wheeler]

You're listening to Radiolab Radio Lab from wny.

[Jad Abumrad]

See?

[John Moallam]

Yep.

[Carl Zimmer]

And npr. So have we said where we are on tape yet?

[Jad Abumrad]

Starting us off today are our producers, Lynn Levy and Sean Cole.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[David Quammen]

So this is a story that begins when.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, it actually starts in 1906. And it doesn't start on the island. It starts in Oyster Bay.

[David Quammen]

Ooh, nice neighbor.

[Robert Krulwich]

Very nice. There was this one rich family on.

[Carl Zimmer]

Vacation there, and their daughter gets sick. She gets sick first.

[Robert Krulwich]

This is Judy Levitt.

[Carl Zimmer]

I am a professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin, and she wrote a.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Carl Zimmer]

About six out of 11 in the family get sick.

[Robert Krulwich]

And with this disease, the fever is just the first part of it.

[Carl Zimmer]

Both diarrhea or constipation are reported. So it can go either way, I guess.

[Jad Abumrad]

What is it?

[Robert Krulwich]

Typhoid.

[Carl Zimmer]

And they couldn't figure out what had caused the disease, so they called in this sanitary engineer named George Soper with.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[David Quammen]

The well or in the pipes.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah. So he looks into all of that.

[Carl Zimmer]

Did a whole test on the house and the water and everything. Couldn't find anything.

[Robert Krulwich]

And so he starts talking to the.

[Carl Zimmer]

Family and he started quizzing them all. And they remember. Hispanic Summer.

[Robert Krulwich]

He builds up this whole picture of. Of several outbreaks going back years.

[Jad Abumrad]

1900, Mamaroneck.

[Robert Krulwich]

A new York family had a house for the summer. 1902. Dark Harbor, Maine.

[Carl Zimmer]

1904.

[Jad Abumrad]

Seven cases. Sands Point, New York. Autumn 1906.

[Robert Krulwich]

Winter 1907.

[Jad Abumrad]

New York City.

[Robert Krulwich]

All these cases. And they all had one thing in common.

[David Quammen]

What?

[Robert Krulwich]

Each of these families had employed the same cook.

[David Quammen]

Really?

[Robert Krulwich]

Which is funny, because when you cook food, you kill the bacteria in the food.

[David Quammen]

Oh, so it couldn't be the cook.

[Robert Krulwich]

Then, but this cook.

[Carl Zimmer]

Her most famous dish was peach melba, which is ice cream. And fresh peaches.

[Robert Krulwich]

Fresh peaches. Raw fruit.

[Carl Zimmer]

That was a perfect medium.

[Robert Krulwich]

And the cook's name was Mary Mallon.

[David Quammen]

Mary Mallow.

[Jad Abumrad]

Mary Mallow. Wait a second. Chunkle.

[David Rosner]

Typhoid.

[Jad Abumrad]

Typhoid Mary is what we're talking about.

[David Quammen]

Oh, so we know this story.

[Robert Krulwich]

No, you don't know this story.

[David Quammen]

What do you mean?

[Robert Krulwich]

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 who we still are in a lot of ways.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's all in the details, all of.

[Robert Krulwich]

The juice and problem.

[Jad Abumrad]

Like in, like the peach juice? Yeah, just like the peach juice we're still dealing with.

[David Quammen]

Wait, I'm Robert Krylwich. Go ahead, go ahead, do your part.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hey, Jad Abumrad.

[David Quammen]

This is Radiolab, and in this hour.

[Jad Abumrad]

A series of stories that all hew to that delicious story archetype we call.

[David Quammen]

Patient Zero, the first cause.

[Jad Abumrad]

We'll try to trace ideas and trends and massive social traumas like pandemics back.

[David Quammen]

To that one 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

I like the but for the but for but.

[David Quammen]

Meanwhile, back to the peaches.

[Robert Krulwich]

So George Soper's like, I've gotta find this woman. And when he finds her, she's in.

[Carl Zimmer]

New York City working for another family.

[Jad Abumrad]

The laundress had recently been taken to the Presbyterian Hospital with typhoid fever.

[Robert Krulwich]

And 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, 5 foot 6, blonde hair, blue eyes, had.

[Jad Abumrad]

A good figure and might have been called athletic had she not been a little too heavy.

[Robert Krulwich]

Irish immigrant, 36 years old, not particularly clean.

[Carl Zimmer]

And he says, mary Mallon, I think you are causing disease in people, and I want samples of your urine, feces and blood.

[Robert Krulwich]

Good afternoon.

[Jad Abumrad]

And she says, what are you accusing me of being sick?

[Robert Krulwich]

Playing the role of Mary is Columbia Public health professor David Rosner.

[Jad Abumrad]

How dare you. I'm not a sick person. What does she do?

[David Rosner]

She chases him out of the building.

[Carl Zimmer]

With a fork in her hand.

[Robert Krulwich]

A serving fork?

[Jad Abumrad]

A serving fork, yeah, I felt rather lucky to escape. But did she have typhoid? I mean, did she outwardly have typhoid?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, that's the thing.

[David Rosner]

She never had any symptoms. She felt perfectly healthy.

[Robert Krulwich]

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 feels the symptoms. The symptoms. So in one weird way, Sopers 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?

[David Rosner]

I feel fine. I'm living a moral life.

[Jad Abumrad]

I'm not a vagrant.

[David Rosner]

I'm employed. I'm a good, solid citizen.

[Jad Abumrad]

You know, you would be crazed too, wouldn't you? Even today. You'd probably grab your knife.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, you'd grab your knife.

[David Quammen]

Well, does he have any evidence, though, that she is spreading the disease?

[Carl Zimmer]

Not yet.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's why he needs her poop. So he goes back, finds her at a rooming house, she kicks him out, swears at him.

[Carl Zimmer]

She apparently had quite a temper.

[Robert Krulwich]

And then the health department sends in.

[Carl Zimmer]

This female doctor by the name of S. Josephine Baker. Maybe she could ask for blood feces in urine a little more gently.

[Robert Krulwich]

I just don't know how you ask for that gently. But she tries to. And when it doesn't work, she comes back a little bit later with cops.

[Carl Zimmer]

And they come to the house and Mary Mallon, when she realizes what's happening, disappears.

[Robert Krulwich]

What do you mean, disappears?

[Carl Zimmer]

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.

[David Rosner]

Coming outside of a door.

[Carl Zimmer]

So a little piece of calico kind of stuck in a doorway.

[David Rosner]

They open the door and there she is.

[Carl Zimmer]

And so they drag her out. And she comes out kicking and screaming.

[Jad Abumrad]

And screaming and kicking.

[Carl Zimmer]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

And Baker later said something like it.

[Carl Zimmer]

Was like being in a cage with an angry lion.

[Robert Krulwich]

So they take her down to the.

[Carl Zimmer]

Hospital, they tested her feces in urine, and they found that, yes, she was in fact, a carrier of live typhoid bacilli.

[David Rosner]

It's a weird island.

[Carl Zimmer]

I spent a while on him. So they isolate her and they ultimately move her.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay, good.

[Carl Zimmer]

From Manhattan to North Brother Island. Let's have a bit of a haunted vibe.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah.

[David Rosner]

And there she is.

[Jad Abumrad]

Thanks, man.

[Robert Krulwich]

We went there to. Just to try to get our heads around what she must have thought.

[Jad Abumrad]

What do you think? What was the island like?

[Robert Krulwich]

Man, everything is completely overgrown. It was really creepy.

[David Quammen]

Creepy because it was in such dissolution.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

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. Still standing. But it's not standing anymore.

[Carl Zimmer]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

So we're marching around, and then Lynn 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.

[Carl Zimmer]

She could have seen where she used to live.

[Robert Krulwich]

You can see the traffic on the streets. This was like the most horrible seaside vacation.

[Carl Zimmer]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wait, what?

[Beatrice Hahn]

So that's.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's another thing that they were figuring out at the time. So she was probably an intermittent carrier.

[Jad Abumrad]

What does that mean?

[Robert Krulwich]

The disease is always in her, but sometimes she excretes it and sometimes she doesn't.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, that must have been confusing for her.

[Carl Zimmer]

When I first came here, I was.

[Jad Abumrad]

So nervous and almost prostrated with grief and trouble.

[Carl Zimmer]

My eyes began to twitch.

[Robert Krulwich]

This is from a letter that Mary wrote from the island.

[Carl Zimmer]

I have, in fact, been a peep show for everybody.

[Robert Krulwich]

But if you keep reading it, and in fact, 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.

[Carl Zimmer]

Really, the tuberculosis men would say, there she is, the kidnapped woman.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

And how long was she on this island?

[Robert Krulwich]

For three years.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow.

[Robert Krulwich]

And then what changed was a new health commissioner took over.

[Carl Zimmer]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

If she didn't cook, he lets her go. He lets her go back to Manhattan, but he makes her promise.

[Carl Zimmer]

She did promise.

[Robert Krulwich]

She signed an affidavit saying she'll never cook again. And she was released.

[Jad Abumrad]

They gave.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

And then.

[Robert Krulwich]

At a certain point, they kind of stopped keeping track of her.

[Jad Abumrad]

What happened?

[David Quammen]

So how many years will go by? 5.

[Robert Krulwich]

5.

[Jad Abumrad]

What happens next?

[Robert Krulwich]

There's an outbreak of typhoid.

[Carl Zimmer]

Where?

[David Quammen]

Where?

[Robert Krulwich]

At a maternity hospital. Oh, you're 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

She was known willfully and deliberately to have taken desperate chances with human life. She had abused her privilege. She had broken her parole.

[Carl Zimmer]

So then they put her back on North Brother island, back in her bungalow, and there she sits.

[Jad Abumrad]

She was a dangerous character and must be treated accordingly.

[David Quammen]

Absolutely. She broke her promise.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, I totally agree.

[David Quammen]

She made a deal and she didn't keep the deal.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[David Quammen]

What, really?

[Robert Krulwich]

Mostly men, by the way.

[Jad Abumrad]

And they were cooking.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Why? Why only her?

[Robert Krulwich]

I think it was more about making people feel safe than actually making them safe.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, look out for this stair.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. These must be the wards.

[Robert Krulwich]

Definitely, yeah.

[Carl Zimmer]

So when was she here?

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Carl Zimmer]

Did she die in here?

[Soren Wheeler]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Carl Zimmer]

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. More information about [e-mail]. radiolab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR. Okay, that's it. Thanks. Bye. Radiolab is supported by Bilt. Nobody wants to pay rent, but if you have to, Bilt works to make it more worthwhile. By paying rent through Bilt, you can earn flexible points that can be redeemed toward hundreds of hotels and airlines, a future rent payment, your next Lyft ride, and more. But it doesn't stop there. You can dine out at your favorite local restaurants and earn additional points, get VIP 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 joinbuilt.com Radiolab that's J-O-I N B I L T.com Radiolab.

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Radiolab is supported by Rippling Finance. Teams often spend weeks chasing receipts, reconciling spreadsheets and fixing errors across disconnected spend tools. This can be frustrating. And that's not software as a service, that's sad software as a disservice. If you've been thinking about replacing stitched together tech stacks with one platform for all departments, Rippling can help. Rippling is a unified platform for global hr, payroll, IT and finance, helping people replace their mess of cobbled together tools with one system designed to help give leaders clarity, speed and control. By uniting employees, teams and departments in one system, Rippling works to remove the bottlenecks, busywork and silos in business software. With Rippling, you can choose to run hr, IT and finance operations as one, or pick and choose the products that best fill the gaps. Right now, you can get 6 months free when you go to rippling.com Radiolab learn more at R I P P L-I-N-G.com Radiolab terms and conditions apply. Radiolab is supported by Planet Visionaries, the podcast created in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Stay tuned for a trailer and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

[Carl Zimmer]

I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honl Foundation. I wanted to let you know about a brand new season of the Planet Visionaries podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. This is the podcast exploring bold ideas and big solutions from the people leading the way in conservation. Join me in conversation with the likes of climate champion Mark Ruffalo, biologist and photographer Christina Mittermeier, and one of the most successful conservationists of our time, Chris Tompkins. Join us on Planet Visionaries wherever you get your podcasts.

[David Rosner]

Limu Keymoo and Doug Here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat.

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Helping people customize their car Insurance and.

[Jad Abumrad]

Save hundreds with Liberty Mutual.

[David Quammen]

Fascinating.

[Carl Zimmer]

It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug Limu.

[Jad Abumrad]

Is that guy with the binoculars watching us?

[Carl Zimmer]

Cut the camera.

[Rippling Finance Announcer]

They see us.

[John Moallam]

Only pay for what you [e-mail] Liberty, Liberty, Liberty.

[Jad Abumrad]

Liberty Savings Fairy underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company affiliates excludes Massachusetts. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

[David Quammen]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab.

[David Quammen]

And today it's Patient Zero. That's our subject.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. And this next story, it's so huge. It's the ultimate Patient Zero story, really.

[David Quammen]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, a lot of people are going to help us tell the story, but starting us off is science writer Radiolab regular Carl zimmer.

[Beatrice Hahn]

So, in 1981, doctors for the first.

[Carl Zimmer]

Time describe a mysterious, newly discovered disease.

[Jad Abumrad]

A syndrome which affects mostly homosexual men.

[Beatrice Hahn]

The young men in Los Angeles were dying.

[Carl Zimmer]

The number of cases has been growing faster and faster. So far, more than 80Americans have died. 258 people have died.

[Rippling Finance Announcer]

625 people have died.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[David Rosner]

Right after news of this syndrome started to break.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's science writer David Quammen, who, along with Carl will be one of our guides.

[Beatrice Hahn]

Epidemiologists were trying to figure out where.

[Soren Wheeler]

Where did it come from?

[Beatrice Hahn]

And they were thinking like, well, maybe it's a sexually transmitted disease.

[Jad Abumrad]

So the CDC launches a study of.

[David Rosner]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Is that just a series of interviews with people?

[Beatrice Hahn]

Yeah. Please name all the people that you. That you slept with.

[Jad Abumrad]

The CDC eventually releases the results of this survey in the form of a.

[David Rosner]

Diagram, like a network drawing, with circles representing patients and then lines representing sexual contact.

[Jad Abumrad]

And each patient, each little circle was numbered.

[David Rosner]

New York, 7, Los Angeles, 12.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[David Rosner]

Direction, seven or eight, emanating from him.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 zero.

[David Rosner]

Number zero.

[Jad Abumrad]

As far as we know, that was the first time that you ever get the term Patient Zero.

[Carl Zimmer]

Patient Zero was a man, the central victim and victimizer.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Carl Zimmer]

He was a French Canadian, a very handsome airline steward named Gaetan Dugas.

[David Rosner]

Gaetan Dugas, Patient Zero.

[Jad Abumrad]

A few minutes later in the report, Schultz comes on to describe a guy.

[Carl Zimmer]

Who has got unlimited sexual stamina.

[Jad Abumrad]

This sexual athlete who would fly from one hot spot to the next because of his job, having sex with literally thousands of men.

[David Rosner]

And 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 Shilts, he would say, I've got gay cancer.

[Carl Zimmer]

Now you're gonna get it too. You talk to him? I talked to him, yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Dr. Selma Dritz, she was part of that CDC study.

[Carl Zimmer]

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.

[David Rosner]

Really a chilling moment.

[Jad Abumrad]

And pretty much from that moment on.

[Beatrice Hahn]

Gaetan Dugas, he just took on this aura as single handedly causing an epidemic in the United States.

[Jad Abumrad]

Now, I don't know about you, but I first bumped into this story in the movie version of in the Band.

[Carl Zimmer]

Played on My Friend. We're talking about thousands of men whose faces I cannot even remember. And you want names?

[Jad Abumrad]

That's an actor playing Gate Newcombe 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.

[Beatrice Hahn]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

He was not Patient Zero.

[David Rosner]

No, he was not the beginning point.

[Beatrice Hahn]

He wasn't.

[Jad Abumrad]

Not even close. 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, you need a beginning. You need some way of explaining how this disaster happened and how it might happen again.

[David Quammen]

And how exactly do we know that Gaten Dugas wasn't Patient Zero?

[Beatrice Hahn]

Well, there are a couple reasons. We know it. So one thing that people started to.

[Jad Abumrad]

Do, scientists, was to.

[Beatrice Hahn]

They started going back and looking at.

[David Rosner]

People who had died, people who died mysteriously.

[Jad Abumrad]

Aids, like things in the past might.

[David Rosner]

Some of them have been early cases.

[Beatrice Hahn]

And they started finding a lot.

[Carl Zimmer]

Robert Rayford had AIDS 12 years before it was recognized in this country in 19. In 1959, a sailor in Britain died of pneumocystis pneumonia.

[Jad Abumrad]

And so for a while, you had all these new patient zeroes.

[Carl Zimmer]

In 1961, a nurse in Chicago died of kapposi sarcoma.

[Beatrice Hahn]

But the real definitive blow to this old patient Zero nonsense came by actually looking at the virus itself.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[David Rosner]

When it replicates within a single patient, it copies itself imprecisely. It mutates quickly. It changes a lot.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[David Rosner]

To look at the amount of diversity among HIV patients in the US and.

[Beatrice Hahn]

Other parts of the world.

[David Quammen]

And the more diversity, the longer the virus has been around.

[David Rosner]

Right, right.

[Beatrice Hahn]

And they could use that kind of like a clock. If you have a virus here and.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Beatrice Hahn]

The picture they get is that AIDS.

[Jad Abumrad]

Entered the United States around 1966, at.

[David Rosner]

A time when Gaetan Degas was still a virginal adolescent.

[Jad Abumrad]

From there, scientists were able to trace the virus back to Haiti and from Haiti back to Africa.

[Beatrice Hahn]

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.

[David Rosner]

Yep. And that takes us back to ZR59 and DRC60. Can we talk about them?

[Jad Abumrad]

Sure. What?

[David Rosner]

These are the two earliest known HIV positive human specimens.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[David Rosner]

This had been taken from a Bantu man in 1959.

[David Quammen]

1959, yeah.

[David Rosner]

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.

[Carl Zimmer]

One glimpse into the kind of deep history of hiv.

[Jad Abumrad]

But then along comes that guy, Michael Worbey. 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

It's kind of like Han Solo in the Star wars movie when he's kind.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Soren Wheeler]

And with the two of them, then.

[Carl Zimmer]

You can kind of go back in.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[David Rosner]

Common ancestor of those two specimens goes back to. To about 1908.

[Jad Abumrad]

1908. That is when it started in human beings.

[David Quammen]

What, 1908? Is that what he said?

[David Rosner]

Roughly, give or take a margin of error, early 1900s.

[John Moallam]

Wow.

[Jad Abumrad]

So around 1908, give or take, something happened.

[David Rosner]

That's right. That moment is the spillover.

[David Quammen]

Spillover.

[David Rosner]

Spillover is the term the scientists use to describe the moment when a virus in one species passes into another species.

[Beatrice Hahn]

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.

[David Rosner]

So the search was on the inability.

[Robert Krulwich]

To find a similar disease and research animals.

[Jad Abumrad]

Turns out, right about the time that the HIV virus, 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.

[David Rosner]

Simian Immunodeficiency Virus. Yes.

[Carl Zimmer]

And that's where the origin quest started.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Beatrice Hahn.

[Carl Zimmer]

I'm a professor of medicine and microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania.

[Jad Abumrad]

And so after they found it in macaques, what happened?

[Carl Zimmer]

It took a couple of years, but.

[Jad Abumrad]

Eventually, she says, they found SIV and.

[Carl Zimmer]

Still another primate species, the sooty mangabe.

[Jad Abumrad]

And then in a few more, the.

[Carl Zimmer]

African green monkeys, mandrills.

[Jad Abumrad]

Pretty soon it was all over the place.

[Carl Zimmer]

There are Now, I think, 40 different species of African monkeys known to have their own version of siv.

[Jad Abumrad]

So then the question was, which one of these monkeys or primates passed it to us?

[Carl Zimmer]

Then unexpectedly, a researcher named Martine, Martine.

[David Rosner]

Peters at this center in Gabon decided.

[Carl Zimmer]

To test her chimps, two orphan chimpanzees.

[David Rosner]

And bingo, she found a very, very.

[Carl Zimmer]

Close match, a virus that was the closest relative of HIV 1. So everybody said, well, you know, it was a chimp.

[David Quammen]

It was a chimp.

[David Rosner]

Okay, yeah, it came from a chimp.

[Carl Zimmer]

Yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

But then the question was, well, which chimps? Or rather, where?

[David Rosner]

Where? Exactly. So Beatrice Hahn and her colleagues started looking at chimps that came from different parts of western Central Africa.

[Jad Abumrad]

Now, getting blood samples from chimps in the wild is pretty much.

[Carl Zimmer]

It just isn't feasible, you know, because.

[Jad Abumrad]

In the wild, they hide the moment they see us.

[Carl Zimmer]

So you get stuck with fecal samples.

[Beatrice Hahn]

Poop.

[Carl Zimmer]

Oh, yes, poop.

[Beatrice Hahn]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Poop, bring it back to the lab. And Beatrice would analyze all the viruses.

[Carl Zimmer]

Over 90 different wild communities from every part of Central Africa, over 7,000 different fecal samples.

[Jad Abumrad]

And slowly they were able to piece.

[Carl Zimmer]

Together which communities were infected and which ones had the closest to HIV 1. That's when it hit us for the first time.

[Jad Abumrad]

What exactly hit you?

[Carl Zimmer]

The geographic origin of these chimps, in.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[David Rosner]

This little corner of southeastern Cameroon between.

[Carl Zimmer]

The Boomba river, the Ngoka river and the Sangha river.

[Jad Abumrad]

These chimps were essentially penned in between these three rivers.

[David Rosner]

It's an area probably only of 100 square miles, not much more than that.

[David Quammen]

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.

[David Rosner]

Yeah.

[Carl Zimmer]

There is no other virus that is any closer, so that's that.

[Jad Abumrad]

So can you reconstruct the spillover and the WHO that it spilled over into? As you know, as best as we.

[David Rosner]

Understand it, you can hypothesize, and the best hypothesis is the cut hunter hypothesis.

[Jad Abumrad]

The cut hunter, The C U T.

[David Rosner]

Hunter, that's right, A hunter who gets cut.

[Jad Abumrad]

And what can we say about this guy? I mean, is he. What do we know about him?

[David Rosner]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[David Rosner]

That's another of the big questions. People, certainly in Central Africa have been eating monkeys for thousands of years.

[Jad Abumrad]

I mean, David says there's really no way to know, but this could have just been the right virus, Maybe this.

[David Rosner]

Particular virus evolved in a way that made it more transmissible in humans, or.

[Jad Abumrad]

Maybe it just got Lucky to come along at precisely the right time.

[Beatrice Hahn]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

It was huge.

[David Rosner]

The cities were attracting people from the boonies in those days.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[David Rosner]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

And he traced the path of the virus.

[David Rosner]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 fellow that I call the Voyager, who then got in the boat as David did, and carried it down the river.

[David Rosner]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

River, the big river, and into the city.

[David Rosner]

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.

[David Quammen]

So that's how it happened.

[Jad Abumrad]

We could take it back even farther, actually.

[David Quammen]

What do you mean?

[Jad Abumrad]

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?

[David Quammen]

Right.

[Jad Abumrad]

So you could ask who was chimp zero? What do we know about chimp zero?

[David Rosner]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

It actually comes from two monkey viruses. Two different monkeys from two completely different species.

[David Quammen]

What, would they have encountered each other somewhere, had a fight?

[David Rosner]

They probably encountered each other in the stomach of a chimp.

[David Quammen]

Meaning what?

[J]

Well, from the perspective of chimpanzee monkeys, they look tasty.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Nathan Wolfe, professor in human.

[J]

Biology at Stanford University.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[J]

The Kibale National Forest in southwestern Uganda.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[J]

And one individual managed to grab two juveniles. And then the three individuals all met up and.

[Jad Abumrad]

Began to eat the monkey while it was still alive.

[J]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

It is quite disturbing to watch, he.

[J]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

The chimps are literally covered in blood. They have blood on their face and 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.

[J]

We don't know exactly the time, say some hundreds of thousands of years ago.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 mangabi.

[J]

This is a larger primate and these.

[Jad Abumrad]

Are tree dwelling little guys. Tree dwelling, little bit of red fur on their heads.

[David Quammen]

Yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 another monkey. And this monkey was called a spotnose guenon.

[John Moallam]

Yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's got a spot on its nose, I assume. There you go, very small.

[J]

One of the tiniest monkeys of all of the old world monkeys.

[Jad Abumrad]

And Chip zero eats that monkey and gets a spot nosed guenon version of the AIDS virus or the SIV virus inside it.

[J]

So you've got the red cap mangabe and you've got the spot nosed guenons. You've got a guenon and a mangaby.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[J]

Nowhere because when one of these viruses makes the jump, they go from a.

[Jad Abumrad]

Place they've adapted to and that they know to a completely foreign landscape.

[J]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Environment is different and the chimps immune system would normally kill them. But then 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.

[J]

There is a single cell simultaneously infected with both viruses.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 gu.

[J]

And 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is what viruses do. They hijack these enzymes to make copies of themselves. Now here's the problem.

[J]

These enzymes, they're not necessarily that sticky.

[Jad Abumrad]

And while they're in the process of copying one virus, every once in a while they'll accidentally fall off mid copy.

[J]

And go thwack and latch on to.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[J]

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 mangabe and the guenon that.

[Jad Abumrad]

Through sheer random luck works. It landed on the exact right combination of genes that allowed it to evade the chimp's immune system.

[J]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

But then boom, suddenly in a flash, from these two viruses that can barely survive in the chimp, you get a.

[J]

New virus, little bit Mangabe, little bit.

[Jad Abumrad]

Guinan can not only survive in the chimp, but can thrive. In fact, for this baby virus, the chimp is the perfect host.

[J]

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.

[David Rosner]

Let me add another parenthesis. There are essentially 12 major groups of the HIV virus.

[Jad Abumrad]

What David means is that 12 different kinds of HIV viruses have spilled over 12 different times.

[David Rosner]

Eight of them came from monkeys, three of them came from chimps, and one came from gorillas.

[John Moallam]

Wow.

[David Rosner]

And of those 12, only one of them is responsible for the global pandemic. There are 12 kinds, 12 times that we know about. It's probably happened dozens and dozens more times that we don't know about. So the spillover is not a highly improbable event.

[J]

These sorts of viruses, they're constantly pinging at us. They're pinging at us and pinging it at us. We see it happening all the time.

[Jad Abumrad]

You see it happening all the time. Nathan has set up a series of.

[J]

Monitoring stations in places like Central Africa.

[Jad Abumrad]

And he and his colleagues have been tracking what he calls the viral chatter in the people who hunt these primates.

[J]

We collected specimens from the animals that they were hunting.

[Jad Abumrad]

They compared that to blood samples from the hunters themselves, and guess what we.

[J]

Found a whole range of new retroviruses that were moving over into these hunters.

[Jad Abumrad]

For example, he's been tracking something called the simian foamy virus, which is a.

[J]

Virus in the same family as hiv.

[Jad Abumrad]

And he has seen it hop from an individual gorilla to an individual human. Who killed that gorilla?

[J]

Yeah. These are almost certainly what we call primary transmission events.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, so you really are looking at the potential beginning of something.

[J]

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. And the real question is, how do we stop patient zeros?

[Jad Abumrad]

How do we avoid patient patient one and patient two.

[J]

Exactly.

[Jad Abumrad]

So Nathan is developing a series of.

[J]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

No roads, often no electricity.

[J]

But many of these places, they still have cell phone towers.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[J]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Because think about it, he says HIV landed in humans in 1908, but we didn't know about it until 1981.

[J]

We had decades of time when this was a virus before it spread globally.

[Jad Abumrad]

What if we'd been looking 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.

[David Quammen]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

[e-mail] 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.

[David Quammen]

And also to Beatrice Hahn at the.

[Jad Abumrad]

University of Pennsylvania and to Katie Slocum from the University of York for letting us use her recordings of chimpanzees.

[Soren Wheeler]

Hey, this is Soren Wheeler, senior editor and producer at Radiolab with a quick update. So David Quammen's book Spillover has been out for a couple years now, and as we all know, we are actually now at this moment facing the tragic consequences of another spillover. This time it's the Ebola virus. And we found ourselves wondering just how far it's going to spill.

[David Rosner]

Okay, all right. Okay.

[Soren Wheeler]

So Robert and I called up David Quammen again. He had actually just reprinted, with updates the chapter about Ebola from his book.

[David Rosner]

Yeah, Ebola. The Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus.

[David Quammen]

First of all, how old is this disease? Anyone have any idea?

[David Rosner]

Well, as a human disease, as far as we know, it dates to 1976. There was this outbreak of a strange disease at the Yambuku Mission in northern Zaire.

[Soren Wheeler]

318 cases, 280 people die.

[David Rosner]

And then there was another one in Sudan at about the same time.

[Soren Wheeler]

This time, 151 people die. And then it just disappears, hiding in the forest without a trace. Until 1994, thousands of miles away in Gabon. Another outbreak.

[David Rosner]

Yes, that's the history. Since 1976, it disappears for two or three years at a time. Sometimes it disappears for a decade and then it spills over and causes a human outbreak.

[David Quammen]

Well, if something is in the closet and is going to die, jump out at you, then the natural question to ask is, where's the closet? Like, where is it hiding?

[David Rosner]

Well, the main suspects are bats. We don't know that for sure because nobody has ever isolated live Ebola virus from an African bat.

[David Quammen]

Have they tried, have they looked in lots and lots of bats?

[David Rosner]

Yeah, they've looked in lots. They've looked in all kinds of animals. They've looked in insects, they've looked in snakes, they've looked in forest antelopes, they've looked in monkeys, they looked in plants. Literally hundreds of different species they looked in, found zero traces of live Ebola virus.

[Soren Wheeler]

So we really don't know where it's coming from or where it might come from next.

[David Rosner]

No, no.

[David Quammen]

Can I just ask you just to describe the Ebola virus. It's apparently viruses are generally teeny. Is this a teeny, teeny, teeny one?

[David Rosner]

Yes. Yeah, it's a teeny virus. It belongs to a family they call the filoviruses, Filo, as in the thread. It's a spaghetti shaped virus. Its genome is carried on just one strand of the genetic material, rna.

[Soren Wheeler]

And while those genes have let the virus live happily for hundreds of thousands, even millions of years in bats or whatever animal it lives in, when it.

[David Rosner]

Gets into humans, Ebola burns too hot.

[Soren Wheeler]

It makes so many copies of itself so quickly that it just destroys the body. And the person is usually dead within a few weeks, which David says is actually bad for the virus because Ebola can only pass through direct contact with bodily fluids. And because it kills so quickly, it doesn't have a lot of opportunities to get into the next person.

[David Rosner]

So the scientists have a term for that too. They call, at least they used to call us a dead end host. How's that for a phrase? We're the dead end host of Ebola. And that means that when Ebola gets into us, it has no great future. It's either going to burn out and come to an end or we're going to stop it. But right now we don't seem like a dead end host.

[Soren Wheeler]

Yeah, I'm wondering like, you know, if we've, since we've started noticing in 1976, a burst here, a burst there, why now this? Why is it?

[David Rosner]

That's the big question for Ebola 2014. This time we've got a very different situation. It's gotten out of control. Why has it gotten out of control? Well, partly because we recognized it late. It began back in December of 2013 with a two year old boy in southeastern Guinea. At least he's the first known case at this point. He died. His mother died about a week later. His sister died, his grandmother died. Other people in the village died. This went on from early December until the middle of March.

[Soren Wheeler]

By then it had spread from these small towns, villages into larger cities. In part, David says, because while previous outbreaks had been in very remote places, it now found itself in a more densely populated area.

[David Rosner]

The capital cities in these small West African countries are not very many miles away from the villages of the countryside. Then the virus got into these poor neighborhoods like West Point, where people were living together in crowded slum like neighborhoods. And when their loved ones Got sick, people took care of them, and when their loved ones died, people cleaned the bodies and touched the bodies and said goodbye to them. So the infection spread. And of course, those dense, poor neighborhoods in the capital cities are not that far from the international airports. So suddenly you've got the opportunity for almost the first time for Ebola to get on an airplane.

[Soren Wheeler]

So if you. If is. Have people changed the way they think about Ebola? Because, I mean, is there a mood shift there?

[David Rosner]

There's a little bit of a mood shift, but the experts, the scientists, the public health officials are still saying this is not that kind of virus. It still is, as far as we know, a virus that is only transmissible by direct contact with bodily fluids. It should be easy to stop, easy to contain.

[Soren Wheeler]

But according to David, the thing that some scientists are worried about is that as Ebola gets into more and more people and makes more and more copies of itself, it's changing.

[David Rosner]

Yes. Every time it replicates, there is a chance of a mistake.

[Soren Wheeler]

There's a chance that the genes for the next virus will come out just a little bit different. It'll mutate.

[David Rosner]

Most mutations are either insignificant or they do damage, but occasionally there can be a mutation that might possibly help the virus.

[David Quammen]

Can we track these things? Like, can we take a person who's got sick of Ebola in Sudan and compare it to a person who's sick of Ebola in the Congo and compare that to a person who's sick of Ebola in Niger and wherever? Can we do that and see whether it's changing?

[David Rosner]

Yes, and it has been done. Stephen Geyer and his colleagues published a paper in Science in early September which involved doing exactly that.

[Soren Wheeler]

And one of the things they found, says David, is that since this virus has been in US during this outbreak, it's been changing twice as fast as it has previously when it's living in its animal hiding place.

[David Rosner]

Yeah. So it has had more opportunities to replicate in more different people. It hasn't just been in 300 people, it's been in 9,000 people.

[David Quammen]

Now, is that the key word, is that the more opportunities you have to have a good mutation from your point of view that this is. Suddenly this disease has gotten an enormous number of opportunities.

[David Rosner]

That is the operative word.

[J]

Yeah.

[Soren Wheeler]

Are there boundaries around that? I mean, like, do we have any sense of how big a leap it would be for this to suddenly be transmissible in the air?

[David Rosner]

Yeah, we know that for this to spread through the air, there are very special machinery. You know, grappling hooks, proteins on the outside of virus that help it catch hold of particular cells and enter them. And Ebola doesn't have the right grappling hooks to lay hold of cells in the respiratory tract and get in them and then come bursting out of them and be carried outward on your breath. To get to that point would require a number of mutations, each of which is infinitesimally unlikely.

[David Quammen]

And when you multiply a mutation that it would be startling. Like a what to a what.

[David Rosner]

Yeah, some people have been saying that it would be like mutations that allowed a giraffe to fly. But there are other scenarios that are a little more probable. For instance, it might mutate and adapt in such a way that it kills fewer people or kills them more slowly and leaves people infectious for a longer period of time. Maybe people are walking around for three or four weeks with an occasional vomiting episode, but they're not dying. That would potentially give Ebola a greater opportunity to spread among more people.

[Soren Wheeler]

What, this is not a fair question to ask you, but what should we be doing?

[David Rosner]

I think the most important thing we should be doing is not letting the public health versus civil liberties issues in the US Distract us from West Africa. As the case count getswe've talked about this. As the case count gets higher, it has more opportunities to mutate and therefore more opportunities to adapt. So we need to end this outbreak in West Africa before this virus learns too much about us.

[Soren Wheeler]

Thanks again to David Quammen. His book is Ebola the Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus. We'll be back in just a moment.

[Jad Abumrad]

My name is Brennan Novak and I'm calling from Reykjavik, Iceland, where about half.

[Robert Krulwich]

The country believes in elves.

[Jad Abumrad]

Radiolab is supported in part by the.

[Robert Krulwich]

National Science foundation and by the Alfred.

[Jad Abumrad]

P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about [e-mail].

[Rippling Finance Announcer]

Radiolab is supported by Rippling. Finance teams often spend weeks chasing receipts, reconciling spreadsheets, and fixing errors across disconnected spend tools. This can be frustrating. And that's not software as a service. That's sad software as a disservice. If you've been thinking about replacing stitched together tech stacks with one platform for all departments, Rippling can help. Rippling is a unified platform for global hr, payroll, IT and finance, helping people replace their mess of cobbled together tools with one system. Designed to help give leaders clarity, speed and control. By uniting employees, teams and departments in one system, Rippling works to remove the bottlenecks, busywork and silos in business software. With Rippling you can choose to run hr, IT and finance operations as one, or pick and choose the products that best fill the gaps. Right now, you can get 6 months free when you go to rippling.com Radiolab learn more at R-I P P L-I-N-G.com Radiolab terms and conditions apply. Radiolab is supported by Planet Visionaries, the podcast created in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Stay tuned for a trailer and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

[Carl Zimmer]

I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honl Foundation. I wanted to let you know about a brand new season of the Planet Visionaries podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. This is the podcast exploring bold ideas and big solutions from the people leading the way in conservation. Join me in conversation with the likes of climate champion Mark Ruffalo, biologist and photographer Christina Mittermeier, and one of the most successful conservationists of our time, Chris Tompkins. Join us on Planet Visionaries wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hey, you want to know about one of my proudest moments of being a dad?

[David Quammen]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

Happened this morning.

[David Quammen]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

So you know how Emil's a little bit of an introvert, Right. We're sort of worried whether he socializes enough. Well, we were taking him to daycare and we're get, 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.

[John Moallam]

Out of nowhere. That is amazing. Yeah, because it's like they're out in their own society, you know?

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. Okay, so let's do the introductions. I'm Jad.

[David Quammen]

I'm Robert.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab. We're calling this show Patient Zero. Yeah. And for this next segment, no more patients, no more diseases. Exactly.

[David Quammen]

Let's focus instead on invention, on the people who bring new ideas into the work.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. The 0 is behind the ideas. That doesn't quite sound right. You know what I mean?

[David Quammen]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

And that guy you just heard.

[John Moallam]

Hi, my name is John Moallam. I'm a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine.

[Jad Abumrad]

He's got his own high five story to tell, though it's not about his daughter.

[John Moallam]

We have. I think we have kids around the.

[Jad Abumrad]

Same age or her first high five. It's actually about the first high five ever.

[John Moallam]

Yeah, ever. Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

See, one morning a few years ago.

[John Moallam]

2007 or 2008, John turned on his.

[Jad Abumrad]

Computer, opened up his email, and found.

[John Moallam]

A press release about the true, undisputed inventor of the high five coming out finally.

[Jad Abumrad]

Who is the press release from?

[John Moallam]

National High Five Day, which is a kind of a joke holiday that was invented by a group of high school friends, I think.

[David Quammen]

And they told the story.

[John Moallam]

They told the story of Lamont Sleetz, college basketball player at Murray State in Kentucky.

[David Quammen]

And the story in the press release went something like this.

[John Moallam]

Sleetz's father fought in Vietnam as part of the 1st Battalion, 5th infantry, which was nicknamed the 5. And they used to greet each other by holding up their hand and saying five as a kind of prideful. 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 and go, hi, five.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, like, hi. Like, hello, five.

[John Moallam]

Hello, five. Yeah, high, comma, five. You know, he has small hands. He likes to put them up against the big hands of the five guys. 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. 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

And within a few weeks of John getting this press release, the story was everywhere. Went kind of viral.

[John Moallam]

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 and the athletic department apartment there.

[Jad Abumrad]

And then you read this and you thought, what?

[John Moallam]

I thought, how sad.

[Jad Abumrad]

How sad.

[Soren Wheeler]

Why?

[Jad Abumrad]

How sad?

[John Moallam]

Because I knew the story of Glenn Burke.

[Jad Abumrad]

Turns out John had already been poking around into this question of who invented the high five. And he had stumbled on this photograph.

[John Moallam]

You know what?

[Jad Abumrad]

Maybe I don't have it, but black and white picture.

[John Moallam]

Oh, yeah, here we go.

[Jad Abumrad]

Two baseball players facing each Other Afros, black, huge smiles, and their hands are in the air right about to connect. Which one of these is Glenn Burke's?

[John Moallam]

Burke's the guy in the warm up jacket. I think he's even got his hat on backwards.

[Jad Abumrad]

Glenn Burke was a center fielder for the LA Dodgers in the 70s.

[John Moallam]

Big guy, he says he had 17 inch biceps, so I'll take his word for that.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 Glenn is sort of throwing his whole body forward that he, he's the one initiating the gesture.

[John Moallam]

I mean, this is a guy who was, you know, the soul of the Dodgers clubhouse.

[Carl Zimmer]

He just had that type of charisma.

[David Quammen]

This is Luther Burke Davis, Glenn's sister.

[Carl Zimmer]

With Glen, it was like, like he'd always be on the stage. Often said he should have been a comedian.

[John Moallam]

He was always dancing around in the, in the clubhouse. He, he used to do Richard Pryor stand up routines just from memory.

[Carl Zimmer]

He just genuinely loved people.

[David Quammen]

So much. So she says that in the year that picture was taken, the Dodgers made him their sort of public face of the team.

[Carl Zimmer]

He was their ambassador of goodwill.

[David Quammen]

He's the guy they'd say that to all the press events, you know, like.

[Carl Zimmer]

Meet the youngsters or that sort of thing.

[John Moallam]

Here's the story about this picture.

[Jad Abumrad]

What was the date?

[John Moallam]

October 5th. Poetically enough, 1977.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's the playoffs. Dodgers versus the Phillies game four bases.

[John Moallam]

Are loaded, Dusty Baker steps to the plate and. Grand slam.

[Jad Abumrad]

Crowd goes nuts.

[David Quammen]

Baker does his victory lap and just.

[John Moallam]

As ease, you know, round and third, coming to the plate.

[David Quammen]

Burke comes racing out of the dugout.

[John Moallam]

And he's got his arm really high up.

[Jad Abumrad]

And Baker sees him, instinctively raises his arm, and before you know it, Burke.

[John Moallam]

And Baker smack hands.

[Jad Abumrad]

Bam. There it was.

[Carl Zimmer]

The sportscasters that were, you know, announcing the game said they had never seen that done in sports before.

[John Moallam]

And from there on, the Dodgers started high fiving and everyone else started high fiving.

[Carl Zimmer]

The high five became a thing.

[Robert Krulwich]

Mm.

[Jad Abumrad]

And it all began with that one.

[John Moallam]

Moment, the platonic high five right there. Unfortunately, that moment, that was actually both the beginning and also almost the end of Burke's career.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's not that he wasn't good. He was actually really good. Even in his rookie season, he was.

[John Moallam]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

Apparently.

[John Moallam]

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.

[David Rosner]

What?

[Jad Abumrad]

$75,000 to get married? What is this, like the mob or something?

[John Moallam]

Well, exactly. I mean, no, 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 Oconds for a player who everyone acknowledged was completely inferior.

[Carl Zimmer]

That was confusing for us and I knew it had to be confusing for him.

[John Moallam]

It was shocking to everyone. No one understood why he was traded.

[Jad Abumrad]

And you think it was because he was gay?

[John Moallam]

Yeah, yeah.

[Carl Zimmer]

You know baseball, this all American sport.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Carl Zimmer]

But, you know, at least he was still going to be able to play ball, or at least he thought.

[John Moallam]

He ends up in Oakland, doesn't get very much playing time.

[David Quammen]

And when he did get on the field, it wasn't very pleasant.

[Carl Zimmer]

He used to get heckled a lot, you know, from people in the bleachers.

[David Quammen]

And even worse, according to a couple of different people. His coach, Billy Martin, would often introduce Glenn Burke this way.

[Carl Zimmer]

This is Glenn Burke, the faggot.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really?

[Carl Zimmer]

Yeah.

[John Moallam]

And so Glenn Burke retires. Wow.

[Jad Abumrad]

And he was only like 26 or something, right?

[Carl Zimmer]

Yes, he was young.

[John Moallam]

Within a year of his rookie season, just walks away.

[Jad Abumrad]

God, that's like a boarded career.

[John Moallam]

Exactly. From there, he ends up in the Castro district in San Francisco, which is the big gay neighborhood.

[Jad Abumrad]

And things go okay for a while.

[David Quammen]

But then one day when he's crossing.

[Carl Zimmer]

The street, three teenage girls in their.

[Jad Abumrad]

Mother'S car come barreling down the road.

[Carl Zimmer]

And they hit him and broke his leg in three places. Oh, man. And that kind of ended everything when that happened.

[David Quammen]

He starts taking painkillers. One thing leads to another, he gets.

[John Moallam]

Hooked on crack, can't hold a job.

[Jad Abumrad]

He goes broke, ends up living on the street.

[John Moallam]

And in 1994, Burke is diagnosed with HIV or AIDS, I guess AIDS at that point.

[Carl Zimmer]

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'd dance and he'd move his arms around because he was in the bed, he was bedridden.

[Jad Abumrad]

And so you took care of him until he died?

[Carl Zimmer]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

Glenn Burke died in 1995.

[David Quammen]

But what he's left with, at this point is he's left with the original high five, right? That's his claim.

[John Moallam]

Yes. Yes. That defined him to some people, at least at the end. And he believed it. A reporter had asked him 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Huh. So what did you do when you got this press release?

[John Moallam]

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.

[Carl Zimmer]

Hello?

[Jad Abumrad]

Hello. Eventually.

[Carl Zimmer]

Hey, there we go.

[Jad Abumrad]

He gets this guy on the phone.

[Carl Zimmer]

My name is Greg carrolledge.

[Jad Abumrad]

Greg is one of the founders. And he and John get to talking, and John asks him the sensible first question.

[John Moallam]

Is the Lamont Sleet story true?

[David Quammen]

He figured it was, but he thought he should at least ask. He's a reporter.

[John Moallam]

And there was a pause, and he said, no, frankly, we've been waiting for someone to ask.

[Jad Abumrad]

We thought no one would ever ask.

[John Moallam]

It's not true.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is something that we had made up. We wanted to see if the media would run with it.

[David Quammen]

They made the whole thing up.

[John Moallam]

They made the whole thing up. And then they just went to go cast their protagonist.

[Carl Zimmer]

Yeah.

[Rippling Finance Announcer]

So we sat down, we picked Murray State.

[Carl Zimmer]

That's just kind of a great sounding school. It pops up in the NCAA tournament every few years.

[John Moallam]

And they came across the. This guy, Lamont Sleetz.

[Jad Abumrad]

Why him?

[Rippling Finance Announcer]

Well, it was pretty close to random.

[John Moallam]

They then told me they had received an email from Lamont Sleet's wife.

[Carl Zimmer]

Absolutely.

[Jad Abumrad]

His wife emailed us and said some.

[Carl Zimmer]

Of the details that you have are.

[Jad Abumrad]

Are flat out wrong. That implies that some of the things you've said are right, though.

[John Moallam]

But Lamont thinks he probably did invent the high five.

[Carl Zimmer]

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

[Jad Abumrad]

What about Glenn?

[Carl Zimmer]

I was kind of, like.

[Robert Krulwich]

Kind of.

[Carl Zimmer]

A bit blown away, you know?

[Soren Wheeler]

Yeah.

[John Moallam]

You know, here was this guy who was proud of this, and these guys just kind of stripped it away from him.

[Jad Abumrad]

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?

[Carl Zimmer]

We do feel.

[Jad Abumrad]

We do feel we wish that we.

[Carl Zimmer]

Had done things slightly differently and putting together this sort of collegiate prank, but.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Carl Zimmer]

I'm very proud. Anytime I see somebody do a high five, it just really makes me happy.

[Jad Abumrad]

And that seemed like a good end to the story.

[David Quammen]

But no, because then John told us.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[John Moallam]

I've wanted you to believe that he.

[Jad Abumrad]

Was the hero at this point. Right.

[John Moallam]

So maybe I should tell you a little bit about Derek Smith. Right.

[David Quammen]

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.

[John Moallam]

Cardinals, was at practice, and a guy named Wiley Brown went up to Derek Smith and was gonna give him just a 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

And John says, when Louisville played in the 1980 NCAA Finals, I haven't seen.

[John Moallam]

It, but apparently the broadcaster referred actually to the high five handshake.

[Carl Zimmer]

Give him the high five handshake. High five.

[John Moallam]

He felt compelled to explain it to America.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow. And the moment that Derek Smith did it, did an asteroid fall on his head or something?

[John Moallam]

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.

[David Quammen]

What?

[John Moallam]

Yes. And he said explicitly to Wiley Brown, this is something I'm going to be remembered for. You know, our kids and our grandkids are going to talk about this. And in fact, our kids and grandkids.

[Jad Abumrad]

Do talk about it, and they're probably very proud.

[Carl Zimmer]

But it was Kathy.

[David Quammen]

Then we ran into this one.

[Robert Krulwich]

You're not.

[Jad Abumrad]

Fire away. This is Kathy Gregory. She coached women's volleyball in the 1960s, years before Glenn Burke and Derek Smith. And she says with her girls, everyone.

[Carl Zimmer]

Did it all the time. So I do believe that it was.

[Jad Abumrad]

Volleyball that first started it and interestingly, she says they would high five more when a player score screwed up.

[David Rosner]

Yes.

[Robert Krulwich]

No, no.

[Carl Zimmer]

It isn't just about celebration.

[Jad Abumrad]

Because really, when do you need a high five?

[Carl Zimmer]

Of course, it's more when you're down.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[John Moallam]

It makes people so happy.

[Jad Abumrad]

So, women's volleyball. There you go.

[David Quammen]

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 ut. Sank.

[Jad Abumrad]

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, the dawn of man.

[John Moallam]

Because it, like, gives pleasure. Yeah. It's just like from an evolutionary point of view.

[David Quammen]

No, I don't think so. I think this has the feeling of something that was born. I mean, who in this room wants Glenn Burke to be the original guy?

[Jad Abumrad]

Just raise your hand. Me, me, me.

[Carl Zimmer]

Yeah, it's the better story.

[David Quammen]

So look at what's happening here. Every time we look for the original of anything, be it a disease, a contagion, a gesture, we find more than one. So what do you do in this situation?

[Jad Abumrad]

I think you know what you do, is you just choose. You say which one is the better story. Let's just go with the best high five. Forget the first. The best.

[David Quammen]

And I think we can do that. Let's just call it Glenn Dark.

[Jad Abumrad]

Glenn Burke invented the high five. Done. All right. High five. High five.

[Carl Zimmer]

Hi, radiolab, this is beatrice hahn. Radiolab is produced by jet abumrad. This is quammen.

[David Rosner]

Our staff includes ellen horn, doran wheeler.

[Carl Zimmer]

Pat walters, tim howard, brenna farrell, len levy and sean cole.

[John Moallam]

Some help from jonathan mitchell, rachel james and matt kilpe.

[David Rosner]

Special thanks to mike feller, chris condian.

[Carl Zimmer]

Sydney smith, ben feldman, marva felchin and katie slocum.

[David Rosner]

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Okay, you all.

[Carl Zimmer]

Bye.

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