Listener Questions #17

Daniel and Kelly answer listener questions about screwworm at the southern border, life without the Moon, and the status of synthetic blood.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Screwworms have invaded beyond the Panama Canal. Will they infect
Texas cows grazing amongst the chaparral?

Speaker 2 (00:15):
How would life evolve without a moon? Would we have people?
Cats and funky mushrooms?

Speaker 1 (00:21):
How long is the wait until synthetic blood goes on sale?
I promise I'm not a vampire. I'm just a little pale.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Whatever question keeps you up at night, Daniel and Kelly's
answer will make it all right.

Speaker 1 (00:33):
Welcome to another Listener Questions episode on Daniel and Kelly's
Extraordinary Universe.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I'm not
a vegetarian, but I don't like to eat blood.

Speaker 3 (00:57):
Hello, I'm Kelly Waiter Smith.

Speaker 1 (00:59):
I study Paris and space and I also am not
a big fan of eating blood. What are those blood
sausages or whatever that are popular in the UK? Yeah,
I can't do that, or at least I've never tried.
Maybe I'd like it, but I can't get myself to
try it.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
There's some line for me between like normal muscle and
like the rest of the body and the blood and
the brain and the guts and stuff. It just creeps me.
Out though. Katrina has a friend who's big into cooking organs,
and she has a website. I think it's called Awful
Recipes o ffal.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
You know, I feel like it's actually a deficit of
my character that I'm not into eating more of the animal,
because I do feel like, yeah, that if you're going
to take another animal's life, you really should make the
most of it.

Speaker 3 (01:47):
But I just really have problems with the texture and stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
So my solution has been to try to cut down
on meat as much as I can.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
No, I totally agree it feels weird to just throw
away parts of an animal because you're like, oh, ichy,
and when really the whole thing is kind of ikey
if you think about it too much, which we all should.
We all all should be thinking about it too much
and feeling okay about our choices.

Speaker 3 (02:07):
That's right, Yes, we should think through our choices.

Speaker 1 (02:09):
It's so easy to be separated from the food that
you eat and not think through the implications of what's
happening there.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
But nobody's gonna have an appetite after this episode anyway, right, Kelly,
I'm here to help.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
All right, So let's jump right into question number one
from John, this is a topic I've been wanted an
excuse to dig into for a while, and so let's
hear what disgusting thing John wanted to know about. Well, friends,
At this point in the episode, we thought we were
going to drop an audio file where our friend John

(02:40):
reads his questions. But sometimes an audience member will send
a question and then they disappear. Maybe they've moved away,
maybe they're busy, hopefully they're well. We never got the
audio file, so I'm going to go ahead and read
the question from John. Here we go, Please do a
segment on the current situation at the South border concern
cattle and the re emergence of the parasitic fly and

(03:03):
their maggot offspring known as screwworms. Is the current embargo
something worth worrying about? Will it spread across the border regardless.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
Of what we do?

Speaker 1 (03:12):
Are there any human diseases related to the parasite after
eliminating them back fifty sixty years ago? How did it
become a problem again? Catching us by surprise?

Speaker 3 (03:23):
Thanks? Oh man, Daniel, all right, nobody.

Speaker 2 (03:30):
Why were you so excited to get this question?

Speaker 3 (03:33):
Kelly?

Speaker 1 (03:34):
Well, because I had been hearing about screwworms for a while,
but had never really dug in, and so they were
on sort of like the periphery of my consciousness. And
I was like, oh great, now there's a new parasite
that I have an excuse to learn about. But I
what is a really good word for? Like I'm begging,
I beseech you. I beseech you do not look up

(03:57):
pictures of screwworm or like what screwworm does to people,
because the photos have to Oh god, it's really horrible.
And if you do, we will go ahead and record
some video so that we can put your reaction up
on Blue Sky and our Instagram accounts because it's really horrifying.
So so let me go into the life cycle before
we do anything else.

Speaker 2 (04:17):
Okay, tell us what is this thing? Basically, because I
know just because it's called a screw worm doesn't mean
it's a worm.

Speaker 3 (04:22):
It's not a worm.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
It's called the screw worm, doesn't mean it screws anything.
So what is it? And how does it live?

Speaker 1 (04:28):
It is not a worm, but it does screw, So
it is this we're talking about the new World screw worm.
There is another species in the quote unquote old world.
And so the deal here is it's a fly. Mom
lays her eggs around the edges of wounds or on
mucous membrane, so like around your eyes or in your

(04:48):
mouth and stuff. I know, I know, bad start bad start.
The eggs hatch and the larva like the baby's hatch
out of the eggs, and then they start screwing into
the flesh to get into the flesh to eat it.
And that's why they're called screw worms. I guess they
sort of screw in the way a screw screws into wood.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
Why did they screw? I mean, they can't just like
chew their way in like any normal parasite.

Speaker 3 (05:11):
I mean, I guess they're doing both.

Speaker 1 (05:12):
But also a lot of parasites aren't like chewing their
way through flesh. So for example, you know, hookworms have
like hooked mouths and they sort of bite down, but
they're not like kind of chewing their way through and
migrating through the flesh, whereas screw worms are migrating through
the flesh, which is really truly horrible.

Speaker 2 (05:27):
Why are they migrating through? Like where did they want
to go? I happen to be between them and their destination.

Speaker 1 (05:32):
Well, no, they've consumed the flesh, they're done with it.
They want more flesh, and so they're screwing in to
get more of it. And so, you know, we talked
in a previous episode about maggots that specifically ate dead tissue,
and so they were useful for cleaning out wounds. But
these flies are specifically eating the live tissue. Wow, and

(05:53):
they are not pleasant. So they screw in, they eat.
When they're done eating, they fall out and off the
host onto the ground.

Speaker 4 (06:02):
All right.

Speaker 3 (06:02):
They do a stage called pew.

Speaker 1 (06:04):
Painting, and then when they hatch, they emerge as adults
who go off in search of more flesh to lay
their eggs on.

Speaker 2 (06:13):
How come nobody call these like zombie flies or something?

Speaker 3 (06:17):
So we usually reserve the word zombie.

Speaker 1 (06:22):
For instances where a host behavior is being sort of
like manipulated in a way that benefits the parasite at
the expense of the host.

Speaker 2 (06:30):
I love this. They're like semi official rules in biology
for what you can call a zombie.

Speaker 3 (06:34):
Oh no, no, there's a lot of fighting over this.

Speaker 1 (06:36):
There are people who feel like you shouldn't be using
the phrase zombie at all because you're just going to
confuse the public. They're not coming back from the dead.
I feel like the public gets that, like you need
to give them a little bit more credit.

Speaker 2 (06:47):
But are there similar rules for like werewolf or mummy.

Speaker 3 (06:51):
I don't think so.

Speaker 2 (06:53):
No, no, all right, so it's a free for folks.
If you discover something, feel free to call it a
where way.

Speaker 1 (06:58):
Oh no, no, there are there are a fit mum,
and so they essentially shells of their former self because
parasites have like eaten their insides and stuff, and they're
like pale relative to the others. I don't know too
much about aphan mummies anyway, So to get back on track,
I ended up watching a video lecture that veterinarians are
supposed to watch to get like, you know, credit for

(07:21):
their requirements for their field about screwworms, and they were like,
sometimes it'll just be like a pinprick hole in an animal,
because like you know, dogs and stuff can get this too,
and you just have to feel the hole and you
feel the worms moving around inside. So it's not even
that it's like a big anyway, super gross.

Speaker 2 (07:37):
So you can be walking around with like a sack
of these worms inside you.

Speaker 1 (07:41):
You would know, But yes, the answer is yes. So
females lay something like two hundred to three hundred eggs
at a time, and they can lay two to four
batches in their lifetime, so you can pretty quickly once
you have an open wound, it attracts.

Speaker 3 (07:54):
More screwflies or more screw worms.

Speaker 1 (07:57):
So if you're in an area where there's a lot
of screwworms, you can pretty quickly build up a life
threatening illness because they're just eating so much of you.
Or you can get secondary infections because now you have
this growing wounds that can you know, acquire bacteria and
you die that way.

Speaker 3 (08:12):
So it's truly awful.

Speaker 2 (08:14):
And what do they usually eat? Is it mostly people
or is it dogs? Are they totally indiscriminate.

Speaker 1 (08:18):
Anything they can really get their hands on, So quite
often they're going after livestock or they can go after wildlife.
Sometimes you find it in pets and occasionally you will
find it in people.

Speaker 2 (08:28):
And do they have the same preference for flesh as
Kelly does, like do they prefer the muscle or they
eat you know, organs and eyeballs and any sorts of things.

Speaker 1 (08:37):
So I don't preferentially eat wounds on animals and they
have a tendency also to go form mucus membranes and
like genitalia stuff like that, and so I would say
they do not have similar preferences to Kelly.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
I'm not trying to put you together in a category.
It's just using you as an example.

Speaker 1 (08:56):
I'm feeling a little insulted, but I'm gonna I really
like parasites enough that I'm going to rise above and
decide that to compliment. But so this used to be
in the United States. It was a huge problem. Like
in nineteen thirty five, one hundred and eighty thousand cattle
died in Texas alone from this parasite. So you typically
find it in South and Central America, and it was

(09:17):
in North America for a while. Tended to be in
the Southern States because that stage that lives off of
the animals is cold sensitive, so if it freezes, that
kills them, but they can come back during the summer,
so you can still get them pretty far north, just
depending on where they've managed to travel. But this was
such a big problem for agriculture that the United States said,

(09:40):
all right, we absolutely need to do something about this.
And so what they did was they developed in nineteen
fifty eight, what's still called the sterile insect technique.

Speaker 3 (09:49):
And this is something I think you might enjoy.

Speaker 1 (09:51):
So essentially, they they get the flies, they can well
wait for it, wait for it.

Speaker 2 (09:56):
I love hearing about sterility as a rule.

Speaker 3 (09:58):
So yeah, oh yeah, well I know that's a thing
for you. I don't know you started this path. I
just took the next step.

Speaker 2 (10:07):
Well, what is a sterile insect technique?

Speaker 1 (10:10):
Okay, So they take a stage of the flies and
they expose them to radiation, and in particular, they're exposing
them to low doses of cobalt and this essentially sterilizes
the male flies and then they release loads of male
flies out there. And the thing that you need to
know about screwworms is that the females only mate once

(10:31):
in their life, even though they're laying multiple clutches of eggs.
So if a female mates with one of these irradiated males,
the eggs that she lays will not hatch. And so
by doing this, you essentially are like pulling females out
of the population, like they still exist, but they're not
making any viable eggs. And so every generation you put

(10:54):
more sterile males out there, and over time you can
drop the population down to zero using.

Speaker 2 (11:00):
This method, down to zero, really.

Speaker 3 (11:01):
Down to zero.

Speaker 1 (11:02):
So actually we started doing this in nineteen fifty eight,
and by nineteen sixty six the United States was free
of New World screwworm?

Speaker 2 (11:10):
How do you get down to zero? I understand that
you can suppress the population because you have some males
that are sterile, But as long as you have any
males that are not sterile, won't you keep getting some
more screw worms.

Speaker 1 (11:21):
They do this generation after generation after generation, and they
swamp the population with these sterile males. And so they're
literally like loading up airplanes and dropping airplanes full of
no no, no, no, This is how they distribute the
screw worms. They drop airplanes full of these sterile insects.

Speaker 2 (11:38):
If anything is going to inspire conspiracy theories about the government,
then like dropping airplane loads of intentionally irradiated flies on
the population.

Speaker 3 (11:47):
Wow, flesh eating flies.

Speaker 2 (11:48):
Yeah, that's right, eating irradiated flies. Oh my gosh. All right,
but it's good for you, folks, really, it's in your interest.

Speaker 3 (11:55):
Trust us, trust the scientists.

Speaker 2 (11:57):
So all right, so they did this and it worked amazingly.
Ya science M M.

Speaker 1 (12:06):
But the problem was that screwworm was still present in Mexico,
and so it kept getting across the southern border, and
so this problem didn't go away. So we decided, okay,
you know what, We're going to eradicate screw worm from
Mexico as well. Yeah, and so they started, with the
Mexican government's permission. This was a collaboration. They started dropping
plane folds of sterile screw worms over Mexico and by

(12:29):
nineteen ninety one, Mexico was free of screwworm. Yay, which
is amazing. And so they ended up marching screw worm
back farther and farther and farther until screwworm was only
found on the southern side of the Panama Canal.

Speaker 2 (12:44):
This seems like such good news. It must be ironic
foreshadowing for some terrible twist you're about to drop on us.

Speaker 3 (12:50):
I mean, this is no this is good news, full stop.

Speaker 2 (12:52):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (12:52):
There were like decades where we were completely without screw worms.
It's amazing, like go science. And so Panama has this
facil where they're constantly making these sterile insect males and
they're constantly dropping them in the Panama Canal region to
try to make sure that screw worm doesn't make its
way back up again, because it's still present south of
the Panama Canal.

Speaker 2 (13:12):
Why don't the South American governments do this as well
so we can eradicate this guy.

Speaker 3 (13:15):
Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know.

Speaker 1 (13:17):
I don't know if it's too expensive or what. But
the countries that did eradicate it had American help and
collaboration to sort of scale up to keep this going.
But it's kind of amazing that it hasn't gotten past
because we move a lot of animals around, you know,
and so like in two thousand, a gelding, which is
like a kind of horse but I don't know much

(13:38):
about horses because I hate horses, was imported.

Speaker 2 (13:41):
Well, technically, it's a sterilized male horse.

Speaker 3 (13:44):
Okay, thank you.

Speaker 2 (13:45):
Sterilized surgically oh ye, not.

Speaker 1 (13:47):
With radiation, not with cobalt. Oh no, snip snip okay,
got it.

Speaker 3 (13:51):
Got it.

Speaker 1 (13:51):
So a snip snipped mail horse was brought to Florida
from South America, and as it was coming across the border,
it was discovered that it had screw and it went
into quarantine, got treated, and so it didn't spread yay.
In two thousand and seven, a dog from Trinidad was
sent to Florida and it had screwworm larva you know,
snacking behind its eyes.

Speaker 3 (14:12):
Oh god, I know, I know.

Speaker 1 (14:14):
And the dog made it to Mississippi and so it
could have been spreading it, but a veterinarian in Mississippi
found them, reported it. It was controlled, it got treated,
the dog lived, It didn't spread.

Speaker 2 (14:26):
Amazing, but it feels like fingers in the dike.

Speaker 1 (14:28):
Yes, yeah, it does, right. So in twenty sixteen, there
was an outbreak in the Florida Keys. We don't know
how screw worm made it to the Florida Keys, but
it got there and it ended up in the key
deer population, which is an endangered subspecies of white tailed
deer that you find in that area, and one hundred
and thirty five of them died. That was about ten
percent of the population. It also infected dogs, pet pigs, cats,

(14:51):
in a raccoon.

Speaker 3 (14:52):
I know, super sad.

Speaker 1 (14:54):
But we put sterile males out and we were able
to get it under control again. So using that steril
insect technique, we wiped it back out again. But this
current outbreak, as I understand. It is the most concerning
outbreak that's happened so far. So screwworm has managed to
jump above the Panama Canal. I don't think we know

(15:14):
how it happened, and it has been sort of creeping
its way back up, heading into Mexico and getting close
to the border. So Zach was just in Texas visiting
his family and he said that they they were like
commercials about you know, watch out for screwworm. Check your animals,
keep an eye out, because we really want to make
sure this thing doesn't establish here.

Speaker 2 (15:34):
Check your eyeballs, Check your eyeballs.

Speaker 3 (15:36):
Oh gross.

Speaker 1 (15:37):
So it's been estimated that if it takes hold in
the US, it could cost over one and a quarter
billion dollars to eradicate it from the US if we
had to deal with this again. It was recently announced
that eight and a half million dollars is going to
go to building another facility to raise sterile mail insects
in Texas and then they're going to work with the
Panama facility to try to wipe screw worm out between

(15:59):
Panama and the US and the areas where it's taken hold.
So they are putting a lot of energy and money
into trying to tackle this because it would be a
big deal if it got across the border.

Speaker 2 (16:10):
I really hope they tackle it before it gets to
my house.

Speaker 1 (16:12):
Yes, absolutely, Well, you know, they probably don't want to
go to California anyway, because it's like kind of a
boring place.

Speaker 3 (16:18):
I'm more worried about Virginia.

Speaker 2 (16:20):
But they don't like mountains, they don't like oceans, they
don't like beautiful weather. You're right, they should head to Virginia.

Speaker 1 (16:26):
Oh yeah, We've got much better wildlife here, and I'm
sure the wildlife is delicious, and so, you know, come
to Virginia.

Speaker 3 (16:34):
This got weird.

Speaker 1 (16:35):
So well, Virginia will change our motto from a Virginia
is for lovers to Virginia is for screw worms. But anyway,
so John wanted to know, should we worry about this problem?

Speaker 2 (16:50):
I'm already worrying. Yes.

Speaker 1 (16:52):
Yeah, the answer is yes we should worry, and people
are worrying and taking what seems to be appropriate measures
to me, And are there any human disease is related
to this parasite? I wasn't able to find any. So
the parasite can infect and live in people, and that's horrible.
But I don't think it spreads any diseases as far
as I was able to tell. And how did it

(17:12):
manage to catch us by surprise? I would say it
didn't catch us by surprise. Monitoring for this is pretty widespread,
and we've been constantly sort of working to keep this
below the southern border.

Speaker 3 (17:24):
To be honest, I am amazed and.

Speaker 1 (17:27):
Very proud of our efforts that it hasn't gotten above
Panama more often like this. It's incredible that we've been
able to control it to the extent that we have. So,
you know, something just managed to move across the border
that was infected by screwworm and we're on it again.
This is probably unless we completely remove screwworm from the
face of the planet, this is something we're just always
going to have to deal with happening from time to time,

(17:49):
would be my guess.

Speaker 2 (17:50):
Well, let me take the other side of this. Let
me be the screw worm advocate. You know, many things
are unpleasant or heat or gross, but then it turns
out they serve some positive function in the ecosystem. If
we remove screwworm from the Earth, we just like delete
all of them. Is there some beautiful critter that like
eats screw worms. It's no longer going to be around.

Speaker 1 (18:11):
No, no, So I don't actually know the answer, But
what I can tell you is that for decades we
have managed to eradicate screwworm from North America and most
of Central America, and we haven't seen ecosystems collapse or
something like that, you know. So it's possible that there
is that birds really liked eating screw worms and they

(18:32):
have a little bit.

Speaker 3 (18:33):
Less food to eat.

Speaker 1 (18:34):
Yeah, but I think this is one of those things
where as a pro human individual, I think that any
ecosystem costs would be worth it because otherwise that you know,
the costs for our livestock and our pets and for
you know, endangered species like the key deer, it would
be better to not have it around.

Speaker 2 (18:54):
And then Kelly wouldn't have to think about gross pictures
online as she eats her hamburger.

Speaker 1 (18:58):
My god, it was a horrible photo of like the
head of a key dear that I won't I'll stop,
So John, thank you for this fascinating question and go science. Okay,

(19:29):
next up, we have a question from Robert from Richmond.

Speaker 2 (19:32):
Thank you very much, Robert for reaching out to me
to ask this question. And remember to everybody out there,
if you have a question about the way the universe works,
something you want to understand, and you'd like Daniel and
Kelly to break it down for you, please just write
to us to questions at Danielankelly dot org. Don't ask
chat GPT, don't read some nonsense online. Reach out to us.

(19:53):
We really will set you right, all right. Here's Robert
from Richmond.

Speaker 5 (19:57):
This is Robert from Richmond, Virginia. I was wondering how
life on Earth would have evolved differently, if at all,
if we didn't have the moon, so we wouldn't have
tied to mix the primordial soup, we wouldn't necessarily have
as much of a tilted axis. Even nocturnal predators wouldn't

(20:21):
have the light of the moon at night to hunt.
The moon has been there for so long that it's
kind of interesting to see how it would be different
without it. But also, there are so many planets that
have more than one moon. We're kind of unique in
that way. How would life evolve differently with more moons?
I know there's a lot too unpacked there. I appreciate

(20:42):
all the hard work. Keep it up look forward to
hearing from you guys.

Speaker 3 (20:46):
Well, this is a great question which is exactly what
I would expect for a fellow citizen of Virginia, which.

Speaker 2 (20:53):
Is what a Virginian is this a Mitmonian.

Speaker 1 (20:57):
Rich Mendian, Virginian. Richard is a Virginian, a fellow Virginia.

Speaker 2 (21:05):
And Richard is doing something which I do all the time,
in which I love seeing in people, which is thinking
about how the universe could be different? Why is it
this way? And that's like one of the big questions
of science, that's why we do science to understand is
the way our universe works? An accident, is it happened
for a reason? Of those reasons important? Do they determine

(21:25):
why we're here? All these things help un rapper like
the context of our lives. So yeah, awesome, Robert, thank
you for thinking big. Or maybe Robert's just writing a
science fiction novel and need some.

Speaker 3 (21:35):
Help and we're happy to do that too.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
Yeah, no problem, no problem. Yeah, So this question has
a lot of angles. You could think about whether life
would have evolved if Earth never had a moon, or
you could think about what would happen if we lost
our moon. So I started with that one because it's
sort of like a fun science fiction scenario, like, Hey,
we have a moon, are we going to have it forever?
Is it possible we could lose our moon? And the

(21:59):
answer to that is yes. You know, people think about
the Solar System as sort of static and this slow
moving parade of planets around the Sun that's been happening forever,
But that's not true. The Solar System is kind of chaotic.
It's just on longer time scales than we mostly think about.
You know, the order of the planets we have today
is not the same order the planets we've had forever.

(22:20):
Planets have migrated in and then migrated out. There are
theories that we had another gas giant that when Jupiter
and Saturn migrated to the inner Solar System and then
back out, one of these was tossed into outer space.
So there might be like a lost sibling planet out there.

Speaker 1 (22:36):
I like to imagine the noise it made as it
got flung out into space.

Speaker 2 (22:40):
Why mean exactly? And maybe that planet had like the
best climate in the whole Solar System. Maybe the Solar
System lost its California in that interaction, And I'll never know.
That's fine, and so in a similar way, we could
lose our moon. You know, something could like hit the
Moon and deflect it and knock it out of orbit.

(23:03):
In fact, right now, scientists are tracking a new interstellar comet.
This is a piece of the universe that comes from
another star, like a big chunk of rock and ice
thrown out of another solar system that's passing through hours
and we don't think it's going to hit the Earth
or that close, but it's moving really really fast. And
if it did hit the Earth, wow, that would be devastating.

(23:26):
And if it hit the Moon, it could certainly knock
it out of orbit.

Speaker 3 (23:29):
You know.

Speaker 1 (23:30):
I remember when I heard that. My first thought was, oh,
all right, hitting the Moon. That would be like a
bummer for a lot of reasons, but that would be better.
And then I'm like, wait a minute, maybe that wouldn't
be better, or it would be better, but like not
much better.

Speaker 2 (23:42):
Yeah. In fact, there's a great science fiction novel called
Seven Eves which starts out with some aliens basically destroying
our moon. It's never really explained how it happens, but
most of the book has to do with trying to
survive the destruction of the moon because if it turns
into rubble and then starts falling into Earth, filling the
atmosphere with this stuff, and you basically have a nuclear

(24:02):
holocaust on Earth. It's end of days kind of stuff.
So we don't want our moon to be obliterated into dust,
but it could also just be knocked out of our orbit.
We could just lose it and go wandering into the
Solar System. And so that lets us think about, like, well,
what would life be like on Earth if we didn't
explode the Moon, if it just sort of like drifted
away somehow. Well, the Moon plays a big role in

(24:24):
biological experience, right, Like we know, for example, that the
Moon causes tides right high tide and low tide. This
is because of gravitational tidal forces. That's why they're called
tidal forces. And the physics here is really fun and
it sounds complicated because it's gravity and all that stuff,
but it's pretty basic. You know, one side of the
Earth is closer to the Moon than the other side
of the Earth, and so the Moon's gravity pulls on

(24:45):
the Earth harder on the closer side than the further side,
So it turns to Earth into something like a football
instead of a sphere. It's like squeezing the earth, and
the water on the Earth is the squishiest bit, and
so it responds the most. Most people don't realize though,
that all of the Earth gets squeezed. They are these
things called land tides that move the distance of the

(25:05):
surface of the Earth relative to the center by meters. Yes,
as the Moon goes around the Earth, it squeezes and
massages the Earth changes its shape, not just the water,
but the land also changes its shape.

Speaker 3 (25:18):
Lies. That's amazing.

Speaker 2 (25:23):
Yes, these are lies propagated by flies that the government
drops over California, infected with conspiracy theories.

Speaker 3 (25:30):
Why you could dropping worse things?

Speaker 2 (25:32):
Probably, Yes, most people know about the moon's effect on
water tides, but not so much about the moon's effect
on the earth. Right. And also, the Sun gives us tides, right, Like,
the Sun is much further away, but it's also much
more massive, So if you got rid of the Moon,
we would still have tides. Right. Tides are combination of
the Sun's tides and the Moon's tides, which is one

(25:53):
reason why tides are complicated. Like if you look at
a tidal chart, it's never like it goes up, it
goes down. It goes up, it goes down. It's a
simple sid It's complicated. It goes up, it goes down,
it comes up less, it goes down more. It's really complicated.
And that's due to the Sun and the moon and
the shape of the inlets and stuff. Tides are really complicated.
Isaac Newton started working on them hundreds of years ago,

(26:14):
and it wasn't until like one hundred years ago or
so that we had a pretty solid understanding of the
physics there.

Speaker 1 (26:18):
Tides made my PhD super confusing because I had, you know,
I had to go out and collect snails when the
tide was low, and I would always think like, oh,
I remember when the tide was the other day. I'm
going to extrapolate forward, and you know it was not
as predictable as I wanted it to be.

Speaker 2 (26:34):
Yeah, I know, they're complicated, and people think that this
complexity might have really been important for the development of life.
Like number one, If you got rid of the tides,
a lot of life by the seashore would be very confused,
and a lot of assumptions they make and things they
rely on would be thrown into chaos. So the conditions
for life on Earth would be drastically different, and some

(26:56):
things would live and some things would not live. But
also historically will imagine that tides played a role in
the evolution of life, that when you're on the border
between fresh water and saltwater, you have these brackish water
systems and there's a lot of like mixing up that happens,
and you can imagine like water sloshing up into these
tide pools and mixing this bit of biochemistry. But that

(27:16):
bit of biochemistry, and maybe that's even plays a role
in abiogenesis. A lot of this is very speculative, right, like, hmm,
maybe this and this seems like a compelling story. None
of it is the kind of science where we can like,
let's do the experiment. Let's have an earth without a
moon and an Earth with moons, and let's see if
life starts more often. It's just sort of more like
a reasonable sounding story, And that doesn't make it like

(27:39):
non scientific. It just means, hey, this is the most
we can do right now, sort of think about it
clearly and try to imagine. So we don't know the
answer to like could life have evolved without a moon?
Would life evolve differently without a moon? But there are
strong arguments to make that it's certainly possible.

Speaker 1 (27:56):
So estuaries are ecosystems where fresh water it's salt water.
If you didn't have the moon, would estuaries narrow, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:06):
There'd be a narrower band there, right, because it'd be
less mixing, right, because the moon brings the salt water
up further into the fresh water.

Speaker 1 (28:14):
Absolutely, estuaries play an important role for ecological services, and
they're economically important because they end up being places where
baby crabs and baby fish that we like to eat
start their lives.

Speaker 3 (28:24):
So anyway, let's keep the moon there. I've decided.

Speaker 2 (28:28):
The moon makes things yummy nice.

Speaker 3 (28:30):
Yeah, sure, yeah, the moon makes yummy things.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
And the moon also affects global weather in other ways
because it changes current patterns. You know, it helps stabilize
climates by mixing up the air. Like it's pulling on
the air as well, so it's not just water. Has
all sorts of effects on the air and on the land.
In addition, of course, the moon provides light at night, right,
It's like essentially huge mirror in space reflecting the Sun

(28:57):
down to Earth. And so any crater that like takes
advantage of a little bit of moonlighte for hunting is
going to be disadvantaged. There is another in the category
of like things would be different. We don't know exactly
what that would mean, but we can sort of speculate intelligently,
and it seems certain that it would dramatically change the
conditions for life.

Speaker 1 (29:16):
Would it be good for our favorite creatures, which are rats,
that would it help them hide at night?

Speaker 2 (29:22):
It would it be good for rats that are out
at night, especially because it would be bad for owls, right,
owls that do a lot of rat eating. But also
it would be good for astronomers. You know, having a
moon is really bad when you're on the ground with
your telescope and you want to look at some star
and then boom, you have this huge sun mirror shining
into your eyeballs. It's a lot harder to have dark nights.

(29:44):
So a lot of our dark knights are ruined by
a moon. So you know, maybe there's a conspiracy out
there among astronomers to get rid of the moon.

Speaker 3 (29:52):
Hey guys, knock it off. Knock it off. We need
the moon.

Speaker 2 (29:57):
And there's even more dramatic effects that the moon plays
on the Earth. It's not just the tides and not
just the air, it's not just the night, but the
Earth's rotation and tilt are strongly affected by the moon
because the moon is pretty big, like especially for our moon, right,
lots of moons in the Solar system are much smaller
than our moon, but our moon is big enough that
it carries a significant fraction of the angular energy of

(30:21):
the Earth Moon system. So people think that the Earth's
rotation itself is affected by having a moon, and that
the tilt of the Earth is sort of moderated by
the moon. So like if we didn't have a moon,
earth tilt might be even crazier, it might be much deeper.

Speaker 3 (30:35):
That would affect seasons.

Speaker 2 (30:36):
It absolutely would affect seasons. Or it could also have
no tilt, right, and we can end up with no seasons.
And so the Earth's rotation and the earth tilt is
a product of this balance between the Earth and the Moon.
And there's another fun thing that's happening there, which is
that as these two are sort of massaging each other
right tidal and they're using their angular momentum to massage

(30:58):
each other, and it takes some energy to sequi easy
the Earth into a football. As it does that, it's
losing some of its angry momentum, and so the Moon
is actually getting further and further away from us every year,
and not by like some tiny amount like microns or something.
It's happening by one centimeter per year.

Speaker 1 (31:15):
I mean, that's still a tiny amount. I thought you
were gonna tell me like a mile a year or something,
but you know that. I'm still concerned because I'm Kelly,
and I'm concerned about everything. But like, the centimeter doesn't
sound like a lot. Convince me it's a lot.

Speaker 2 (31:29):
Well, it's not a lot for a year, but if
you have a lot of years, that's a lot of centimeters.
Imagine what the Moon might have looked like a million
years ago or two million years ago. As our ancestors
are walking across the plains. They had a bigger moon
in their night than we did.

Speaker 3 (31:45):
Dinosaurs saw a bigger moon.

Speaker 2 (31:47):
Yes, exactly, that's kind of cool. Yeah, okay, Dinosaur astronomers
had an easier time understanding the surface of the Moon
because it was closer.

Speaker 3 (31:55):
Now I care work.

Speaker 1 (31:56):
Did dinosaur entomologists drop steril insects on Californians.

Speaker 2 (32:03):
One of my favorite dinosaur stories is somebody who reconstructed
the path of the asteroid that hit the Earth sixty
five million years ago, and at least one of the
possible paths includes a close flyby before it actually hit,
So that means that dinosaur astronomers had plenty of warning.
Oh wow, they could have seen this thing in the
sky before it hit, like weeks beforehand and prepared. But man,

(32:27):
they didn't fund astronomy enough. So there's a lesson, folks,
fund astronomy.

Speaker 1 (32:32):
That's right, Dinosaur NASA should have gotten a lot more money.

Speaker 2 (32:35):
And on that note, you know, this interstellar commt is
fascinating and it's not going to hit the Earth, so
nobody should worry. But you know, if it was pointed
at the Earth, then we would have very little time
to do anything about it, which means we should be
getting ready to do something about it before we spot
these things. So like we really should be spending more
time and energy on Earth protective services if you ask me.

Speaker 1 (32:57):
So that's that's two squares on your Bingo card if
you're not keeping track. There's a existential dread and more
funding for science.

Speaker 2 (33:06):
Especially because these sins could be lobbed in our direction
by aliens. So there's another Bengo square.

Speaker 1 (33:11):
Fo yep, yep, yeah, Oh sorry, we still got to
hit on cannibalism and poop.

Speaker 3 (33:16):
We'll get there, all right.

Speaker 2 (33:17):
So if we lost our moon, or if Earth never
had a moon, we're looking at a very different situation
for life. We know that life on Earth would change
a lot, or may have not evolved or could have
evolved very differently. I don't have any reason to believe this,
but my hunch is that if Earth didn't have a moon,
we still might have gotten life. It just would be
very different. You know, it's easy to say these conditions

(33:39):
were required for life to turn out as we know it.
Therefore life wouldn't have evolved if you don't have those conditions.
But I think it's also equally likely that life just
would have been weird or indifferent. But the other side
of Robert's question is not just losing our moon, but
what about more moons? What if Earth had two moons
or seven moons? What would that be like? And is
that possible? And yes, it is still possible at this

(34:00):
fairly mature stage in the Solar system to get more moons.
We think this happened a lot with Jupiter and Saturn,
for example, some of their moons were formed as the
planet's formed, sort of leftover stuff that was too far
out and moving too fast to fall into the planet,
sort of the same way the planets didn't fall into
the Sun. And these moons tend to orbit in the
plane of the Solar System. But some of the moons

(34:21):
have like wacky orbits, and this might be because they're captured.
They're just something that came by and the gravity of
Jupiter or Saturn grabbed onto it. And so the Earth
could do that too. You have some chunk of stuff
from another Solar System or from somewhere else in the
Solar System comes by at the right angle and the
right velocity, the Earth could grab it, and then we
could get two moons. Wow, and then we'd have even

(34:43):
wackier tides.

Speaker 1 (34:44):
If you had to guess probabilistically, if something comes close
to Earth, yeah zero oh yeah, okay, so it would
be more likely to smack into us and do damage
then create another moon, right.

Speaker 2 (34:54):
Yeah, absolutely, most likely it hits us or it totally
misses us. But to get captured, you need to have
exactly the right velocity and radius match, right, Like you know,
first your physics, you can do the orbital mechanics at
every radius from the Earth. You need a specific velocity
in order to be in orbit, and so those things
have to match, and the angle has to match, and
so yeah, it's unlikely, but you know, obviously it has happened.

(35:17):
There definitely are moons that have been captured, so it
could happen to us. Whoa, and so it would affect
the tides. They would be even more complicated for grad
students trying to plan their experiments.

Speaker 3 (35:27):
Trying to go get snails.

Speaker 2 (35:28):
Yeah, it could affect the Earth's tilt and spin if
it's a big thing, right, So it could have a
real impact. And those two moons then would have complicated interactions.
They could even like squeeze each other and induce, like
you know, stuff going on inside those moons. You could
end up with like a volcanic moon in the sky.
That would be pretty awesome.

Speaker 3 (35:46):
Could we get a ring? Could they break each other
apart and give us some ring?

Speaker 2 (35:49):
Absolutely? Yeah, the moon could destroy the other one, or
the other one could destroy the moon. We could end
up with a ring. It could be really fascinating. So
is this something you should worry about. It's unlikely that
we would lose our moon anytime in your lifetime or
your children's lifetime or the next thousand years. If we
lose the moon's pretty survivable. If the moon gets destroyed,

(36:11):
then yeah, you'll be glad you built that bunker. But
you know, I think you have bigger things to worry about.
I think you should be more worried about screwworm than moons.

Speaker 3 (36:20):
And science funding.

Speaker 2 (36:22):
All right, well, thanks very much for that question, Robert.
Let me know how your science fiction novel is turning.

Speaker 5 (36:26):
Out awesome, Thank you guys. So basically, we don't know,
and I kind of love when this happens because it's
finding the edges of what we know and don't know,
and it just shines a light on areas of future research.
You know, maybe if we figure out how the moon
or moons might play a part in evolution, then that
might help future SETI type programs to search for exoplanets

(36:51):
with you know, only one moon if we find that
that's a critical part of you know, life creation, or
focus on planets that have moons and ignore the ones
that don't. Whatever that case is. But I appreciate it,
Thank you very much, and yay, go fund research.

Speaker 2 (37:29):
All right, we're back and we're answering questions from listeners,
and we're going back from physics into the gross world
of biology. So finish up that snack before you listen
to the rest of this episode.

Speaker 1 (37:42):
Let's listen to a fantastic question from Anthony.

Speaker 4 (37:45):
Hello, Daniel and Kelly. I'm Anthony from Orlando, Florida. I
enjoy your podcast and learn a great deal from you both.
Your recent conversation on Preon's was fascinating and scary. I
believe there is a comment in that discussion on synthetic blood.
What is the progress in developing synthetic blood for general use?

(38:06):
Are we any closer to it being used? Would it
be universal or type like regular blood? Again, thank you
and love your podcast.

Speaker 2 (38:14):
All right, Kelly, So what is blood anyway?

Speaker 1 (38:17):
Yeah, so it's complicated. It's not It depends, but it's complicated.
So blood, depending on how you want to slice it,
blood can be three or more things. So one of
them is plasma. This is like the fluidy part of
your blood. It's something like fifty five percent of your blood.

Speaker 2 (38:35):
I've never understood why do they call it plasma, because
to me, plasma is a gas that's been heated up
until you get ions. Is there some similarity between physics
plasma and blood plasma?

Speaker 1 (38:45):
Gosh, you know, if I had to put money on it,
our plasma came first. So I don't know the answer,
but you guys probably stole it.

Speaker 2 (38:56):
From us, fair fair.

Speaker 3 (38:58):
All right.

Speaker 1 (38:59):
So yeah, this it carries stuff around like electrolytes and
hormones and antibodies made by your immune system, and it's
the bulk of blood, like fifty five percent of blood.
It also carries around stuff that helps with coagulation, so
like when you get a cut and your cut sort
of clots up and makes a scam. And then about
forty four percent is red blood cells, and inside of

(39:24):
the red blood cells is hemoglobin, and hemoglobin is what
carries oxygen to different parts of your body. And then
the last part is platelets, and these are like little
parts of cells that are really important for coagulation and
clotting up wounds.

Speaker 2 (39:42):
So as somebody who's naive about biology, I always imagine
the blood is like, you know, it's the circulatory system.
It's like the highway for the body. Everything that needs
to go from one place to another gets dumped into
the blood. And then somebody else pulls it out.

Speaker 3 (39:53):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (39:53):
And so we're talking about water, electrolytes andti bodies, red
blood cells, platelets. All this stuff is just flowing through
the blood and useful to some bits.

Speaker 3 (40:01):
Of the body.

Speaker 2 (40:01):
Is that fair?

Speaker 3 (40:02):
Yes, Your blood vessels are the highway system move in
the blood around.

Speaker 2 (40:05):
So then why do we have different types of blood
when it makes blood A or B or O or whatever.

Speaker 3 (40:10):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (40:10):
Right, So we've known about this for a while, So
I'm just gonna quick back up into history. So for
a while, we were like infusing blood from dogs into people,
or blood from lambs into people. Actually I think it
was mostly lambs, and there was a bit of a
religious like lambs are sort of innocent, lamb of God
sort of thing, and so that's the right kind of
animal to be putting into our bodies. And so for

(40:31):
a while, lamb blood was going into people. But we
learned that not only is it bad to put blood
from other animals into humans, it can also be bad
to switch blood from one human to another. And Austrian
physician Karl Landsteiner in nineteen hundred started mixing up different
blood from different people and he was like, well, sometimes

(40:53):
when you mix blood together, it coagulates and sometimes it doesn't,
and it's always the same if you take blood from
He wasn't.

Speaker 2 (40:59):
Doing his experiments in people. He was like doing this
in the lab.

Speaker 1 (41:02):
As I understand it, he was extracting blood from people
in his lab and he was like, you know, if
you extract blood from person A in person B, every
time you do that and mix the bloods together, it clots.
But person a in person sees blood every time you
do it doesn't clot when you put them together. So
what the heck is going on there? And he eventually
gets the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for sort

(41:23):
of figuring this out. And the answer is that blood
have like proteins that are like sticking out on the cells,
and some people have different kinds of proteins than others.
And if two people have different proteins on their blood cells,
then your immune system will recognize it as foreign and
attack it.

Speaker 2 (41:40):
And that's what the clots are. And the clots are
like the immune system clumping it up.

Speaker 1 (41:44):
Yes, exactly, yeah, and so but so you asked why
do we have different blood types?

Speaker 3 (41:49):
And the answer, we do not know.

Speaker 1 (41:52):
And so for a while it was popular to postulate
that it had something to do with like our ancestry
and where we came from. Like type A blood is maybe,
you know, like hunter gatherers, and so those people actually
should be eating more of like a hunter gatherer diet
because their blood.

Speaker 3 (42:06):
Is like that's what it evolved for.

Speaker 1 (42:10):
But the answer is that blood types show up in
primates before humans. So you know, chimpanzees have blood types,
and we don't really understand it could have something to
do with differences in immune functioning. So you know, maybe
people with type A blood might be more susceptible to
some virus that sweeps through the population, and type B

(42:30):
blood would be less susceptible. And this variability popped up
at some point and then was retained because it helped
some parts of the population avoid diseases. But the answer is,
we really don't know. But it happened before humans came around, all.

Speaker 2 (42:44):
Right, So then it can't be explained by for example,
I radiated flesh eating flies distributed on the population by
the government.

Speaker 3 (42:49):
Guys, those flies that are radiated. It's a good thing.
It's a good thing.

Speaker 1 (42:54):
The science is helping us. You Californians are always jumping
to conspiracy theories.

Speaker 2 (43:00):
It's just so fun. It's just so easy. Now I
see why they do it.

Speaker 3 (43:06):
It feels good, doesn't it.

Speaker 2 (43:08):
Yeah, you don't need evidence, it just need a compelling story.
That's right, all right. So we have all these things
inside the blood. So why do we think about synthetic blood?
Why do people work on making fake blood?

Speaker 1 (43:19):
So right now, what we do is we get blood
from donors, and that's great. And when you donate blood,
often what happens is your blood is sort of separated
out into different parts, the red blood cells, the plasma,
the platelets, and they can go to different people depending
on their need. A major need for blood, though, is trauma.
So you know, for example, if you get into a
car accident and you lose a lot of blood when

(43:41):
you get to the er, when you get into the ambulance,
they might want to try to increase the amount of
blood that you have, and so donated blood gets used
for that purpose. And then another important use for blood
is in wartime, and here it's particularly hard to transport
blood from blood banks back home because blood has a
shelf life.

Speaker 3 (44:00):
So red blood.

Speaker 1 (44:01):
Cells are good for you know, a bit more than
a month month and a half, depending on like where
you are and what their rules are. I think platelets
are good for something like a week. Uh, And so
this stuff isn't good indefinitely, and it takes a long
time to get it from a bank to overseas, for example,
if you're talking about a war situation, and so having

(44:22):
synthetic blood would be great not only for these situations
where you know it's hard to get the blood to
where it needs to go, but also every once in
a while we have shortages. So, for example, the Red
Cross has declared blood shortages at different times, and so
if you can't get enough blood from people, it would
be nice to have synthetic blood. And the purpose of
synthetic blood is really just to hold you over until

(44:44):
your body can start making your own.

Speaker 2 (44:46):
Wouldn't it also be nice to have synthetic blood because
then you could prevent like the spread of blood borne diseases.

Speaker 3 (44:51):
Right, Yeah, So I mean that's worth considering. But at
this point, we have.

Speaker 1 (44:55):
A lot of complicated screening procedures to find out if
blood is carrying infections, and I believe that we extract out,
for example, white blood cells before you give people blood,
because white blood cells, you know, could be carrying things
like HIV, And so the probability that you pick up
a disease from a transfusion in the United States and
the UK is very low. It might be higher in

(45:17):
other parts of the world, but we're very careful about
screening it here.

Speaker 2 (45:21):
Yeah, and so how do the various human blood types
connect to the question of like making synthetic blood where
we have to make several different synthetic blood types.

Speaker 1 (45:28):
Well, so that's the great thing about synthetic blood is
hopefully you don't have to worry about typing anymore because
you can make synthetic blood that doesn't have those sort
of proteins sticking on the outside that are going to
attract the attention of the immune system. And so it
would be helpful for example, like you know, imagine there's
an accident and somebody whose blood type you don't know
is going to need a bunch of blood. I guess

(45:50):
you need to take all of the different kinds of
blood with you, and then you need to take the
time to get a small sample of blood from the
trauma patients to figure out what kind of blood they have,
or at least you need to make sure you've got
enough of the universal donor's blood, which is type O,
to bring with you. So it would be much less
complicated if you didn't have to worry about blood typing
at all, and you could just universally have a synthetic

(46:12):
blood that you could bring with you that was more
shelf stable. This would solve a lot of problems. So
most of the research so far has been done on
making synthetic red blood cells. So this is again about
forty five percent of what blood is made of. And
initially what they were doing was they just got hemoglobin,
which is the part that binds to the oxygen, and

(46:33):
they were putting hemoglobin in people. They were like, well,
the important thing is the oxygen transport in an emergency
to keep everything going. But hemoglobin interacts with other kinds
of oxygen in the body. So nitric oxide is used
by our blood vessels to control vasodilation and vasoconstrictions, so
essentially to control how open or closed your blood vessels are,

(46:56):
and so just putting hemoglobin in meant that the hemoglobin
could interact with the nitric oxide and could tinker with vasodilation.
That sounds bad, or at least that was what was
claimed by a meta analysis that sort of changed the
way the whole fields felt about these things. And so,
for example, there's a product called Hemopure which was developed
in the nineties and it's essentially a cow hemoglobin which

(47:20):
has been purified, and now it's only used in compassionate
use cases, like you absolutely need it to try to
save someone's life. But there's some concern about it, you know,
messing with vasodilation. But some doctors still use it, and
in fact, there are doctors who argue that, like, look,
this isn't actually a massive problem because people are only
using this for like a day or two before their

(47:41):
body can start making enough red blood cells to replace them.
This isn't a real long term problem. We're overreacting. But
the field has essentially decided that this pure hemoglobin route
is not the best way to go.

Speaker 3 (47:55):
So what do you do.

Speaker 1 (47:56):
So there's a new company called Erythromyre and they're making
a red blood cell analog. So essentially what they do
is they get hemoglobin. In this case, they are extracting
hemoglobin from blood that has been donated but is now
past its shelf life. So if that blood doesn't get
given to someone in time they take it, they remove

(48:17):
the red blood cell outer part, they extract the hemoglobin,
and then they put the hemoglobin in a lipid layer
that they have made, so they essentially like enclose it
in a tiny, fatty capsule. It's smaller than a usual
red blood cell, but it keeps the hemoglobin from interacting
with the nitric oxide and messing with the vasodilation stuff.

(48:40):
And this is actually a really clever molecule. So it's
pH sensitive, which is important. So when it goes to
the lungs and you have high pH, it allows oxygen
to bind to the hemoglobin, and then when you get
to the parts of your body that are in need
of oxygen, that ends up being a low pH environment
and the hemoglobin can let go of the oxygen and

(49:01):
the oxygen can go oxygenate your other cells like it
needs to, which is like kind of fascinating to me,
like what a cool thing to have been able to
figure out. And it's universal, so there's no compatibility problems.
You don't have to type a patient beforehand. It's a
freeze dried powder and so you mix it with saline,
so you essentially get this like plastic bag that with

(49:22):
the divider in the center, and you've got the like
freeze dried eurythromyr on one side and saline on the
other side, which is like salt water that's the same
sort of saltiness as our blood. And then you like
break the divider between them, you mix the whole bag up,
and now you've got red blood cells or you know,
synthetic red blood cells that you're ready to give to

(49:43):
a patient. And they're thinking this could be shelf stable
for up to two years.

Speaker 2 (49:46):
And they've like tried this at works. It like actually
carries the oxygen the way that you need.

Speaker 1 (49:51):
They have done experiments on animals and it seems to
be doing well in the animals, and it seems like
they're lipid case for the hema globin gets you know,
processed by the digestive system the way you would expect
it to and you sort of pee it out when
you're done with it. And so the animal studies so
far have been promising. And a lead guy on the

(50:13):
project is doctor Doctor, and so I feel like we
have to trust that this is being done well.

Speaker 2 (50:20):
Like his last name is doctor and he's the title
of doctor.

Speaker 3 (50:22):
That's exactly right, yes, And.

Speaker 2 (50:24):
If he was at a German university, he could be
like doctor, professor, doctor doctor.

Speaker 3 (50:28):
Yeah, yes, amazing, we should move him to Germany.

Speaker 2 (50:32):
So I'm really surprised that you can replace red blood
cells with something so simple, like, aren't red blood cells complicated?
Aren't they doing something else? Is there anything else that
red blood cells aren't doing that we're not capturing with
just hemoglobin in a fatty drop.

Speaker 1 (50:46):
Probably, but you really just need to keep someone alive
for like the again, for the time that it makes
for their bone marrow to make their own red blood cells.
And so this is definitely just a short term solution
to keep your heart kicking so that you have time to,
you know, do the recovery on your own.

Speaker 2 (51:03):
This seems kind of amazing. Is this something you think
we're going to see in hospitals and trauma centers?

Speaker 1 (51:07):
I think they're going to be starting experiments in humans
in the not too distant future, so it's possible we'll
see this. But this is really hard because like, who
do you decide to give it to first? It's going
to be tough to design the human trials because we
know that red blood cells donated from a human work,
and so figuring out the first person who you're going
to be like, oh.

Speaker 3 (51:27):
No, you're in it. This is a trauma situation.

Speaker 1 (51:29):
You might die, but we're going to give you this
experimental thing, even though we could give you this other
thing that we know would work. You know, that's a
little bit difficult, and so I'm sure they're going to
have a little bit of trouble designing and finding the
right population to try this on.

Speaker 2 (51:41):
You can imagine the compassionate use. You could give this
to trauma centers and then when they are in a
situation where they just don't have blood and somebody's going
to die, they're like, all right, well let's dip into
the fake stuff.

Speaker 3 (51:52):
Yes, absolutely, yep.

Speaker 1 (51:53):
Or you could send it to folks who are out
at the front lines in a war and they might
not be able to to blood type someone or something
like that, so they can't tell and they might not
be able to get blood donations. And so yes, you
absolutely can't imagine situations where having this on hand as
a backup could get you the data.

Speaker 3 (52:12):
That you need.

Speaker 2 (52:12):
All right, and what about the rest of the blood,
what about synthetic platelets?

Speaker 1 (52:17):
Yeah, so doctor Ashley Brown's lab at North Carolina State
University has a platelet like particle that is an animal
testing right now, and the animal tests have gone pretty well.
So essentially what they did was they've got this like
very tiny nanoparticle that they made and it's like a
tiny microgel, so it's sort of soft and squishy, and
they've attached to it a protein that binds with this

(52:39):
thing called fibrin. So when your body starts to make
a clot, fibrin is a protein that's used to sort
of get that clot sticking together, and so essentially your
body starts dealing with the wound and then you're putting
this stuff in there, which is going to bind with
the fibrin that's already in the clot, and it's going
to move the clotting process along more quickly. So it

(53:00):
essentially finds where clots are forming by having this antibody
that binds with something you find in clots, or at
least that's my understanding. And so they did it in
mice and pigs and things went well. They said that
they might be a few years before human trials, and
there's things that they want to do, like get clumping
to work a little bit better. And this is definitely

(53:21):
not like, oh hey, we have created platelets again, and
everything that platelets do we're able to do with the
synthetic product. But it could be a really good measure
for like again, you know, there's a trauma situation. You
just got to get somebody to the point where their
body can recover and take over this work on its own.
And so anyway, so the take home, Anthony wanted to

(53:41):
know how close are we and the answer is that
we've got synthetic blood components that are being tested in
non human animals, and the current designs would be universal
if they work out. But we're mostly in the trial phase,
and so we're still relying on blood from human donors
more than anything else. There are some other products on

(54:02):
the market that we didn't talk about, but sort of
in general, at the moment, we are mostly relying on
human donors. And I'm sorry for all the vampires out there.
Still have some work left to do. True blood is
not ready yet.

Speaker 2 (54:15):
I'm so glad you made a vampire joke, because I
feel bad I fell down on the opportunity to make
a were wolf joke in the moon question, you know.

Speaker 1 (54:22):
I know, so, Oh my gosh, Daniel we could have
had zombies and werewolves and you know what, let's let's
start recording again.

Speaker 3 (54:29):
We're going to do this again.

Speaker 2 (54:33):
All right. Well, that's exciting, and I'm also sort of surprised.
You're sort of like optimistic and upbeat about this. This
seems like great news. Have you spent some time in
California recently? What's going on now?

Speaker 1 (54:44):
I'm surprised too. You know, I didn't get enough sleep
and you know the all right here, let's go ahead
and we'll do the Kelly treatment a.

Speaker 2 (54:52):
Right.

Speaker 1 (54:52):
It should be worth noting that we have tried things
in the past that have not stuck. So for example,
you know that the straight up hemoglobin without a like
lipid layer, you know, we was tried and we ended
up deciding this is not really the solution for us.
So it's possible that will happen with these other things
that we talked about today too. So there's the Kelly treatments,
all right.

Speaker 2 (55:12):
A little bit of cold water. But yeah, on the whole,
this seems very promising.

Speaker 3 (55:16):
Yeah it does. It doesn't.

Speaker 1 (55:17):
So I am really looking forward to when the vampires
can come out of hiding and we can start dating them.

Speaker 2 (55:25):
Yay.

Speaker 1 (55:26):
Science that's right, that's right.

Speaker 2 (55:30):
All right. Well let's see what Anthony thinks about our
answer on synthetic blood.

Speaker 4 (55:35):
Daniel and Kelly, as usual, you guys knocked it out
the park. I appreciate your answers. I learned a great deal.
I was particularly interested in this because I have relatives
whose religious convictions would prevent them from accepting blood transfusions. Perhaps,
as this science develops, they'll have another choice, or an
alternate decision that can save their lives. Possibly. I appreciate

(55:57):
your answers, love your podcast.

Speaker 2 (55:59):
Thank you, thank you, Okay, thank you everybody for these
wonderful questions. We love hearing from you. Please do write
to us two questions at Daniel and Kelly dot org.
We say we will write back to everybody, and we
really really mean it. We want to hear from you
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Speaker 3 (56:13):
We look forward to hearing from you. Have a good one.

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