Shrink

SPEAKER_01: Listener supported. WNYC Studios. Dr. Joy Buolamwini warns that AI could hardwire all of the biases of today's world into our future. But this week on Notes from America, the poet of code explains how we can write a different future in tech. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_04: Hello, I'm Lulu Miller. If you joined us last week, you met the hidden body part, stowing away inside your body. And today we have another hidden story about life and non-life and how the line in between them is way blurrier than we might think. We are talking about viruses today. This episode is a rewind, but it's a lovely one. It's called Shrink. And what I love about it is not just that it busts a binary between life and non-life that I always thought was hard and fast, but also that as you listen, it really feels, at least to me, like Robert Krowitch and Jad Abumrad, OG hosts, that they kind of shrink down into these little boys who are so giddy with questions for Carl Zimmer. It's like they're, I picture them like two little boys at Santa's knee, just taking in the knowledge. And it's a really raw, lovely glimpse, I think, at what this show does best when it does its best, which is to make space for questions and for real listening. So I hope you enjoy this kind of giddy romp through the evolution of life and non-life and all the places where that line blurs out a bit. Here we go. SPEAKER_07: Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC. SPEAKER_04: See? Yeah. Rewind. Come on. You guys came saying we want to talk to you about three things. SPEAKER_08: Okay, okay, okay. Let's do that. Let's do that. We have to like keep up with this. Hey, SPEAKER_06: this is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. We're going to do something that's a little bit unorthodox today, at least for us. You know, if you've listened to the show in the last 10 years or so, however long we've been doing this, you understand that like, we like to edit, right? We like, we like a good edit, or 70. But today I want to play you something that has almost no edits at all. It's just a conversation, which is of course the foundation of what we do. These long, rambling, occasionally profane, error-strewn conversations that we then edit into something coherent. But today, I want to show you the messiness. No edits! This is a chunk of a conversation with science writer Carl Zimmer. He came and sat down with us a while back, and we talked for four hours. Two of those hours became the basis for the CRISPR podcast that was a few podcasts ago. This was about gene editing. But then we kept on going for another two hours, and he told us this story, actually two stories, but we're only going to play one, that I thought was really cool. And it's about this new way of SPEAKER_06: looking at life. Is this a long story, a medium story, or a short story? No, it's not a... We can get through this a lot faster than CRISPR. SPEAKER_06: Okay. I really like CRISPR, by the way. So do I. I'm into it. SPEAKER_08: CRISPR is... Yeah, it's the bomb. SPEAKER_07: Yeah, that's a perfect, perfect way to describe it. SPEAKER_08: Biological bomb. SPEAKER_06: Okay, so chapter two. Maybe you could start the story. Once Upon a Time. SPEAKER_08: Sure. So Once Upon a Time being... I'd say Once Upon a Time being before 2003. We basically had two kinds of living things on Earth. We had cellular life, and we had viruses, and it was nice and distinct and clear cut. And so cells included us, because our bodies are made of cells, and bacteria, which are single-celled, and all the other things that can grow and let their cells divide. They have DNA, they have proteins in them, they all that stuff. SPEAKER_08: And then over here, you had viruses, and viruses were just little packages of genetic material that would go from cell to cell and use the cell to make new viruses. And so inside of them, all they had were genes and a couple proteins that would then sort of hijack their host. I mean, they seem like so preliminary that they don't maybe not even qualify as life. SPEAKER_07: Right. They can't grow on their own. They can't generate their own energy. So us and SPEAKER_08: all other cellular life, we make a kind of a fuel called ATP. And we need that to do every little thing in our body. And viruses don't make ATP. So couldn't we say that life is us, cells and multicellular beings, and then there's SPEAKER_07: like sort of pseudo-life, which is these little things that live off of us? Yeah. Yeah. A lot of scientists don't really think viruses are truly alive. They just sort SPEAKER_08: of take advantage of life to make more copies of themselves. SPEAKER_06: Can I ask a dumb question? So viruses, they don't have a wall around them in the way that cell cells are walls, essentially, are walled off areas? SPEAKER_08: They might have a protein shell. And so, you know, when the flu virus goes into a cell, SPEAKER_08: that protein shell kind of breaks open and the genes and proteins inside come out. SPEAKER_06: They do have containers that contain them for a while. I see. Isn't that one of the, somebody who had a list of rules that make you alive and wasn't a container was one of those rules? I, yeah. But they don't do the energy, but they have the container at least. Right. So the problem with viruses is that they have some of the things that we think SPEAKER_08: are essential for life, but not quite all of them. So it's been convenient just to say viruses are not alive. Put them over there because they don't have everything that cellular life has. So we'll just say they're not alive. They're just viruses. Gotcha. And then? So then what happened is that there was a scientist named Timothy Robotham in England who was investigating a... Timothy Robotham? Timothy Robotham. That's a good English name. SPEAKER_07: Robotham with a ph? SPEAKER_08: Timothy Robotham was working in Bradford City in England. And he was looking at the kinds of bacteria that might be growing in a hospital. You know, like they were having some problems with pneumonia outbreaks and so on. And he was like, okay, what's growing around here? And so he went to a sort of a cooling tower for water on top of the hospital and he took a sample and he went and put it under his microscope and he's like, some interesting bacteria here. Oh, here's a very interesting bacteria that doesn't really look like anything I've seen before. SPEAKER_07: This guy would just kind of crawl around to weird places and just snatch little snippets of scum or what would he? Yeah. What was he? What was his job? He's a microbiologist. SPEAKER_08: Oh, of course. So, you know, it would be good to know. Like, I mean... Is that what microbiologists do? SPEAKER_07: They just go scrape little bits of rock or water tower? They search the world. Yeah. I mean, microbes are everywhere. SPEAKER_08: So microbiologists go everywhere to find microbes. So they're even, you know, in a water tower on a hospital. SPEAKER_06: Was he in a kind of an investigatory role? He was trying to help them figure out which bacteria are making people sick? SPEAKER_08: That was one of the hopes. But, you know, he was thinking of doing a survey because, you know, there are diseases like Legionnaires disease, which can, you know, grow in these sort of containers of water. You know, that's... There's some concern about that. So, you know, better to get to know what's growing. So he's particularly taken by one thing that he assumes is bacteria. And it's got a kind of interesting kind of roundish shape. And he called it... And when bacteria are round, you can call them cockeye or caucus. So he names this Bradford caucus. Gives it a name. SPEAKER_06: That's why the caucus name comes up? He's referring to the shape? Mm hmm. Like streptococcus? Is it because it's round? SPEAKER_06: I did not know that. The things you learn. Talk to Carl Zimmer. My God. SPEAKER_08: Okay. So he's trying to study this thing. And he's trying to... So when you're a microbiologist, the way you study bacteria is you get them to grow. And he can't get this to grow. He's feeding at things and it's like, it's not growing. Why is it not growing? I can't figure it out. And eventually, you know, he just hits a wall. And unfortunately, his lab got shut down. And so he basically said, okay, I don't want to throw this stuff out. So I'm going to give it to some of my colleagues in France. SPEAKER_06: It wasn't dying, which wasn't growing? Yeah. SPEAKER_08: So he gave it to a scientist named Bernard Lascola and his colleagues. And they kind of put him... Degnar Lascola. Oui. And he just says, he just sets it aside for a while and doesn't, you know, it's just more bacteria, you know. And it's for some reason, he decided to, you know, take a look at this Bradford caucus. You know, like, what was this thing that that Robotham was talking about? So he looks at it and he says, okay, this is the size of bacteria, but it looks like a gigantic virus. SPEAKER_07: Hmm. You know, it... So what is a gigantic virus? It's usually very small. Exactly. SPEAKER_06: So bacteria to a virus is like... SPEAKER_08: Like hundreds of times bigger. Hundreds of times. SPEAKER_07: Okay. So it's the Queen Mary to a small thingy. SPEAKER_08: So he looked up close and he was like, what is this thing? This doesn't look right. This, this, if I didn't know better, I'd say this is, this was a virus. SPEAKER_06: He's saying this based on its internal orientation? Its appearance. It's because it had the protein thingy. So, so, so a lot of viruses, they have a shell made of protein and the shell is kind of composed of plates. SPEAKER_08: So it's kind of looks like a soccer ball. Ah. Hmm. So it's a very distinctive look. Okay. SPEAKER_06: And it looked like that? SPEAKER_08: It looked like that. Didn't look like bacteria. SPEAKER_06: Oh, interesting. It was like, wait a minute. SPEAKER_08: Could this be a virus? SPEAKER_07: So this would be like, maybe like finding an enormous soccer ball in the woods. SPEAKER_06: Yes. So he'd found the, the Leviathan equivalent of a virus. SPEAKER_08: Right. It didn't make sense. It was, it was kind of crazy in that microscopic realm to say maybe this is a virus. SPEAKER_06: Wait. So didn't, so Brad Mumford, what's his name again? SPEAKER_08: Timothy Robotham. SPEAKER_06: Robotham didn't have this realization? Nope. He hadn't looked at it closely enough. SPEAKER_08: He looked at it. SPEAKER_06: But he just didn't somehow put the, put that this is a virus. It didn't click, of course. It was a Tuesday, you know. Wednesdays are, that's a virus day and this was Tuesday. SPEAKER_07: And, and it's, it's likely that other people were looking at the same things in years before. SPEAKER_08: SPEAKER_06: I'm thinking they were bacteria, not realizing. SPEAKER_08: Here's a big, here's something the size of bacteria. Well, in fairness, because viruses are always small, then you wouldn't think a big thing would be a virus. SPEAKER_07: Well, viruses are always small in the sense that they were discovered because they were small. SPEAKER_08: So basically, what scientists did was they discovered viruses by filtering fluid from a sick plant or a sick animal through a filter, porcelain actually. And it was so small that, that anything the size of bacteria got trapped in the porcelain and anything smaller came out. Oh. And lo and behold, they could find things that could cause sickness in that fluid that passed through the filter. SPEAKER_07: Also, the discovery of viruses meant it was innately small because that's how you filtered for them. SPEAKER_08: That's what they were looking for. That's interesting. So there were probably generations of scientists who were looking in through microscopes, saw some interesting round thing and assumed it was bacteria and it was probably a virus. SPEAKER_06: What the fuck is this giant, giant leviathan virus? I assume that was his question. SPEAKER_08: Well, I mean, first he had to really establish that it was. And so what happened was that he looked very closely at it and kind of worked out its chemistry. And the more he looked at it, the more it looked like a virus. He started, he started actually looking at its DNA, which hadn't been possible before. Turned out that its DNA resembled the DNA of viruses and not of any known bacteria. It didn't have, it didn't actually didn't have the equipment for making fuel inside of it. And then the real kicker was that he found out how to grow it. What he had to do is he had to stick this thing inside of amoeba and then out of the amoeba would come more Bradford caucus. SPEAKER_06: Just like a virus. SPEAKER_08: Exactly like a virus. So you need to change the name from Bradford caucus to something else. SPEAKER_08: Right. So, so they named it Mimi virus. Mimi virus? SPEAKER_07: Mimi virus? Because they were in France and Mimi is in the, in a French opera. Because it was a mimic. SPEAKER_08: It was mimicking. It was a mimic. Yeah. SPEAKER_06: Interesting. Mimi. Like a little, like a mini me. Mimi? Is that like a French word for mimic? SPEAKER_08: I think they just took, you know, the beginning of mimic and added it to virus. SPEAKER_06: Mimi virus. Very nice. I guess it's the same thing twice. Mimi. It's like mimic. Yeah. Okay. I get it. So. Interesting. Yeah. SPEAKER_08: So this, so this was, I mean, this was really bizarre when they, they published the report on this in 2003 and then people really scratched their head because remember, you know, ordinary viruses have, you know, maybe 10 genes. This one had 1,018 genes. Wow. SPEAKER_07: When you have 10 genes, those are the genes that, so you have a protein capsule and so you can swim through the thing. So when you land on a cell, you can burrow in and then explode and then make babies. So those are, there's not much to being a virus and just need a few genes for that. Why would you need a thousand? What would you say? SPEAKER_06: Does this thing have particular talents that the other viruses didn't have? Yes, maybe it was like. It does. It does. Oh, it does. What is it? Okay. SPEAKER_08: Well, so what's one thing that's really interesting is what happens when it goes inside its host, an amoeba. It goes in, but instead of kind of shedding off that protein code and just spilling out its contents, it actually goes in and stays as it was. You mean stays like in a container and everything just sort of? SPEAKER_07: Yeah. Oh. It's called the virus factory. SPEAKER_08: Once it's inside there, it's this thing they call the virus factory and it basically is able to, components come into it and then it has enzymes that can refashion them and then they, out come the components for new giant viruses. Or it doesn't have to go into the nucleus of the already existent cell? SPEAKER_06: No, it just floats in there. SPEAKER_06: Oh, interesting. So it, what does it do? Like it builds a little portal and then it sucks up some stuff? Yeah. It has this beautiful sort of, they call it a stargate because it's shaped like, it's a doorway shaped like a star and things come in and then out another stargate, these sort of manufactured things come out and then in the cell they assemble into new giant viruses. SPEAKER_06: Oh, so it spits out the raw materials and then self assemble into a giant, a giant leviathan? SPEAKER_07: No, baby giant leviathans, which then how do they get out of the, do they explode through the surface of the cell? SPEAKER_06: They just blow out. That's like a totally, that's a totally different thing. I've never heard of that. Yeah, I thought normally viruses just go into the machine that's already there because they're parasites. SPEAKER_07: They just use the living thing. Yeah. This thing is, I have a weird kind of respect for this thing. SPEAKER_08: Oh yeah, it's amazing. And you know, one of the amazing things about it is that it can get its own viruses. It gets, there are, really? Yes. So there are viruses of viruses. These things are called virophages and they actually go into the virus factory and hijack it. Oh, interesting. And instead out come virophages. Oh, wow. Oh yeah. SPEAKER_03: SPEAKER_06: As soon as you have a virus factory, that's what a virus wants. So now that the virus has its own virus factory, well it's going to get, it's going to be affected, viralized by the other viruses. Right. Weird. SPEAKER_07: Yeah, weird is the right word, I think. SPEAKER_08: Right. Now in 2003, you know, you could say, well, this is one weird virus. But the scientists said, well, hmm, I wonder what else there is. Like, SPEAKER_07: Well, did that, wait a second. So they said, okay, it's got all this extra genetic power, but it's doing this sort of special circus act here. It's building its own factory and it's just behaving differently from it. So maybe it just needs all those genes to do this special thing it's doing. SPEAKER_08: The problem was that when they looked at these, you know, 1,018 genes, most of them didn't match anything anyone had found before. SPEAKER_06: These are new genes. SPEAKER_08: Genes, yeah, that you couldn't even guess at what they were at. This has got to be from, like, this is like an alien. SPEAKER_06: This is from Saturn, this thing. Is that where you're driving with the story? Not quite, but kind of. SPEAKER_08: I mean, SPEAKER_07: So wait a second. So they look at all the genes, they look at the chemistry of life as it's known, and they don't find any matches for this little thing? This big thing, really? For most of the genes, they couldn't find a match. SPEAKER_08: You know, you can look at, I mean, Wow, that's a double mystery. SPEAKER_07: Like, what is it? What is this? And where does it come from? It doesn't seem to have the smell of Earth life. SPEAKER_08: Yeah, except that it uses DNA. I mean, it uses protein. It uses our chemistry, but it's doing something weird. And so these scientists said, well, okay, they looked in an English hospital, you know, water cooling tower. Let's go look at one here in France. And so they looked and they found another giant virus, which is even bigger than the one that they had already found. Where was it in the hospital in France? In the air conditioning unit? It was in another cooling tower. SPEAKER_06: Jeez, this is like a, this is a cooling tower phenomenon so far. Rooftop biology. SPEAKER_08: Well, it's Excitement galore. It's more like the drunk looking for the keys under the lamppost, you know. It's like, you know that? Oh, this is wherever you look, there it is? We know that we know there was giant viruses found in one water tower. So let's go look in another water tower. Like, that's our safest bet. And hey, look, we found an even bigger one, you know, which they, which had An even bigger one? It was even bigger. Yeah. So instead of a 1,018 genes, it had 1,059 genes. So they named this one Mama virus. SPEAKER_00: SPEAKER_07: Mimi's first cousin Mama. Right, right, right. Did Mama do the things in the cells that Mimi didn't do? Or it was the same, did it also build a factory? SPEAKER_08: Yeah, it was, it was making a virus factory. So it was like, so there's something, there's a common theme here with these two. Now you have two giant viruses doing the same thing. And it's the whole Stargate and everything? Yeah. What's weird is that, you know, the Mama virus has a bunch of genes that Mimi virus doesn't have. So it's like, and again, don't match anything that people can figure out. So they don't know what these extra ones do? Some of them look like they're involved in building proteins, which doesn't make any sense because viruses are not supposed to do that. So it's, it's, this is all completely confusing. But then they say like, okay, maybe we need to kind of get away from the whole water tower thing and you know, widen our little... Where would you go? SPEAKER_07: Like, so the opposite of a water tower would be like the bottom of a well or is it, or do you go to a library and look in the interior of old parchment books? SPEAKER_08: No, you start looking at places like, you look, you look in the ocean or you look in sediment or you look inside animals or you look in the soil and they start finding giant viruses over and over and over again. Really? Yeah. SPEAKER_07: In all those places? In many... Soil inside of animals, like in animal tummies or something? SPEAKER_08: Yeah. So they, they went to, these researchers went to Brazil and said, let's go look at animals and see if we can find giant viruses. And they found a new species in cows and they found a new species living inside of a monkey. SPEAKER_06: And these were, were they finding giant or giant viruses? I mean, the numbers of genes were going up and up and up. Yeah. They would, they would keep finding new record breakers. SPEAKER_08: So, so the, the biggest one right now is called Megavirus. SPEAKER_07: That's the summer movie. Megavirus. I mean, there's, you know... Bigger than Mimi and bigger than Mama. SPEAKER_07: Mega in a world. SPEAKER_06: In a world. You got it. SPEAKER_08: That's right. It's like the truckasaurus, you know, like this is like, I, I'm wondering what they're going to do as they keep finding bigger ones because you keep having to find superlatives for these things. Well, where was mega found? SPEAKER_07: And what, where was, what was it? SPEAKER_08: Mega, I believe was found in the ocean. SPEAKER_06: And how many genes does mega have? Mega has 1,120 genes. SPEAKER_08: Okay. So we're... But it's not actually the big, so it has the most genes, but it's not actually the physically the biggest giant virus. Which was? So this, this one is called a Pandora virus. It was found in a box. SPEAKER_07: Let me guess, you know, in a sealed box and then they opened it and oh my gosh. SPEAKER_08: Well, it's shaped, it has this bizarre shape like an urn. Uh-huh. Which is completely nuts. There's no urn shaped viruses. Crazy. SPEAKER_06: And, and, and the urn, did that remind somebody of the myth of what? So Pandora's box was actually an urn. Oh, it was. Okay. Oh, I see. Oh, why did they call it Pandora's box then? SPEAKER_07: God, that's a very learned... Just to make you happy. Very learned naming. Because you love where they found it. Where did they find it? SPEAKER_08: So what they did was, uh, these Russian scientists they were collaborating with dug up frozen tundra that had been frozen for 30,000 years. And they said, let's thaw this out and see what's in there. What kind of things have been asleep for 30,000 years? SPEAKER_06: And it sounds like the beginning of a sci-fi movie right there. SPEAKER_08: Among other things they found... In a frozen land. They found Pandora virus. SPEAKER_08: And they, not only did they find it, but they, when they let it warm up a bit, uh, and then they gave it some amoeba to check out. They did its thing. They did its thing. SPEAKER_06: Wow. And how much bigger, if the first, uh, giant virus you introduced us to was like an elephant sized mouse, compared to that elephant sized mouse, how much bigger is this one? Um, maybe it's more specific than you want to be. SPEAKER_08: I need to look at the numbers, but you know, you're kind of going from, I don't know, elephants to dinosaurs. You're getting bigger and bigger and bigger. You're, you know, we're not talking about, you know, Pandora virus is bigger than a lot of bacteria. SPEAKER_07: Wow. So wait a second. So these things are now being found everywhere you look? I mean, they are incredibly common. SPEAKER_08: They've even been able to get giant viruses out of people. SPEAKER_07: Really? Yeah. We did. SPEAKER_06: What's, uh, where are you finding them in a person? SPEAKER_06: In our intestines or something? SPEAKER_08: Um, I believe they found one sample in somebody's lungs. Um, and another sample was found in someone's blood, but it's really hard to tell whether they're actually like actively invading us and making us sick. You know, maybe instead of invading amoebas, they can invade human cells. Cause maybe on human cells are surprisingly similar. Um, or is it just kind of along for the ride with some amoeba that infect us? Um, or does it kind of drift in and when people are sick, their defenses are down. So we don't know if giant viruses have anything to do with human disease, but. SPEAKER_08: It's strange to me though, you have a category problem here. SPEAKER_06: That if you've got a giant virus that's virus like in its general shell, but it's making proteins, it's got a bunch of genes that viruses don't have. You're already bigger than some bacteria. Shouldn't we call it as its own separate thing at this point? That's what people are arguing about right now. SPEAKER_08: I mean, do we keep that line between viruses and cellular life and just put the giant viruses with the viruses or do we kind of blur the line a bit? This feels like it's on its way from one category to the other. SPEAKER_08: So that's, that's one of the big questions is like, what way did this thing go in evolution? SPEAKER_07: What does that mean? SPEAKER_08: Well, how do you get a giant virus? Like how do you? How do you? Well, that, so, so we'll get to the potential answer to that question, which I SPEAKER_06: think is totally fascinating after the break. SPEAKER_05: Hey, it's Letif. You know how sometimes at the end of the year, you're sort of looking back over what happened and you start to notice like secret patterns this year for us at Radiolab, it was birds. So as a little extra this month, we designed a set of stickers for new signups to our membership program, the lab. We had the golden goose vultures from Corpstein and the lesbian seagulls, the Sci-Hub Raven from the library of Alexandra head over to radiolab.org slash join to check them out. Chirping in will help us make this show that we love. Thank you for considering it. SPEAKER_02: I just love the opera. Never been? Then come with me. I'm Rhiannon Gittins host of Aria Code, the podcast where together we explore the magic of opera one song at a time for diehard fans and newcomers alike. The best part, no tux or ticket or high heels required. Listen to Aria Code wherever you get podcasts. SPEAKER_06: Hey, Jad here, Radiolab. So we're going to return to our conversation with science writer Carl Zimmer. It's an unedited conversation. And we were talking about giant viruses and what they can teach us about life, which really starts with a simpler question of like, where the hell do they come from? SPEAKER_08: How do you get a giant virus? Like how do you, how do you? Well, so, so one clue comes from those genes. So now that they're finding more and more of these giant viruses, they're finding enough variety of them. They can, they can look for a service, some, some common genes that they share, some, some common mutations and genes. And they're finding actually that, that it looks like giant viruses might actually belong to one lineage. SPEAKER_07: Oh, interesting. So they're cousins, they have a common ancestor? Yeah. So it's a tribe of a sort. Right. And if that's, if that's true, SPEAKER_08: it could be an incredibly old tribe. These, these giant viruses could be a lineage conceivably that, you know, goes all the way back to, you know, the early stages of life. SPEAKER_07: The dawn of time. In a world. It's really old? Like back to the very beginning of life on earth? Um, to that era. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, SPEAKER_08: maybe when cellular life was getting started. But the question is, well, what were the giant viruses like then? Now, some people have said, well, no, giant viruses actually started out as teeny tiny viruses and they've just been like gathering up new genes through time and just been getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Um, but you know, a number of the people who actually studied giant viruses and have really, you know, helped us to understand the most, they're saying, no, we don't think so. We actually think that these things started out as cellular life. They were cells, they were full blown cells. SPEAKER_07: And. Oh, you mean they were from the other side of the road? They were in cellular life. And then what, they switched sides? Yeah. They changed teams. Yeah. How, how did, no, that like, I can't have a plant that becomes an animal. How did they, SPEAKER_06: so they've started off as like what we would call creatures. Right. And then they started out truly alive. You know, they, they, SPEAKER_08: they free standing out there in the air or the water or the ground or yeah, SPEAKER_08: just some, like some free living microbe. Yeah. And then that could, then why would they be, why would you go demote yourself? This is, this is your problem with parasites. You keep saying mean things about parasites. Well, how many years have we been talking about parasites? That might tell you nothing. SPEAKER_07: If I had a choice between being a intake, having my own integrity and choosing to make a living on my own or to suck off you, I would just live on my own. Excuse me for, I know you like parasites, but honestly. Could you not use that, that passage in the recording? SPEAKER_08: It's already been cut. Um, SPEAKER_06: so, so wait a second. So you, according to this theory, you have a microbe. It stands true, never the less. We have a microbe that is, um, that is doing its thing and then something happens. Okay. What is the something? It becomes a parasite. SPEAKER_08: It becomes a parasite. Or at least, you know, maybe a symbiont. Here, basically what it does is it starts living inside another cell. SPEAKER_07: You mean it gives up its integrity as an, as a, as a free life form, a freestanding life form. SPEAKER_06: Just so we understand what that means. That means that it's got a shell, it's got a border, it's making its own energy. It's replicating in the way that at the beginning, at the beginning, at the beginning, it can make its own energy. It can grow, it can divide. SPEAKER_08: It can do all the things that living things do. Yeah. SPEAKER_07: And then for some reason it chooses to require some other creatures existence for its own. It has, it has to become dependent on some other organism for its very, very existence. SPEAKER_08: Well, let's flip it the other way and say it discovers a wonderful new home inside of another cell. It's a, it comes in and like, just like I love leaving my Park Avenue apartment for a dark cave. SPEAKER_07: It's a new and exciting opportunity. No, no, no, no, no, no. Au contraire. SPEAKER_08: Au contraire. Like imagine, imagine like you, let's, let's imagine you're like Bear Grylls. Okay. Let's imagine you are like hiking around and killing your own food. Okay. I, I let's, let's try to picture this. Okay. Robert doing this? You're gutting your deer. You're starting your own fires. You're going on and on and on. And you do that for like a few years. And then, and you're walking through the jungle and then. You're very, very skinny. It's not going well. SPEAKER_06: So Robert Krolwich, the haggard hunter, SPEAKER_08: and let's say you're doing this in Minnesota, right? So it's like cold. Okay. And then suddenly like you, you, there's a break in the forest and you come across a giant mansion and you're like, what is this place? And you open the door and inside there's like, conveyor belts with ice cream and steak and you know, and, and there are slippers waiting for you and you know, anything you need, it's, it's, somebody else is taking care of it. There is one thing you left out when I walk into this magical kingdom of SPEAKER_07: Minnesota. It doesn't let me out. I can't leave ever again. Because I am become so dependent on its natural wonders that I lose my independence, my integrity, and the very, very thing that I walked in with is now gone. We did literally have this conversation a few years ago. We did. It's true. SPEAKER_08: We did. And I did point out to you at the time that you are quite dependent on, on other species. Do you want me to bring up? I will just, I would just say see episode 32. Jad's eyes will roll right out of their sockets. SPEAKER_06: SPEAKER_08: So, so like becoming, being able to take advantage of another cell, evolutionarily speaking is, is a great way to go because you have all these things taken care of for you. Now, the, the, in, according to this theory, these, these mysterious ancient microbes started going into these cells and reproducing there and then going out again and then finding another host cell to infect. Okay. Were they making like were they making their hosts sick? SPEAKER_08: Probably. Yeah. Probably. Yeah. Because giant viruses are not good to get. SPEAKER_06: See, this is, this complicates your mansion metaphor just a tiny bit because what it means is that you go in the conveyor belt and you're feeding yourself and having a good time, but then your filth starts to muck up the place and it starts to collapse from within. That doesn't sound so nice. To strain the metaphor a bit. SPEAKER_08: Go boy, go boy. SPEAKER_07: Robert Krowitch. No, no, don't even try referring to me. Now it's going to him. SPEAKER_08: Okay. I'm just trying to understand. So, so you, you spend some time in this wonderful mansion. You, you rest, it's warm, it's comfortable, so on. You, you, you eat. You fill it with your filth. You start a family, you know, and then all of a sudden you and your descendants, you know, leave the mansion. The mansion just collapses from all the damage you did to it. But you know, actually you see in the distance there's another mansion. Let's just go over there. Now you feel like rested and ready and like, yeah, all we got to do is get over there. So let's just go there. We don't have to, we don't have to stop to kill a deer. We just go to that next mansion. The ice cream is waiting. I still got to walk, so I need my legs, so to speak, to get to the next mansion. SPEAKER_06: But I don't need the powerful muscles that I would have needed to kill the deer. I can let go of those. You don't need, even need, you know, let's say that you're, you know, SPEAKER_08: you don't even need the knowledge of how to kill a deer. SPEAKER_07: Be blind, dumb and fat. That's where you end up. So these things, these things, these things get, SPEAKER_08: excited. They get rid of, they start getting rid of these genes. And how does that happen? Just, you know, a random mutation comes along and just cuts out a bit of DNA. Cause it doesn't need them. You're fine. Yeah. You're like, that's okay. Is it a moment where, Oh, there goes a big chunk of me. God, I don't need that. SPEAKER_08: I mean, that's a regular kind of mutation that happens all the time. Really? In cells. Oh yeah. Yeah. But then your, your, SPEAKER_07: your successor being just travels a little bit lighter and is able to succeed just as well. SPEAKER_08: Right. So, you know, if, if, if, if, you know, if, if we are born, you know, with, with a part of our DNA that's deleted that had some, you know, like hemoglobin genes in it, like good night, like that's bad. I mean, but, um, you know, but if you cut out a gene that this giant virus no longer needs because it's got everything supplied to it in its host, fine. So Chuck that, Chuck it out. So you have this. So the idea is that you, that these viruses, they're giant viruses, but they're actually been shrinking. Huh. And at, SPEAKER_06: at a, at a, how fast does a giant, like the imagining back at the end, in the beginning there was, there was not mega, not Gino, but like a cellular being, right? Oh, a cellular being. Right. Okay. So this, I mean, cellular beings with all of the privileges and joy, independent life. SPEAKER_06: Size wise, it's a blimp. It's a massive thing and then suddenly it starts to shrink bit by bit by bit by bit. What, at what rate does it start to shrink and shed itself? SPEAKER_08: Well, it could be that these giant viruses we're finding that these giant viruses that scientists are finding could be shrinking very, very, very slowly. It could be that there are other viruses that made this transition that shrank faster. SPEAKER_00: So maybe, maybe it's a race to the bottom. SPEAKER_08: Maybe some, some, maybe some tiny viruses are just former giant viruses that just shrank really fast. Race to the bottom. It's such a different way of thinking about life. You, SPEAKER_07: you generally assume being a multicellular organism yourself that little things in some deep sense, though you're not supposed to say this, want to be big things. You don't want to say this. I know, I know. But most people, unlike you asshole, most people think that it's better to be more complex than to be simple. But here you're talking about a different voyage altogether. It might just work out for you to be simple rather than complex. Um, I think that's a good thing. Well, given that, that viruses are insanely abundant on this planet, SPEAKER_07: I mean there are by some estimates, SPEAKER_08: uh, 10 to the 31st power viruses on earth. Think about that. Like it's a, it's a, you know, it's a one with 31 zeros after it. I mean, it's inconceivable how many viruses there are on earth. So it's their world. So apparently, you know, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, apparently, you know, nature has not agreed with you, but you know, it is interesting like, uh, thinking about how, how life gets smaller and simpler. That's interesting. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. If it's true that this trajectory is as, as common as you say that things start out sometimes, start out big, and then learn to live inside other things and in the process gets smaller and smaller and smaller. and smaller and this is actually maybe what happens to a lot of viruses not just some viruses. It in a way it gives the virus an honorable history. SPEAKER_07: I don't know why I feel that way. This boy isn't gonna sign up for that. No, he's not gonna sign up for that and I don't. SPEAKER_06: That's okay. SPEAKER_08: Well, an honorable history, but then I mean it abandoned its free-living past, right? It did. It gave in to the temptations of the mansion full of steak and ice cream. SPEAKER_06: It's true, but I've always assumed and this is not something one should assume that viruses were a kind of proto-organism. They were somehow at the beginning of something and they never quite got going. Yeah. But you're actually saying that these viruses are in a way at the end, not at the end, but they're at the, I don't know how to quite use the words that I want to use. They feel somehow at the end of something not at the beginning. Like you just took what I considered to be the beginning and you've now made it an end. An end. And that's interesting. I never, that's... Yeah, that's very interesting. Yeah. SPEAKER_08: Very interesting. So life can go in different directions. SPEAKER_06: And how far can that reverse journey go? I mean can you go from like, how big did that, was it ever like a turtle with things or no, a giant dinosaur? No? No, sorry. No. SPEAKER_08: There are things called, I believe they're called myxozoans, which started out as free living animals and have become parasites and they're just down to just a few cells. SPEAKER_06: Wait, wait, wait, wait. Myxozoans? You say free living animals, you don't mean animals in the way that anyone would think of an animal. Like a jellyfish. Like, oh look, my pet fluffly, not like that. SPEAKER_08: Well my pet jellyfish. Really? SPEAKER_06: Really? Yeah. So you're saying a jellyfish sized thing has now reduced itself to a tiny speck? You're doing microscopic parasite of fish. SPEAKER_07: Get the frick. Don't even say it, because you can't do it if you're that small. SPEAKER_06: That's insane. Really? It's like going from something you can see and would want to avoid while swimming down to something that you might even just breathe in without even knowing it. SPEAKER_06: Wow. You're blowing my mind. Shrinking my mind. What was it called again? SPEAKER_06: Myxozoans. SPEAKER_08: I believe they're called Myxozoans. A Myxozoan? Yeah. How do you spell that? M-Y-X-Z-O-A-N. I'm trying in my mind to construct a scenario where we, like the Myxozoans, could begin SPEAKER_06: to shed. Like, if we were living inside the, like, not the iPhone, but the iHome, the iUniverse. Well, you know, but the fact is that we have cast aside some things. SPEAKER_08: You know. What have we cast aside? Well, we can't. I mean, we used to smell better. I know that. We could smell better. We're making our own vitamin C in our own bodies. Our own bodies, we're vitamin C factories. Really? SPEAKER_06: Yes. What changed that? Why did we want to let go of that? That sounds great. SPEAKER_07: Sunshine vitamin C? Yeah, making your own supply of vitamin C. Well, if you are sitting around eating fruit SPEAKER_08: all the time, fruit which is loaded in vitamin C, then if you get a mutation on your vitamin C gene, well, you're fine because you're getting your vitamin C from somewhere else. You don't feel that lack. You don't start getting scurvy because you're feeding yourself on fruit. SPEAKER_08: And then that mutated gene may then spread out and end up being in every member of your species, which seems to happen to us. I mean, you can literally like see like these, we have these broken vitamin C genes. SPEAKER_06: So sometimes we shrink too. Yeah. SPEAKER_00: Okay. SPEAKER_06: So there you have it, a raw conversation with science writer, Carl Zimmer about shrinking, shrinkage in life. Now, usually what happens in these conversations is because you're just talking and because you don't really have like an encyclopedia sitting right next to you, you get a lot of the little things wrong, little details, little facts, names, dates, whatever. And then, you know, you fact check it later. So in fairness to Carl, as we were fact checking, we gave him the chance to listen back to the raw conversation. Let's make a couple of amendments. This is fact checker Carl scolding, rambling Carl. SPEAKER_08: Okay. So, okay. We were saying that this microbiologist, Tim Robotham took his samples to France, but actually there was another microbiologist named Richard Birtles that did it. Gotcha. Small but important. Sorry, Richard. Our apologies. Yeah. So I started talking about genes, mama virus turns out to have 1,023 genes, not 1,059 genes. My apologies. Then I started talking about mega virus at the time in 2011, it was indeed the biggest virus known 1,120 genes. Okay. Okay. However, there was in 2013, a another virus found called Pandora virus. Now I was saying that this was something found the Siberian tendra wrong. SPEAKER_08: This was found in the ocean and this virus has a whole lot of genes. SPEAKER_06: How many? SPEAKER_08: It has 2,500. Whoa. 2,500. I mean, that's way more than a lot of bacteria. SPEAKER_06: Also at a certain point, and we do refer to Pandora virus as being the biggest virus in size. Actually that distinction goes to pithovirus. And also it seems that since we talked, there's evidence that there might actually be a couple separate lineages of giant viruses. One may have evolved from big to small as we talked about, but another one might have gone in the usual direction from small to big. SPEAKER_08: There's one last thing that I see. So apparently, apparently I didn't quite spell myxozoan correctly. This is how you spell myxozoan. M-Y-X-O-Z-O-A-N. Apparently I missed one of those O's. I can't remember. SPEAKER_06: I mean, I'd be lying if I say I didn't think a little bit less of you now. Okay. Extra O, back in. The raw stupidity that goes into radio lab. SPEAKER_08: Stupid people interviewing stupid people. SPEAKER_06: About smart things. That's funny. That's a great tagline. Okay. That's our new tagline. I'm Chad Iboomrod. Thanks for listening. SPEAKER_03: Radiolab was created by Chad Iboomrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keith is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Blum, Becca Bressler, Kety Foster-Keys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nyana Sambadam, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Alyssa Jong Perry, Sara Khare, Sarah Sambak, Arian Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Timmy Broderick. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, my name is Michael Smith. SPEAKER_00: I'm calling from Pennington, New Jersey. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, the Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.