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SPEAKER_04: Listener supported. WNYC Studios. Crack cocaine plagued the United States for more than a decade. This week on Notes from
SPEAKER_01: America, author Donovan Ramsey explains how the myths of crack prolonged a disastrous era and shaped millions of lives. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_06: Hey, I'm Elie Tefnasser. This hour, we dive deep into the vault back to 2012 to explore the grotesque tube slide that lives inside all of us. I mean, it seems straightforward, right? It should be like every day, several times a day, put food in your mouth. Sometime later, comes out the other side. But what really happens in between? Now, I so vividly remember listening to this episode when it came out. What I still love about it is it's just this idea that that one errant gunshot wound opened up this portal for us to peer inside ourselves and to see what's actually going on in there in real time. And that what we saw upended so much of what we thought we knew about the kind of messy mystery in the middle of us. I have a feeling, call it a gut feeling, that you're going to enjoy it. So without further ado, I give you Guts, best enjoyed after a meal. Yeah, wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio
SPEAKER_16: Lab. Radio Lab. From WNYC. Rewind. Hello. We're going to start this show today with
SPEAKER_13: Mary Roach. Hey, Tim here. Hi, Tim. Hey, let me see if I can... Mary is one of our favorite
SPEAKER_13: authors, mostly because she kind of writes about stuff that's icky, gross. I'm the kind
SPEAKER_14: of person, if I find myself in an operating room for whatever I'm reporting on, I'm the kind of person where they'll be like, Ms. Roach, you need to step back. Your head is actually inside the body cavity. And for her latest book? Called Gulp. She got really,
SPEAKER_13: really into and inside cows. Yeah, the fistulated cows that the agricultural schools have. And
SPEAKER_13: what's a fistulated cow? A fistula is a irregular anatomical passageway. And a fistulated cow...
SPEAKER_13: In this case... Has a hole... An opening... Right in its side so that you can actually stick your hand into its side and reach all the way down... To the stomach. This is a living cow,
SPEAKER_05: right? It's a mooing... This is a live cow. And you've done this? Yeah, it was. It was this
SPEAKER_14: amazing because really, you know, a cow is... She did it at the University of California,
SPEAKER_05: Davis. You're just, you're standing there and sort of normally, and for some reason I've worn
SPEAKER_14: a skirt and kitten heels and my hosts are wearing manure encrusted muck boots and they're a source of great entertainment. And it's packed really tightly. You got to really work your arm. The guy I was with, Ed DePeters, he's like, no, keep going, keep going. I'm like, I don't know, Ed. I'm not sure, really. Go further in or... Yeah, keep going, keep going. And I'm literally up to
SPEAKER_14: my shoulder inside this cow. I so want to do that. Where are you guys? We're in New York. Yeah, I know
SPEAKER_14: where there's one out there. I can get you a fistulated cow. I didn't actually get to do it,
SPEAKER_13: unfortunately, but we sent our producer, Tim Howard, out to Rutgers University where a bunch of high schoolers had come to see Lily, Lily, Lily, the fistulated cow. Okay, let's give it a go. I'm
SPEAKER_02: gonna pop the cork. Did he say cork? Yeah, you have to uncork the hole in the cow. See all the steam
SPEAKER_19: coming out? All right. This is Tim reaching his hand in. Go straight across the top to the far
SPEAKER_17: side. Okay. Oh my God. It's powerful in there. Oh, God. I mean, I was a little worried it was gonna
SPEAKER_14: break my hand. What, you mean like pressure? Yeah. It's a very muscular organ. It's squeezing my arm. Mixing and... I can feel the side of the stomach pushing against me. Squeezing and contracting. Really squeezing. It's groping you back. I'm stuck. I'm just gonna try to go a little bit,
SPEAKER_13: a little bit deeper. And it's hot. It's steamy. It's like bubbly and physical. It's very, yeah.
SPEAKER_14: And she is so calm right now. I can't believe it. The cow's bored and I've got this look on my face
SPEAKER_14: like I've seen God or something. Mary says that for all her times in morgues and in all the places
SPEAKER_05: she's been, this one, this one was really different. It was the expression I was wearing,
SPEAKER_14: I'm sure I've never had cause to use. And here's why. If you think about it, the stomach is a center
SPEAKER_11: of magical transformation. That is Fred Kaufman who wrote a whole book about the stomach. You take
SPEAKER_11: something outside of your body, you put it in your body and it turns into you. So it's like this
SPEAKER_13: conduit between what's outside you and what's inside. The other thing that's weird is that
SPEAKER_11: the human body is a torus. We're donuts. We've got a hole going through the middle of us, all the way through us. So what seems to be inside us, what seems to be inside our stomach, actually is always outside us. Oh this is getting so deep. You don't like the torus? No, I think it's great. I think I'll go with it.
SPEAKER_13: Cause I was thinking we could start that way because that's where we're kind of doing this hour. We're gonna take this thing that's deep inside us and turn it inside out. Yeah. I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krowitch. This is Radiolab and today, guts. That mystery that lies between our mouth and our butts.
SPEAKER_14: We are these sacks of guts and we walk in these skeletons and we walk around and we never even see them. And for centuries nobody really knew what's going on in there. But then something happened that opened up a window.
SPEAKER_14: Yeah. Do you want to start back at the beginning of it? Yeah, let's once upon a time it. Okay. So.
SPEAKER_14: Once upon a time. It all begins. And when is this? They first met in 1822. Once upon a time in 1822 there was a guy named William Beaumont.
SPEAKER_11: William Beaumont is a farm boy from Lebanon, Connecticut. Five brothers and six sisters. And William clearly is the smart one. He was the one with the big dreams. So at an early age he leaves home and gets himself a job as a doctor. An army doctor.
SPEAKER_13: Up north. At Fort Macanac which is this, it's a trading post basically. So Beaumont, he has a little doctor's office at the top of this hill.
SPEAKER_13: And at the bottom. There's a general store. For fur traders who would come in from Canada. Super hardy dudes.
SPEAKER_14: Like it's cold up there and they're going out in canoes and they're running with these huge packages of furs on their backs. I imagine big beards. Sure. In any case that was all just set up. Here's the actual story. One day.
SPEAKER_11: Normal morning. All the fur traders come in and are unloading and loading. Getting their coffee, salted meat. Supplies to go out.
SPEAKER_13: Trap some fur. When all of a sudden. Boom. Right outside the shop. Somebody's gun went off. Somebody calls Beaumont. Beaumont.
SPEAKER_13: Dashes out the door. Runs down the hill. Finds this guy. This 18 year old kid. Really in bad shape.
SPEAKER_13: The kid's lying on the ground. He's a big guy. Muscular. But he's covered in blood. And he has a hole right below his ribcage about the size of the palm of a grown man's hand.
SPEAKER_11: Nobody was sure what happened but someone's gun had gone off by accident and shot this boy point blank.
SPEAKER_11: His lungs are dripping out. There's blood. This is what Beaumont sees when he shows up.
SPEAKER_13: This is what Beaumont sees. And the other thing Beaumont sees is food coming out of his stomach.
SPEAKER_11: Meat and bread and coffee. Basically the remnants of his breakfast spilled out.
SPEAKER_14: On the ground right in front of him. You can kind of see the gears turning in Beaumont's head as if he's thinking.
SPEAKER_14: Whoa. There it is. Digestion in action. Which was kind of disgusting but it was also something of a revelation because in 1822.
SPEAKER_11: The stomach was an area of mystery. Just like today we're aware the brain is an area of mystery.
SPEAKER_13: And for centuries people believed that the stomach, more broadly the gut, was in a very real way the center of our beings.
SPEAKER_11: Yes. In Puritan times the bowels are the seat of human sympathy. You know like where our deepest feelings come from.
SPEAKER_13: If you have bowels for somebody that means you sympathize with them.
SPEAKER_11: Oh is that something people would say? Absolutely. Oh we should bring that term back. That's very interesting. I have bowels for you.
SPEAKER_13: The point is medical science was pretty fuzzy in what happens down there. I mean they knew it was important but they had no idea how it worked. Like how does food become us?
SPEAKER_11: Nobody understood it.
SPEAKER_14: Because they can't see. You can't directly observe it without opening the person up.
SPEAKER_05: But here was a guy opened right up.
SPEAKER_13: But of course Beaumont is a doctor so he's like wait I've got to save this guy so he starts sewing him up frantically. Pretty sure this fellow's not going to make it. And he was surprised that two days later the guy was alive.
SPEAKER_14: Really surprised. And as the months passed this kid.
SPEAKER_13: Saint Martin. That was his name. Alexis Saint Martin. He gets better but a year later he still has his hole in his stomach.
SPEAKER_11: The hole never closes. What happened is he grew a fistula.
SPEAKER_05: Just like the cow we talked about earlier except in this case he didn't have a cork where he was wounded. He had a flap of skin covering the hole. If you wanted to you just pull back the flap and look inside.
SPEAKER_13: And we don't know if Beaumont left it that way on purpose. What we do know is that he sees an opportunity. To make the body give up its secrets.
SPEAKER_14: He sees he's got something that nobody else has.
SPEAKER_11: Maybe he even thinks.
SPEAKER_14: This man could be my ticket out of being a lowly Fort Maconack doctor. So Beaumont kind of hires him as a man around his house.
SPEAKER_11: As a man servant. You know he said it was a charitable thing I wanted to help him.
SPEAKER_14: You know because it couldn't work. And I'm thinking I don't know maybe maybe not.
SPEAKER_14: And so about a year later he starts.
SPEAKER_18: Come on in.
SPEAKER_11: Wow. He starts his experiments. Oh my lord this is straight out of a movie.
SPEAKER_13: While reporting this story we ended up visiting the rare book room at the New York Academy of Medicine. Which is pretty much the coolest room ever. It's all mahogany and they've got like ancient skulls sitting on top of bookshelves and the books are hundreds and hundreds of years old.
SPEAKER_18: In any case the librarian Arlene Shainer showed us around and then put on some white gloves, disappeared between some stacks and came out with a little purple book.
SPEAKER_13: Beaumont's observations.
SPEAKER_18: Experiment one is on August 1st, 1825. So at 12 o'clock I introduced through the perforation into the stomach the following articles of diet. So what he does is he takes different foods.
SPEAKER_18: A piece of raw salted fat pork. Some corned beef. You know like a one inch square of corned beef.
SPEAKER_11: A piece of stale bread.
SPEAKER_18: And he attaches them to a silk string and he inserts them.
SPEAKER_11: Through the artificial opening into the stomach.
SPEAKER_18: Into the stomach for an hour.
SPEAKER_11: Then he takes it out. Like a fisherman? Yeah. Yeah he's fishing. He's doing stomach fishing. And he takes it out and he records you know. So an hour later. How much was digested. Withdrew and examined them. Found the cabbage and bread about half digested. The pieces of meat.
SPEAKER_18: This went on for hours. Returned them into the stomach. At 2 o'clock p.m. withdrew them again. And hours. Returned them into the stomach. Again. For years.
SPEAKER_05: Over the next few years Beaumont puts anything he can possibly think of into that stomach. Pig's feet soused. Take an hour.
SPEAKER_18: Animal brains. Boiled. Take an hour and 45 minutes. Fresh eggs hard boiled. Take 3 hours and 30 minutes. Soft boiled. Take 3 hours. Fresh eggs fried. Take 3 hours and 30 minutes. Fresh eggs roasted. Take 2 hours and 15 minutes. Look it's just the totality of food in America at that point.
SPEAKER_11: Whipped eggs take an hour and a half.
SPEAKER_18: He's trying everything. Baked custard takes 2 hours and 45 minutes. Oh my god that goes on for pages. Alexis St. Martin is becoming increasingly irritable about this whole process.
SPEAKER_11: I would imagine. Because a lot of the times the things that Beaumont would stick into his stomach would make him sick.
SPEAKER_13: Give him fever. Pain in his head. Depressed pulse. Dry skin. Coated tongue.
SPEAKER_18: So in 1825, 3 years after this all started, St. Martin finally bolts.
SPEAKER_13: Goes back to Canada. Gets married. Even has a few kids. All the while. Beaumont is writing him letters. Trying to lure him back. And he was offering him, okay, I'll pay for your family. Okay, I'll give you $50 a year. Okay, I'll give you $75.
SPEAKER_14: I mean, he kept the end name. I'll throw in the land. Because you know, he still wanted to know.
SPEAKER_13: Alright fine, it takes 3 hours and 15 minutes to digest a carrot.
SPEAKER_13: Oyster soup, 3 and a half hours. Or soup, whatever. But how does it work? How does the stomach do it?
SPEAKER_05: And eventually, because he needs the money, Alexis St. Martin does come back. Beaumont starts his experiments again.
SPEAKER_18: And one night, while Beaumont is peering into the boy's stomach, he gets his answer.
SPEAKER_13: He says, he applies a few crumbs of bread to the inner surface of the stomach.
SPEAKER_18: Immediately afterwards, small sharp papillae became visible. He saw little pimples form on the wall of the stomach.
SPEAKER_13: And out of the pimples? Exuded a clear transparent liquor.
SPEAKER_18: Out squirts some juice. Out squirts some juice.
SPEAKER_11: And that was it. That's the magic juice. Clear, almost transparent. Tasted a little saltish and acid.
SPEAKER_18: Ooh. When applied to the tongue.
SPEAKER_14: Yeah, tasting. A lot of tasting went on. And then? You would collect the stomach acid and see if you could digest outside the body. There was this theory that the body had this vital force. And that that was necessary for the bodily processes, including digestion. So if you took the stomach acid out, what would happen? December 14, 1829. At 1 o'clock p.m. I took one and a half ounces of gastric juice fresh from the stomach.
SPEAKER_18: Put into it 12 drams recently salted beef boiled. The theory at the time was, oh, it wouldn't work. You had to have the magical powers of the human body.
SPEAKER_14: But digestion commenced.
SPEAKER_14: Beaumont, one of his big discoveries was, no you don't. That actually there are no secret forces of sympathy and excitement driving things.
SPEAKER_11: It's a chemical.
SPEAKER_13: That's what it's all about.
SPEAKER_05: Now Beaumont didn't know it, but that juice he was seeing? Which he called gastric juice.
SPEAKER_18: Those are enzymes. And what enzymes are are like little chemical scissors.
SPEAKER_13: They break down food so that you can take something in from the outside, like this carrot, and absorb it. It becomes literally a part of you.
SPEAKER_11: The key to the whole thing, the key to life, are enzymes. In a way, they are the magical force. Just in chemical form.
SPEAKER_13: That's it. That's the truth.
SPEAKER_11: He was the first to understand it, the first to see it, the first to figure out the method of how to prove it. And he proved it.
SPEAKER_13: So Beaumont writes a book about this.
SPEAKER_18: And this book is published in 1833.
SPEAKER_11: And he becomes famous.
SPEAKER_18: People were fascinated by Beaumont's experiments. He would kind of go on these tours. He's called over to Yale University.
SPEAKER_11: He gets invited to speak in Europe. Wherever he goes, he brings his gastric juice and he lectures there. From the dude's stomach? Yeah, he travels around with it. And whenever he could, he would take Saint Martin with him.
SPEAKER_13: Saint Martin was his power point.
SPEAKER_14: He's like, I need you man. I need you on the stage so everybody else can come up and stick their tongue in your stomach. For William Beaumont, this works out pretty great.
SPEAKER_05: He's thought of as this tremendous contributor to the understanding of digestion.
SPEAKER_14: As for Alexis Saint Martin?
SPEAKER_13: He was a curiosity.
SPEAKER_11: He was a medical curiosity. For the rest of his life?
SPEAKER_13: For the day he dies. Even in death? His body is a hot commodity.
SPEAKER_11: And his family was very aware of this. They let his body rot in the sun for three days. And then buried him very deeply and put big rocks over him so he would not be exhumed.
SPEAKER_13: Thanks to Arlene Shainer at the New York Academy of Medicine and Fred Kaufman who wrote a book called A Short History of the American Stomach.
SPEAKER_05: And a special thanks to Mary Roach. Her forthcoming book is called Gulp, a Trip Down the Elementary Canal.
SPEAKER_21: Lulu here. If you ever heard the classic Radiolab episode, Sometimes Behave So Strangely, you know that speech can suddenly leap into music and really how strange and magic sound itself can be. We at Radiolab take sound seriously and use it to make our journalism as impactful as it can be. And we need your help to keep doing it. The best way to support us is to join our membership program, The Lab. This month, all new members will get a T-shirt that says, Sometimes Behave So Strangely. To check out the T-shirt and support the show, go to radiolab.org slash join. Radiolab is supported by Capital One. With no fees or minimums, banking with Capital One is the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Even easier than deciding to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with no overdraft fees, is it even a decision? That's banking reimagined. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See Capital One dot com slash bank. Capital One N A member FDIC. Radiolab is supported by Apple Card. Apple Card has a cash back rewards program unlike other credit cards. You earn unlimited daily cash on every purchase, receive it daily and can grow it at four point one five annual percentage yield. When you open a savings account, apply for Apple Card in the wallet app on iPhone. Apple Card subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility requirements. Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Member FDIC. Terms apply. After but her e-mails became shorthand in 2016 for the media's deep focus on Hillary Clinton's server hygiene at the expense of policy issues, is history repeating itself?
SPEAKER_15: You can almost see an equation again, I would say, led by the times in Biden being old with Donald Trump being under dozens of felony indictments. Listen to On the Media from WNYC. Find On the Media wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_05: You do your butt and it is called your gut. What is that? It's just an old person's word for her mouth. As we just heard for a very, very long time, people believe that the stomach was a place of magical transformation.
SPEAKER_13: Yeah, but of course, as we know now, it's just a big muscle with acid and enzymes and stuff.
SPEAKER_05: If you travel a little deeper down, down below the stomach, then things get spooky again.
SPEAKER_02: We just, you know, we have these sort of shadowy images of what's going on in there. That's Carl Zimmer, a shadowy figure himself, a science writer and a frequently thirsty man.
SPEAKER_05: My throat got a little scratchy. Soren and I called him up, you know, while you were gone on paternity leave and he told us, you want a mystery? Yeah, I do. OK, then the stomach is just a warm up. Oh, yeah. The 25 feet of coiled, soiled, fetid tubing inside you. You mean the intestines? Yeah, yeah. That's where the real mystery lies. You know, because here's the riddle. The part of you that turns the world outside into you isn't just you.
SPEAKER_02: It's more like a collective. What does he mean by that?
SPEAKER_05: Well, if you zoom into our intestines, what you'll see is legions of tiny creatures.
SPEAKER_02: Bacteria, viruses, fungi, protozoans.
SPEAKER_10: And those are all little single cell? Tana guys? Yeah, we're talking about non-human things inside of me.
SPEAKER_02: How many have you got, would you say? Me? Yeah. Probably in the order of maybe a couple thousand species. So there's E. coli, Bacteriodes fragilis, and then another one, another one, another one. It's a whole universe down there.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. Microbacteria, flavobacterium, firsinia, the phalopagus, acromobacter, a seed of a monocleidosis.
SPEAKER_02: Some of them you'll find in all of us. And then there are just a whole bunch of other species that are rarer, might be in one person and not in the other. It's like a rainforest. Oh, yeah. You're an oncologist now studying your gut, looking at these complicated networks of hundreds, thousands of species that are living inside of you and depending on each other or preying on each other.
SPEAKER_02: It's just this incredibly complicated pattern that scientists haven't figured out. When you're in an embryonic, in a, what are they called, the sacs?
SPEAKER_05: Your amniotic sac.
SPEAKER_05: Your amniotic sac. How much bacteria do you have in and about you there? You're sterile. You have none?
SPEAKER_02: No. You're clean. Huh. But then as you are coming out, all of a sudden you're into this new environment, the birth canal. You're breathing. Your mouth is open. Stuff is coming into your mouth that's coating your skin. There are lots of bacteria there. The vagina, the birth canal. It's a very complicated ecosystem there. And?
SPEAKER_05: Right after you're born, says Carl, you meet a nurse, then some doctors. You go home. You'll play in your backyard. You'll suck on a shoe. You might eat some dirt and get licked by a dog. And by the time you're going to school, you've got?
SPEAKER_02: Probably about a hundred trillion microorganisms. So a hundred trillion other kinds of cells in you.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: So if you were to take all the bacteria in your body and just made them into one lump, it would be about three pounds. Oh. Really? Think of it as an organ. I mean, your brain's about three pounds. Your heart's a pound or two. So this is another organ.
SPEAKER_05: In this case, it's an organ that helps you digest food. But here's the thing. This place in you, which is filled with foreign critters, somehow this organ gets into your head. What does that even mean? Wait. Just wait a second. Let me introduce you to someone.
SPEAKER_03: Hello.
SPEAKER_10: Can you hear me?
SPEAKER_03: Yes. Yeah, we can hear you. John. My name is Professor John Krein. I'm the professor and chair of anatomy and neuroscience here at University College Cork in Ireland. And I'm a neuroscientist.
SPEAKER_13: A brain guy?
SPEAKER_03: Yep.
SPEAKER_04: If someone told me six years ago as a neuroscientist that I'd be here talking about microbes, I would have laughed it off.
SPEAKER_05: But to make a long story short, John found that as he was getting into neuroscience, a lot of the neuroscientists at his university in Cork, Ireland, they were getting into bugs for reasons that will become apparent in a moment. And eventually, he got the bug for bugs and began to work with this one particular strain of bacteria. This is the lactobacillus strain.
SPEAKER_04: What was it? Lacto something? Lactobacillus, sorry.
SPEAKER_05: Lactobacillus rhamnosus. It looks like a pill really. It's kind of an oblong thing. And it's sometimes used to make yogurt.
SPEAKER_04: We were interested in whether if you fed mice with this for a number of weeks, whether it would alter their behavioral state.
SPEAKER_05: Meaning, if you fed these mice a bunch of this bacteria, would they become very different mice?
SPEAKER_13: Yeah. Different mice? You mean like fatter mice or something?
SPEAKER_05: No, no, no, no, no. Would they change their personalities? This is like a profound change.
SPEAKER_13: Because of a bacteria in their stomach? Yeah. Not in their brain? No. Just in their tummies. Just in their tummy.
SPEAKER_05: So, let me tell you what he did. He had two groups of mice. One of them got the lactobacillus. The others, they got just normal mouse food. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: We fed them a broth just as a control. So, it didn't have any bacteria.
SPEAKER_15: Then?
SPEAKER_04: We looked at how they responded to a mild water stress. And what we found was that… Mild was a mild one. What does that mean? Sorry. Well, it's water. It's water at room temperature. It's…
SPEAKER_05: Basically, what he did is he took these two groups of mice. The bacteria mice and the no bacteria mice. And then he would drop them into a bowl of water.
SPEAKER_04: And all rodents are very good swimmers, but they just don't like water.
SPEAKER_05: Oh. Now, what he was looking for was any difference between the two groups in terms of how they dealt with this water situation. Like if one group squeaked more than the other or something? Whatever. What does that mean? You just keep an open mind and you wait and see what's going to happen. Fine. So. Here we go.
SPEAKER_05: Starting with the first group, the normal ones, he dropped them in. And as you'd expect…
SPEAKER_04: They try and escape. They try and escape.
SPEAKER_05: And he timed them to see how long they'd keep at it. Okay. And one minute passes.
SPEAKER_04: They swim. They swim to the edge and all around looking for an escape.
SPEAKER_01: Two minutes pass.
SPEAKER_05: Three minutes pass. But about four minutes in, he says the mice start to get worn down. And then they decide at this point… There's no point.
SPEAKER_04: I'm giving up.
SPEAKER_05: Which means what? Maybe the ordinary mice just go into a dead mouse float? Yeah, dead mouse float.
SPEAKER_04: You know, they just give up. They don't drown.
SPEAKER_05: No, no, no. They just sit there and think, I will wait us out until it's over. Exactly.
SPEAKER_04: It's been coined behavioral despair. I can't do this anymore.
SPEAKER_05: That is how a normal mouse reacts to being tossed into water. It struggles for about four minutes. It gives up and then sinks into despair. For the second group, this is the group that ate the bacteria. Yeah. You'd also drop them in the water? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go. At first he says they were just like the first group. They were swimming around frantically for one minute, two minutes, three minutes. But then at the four minute mark, when the first group of mice had given up, these mice, they kept going. They kept looking for an out. Past four minutes, to five minutes, six minutes.
SPEAKER_13: So they're not despairing. Exactly.
SPEAKER_05: And they might have kept going on and on and on, but he then plucked them out of the water after six minutes.
SPEAKER_09: The thing that's kind of strange is like, you know, worrying and scurrying about and panicking. Like that all seems like what it is to be a mouse. And you're saying that bacteria in the gut can change that? Yeah.
SPEAKER_13: Wait a second, Sorin. Okay, fine. There seems to be a difference between these two groups. But how do you know? How does John know that the bacteria had anything to do with it?
SPEAKER_05: Well, he didn't just stare at the mice. He looked at their mouse chemistry.
SPEAKER_04: By looking at the stress hormones. And we measured...
SPEAKER_05: And what he found is that in the first group, the mice that quit and despaired...
SPEAKER_04: We got about a hundredfold increase in corticosterone levels. That's the hormonal version of...
SPEAKER_05: Exactly. And in that first group, when he dropped them in the water, their blood flooded with this one. Which initially, you know, it's not a bad thing because a mouse has to act. But all-out panic isn't great for a little mouse. And after a couple of minutes of hormone coursing through the veins, the mouse just burns out and shuts down. But in the second group of mice, now these are the mice that ate the bacteria... We found that in the mice fed the lactobacillus...
SPEAKER_04: They, well first of all, they had half as much of that stress hormone.
SPEAKER_05: Half. And they had another chemical suddenly in the mix.
SPEAKER_04: We found very, very distinct changes in the receptors for GABA in a variety of brain regions. GABA? GABA.
SPEAKER_05: What's GABA? Well, he says you can think of it as the opposite of a stress hormone.
SPEAKER_04: It basically is there to shut down the brain, stop things, inhibit, make us more relaxed, chilled out.
SPEAKER_05: And he thinks what's happening is that in these mice that ate the bacteria, they hit the water, the stress hormones come online. But before things get too intense, in comes GABA and GABA just goes... And as a result, these mice... They're chilled out, they're relaxed, they're not afraid. They never panic, they never burn out, and they never fall into despair.
SPEAKER_04: They behaved like as if they were on Valium.
SPEAKER_13: So somehow the mice, the gut bacteria of the mice are sending Valium to the brain? Is that what he's saying? That's what he's saying, yeah. But he hasn't said anything about bacteria yet. I mean, it's a long distance. Well, let me... Down here, brain up here.
SPEAKER_05: Look, John told me that if you look inside a mouse's body, you will find a giant nerve. The vagus nerve. That runs...
SPEAKER_04: Between the gus and the brain. Oh, you mean like a phone line?
SPEAKER_05: Exactly. Well, maybe they chemically tickle one end of the line, send a shhhh signal up to the brain, which then makes the GABA. Now, in order to prove this, he thought, is why not just cut the line?
SPEAKER_04: Basically, sever the vagus nerve. Oh, because then if the bacteria are the ones doing it, if he cuts the phone line, they
SPEAKER_13: won't be able to do it anymore, and then the mice should go back to normal.
SPEAKER_04: Exactly. So, in collaboration with my colleagues at McMaster in Ontario... He got some mice. Fed them the bacteria again.
SPEAKER_05: But this time, before throwing them into the pool, he cut the nerve. And?
SPEAKER_04: We found that all of the changes that we had seen... The swimming forever, the not giving up...
SPEAKER_04: And the neurochemical changes in the brain... The GABA shhhh, making them so calm... Were completely absent. Ahhh.
SPEAKER_19: You cut out the highway, and then the communication, the brainy changes...
SPEAKER_05: Stop. Totally. Totally.
SPEAKER_13: Huh. And the mouse went back to being quitters? Yep. Oh. You have to be convinced now. Okay. I am convinced. So here's my question, though. This is a mouse we're talking about. This is a mouse. Just a mouse. Does this have anything to say about us? I mean, is there any connection to make? Well, I asked Carl that question.
SPEAKER_02: There was one study that... Where was it? Oh, oh, you know what?
SPEAKER_22: So this was a clinical trial actually done in France last year.
SPEAKER_05: That's John O'Leary, who regularly reports about things neurological for us and others, and he knew about the study too.
SPEAKER_22: Yeah, so they fed people just massive doses of probiotics. Does probiotic mean like the good ones versus the bad ones?
SPEAKER_13: Yeah, probiotics are the good gut bacteria.
SPEAKER_05: They're in yogurt and things like that. So these guys in France, they gave these people packets, like sugar-sized packets of powder. And when they came to packets, there are two different kinds of bugs.
SPEAKER_02: Lactobacillus helveticus and Bifidobacterium longum. Mm, two of my favorites.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah. Well, you should like them because they gave them to people.
SPEAKER_22: And they showed a fairly dramatic reduction in their basal anxiety levels. And they became less stressful and had less anxiety.
SPEAKER_05: Because when they took them to high diving boards and threw them off instead of screaming, how do you test these things?
SPEAKER_02: I see the Hopkins symptom checklist.
SPEAKER_05: Basically they did a little survey and asked questions.
SPEAKER_22: How distressed do you feel? They took levels of stress hormone. And the 24-hour urinary-free cortisol. So they had some quantitative measures. People who took those probiotics said they felt less angry, less anxious, and less depressed.
SPEAKER_05: Wow, so the gut bugs have us on a chain too.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. See, because we have, you know, one thing to remember is like, you know, our mood, a lot of the way our mood is set is through serotonin.
SPEAKER_10: Yes, like when they do antidepressant drugs, it's the serotonin reuptake something. Yeah, so you're controlling the amount of serotonin that's going in and out of your
SPEAKER_02: neurons, right? Yeah. You have very little serotonin in your brain, but it makes a huge difference. You have a huge supply of serotonin in your gut.
SPEAKER_22: 80% of all the serotonin in your body is in your gut. Really?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and the bacteria can be feeding on that stuff. And, you know, there could be, it could be that, you know, they... You have an oil well of happiness in your gut.
SPEAKER_05: And if you get the right pump, you could feel happy more of the time. That's one possibility. So Jadwin, you and I are sitting around feeling all stressed and anxious, or if we're just happy and gay in the old sense of the word.
SPEAKER_22: Now we know this mood is shadowed, influenced, and shaped by the bacteria you have in your intestine.
SPEAKER_02: The kinds of studies that show this effect, they've all happened in the past couple of years. And that's it, period. But there's this judge review. It was in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It was just kind of commenting on a couple of these studies and saying like, hmm, let's think about which bacteria we should focus on for psychological treatments. Let's think about how we can treat people's psychological disorders with bacteria this way. Let's just think about it.
SPEAKER_10: This is in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences. They're talking about treating psychological disorders with yogurt. Yeah, medicinal yogurt in the future.
SPEAKER_10: But medicinal as in Prozac. Sure. Medicinal as in whatever they give to people with schizophrenia.
SPEAKER_02: Well I don't know. I mean, who knows what'll work and what won't work. But it's something that people are saying like, we need to look into this.
SPEAKER_22: There's something for me a little poetic about the fact that a lot of our moods come from the same organ that produces s***. I mean, I haven't put my finger on what's poetic about that, but it just... It does make a little bit more sense when you step back and think about this from the perspective of evolution that our biggest decisions way back when were what to eat, is this going to kill me and make me sick, is this food spoiled? So it makes sense that the part of the body which can detect that is also intimately connected with decision-making systems that have to do with this is going to make me happy or this is I should fear this and not eat this. So as outlandish as it seems that the self is connected with the part of the body that produces s***, it also has a little bit of engineering logic to it.
SPEAKER_05: Special thanks to Carl Zimmer. His latest book is called Science, Inc. It's a description of tattoos that people get on scientific themes and you can see them on their arms, their legs, thighs and embarrassing places.
SPEAKER_21: Well, that's all for now. I'll see you next time. Thank you.
SPEAKER_05: Thank you.
SPEAKER_13: Thank you.
SPEAKER_08: Thank you.
SPEAKER_08: Thank you.
SPEAKER_08: Thank you.
SPEAKER_08: Thank you.
SPEAKER_08: Thank you.
SPEAKER_13: Thank you.
SPEAKER_08: Thank you.
SPEAKER_13: And then three weeks of just sitting there, night after night, watching his family eat dinner without him, he says he would start to drift off and get lost in these really vivid daydreams of meals that he'd eaten in the past.
SPEAKER_08: One of the first memories I have is going to Katz's for the first time. Het's over here, ladies and gentlemen, please.
SPEAKER_13: Katz's is a famous Jewish jelly in Manhattan.
SPEAKER_04: How you doing? Good, how are you?
SPEAKER_08: And standing there at the counter. Pastrami, I'm right with mustard, right? Where the counter man cuts the pastrami and he puts it on a plate and he cuts it out of the hot cooker and it's on a fork and he hands it to you and you take a taste.
SPEAKER_13: And he says in that particular instance when he took a bite, that first bite of the pastrami sandwich it was like pow.
SPEAKER_13: He said it was the first time in his life where he suddenly he was like, oh my God, I'm Jewish. I am Jewish. These are my people.
SPEAKER_07: And that was the first time he felt that? It was. And after about a month of no food at all and these vivid daydreams about food, something
SPEAKER_13: weird happened. John got hungry, like actually hungry, which really doesn't make much sense because hunger signals normally travel from the gut up to the brain and his gut was numb. But he says he really started to feel hungry.
SPEAKER_07: It was, you know, I think of it, it was an existential hunger. And he got really bad.
SPEAKER_08: For example. My wife's a terrific cook. And one night she made a little treat for the kids, mini burgers and french fries. And our small apartment smelled like the kitchen of a white castle. So my wife brought out this big plate of sliders and a pyramid and the kids were knocking down the pyramid and throwing them back. And I couldn't take it anymore. So I snuck out of the living room while they were preoccupied. And I went into our kitchen and there were some fries on the stovetop and I put my hand on the fries and I brought them up to my mouth and I was expecting salt and oil, fatty goodness and the texture of crunchiness and all that. I'm tasting it now. And I put it on my tongue and I got nothing. Nothing really? And I'm rolling it around.
SPEAKER_05: You can't even feel it on your tongue? Not even the salt?
SPEAKER_08: It's like when you go to the dentist and you've got novocaine and my tongue is numb. What's going on?
SPEAKER_13: Is your tongue just out of practice?
SPEAKER_08: I couldn't figure out what was going on. And then I brought up a knife.
SPEAKER_13: And John claims that when he looked at the reflection of his tongue in this metal knife. I see that my tongue is as flat and smooth as this Formica tabletop I've got my hand
SPEAKER_08: on in the studio. And you've got the little bristly furry things? Right. And I realized I haven't used it in so long that my taste buds have evaporated. They're gone. And at the moment that that happens, my oldest son Teddy, who was nine at the time, comes in and he says, Dad, you're not supposed to eat. I said to him, I wasn't eating. I wasn't eating. That's like you switch places almost. And he looked at me with the most scornful, disgusted, just ashamed expression. And I was completely humiliated. I normally failed as an eater. Shame flood. Right. I failed as a father as well.
SPEAKER_13: As the weeks dragged on and John didn't get any better, he actually started to take that thought seriously. Like maybe he really was failing at being a dad.
SPEAKER_08: I'm a stay at home dad. And as a result, I'm the shopper and the cooker and the food planner and the provider for us. And I was out of commission, three years out of work with no gut.
SPEAKER_08: Meanwhile, I can't stop thinking about food. I'm remembering food that I ate 20 years ago, like I had that afternoon. And I'm online looking up menus from restaurants that I've gone to. Really? Yeah. And looking up recipes, you know, for dishes that I've made.
SPEAKER_13: And this obsession grew and grew until one night, he says, his neighbor, Marsha, decided
SPEAKER_08: to cook for us one night when I wasn't eating. And she brought down a chocolate bundt cake for my wife and kids to eat.
SPEAKER_07: Walks it right past John on the way to the kitchen.
SPEAKER_08: And I could smell this thing. I could smell the rum. I could smell the eggs. I could smell the flour. I could smell everything. So again, he sneaks into the kitchen. And I lower my nose down to this bundt cake and I'm smelling it and I'm sniffing it and I'm inhaling this thing like an anteater. And that's not enough in my state. So I plunge my hands into the chocolate cake. You what? I plunge my hands into the chocolate cake. In order to get one with the goo or what? In order to get some sensation of connection with food.
SPEAKER_05: Did you think what's happening to me or did you think, oh, the joy? At the moment my fingers were in this cake, I felt I'm in heaven.
SPEAKER_08: I've reconnected with the living. I have food, if not in me, at least on me. And at the moment while I'm experiencing most pleasure, my wife comes into the kitchen.
SPEAKER_20: When I went in to get the kids some more food, I found him.
SPEAKER_13: This of course is John's wife Susan.
SPEAKER_20: With his hands in the cake just trying to touch the crumbs and he looks so guilty and I was also like, what are you doing? What are you doing? Like somebody going through an underwear drawer. It was very, you know, wrong.
SPEAKER_08: And I have no explanation. I mean, I can say I need to do this. You have no idea how wonderful this is. Please give me some time alone with my bundt cake.
SPEAKER_20: It was just, it was this bizarrely funny, but deeply sad perverse moment.
SPEAKER_13: Yeah.
SPEAKER_20: I suppose it was the first crack in my, in my bubbled attempt to pretend things were normal. You know, I realized how bad things had gotten.
SPEAKER_13: And after that, she says, things only got worse.
SPEAKER_20: It just became, there was never anything to be happy about. He wasn't able to eat. He wasn't sure what the prognosis was. He wasn't sure if he was going to need a second surgery. It was just all bad.
SPEAKER_13: She says John became really depressed.
SPEAKER_20: And he became very difficult to even, not even to cheer up, but just to say, well, let's just not talk about it for now. You know, he was constantly expressing his unhappiness.
SPEAKER_05: Was that, was that the thing? It was just the, it was dark all the time? Very dark.
SPEAKER_20: It just became very hard to face.
SPEAKER_13: So she left.
SPEAKER_20: Well, I had spring break and my kids had spring break.
SPEAKER_13: So Susan took the kids to her parents' place in Indiana for a week.
SPEAKER_20: I needed, I needed to take a break.
SPEAKER_13: Not for good. Maybe the kind of break that means I'm not really sure what our future looks like.
SPEAKER_20: I don't know how we're going to do this.
SPEAKER_13: And I can't really figure that out while I'm with you. So I was alone. Not entirely. While I was on the food pump and not doing well.
SPEAKER_13: But after a few days of moping around the house, John gets an idea. What I need to get myself out of this is I need to return to a place of sanctuary for
SPEAKER_08: me. There was a restaurant not far from your studio here called Chanterelle. It's a French restaurant. And it was one of these very expensive capital letter restaurants that my wife and I had always planned to go to if we had a special occasion. For years I walked past this restaurant and I would look in the window before getting onto the subway and I would see the plates of, you know, scallops coming out and the wine steward pouring, you know, red wine and the handwritten menus on the tables and things like that. So I thought if I can get to Chanterelle and if I can look through the window, then I can heal myself. I'll have a reason to hope. So I got on the subway and it was past four o'clock and I was supposed to be home starting up the pump and feeding. And I got off the subway and I walked over to Chanterelle and it was kind of a little dizzy and delirious. And I get to the window and the dining room is empty. There's dust on the floor. The wall panels have been stripped. The tables are bare. It's empty. It's a cave. Sometime in the intervening months or the preceding months, rather, Chanterelle has closed and I didn't know that. Oh, you're killing me with this story. And I think to myself, you've reached the end of the line. This is it. There's nowhere else to go. And I walked towards the river and I know that people throw themselves in when they do this. And it never made sense to me before. You know, I wasn't ever ready to end things. Were you really? Because I was...
SPEAKER_13: Were you having suicidal thoughts? I mean, I was having really depressed thoughts and I don't know that I would have thrown
SPEAKER_08: myself in, but it was the first time I was standing at the edge thinking about it, thinking about this is how these things happen. So I got to the river and I blacked out, collapsed on the sidewalk and I woke up and it was dark. I had scraped my chin and my elbows were bruised and I'd taken a hard fall. And I got up and I started to walk around. I was on this buckled old sidewalk and I looked around and there are these federal era houses and there was a grill, a gas grill in one of the backyards that was going. Somebody was cooking dinner and I could smell it. I could smell the smoke coming off the grill and I could smell it. It was pork chops. And I was so delirious and so happy to be smelling food that I took it upon myself to finish cooking this guy's meal. So we went. So I... That's so eerie. I lifted up the lid. I lifted up the lid and it looked like to me, you know, one side of the pork chops were cooked and they were ready to be flipped. So I flipped them and I was so far gone that I thought, OK, well, four more minutes and these babies are going to be ready to go. And I didn't have a watch. So I started counting off, counting down four minutes in my head because I was going to get this stuff perfect. And all of a sudden the back door of this townhouse opens up and a guy walks out with an apron on and a cocktail in one hand and a seasoned shaker in the other.
SPEAKER_08: And he looks at me and I look very borderline. I mean, I'm rail thin. I've got it. You know, I'm cut up from having fallen on the sidewalk. I've got, you know, a crazy expression in my eyes. I haven't shaved in a week. I look really very unsavory. So he sees me and I have no way of explaining myself other than to say they're just about done. And I hand him the tools and I turn around and I walk away before he has the chance to call the police or anything like that.
SPEAKER_05: How many years ago was this? This was now three years ago.
SPEAKER_13: And what do you take away from that? Was that a was that some kind of turning point where you walk away from the grill and you're ready to fight the good fight or what?
SPEAKER_08: That only happens in the movies and fairy tales. What actually happened was I got sick again. I had another infection, more bacteria, and I had to go back to the hospital. And when I went back to the hospital this time, they said, OK, we can't even do the food pump anymore because you keep getting these infections. And if the bacteria spreads to your bloodstream through the food pump, then you'll be gone. And we can't operate on you because you won't survive the surgery. So all we have left is to try eating. The only thing that's left is to go back to food because you can't ingest it intravenously. We're afraid of infection and we can't repair your gut surgically. So the only way you can keep yourself alive is to try to use your gut again. So they start you on a round of, I don't know, baby food, Gerber.
SPEAKER_08: I did start on the traditional applesauce and jello and pudding, soft and easily digested foods. And John says it worked.
SPEAKER_13: His body was able to take the food.
SPEAKER_08: But I couldn't taste anything. And it continued that way for another couple of months. And did the food ever taste like food again? Well, I was at the radiologist's. This is not the scene I was expecting. Well, you know, I have a little ritual with this particular radiologist. He's on the east side. And whenever I get tests there, when I'm done with the tests, I'm able to eat again. And again, this is when you do test prep, you're going about 24 hours without eating. So, you know, the thought of food becomes a celebration that you're going to have, right? So there's a diner on Third Avenue and 84th Street, 85th Street, that I always go to. And I get the same meal every time I sit at the counter. And I get a fried egg and bacon sandwich on whole wheat toast. So I went there and I got the last seat at the counter. And I ordered my usual. And I chew into it. And I realize that I've got sort of embryonic flavors going on. I've got the sort of the start of the sensation of tasting and the start of flavors in my mouth. And I could feel that great combination of the fried egg congealing with the crunchy bacon and the crunchy toast. And I do the same, you know, I've got a knife, a butter knife, and I do the same mirror knife examination at the counter. And I can see that where before it was shiny and smooth as a porpoise, I've got little bristles. I've got little bumps on my tongue. And I can taste this fantastic three dollar sandwich.
SPEAKER_05: Do you kiss the lady sitting next to you? Well, I turn to the guy sitting next to me and I tell him, this is the best damn thing I've ever eaten.
SPEAKER_08: And in classic New York diner fashion, he looks at me, he looks up from his Kindle, he looks at me and he says, you should try the meatloaf. And I think, you know, this is it. I'm back, baby. I'm back.
SPEAKER_12: Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Suzy Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Blum, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, Aketi Foster-Keys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Pascu-Thieres, Sindhu Nyanasanbandhan, Matt Keote, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Khary, Anna Raskuette-Pass, Sarah Sandback, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster, with help from Andrew Vinales. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.
SPEAKER_16: Hi, this is Tamara from Pasadena, California. Leadership support for Radio Lab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, Assignments Foundation Initiative and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
SPEAKER_00: WNYC Studios is supported by On Being with Krista Tippett. I'm Krista Tippett of On Being, where we take up the big questions of meaning for this world now. In our new podcast season, we're going to have a different human conversation about AI and also the intelligence of our bodies, grief and joy, social creativity and poetry, and so much more. A conversation to live by every Thursday.
