Listener supported WNYC Studios. Wait, you're OK? You're listening to Radiolab Radio from WNYC. Hey, it's Jad Radiolab. This is dispatch number six calling, I'm initiating the call.

Hi, can I speak to Mark, please? This is he. Hello.

Hi, Mark, this is Jad and I'm also here with Molly from from Radiolab. Hi, Mark. Molly, nice to meet you. Hi.

Um, thanks for taking the time. We're OK.

As I mentioned last week, we've all been thinking about time these days and in this dispatch to completely unexpected time wormholes that I fell into while reporting about the coronavirus and just trying to get through this great pause that we're all in the first first wormhole deals with a guy who, as much as anyone, has really helped us understand the enemy that we're up against.

His name is Mark Dennison. He works at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee. Well, all right, I thank you again for making the time, super appreciate it. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, you know, we just want to ask you some questions about your background, questions about the drug. I got Molly to come on because Molly is much smarter about these kinds of topic areas than I am. And she's been following your work as well.

So I know just those words alone. We've been following your work or like words I just have never heard before.

You are having, like, a bit of a rock star moment. Yeah.

Yeah. It was not my goal. Definitely not my goal. But yeah, you know, it has been a it has been a sort of a little bit of a down the rabbit hole through the looking glass sort of experience. And. What makes the moment so looking lastly for Mark is that he's been studying coronaviruses for 30 years. This thing that we've all just woken up to, which is actually a very ancient virus, by the way, his lab has been studying it for three decades, which in human caronna time feels like an airlock.

His lab was the one that figured out one of the really novel parts of the coronavirus family, which is that they've got a built, in fact, checker that allows them to fact check the copies that they make of themselves as they get made, which is what has allowed them to grow big and become complex. His lab figured that out in 2007. Seven years ago, they figured out how to trick that fact checker and disrupt the virus's ability to make copies of itself, which has led to a drug, this may be the most sought after drug on our pandemic ridden planet.

You've probably heard of the experimental antiviral drug called Grendell Severe Desert Virus. Disappear and disappear, disappear. The FDA is expected to grant emergency approval of the drug. Is this the hope so many have been waiting for?

Ramdas we're in. Preliminary data has been found to shorten recovery times from covid but significant positive effect under certain circumstances. It's shortened. Hospital stays by up to four days. This will be the standard of care.

I've studied it for seven years. I know it's really good at killing coronaviruses and every coronavirus we've tested in every animal, we've tested every aspect of it. So this is good. This is good.

This is good. But he says right now, the drug samiti drugs and so it can only be given to people in the hospital. You have to be in the hospital to get it. And if that's the case, you're probably already sick. So we started talking about all this and it quickly became clear that this guy who's been studying this ancient virus for 30 years, it's like he's been plucked out of obscurity and his sense of time has had to radically change.

All of a sudden, he's under a lot of pressure. People are pushing for results. His lab at Vanderbilt was one of the few facilities in the world that can work with the virus. So he's fielding calls from dozens and dozens of scientists. And companies are like, hey, I've got this compound. Can you test it against the virus? I've got a potential vaccine. We need your help running this experiment. We don't know how to do it, you know?

Yes, we feel the pressure.

It's like the world is suddenly asking him to go way faster and he thinks he can go.

I understand this is very different. This is outside of any scope with anything any of us have ever experienced in our lives. But a couple of things. One is, is I sort of been telling my people over and over again, this is too urgent to go fast.

Why wouldn't you say it's so urgent that we have to go fast?

You know, I think for multiple reasons. For one, he says just there are some basic limits. Like if you're experimenting with a virus in the lab, you've got to grow it in the lab. And that takes time.

You know, it takes two days or three days and culture to grow. If you're testing it with a drug, it may take longer. You know, what have you done today is is really a test to what have you done this week and this month, which is sort of counter to the speed, the need for speed. And I just I just tell people that I will never make them accelerate their work to meet a deadline, that the virus biology won't allow that.

So you're not just kind of going out to do an experiment, but then we start talking more about the lab itself, the BSL three biosafety level three lab, which he runs at Vanderbilt University. This is where they do the experiments on these dangerous pathogens.

It took him two years to just set up the lab to begin with because it's got to be built in exactly the right way with the right air conditioning units that always suck air in a certain direction, in the right rooms, within rooms, within rooms to make sure everything's always contained inside. It's one of the most regulated places on Earth.

And he says when you are in that kind of space, it forces you into a completely different time flow where it could be a cell.

Three is hyper methodical. You do one thing at a time, like you take a flask and if you open, you open. You don't do anything with your hip or your elbow or your other hand or your head. You know, you do everything. With an intentionality that's very good, sort of a. really how we trained to kind of move forward fast and do lots of things in a day. You take a flask out, you move it to the incubator.

You set it down and you go back and you close an incubator, everything is written down, you follow the guidelines, you follow them one step at a time. Your phone's you can't answer a phone. You can't respond to an email. The world sort of comes to stop what you're working in there.

And you have to do that because it's so dangerous. Yeah, no one can tell you to speed up when you're in the best of three.

Set about eight inches from my mouth. Right. Should I just hold it like that?

No one can tell you to go fast, maybe just a little closer to your mouth. OK, there was something about the way Mark talked about the BSL three, the way people have to move and operate in that place. That made me want to talk to someone from his lab who worked there.

My first name is Andrea. My last name is Deitsch Process, which nobody can pronounce here. My husband always says trousers, European Salvati. So trousers. And what do you do with the LE? I direct the coronavirus and the federal research program.

What's an average day like? Can you walk us through it? Yeah, yeah. So first of all, we usually we prepare a lot outside the room because everything that goes into the room can never come out. I leave a note on my door that I'm going to be a cell three and by the time I'm going there, because if I'm not back in about six hours, somebody needs to come check on me. All right. It's Monday morning.

I am talking to you. A cell three walk down the hall with our car. I got my stuff loaded onto a cart with our supplies and most of the morning making about dilutions. This truck that I'm testing again, sars-cov-2. And I'm ready now. Do you ever get scared of the viruses you work with? When we got that shipment of sars-cov-2 so the current coronavirus from the CDC, I did check a little bit opening that box.

You know, it was it was a big deal.

When I approach, I can't really go into too much detail. I'm here now, I can't tell you where to be. This all three is because it's about a security issue. Does your husband know where it is? He does not know. Absolutely not.

He doesn't need to know that myself and. And now I'm in the ante room, which is where I get dressed and put on my PPE and so in the ante room we take street clothes off, cover ourselves in Tifa head to toe, putting on gloves. We were two pairs of gloves there. And then I'm going to put on my pepper, just my respirator turning it on. Now why are you totally enclosed which I like. This is the spine.

It's working correctly. I feel kind of like an astronaut when all that said and done so then once I'm all suited up now I'm ready to go in. I let myself in and then and then I start my work, I set up my workspace and I take the virus out of the freezer right now. This is so scary to you. It's in a small tube. I checked the box. Is there any lights flashing? I need to be aware of everything that goes on around me because we have redundant safety mechanisms.

But if they are failing, I need to know about that. And I'm going to put it in a micro centrifuge centrifuge just for a little bit. It's very important that you're always aware of where you are. There's somebody behind me or someone next to me who might I potentially bump into.

All right. So the sound of the micro side of things being done, I'm going to take it out now and set up my ass DeLucia virus further.

You move your head, you look around, you're always aware of where you are, whose path you might be blocking. We're bigger than we normally are because we wear all that equipment.

Oh, yeah, right. In fact, that these cells are traditionally known as the incubator for about half an hour.

Always know where your hands are every time you touch it too. There might be a little bit of virus on our gloves, so we always have to be aware of what we touch and what order we touch it in.

All right. Now I'm going to quantify the number of infectious viral particles in a mixture. So whenever we open a tube of virus, it's inside the safety cabinet. You drop some volume, you put the volume in the next tube. That's already open because I don't want to have to worry about having the liquid in my pipe picked up and then have to open the tube because it could create aerosols. We're very concerned about aerosols, which are tiny little droplets that could land on other things and they could contaminate other things.

So we put it in the tube and then we move it kind of in the same line, in the same direction.

Basically, what I'm doing here is looking at evidence sheets of cells, Andrea says, just to be allowed to walk in the room.

It takes six months of training. They have all kinds of protocols for everything. Everything is very protocol driven to learn all the rules, how to move, how to do things in the precise order, one thing at a time, methodically. At first, she says, it's kind of stressful. But then a funny thing happens. There comes a point where the thoughts in your mind affect the cells and kills it and then to the next, just settle.

It's it's kind of a place of Zen. Because we are focused, we are alert. I'm just in the know my heart rate lowers. I don't have any thoughts. In fact, it's not a good idea to think about other things, the only thing I can do is, is listen to the music and the music is sometimes inspiring me to kind of bob my head a little bit without moving my hands involuntarily, of course. In the Zen's space, do you I'm wondering what your relationship with time is?

It's funny because the clocks and I keep dying. I think it's something about the airflow and the battery keeps corroding.

So know, my God, time doesn't work in there. Sorry.

What time doesn't work in the BSL three. Yeah, I do lose time. You have to really find your Zen space. I say that because when you're in a respirator with your head and there's an eyelash falls through your eye, there's nothing you can do about it. Oh, wow. Oh, there's a lack of hair just poking your eye every every few seconds. What do you do in that situation? I think it's a Buddhist principle. Kind of acknowledge it.

I just tell myself, yeah, this is really annoying. There's nothing I can do about it. So I'll just focus on my work.

It's a profound, profound mindfulness.

It is funny because I was saying to Jad at one point I was like, it's like we've when you started describing the lab earlier in the conversation, it reminded me of this feeling that I've had enough of like it feels like Coronavirus has asked us all to be very present.

Yeah. Like, there's really no future, you know, that we're planning for. Yeah.

The way Mark puts it, coronavirus has its own time. It's ancient. It's been around for millions of years circulating in bats.

Now it's in us and how we feel about that.

Whether we think the pandemic is over, we can all go back to our lives or whether we think it's only the end of the first part or whatever doesn't really matter.

And because it's got its own time that this gets to kind of it feels almost like an existential kind of a thing as well. Right. So personal care. If I was going to have entitlement articles, I don't care. I don't care. I don't care at all. And I don't have thoughts. I don't have feelings. You can project them on me if you want to, but all I do is find another host and I get into their cells and I replicate it.

Let's say there's even a half a billion people who have been infected with really project out. Well, there's seven point two who haven't been. This is a brand new virus in humans. This virus has never been humans before. And to commercialize again thinking about it. OK, well, I can go here. I can go in this tissue. Oh, I'm doing anthropomorphism. The virus is exploring it. And what is telling us? It's telling us about the difference in children and adults.

It's telling us about the difference between prefilled people to really old people. It's telling us about our immune system. But outside of the virology, it's also telling us about the fragility of the global organism of humans being our political and economic and social and cultural. Systems and habits that those are all being probed by the virus as well. And we're learning about how how we're all interweaved and interleave because it's it's breaking each of those apart and making us view them individually.

You it's weird, just occur to me like there's been this inversion, we're now living in the place where you work. Yes, we're all living in the VSL three basic protection. Who are you?

Let me reiterate. Without protection, no protection.

Coming up, one more time wormhole. Totally different situation. Totally different location. It's after the break. Hi. This is calling from Lincoln, Nebraska. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.

More information about Sloan at W w w dot Sloan dot org science reporting on Radiolab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a science foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Radiolab, we're back. OK, BSL three time we did that. Now for the second chapter time. Some context, so this began in in conversation with Molly, Molly Webster, she had been thinking a lot about all of these ideas and was sort of rolling them around.

I've just had so many conversations with people about. Time in this moment and like everyone trying to, I don't know, understand it or grapple with it or like somehow face sit down in a way that they never have before, like, I can only describe it as like a slipperiness, like, you can't quite hold on.

So as we were talking, can I tell you where my mind goes? Yeah, I told her a story about something that had just happened a couple of days before.

OK, so my family and I went to this farm that's not too far from where we're staying right now. Mm hmm. Bless you. Because all the parks are closed. There's nothing to do with the kids. So a friend of ours was like, oh, I know somebody who owns a farm very close to you. You just go there and walk around. She'd be totally cool with it. Henry the hook. Yeah. Jeff, Jeff, Jeff Flock.

So the four of us went there.

Great, Ramos'. I should say this was in Lebanon, Tennessee, appropriately enough, this all this huge farm, cows, goats, donkeys, sheep, they're all kind of milling around, no fences and. Yeah, so good question. And now I was walking next to a meal. My 10 year old time is actually frozen. How come it doesn't feel frozen to us?

And who's asking all these questions about space time?

Here's another question. Yeah. If I'm truly in a hologram, I think you just watched a PBS show about this. Holograms can rewind themselves.

That's true. How come?

It's sounds like why does time only go in one direction? Uh, does time ever. And it felt like he was processing some stuff about this moment. Maybe. So I just asked him, hey, I have a more ordinary question for you.

How has time felt over this pause or whatever we call it, where we had to go, start staying at home and move to Nashville? Natural stuff. Has it felt like it's gone faster as it felt like it's gone slower or does it feel normal? It feels like a long distance to. We're at home, we're really used to this, so, like time goes fast for us because, like, we're used to so high at home. So, like, when we hear time go slower, basically, because, like, we don't know the place at all.

Interesting. Yeah, I think you're right. He said that. Yeah. Wow. Profound little bucker. Oh yeah. So he kept riffing on this as we walked across this open meadow as a whole group of donkeys past some sheep.

And then we got through the clearing and entered these woods which stretched for about two miles behind the farm. Oh, dragonflies eat the mosquitos. I think whatever eats mosquitoes is a friend of mine.

One go frogs. Spiders love the spiders.

So we're about a quarter mile into the woods. I think when I do love go. Oh, wow, wow, wow. Yeah. It's like a hole when right there on the ground was this very big, very dead cow. Just a skeleton, but, oh, my God, completely intact. That's cool, yeah. Wow.

Skeleton was on its back, legs pointed up. Birds hadn't scattered the bones, but the Ansan cleaned it. So there's no flesh.

That's a cow, right? That's definitely a cow. We just stood there and looked down at it. It's funny, you know, it's like you're just broke five of his ribs with ribs. They have they have a million.

Then we noticed that next to the big cow skeleton. Oh, my God. A little baby skull. A baby girl that I have it. Well, I think your mom would like it if you took that.

It's so cool, though.

Wow. You take a picture of it. What do you think happened to that little baby? I don't know. Let me turn it over. Oh, wow.

Oh, my God. It's tiny, poor thing.

So we were like, what happened here? Was there some kind of birth that didn't go right?

He looks creepy, though. Yeah, I saw it.

But what was interesting is he kept coming back to this question of, like, even a cow. Yeah. Are we sure that's a cow? Because, you know, skeletons all look alike. It's funny, though, but have you ever seen a human skull?

Oh, I've seen that. Those are the weirdest thing I've seen. They don't look that different, do they?

Well, as a cow skull is more like a man's, like a human being, like the head would go down and then they bring the mouth forward.

We started talking about design, like if you take a human skull, smush it, pull the mouth out, slope the nose cow, which caused them to ask. And I didn't record this part, unfortunately. Why are they so similar? Here's where you start to get to the time bit, because I started trying to tell him about this idea that I'd read about 15 years ago, one of my favorite ideas ever, it looks like that's working.

I think I want to see that it's rolling. I'm getting a meter. But why is it not? Oh, no, no, we're rolling.

I learned about this idea from a guy named Sean Carroll, a biologist. I'm Sean Carroll, a professor of biology at the University of Maryland.

So Sean wrote a book about 15 years ago called Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Incredible Book.

And in that book, he tells the story of some research that he was involved in back in the 1980s, 1983, 1984, he and his colleagues were working with some fruit flies and they discovered these genes.

We discovered these genes because messing with them, essentially inducing mutations in them has the spectacular effects.

For example, they'd mess with one gene, just one gene.

Legs would appear on top of the head or an extra pair of wings would form an out of seventeen thousand fruit fly genes. One mutation can eliminate an eye or one mutation can put legs. Were antennae used to be. You can imagine geneticists said, what the heck is that, Gene? Let's go find out. What they would eventually determine is that there were certain genes within the fly that acted as kind of master builders, each one would turn on a whole bunch of other genes and the end result would be a limb or a wing or an antenna, a whole body part, which was cool, but it was just flies.

But within a year, a couple of teams of biologists discovered that these genes existed not only in fruit flies, but in almost every other kind of animal worms whales, elephants, stick bugs, mice, humans. All of these different creatures seem to have the same set, the same master toolkit of these little genes that represents about five hundred million years of animal evolution.

And to see those genes pretty much and similar arrangements to each other across the animal kingdom blew everyone's mind. Yeah, everyone's mind. I don't know anyone who could have claimed they saw that coming. We've learned by looking at creatures from the outside. We look at their anatomy and we say, OK, this is a mouse over here, an elephant over here, a fly here, a worm externally. They just look incredibly different.

But to find out that there are genes building those bodies that they all have in common was a stunning discovery.

And the reason we all have these master toolkit genes, that's because we all came from the same creature way back in the beginning in these genes have been preserved.

Right.

How do you wrap your mind around that, that the thing that builds the butterfly wing could be the same thing that built my finger?

Well, I think you just start from the observation that you and I and a lot of other animals are built of repeating parts with all of these are rib's to your ribcage.

Well, different kind of ribs. This right here, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13.

Your fingers, your digits. Why are fingers different lengths?

That's a very good question. Age, which are slightly different variations on the same theme. Your toes are the same sort of way.

Would you like to if you want to take a half.

I don't know if you like having Huff's and No Fingers your spinal column with the vertebrae where they're slightly different from your neck down to your lower back. It would be great to have like a snake skeleton right next to that cow because there you'd see maybe two or 300 vertebrae with ribs coming off of them. Right. If it was a good, good size snake. And you understand. OK, so that snake is mostly a little head and a little tail with all of these ribs you can build, you know, so many variations on the same theme.

So you're saying one way to understand why so many different creatures can be made with so few genes that we all share is that we're all basically made of Legos.

That's right. That's right. Makes sense why animals have basically the same kind of body as body parts. Yeah, it's it's such a crazy idea.

So, OK, here's I mean, it's a it's a prize. It's a crazy idea, but it just then kind of framed the question in a different way, which is if these body-building genes are so similar, how do you make different kinds of animals?

And that's where a lot of the research then turned.

And the picture that started to emerge is that if so many creatures share the same set of master genes, well, then it's obviously how those genes are used when you turn them on, how long they stay on, when you turn them off and tempo.

For example, if you have a gene that makes the repeating segments of a spinal column in humans and it is the same gene that does that in a giraffe, well, in a human, there will be a switch that goes like this on off. But in the giraffe, it goes like this on.

Off, in other words, one of the big differences that explains the diversity of animals on this planet and this is what we talked about in front of that cow. Is time these simple differences in time? What do they call they're called Hox genes? Yeah, the Hawks gene. So the genes, I guess you could say they are separate animals by the rhythm. I would like to separate them because I mean these animals. I guess so. I guess the way they construct us is all about rhythm.

Yeah, it's all about timing and rhythm. Right. I think that's one of the coolest ideas I've ever heard. Thank you. Yeah. For some reason, it's more understandable this time. Yeah, for sure. Space time. I don't think I'll ever wrap my head around that. I mean like seriously.

OK, got to keep one of the bombs. Yeah.

Like there is something so interesting to think about. How little changes of time create totally different end points? Yeah, you know, so like a like a moment of time created a cow. The same thing with a different moment of time created a jad, the same thing with a different moment of time creating tadpole. And then so you're like, what does this change in time? Like what will it create. Yeah. Yeah.

How, how, how will this moment of time essentially pressure humans to evolve in a different way?

Yeah, like you see how it's dead here, guys. And now it's like more orange and yellow. Yeah. And it was just not even that long ago.

Do you think those cows let us come close.

Oh, they're not supposed to hurt anyone or so human centric that you just suddenly think I wonder what time was like for that cow and its calf.

Oh my God.

Totally. And I remember we had to cross the creek to get back to our car and about 20 cows live cows were in the creek.

These are, I guess, the cousins of the cow that we had met. Former would always. Yeah, look, they're looking at us. Hey, buddies, buddies and ladies. And they're all kind of hanging out there looking at us and chewing really slowly. I remember being struck by just how slow they were chewing. And I just thought, oh, the world's going to keep going. How's is going to keep chewing its grass, flowers are going to keep blooming, rivers is going to keep flowing.

There's a different arc to all of this. Some of that time on a farm makes you think those thoughts. Oh, in those. Car window time switches from slow to fast for you. Maybe you know how when we start to start, we got here and time was so weird. And it was felt he still feels that way. Has changed. I do feel like we've been here a long time. Or like them, like our house feels.

But I think because I'm with my family, with you guys feels like. Big thanks to Hammil Contagion Carla for being that through line that runs through everything big thanks to my dad. Same reason to Molly Webster whose thoughts inspired this episode and who helped me move through it. Tracy Hunt for the production assist and Soren Wheeler for yet one more late night push in a string of late nights that has gone back a decade. I'm Jad Abumrad. Thanks for listening.

Hi, this is Ben Collins calling from southeast London. Radiolab is created by Robert Krulwich and produced by Soring Wheeler Giving. Cliff is our director of sound design. Suzy Lichtenberg is our executive producer of stuff including Simon Adla, Becca Precilla, Rachel Kucik, David Gabal, Bethel HABITATE, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kielty, Annie McKune, Lateef Sakari Orion, WAAC Walters' and Molly Webster with help from Cima Berlei, the powerful tuneup Sara Stanback, Melissa O'Donnell, Htut Davis and Russell Craig.

A fact checker is Michelle Harris. I love Radiolab. So hi, my name is Anna McKewon, I'm a producer at Radiolab, and I wanted to talk about this thing we do at Radiolab because I like it. We have this thing. It's a newsletter, big surprise. Every show has a newsletter, but ours, I think it's pretty fun. Oh, it's so fun. Matt, KDDI. Hello, producer Pheidippides at Radiolab.

What is your favorite part of the newsletter?

My favorite part of the newsletter is first it's getting it and seeing it in my inbox and then second it's opening and then third is just hitting page down on my keyboard till I get to the very bottom of the email.

That's good.

You know, it's at the bottom of the email where, you know, staff picks stuff fix at bottom, which is like, how great is that? It's great. It's just like stuff. Stuff that we like. Stuff for India. What are your favorites? Some of his stuff. There was the one video where it was like seventeen babies on a hamster wheel. Really the article about the guy who made seventeen burritos yet nothing real.

OK, what's your favorite subject? My favorite one ever. Well, it's hard to say.

One of my favorite ones ever was Robert talking in delightful detail about the great sausage duel of 1865, classic classic Mollie's bedbug pajamas.

Oh, yeah.

That was a scary time treacy's pasta recipe, which I did not make because I don't really cook, but I'm just proud of her. Actually, it's it's really simple. This is online.

It's a twenty eight ounce can add tomatoes, five tablespoons of butter, a pinch of salt, an onion, and you cook it in a pan for 45 minutes. All right. Thank you, Tracy.

I'm telling you, everybody is loving this positive. Oh, I do. Definitely. That woman. This guy for sure. I think it's wonderful that we're tasting pasta every day. Not.

Yeah, helping. Anyway, a newsletter as like cools off in it, like Steph picks. It also tells you when an episode is dropping, it's free. It's free. Um, so we're just kind of here to just say, like, you should sign up and you can sign up in about 30 seconds at real newsletter or text. RL News, as in Radiolab News two seven zero one zero one. That's our little news two seven zero one zero one.

And thank you.