Bill Schutt talks "Pump: A Natural History of the Heart"

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert chats with Bill Schutt, author of "Pump: A Natural History of the Heart," about the evolution of the heart and the history of humanity’s attempt to understand it -- along with a few questions about monsters.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of
My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and my co
host Joe McCormick is away from the virtual workspace today,
so it's just me, but I'm going to be joined

(00:23):
by vertebrate zoologist and author Bill shut So. Bill is
the author of two previous nonfiction books, There's Dark Banquet
Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood Feeding Creatures. I
know for a fact that I've I've mentioned that book
on the show before. He also wrote Cannibalism, A Perfectly
Natural History. His latest book is Pump, A Natural History

(00:46):
of the Heart, which is out right now and hard back,
as an e book and also as an audio book.
Now we're mostly going to be talking about the weird
and wonderful evolution of the heart, as well as humanity's
attempt to understand it through history. But as always I
have to stress that the book itself, Pump, in this case,
goes into far greater detail and includes so many more

(01:07):
wonderful examples. Uh uh. Case in point, we don't get
into the horseshoe crab at all or blood transfusions, but
there are great chapters in the book on these topics.
He's a great read and I highly recommend it. So
let's go ahead and jump into the interview. And Hey,
towards the end, we're actually going to chat a little
bit about horror movies. I'm not gonna spoil which one,
but it just happens to be a film that I

(01:30):
watched for the first time in recent weeks, so this
was this is quite enjoyable. Welcome to the show, Bill,
would you mind introducing yourself to our audience. Hi, Yeah,
I'm nice to be here. My name is Bill shut
and I am a vertebrate zoologist and recently took an
early retirement from Long Island University, where I talked for
over twenty years. I taught anatomy and physiology to what

(01:51):
courses and evolution and dinosaurs, and my research interests for
the past thirty years or so have centered around bats
and and within the four plus species of bats, I
specialized on the three vampire bats, and so that sort
of led to my first book after writing a bunch
of scientific papers, and and that was Dark Banquet, Blood

(02:14):
and the Curious Lives of Blood Feeding Creatures. And I
followed that up with a book on cannibalism called Cannibalism
of Perfectly Natural History. And so here I am now
having written a book on the heart, and that is
pumped a natural History of the Heart. When did you
know this is going to be your next book? Did
you just seem like the next logical step or was
there something in particular? Yeah, it really didn't seem like

(02:36):
the first the next logical step because of the topics
that I had covered initially, We're we're more macabre, and
and you know, you go from vampiresm to cannibalism into
the heart, and that's sort of there's sort of a
jump there. And and really what I was lucky enough
with the first two books to sort of find a
niche between the sensationalized, sort of garbage e stuff on

(02:58):
the on one side, and on the other side of
sort of academic material that nobody would read unless you
were studying those topics. And so I so I I
sort of fit myself into the into the middle of that.
And I've always been interested in taking complex or misunderstood
concepts and demystifying them, putting a zoological slant on them,

(03:18):
making it humorous, entertaining, and not using a whole lot
of jargon and and then going off on sort of
side trips where I got to discuss what I thought
and what I believe are important topics, whether it's history
or or or or or biology. So when I was
starting to think about what I wanted to write from
from my third nonfiction book, UM, my editors at Algonquin

(03:43):
and my agent all suggested that I possibly look for
something a bit more mainstream, and they gave me a
short list and and one of the things that I
did some preliminary research on was the Heart. And I
got to say, initially, I thought this has got to
have been done before, because there's a hundreds of books.
This topic is, you know, so widespread and popular, and

(04:04):
I was really surprised to find that that that there
was this space for the type of book that I
wanted to write, where you move through the animal kingdom,
you tell these interesting stories based on animals, and then
you move into humans, go into myths and the history
of of a particular topic, UM, and then UM sort
of grab interesting stories about medicine, past, present and future.

(04:28):
And so I was really surprised, tell you the truth,
that there was so much there and a lot of
it was really strange enough to satisfy that part of me.
And I've always been into um horror movies and and
and books, and so I always had this kind of
like weird bent as far as that stuff went. So UM.
Once I figured out that that that there was enough

(04:49):
interesting material they had to satisfy myself and and I
think my readers that then it was a done deal
that I was going to work on the heart. So
the heart, especially from the human perspective, takes on all
of this additional symbolic like weight and you do you
discuss this in the book, but that stripping away all
of that. What what is a heart and why did
it become necessary from an evolutionary perspective? Good question. Let

(05:12):
me lead off by saying that there are all sorts
of different things that you might call a heart, where
some people might not consider it to be a heart
because it doesn't have a specific lining that sort of thing. Um,
but a heart is really a pump, a muscular pump,
so we're talking about uh, involuntary muscle, so it's not
under your conscious control. And when it contracts, it sends

(05:35):
a fluid, either blood or if you're an insect hemolymph
around the body and there and what it's doing, and
there's there's variation here as well. Is it's carrying oxygen
um to the body, and it's carrying carbon dioxide to
a place where you can be eliminated by the same token,

(05:56):
it's carrying nutrients that are either absorbed through the digestive
track wool to the body and getting rid of waste
products that are produced by the body. So it's a
way to move that fluid around and to move around
those substances. Now that is not a problem. If you're
really really tiny, you don't need to have a special
circulatory system because those those materials that I just mentioned

(06:21):
that they just diffuse in and out of your cell.
If you're a single celled organism, or if you're really
flat like a tape worm, then then that material just
moves from a high concentration to a low concentration. So
just for as an example, um, if if a single
celled organism is surrounded by water and that water has
got more oxygen in it then is inside that cell,

(06:43):
then the oxygen is going to go from high concentration
outside the cell right through the cell membrane into the
cell itself, and and that's how that material moves. It
just goes high concentration to low. That works great if
you're tiny or or or flat, And it doesn't work
at all if you have any kind of size, because
it's very difficult and and and diffusion doesn't work efficiently.

(07:08):
If you're talking about an organism with made of millions
of cells and thousands of cell layers thick, the fusion
just doesn't work, or it works, but it works really slowly.
So millions and millions of years ago, probably half a
billion years ago, in order four creatures to get larger,
they had to evolve systems that allowed those materials to

(07:29):
move in and out and within the body. That had
to take place. And so what evolved with these systems
of tubes and pumps to to help distribute that liquid,
which became the carrier for oxygen and nutrients and waste
and and carbon dioxide. Um. So, so it was in
a sense, organisms couldn't evolve to be as complex as

(07:52):
they are now. Um if they didn't have this transportation
system evolving inside them. I have to say, I really
love the evolutionary journey you take us on in the book. UM.
I think back to your your your book on vampires
and blood drinking and the evolution of bats. And in
a way, it's like we kind of think, we already

(08:14):
feel like the destination there is weird enough, so we
expect the journey to be weird. Um And with the heart,
it's easy to take it for granted, but it's such
a weird and wonderful evolutionary journey you describe. Oh, thank
you very much. Now I love how you explain that
we have to get away from the human centric view
that the human heart is is like the pinnacle of
design or anything of that nature, you know, the the

(08:35):
ultimate and um in an evolution you describe a number
of of wonderful um and if I guess from the
human perspective, strange hearts in the book. If you were
to play favorites, which non human heart in the book
impressed you the most, um, probably the blue whale heart,
for for reasons that that might not be readily apparent.

(08:57):
And and so in the prologue in the first chat
through I detail the um the adventure that my friends
up at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto took when
when unfortunately nine blue whales died on the ice up
in Canada. And and usually these whales sink and uh,
and three of them didn't. They washed the shore on
in these remote spots and and and these guys went

(09:18):
in there and and and recovered one of the hearts.
And the reason they did this is because you know,
they were mammalogists, and they kept hearing this question from
folks about what's the largest heart in the world. Well,
blue whale heart, how big is it? They really didn't know. Well,
it's probably as big as an suv. But so so
when they got the chance to go get one, they
did it. And it took five years. We're tooking heavy

(09:41):
construction equipment to get to move these things around. There
were four of them inside the whale, pushing the heart
out through the ribs. And when the thing was when
when they finally got it on the ground, it when
I looked at the pictures of it reminds me of
like a four hundred pounds soup dumpling. It did not
look like a heart that you I get it. Uh,
you know what a butcher's for example. Um. And so

(10:04):
there was so many strange things about the heart, and
one of them was was this shape that it took
because it we we think that it's able to collapse
under high pressure when they dive. They don't know, but
this is what they hypothesize. The other thing is that
it was a lot smaller than they thought it was
gonna be. Now, this is the largest heart in the world,

(10:24):
Yes it is, but maybe it's the size of a
golf cart rather than an suv. And and that question
became really interesting to them and to myself. And and
what it boils down to is if you were to
look at the heart of a humming bird, for example,
and this is an animal that can can can beat
its wings eight hundred times a minute. To do that,

(10:45):
it takes muscle, and you know, it takes nutrients, it
takes oxygen, produces carbon dioxides, so there's got to be
this massive amount of blood flowing into those flight muscles
in order to do that. Um one thing you can
do is have your heart beat as fast, and hummingbird
heart can beat twelve hundred beats per minute, and that
is probably about the physical limit that a heart can beat.

(11:07):
So we're talking about phil empty relax and then this
whole thing taking place again, twelve hundred times a minute
is ridiculous. So so as a as a mechanical device,
it's probably about topped out right there. I don't know
if you can go any and beat any quicker than that.
The only other way to get more blood to these muscles,
these wing muscles, is to have a larger heart. So

(11:29):
because of that, um, hummingbirds have a heart that's four
or five times larger relative to their body size than
a blue whale heart, whose heart maybe beats ten fifteen
times a minute, and it doesn't have that high metabolic
demand that the little guys like hummingbirds and shrews might have.
That that to me was you know, that was probably
the most interesting. But you know, there was this long

(11:51):
list that I had to sort of picture before I
figured out how to answer that one. But but blue
whale hearts and they are on display. This heart has
gone through the plastination process. If you've ever seen the
body's exhibit, it's like these guys with their cadavers who
are posed and strange position drug dribbling the basketball with
no skin, which is trying to avoid that. Um. So

(12:13):
so this this this plastinated blue whale hard is now
back on display at the wrong and that's got a
they have an interesting exhibit on the whales and they
so they pulled this thing back out of storage and
it's just fantastic, awesome. I I would love to see
that someday. And there's of course an illustration in the
book of you setting beside it. I like that. Than now,

(12:39):
on a similar note, you know, thinking back to you know,
getting away from the human centric view of the heart,
you stress that we also have to realize that the
organ systems in the body don't function like separate chapters
in a textbook. And uh. I found this really eye opening. Um,
you know, because I think to my own self and
I'm thinking, well, that's exactly how I think about it.

(13:00):
I think of those clear overlays and anatomy books, and
I think, Okay, this system, this system, um, and I
fall into that trap of thinking about my own body
that way. Can you can you get into this a
little bit because I found this a rather insightful part
of the book. Sure, as I might have mentioned, I
taught anatomy and physiology for for about two decades and
and and one of the things that I stressed in

(13:20):
my students this is an extremely complex Uh. Of course
too semester course that I taught with a lot of
difficult concepts, and I think that that that the people
fall into this trap, especially students, are thinking that, Okay,
I'm taking an exam, I'm studying circulatory system, and now
I'm going to take an exam and then I can

(13:41):
forget that stuff before I get out to my car
after the exam is over. And and that's just not
the case with when you talk about anatomy. So, for example,
in my mind, there's no way to separate the circulatory
system from the respiratory system because if you're going to begin,
you know, we talked about the fact that one of
the things that the hearts and circulatory systems do is

(14:02):
this circulate blood that carries oxygen. Well, how do you
get that oxygen. That's the role of the respiratory system.
And then at a microscopic level, the circulatory system and
the respiratory system come into contact and there's this transfer
of either carbon dioxide from the circulatory system to the
respiratory system or oxygen from the respiratory system to the

(14:25):
circulatory system, and then we breathe out and the whole
thing starts again. So so I always stress the fact
that you can't that you really can't understand one without
putting it into into the context of the other. And
then you go into things like, well, how do how
do these muscles contract? Well, that's tied into the nervous

(14:48):
system as well. My students would laugh at me because
this is something that I've just stressed over and over again,
that they have to think of this as something other
than chapters in a book. I love that, Like I say,
I feel like, even though I don't have, you know,
this kind of anatomy background, I still flash back to
those anatomy books from like high school and whatnot, and

(15:11):
and think of myself as devided that way. Now in
the book, you also get into the history of humanity's
understanding of the heart, and h I you stressed this
in the book, and I realize our our understanding of
this is imperfect. But can you talk about what the
ancient Egyptians seem to understand about the actual functionality of
the heart and heart related pathologies. Yeah, well, well the

(15:35):
ancient Egyptians and so we're talking, say, from from what
I have researched, something like fifteen hundred and fifty BC
E So that would be the Egyptian Book of the Heart,
which is written on compyrus and hieroglyphs, and and it
appears to some translators that the Egyptians knew quite a

(15:57):
bit about heart attacks and aneurysms. And you've got to
be careful there because these translations from Papyrus Um to
English or to whatever language you might be using, you've
got to be careful because that it's it's not precise.

(16:19):
They had a different way of thinking back then and
there and and our translations of ancient works, you always
have to sort of be careful about what you're about,
what about what you're stating as a as a fact,
what we do, we we are more sure that the
Egyptian physicians believe that the heart was was the center

(16:44):
of of things like emotion or what we would call
the soul. And then on a on a physiological level,
and this is this got picked up by the Greeks,
that that that there were really two circulatory systems, that
venus blood was completely different than our tier real blood,
which was actually air and so um. So it was

(17:04):
initially thought by these guys that and and then passed
onto the to the to the Greeks, and then and
then the Romans who disproved the air part um, that
that the venus blood derived from the liver uh and
and some of it seeped across into the into the
left side uh and that mixed with air, and there
was this magical material called numa in the air. And

(17:27):
and and so they got a lot wrong. Um. Not
that's not to sort of mock them, because they were
working with you know, zero instrumentation and things that we
take for granted nowadays. Um. But unfortunately that got picked
up by the that that the idea of cardiocentrism and
and and also their their ideas about um about the

(17:48):
circulatory system were picked up by the by the Greeks
because Egyptian medicine, that that type of information was held
in high esteem by by the Greeks. Up from their
Hypocrates and arrow Stottle wrote about about the heart and
the circulatory system, they stayed with this sort of cardiocentric view,
that that that that that the heart was the center

(18:09):
of things like that like the mind and intellect. And
they really thought of it the way we now think
of the nervous system. Um. So at the same time,
now artists are jumping into play and their writing, and uh,
it's poetry and and and there are there's all sorts
of plays and and and this idea that the heart

(18:30):
is the seat of emotion became entrenched with artists and
it's still there, um and and then passed on to
the Romans, you know, And that's when things take a
downturn because of because of somebody who must have been
brilliant at the time, Galen. But U but that that
was problematic as as we might talk about event Yeah,

(18:51):
my next question concerns that because because Galen, of course
is always this important figure that that we have to
bring up and we discuss uh in anatomical history and
the dancement of anatomical knowledge. But as you discussed in
the in the book, in many ways that you put
Western medicine back um years tell us about this. Yeah. So,
so Galen was a Roman surgeon and uh, and he

(19:14):
got to travel to to to to Egypt and picked
up methodology UM. And then um worked in the gladiatorial
school as a physician and and began to study anatomy.
But there was a it was it was outlawed to
to actually work on human cadaver. So a lot of
what he interpreted about the human body, came through dissections

(19:37):
of things like apes or dogs or pigs, and and
he wrote a lot and and and some of the material,
the three million words that were eventually recovered, may have
been written by his followers years later, maybe even after
Galen died. But the thing is that he um he
got a lot wrong. So this was all taking place

(19:57):
in the second century CE, and um after Rome fell
hundreds of years later. Galen's work was not was not
initially translated into Latin, which was the language of sciences
back back then, and so it it sat around untranslated
and and was not translated until the early Middle Ages,

(20:21):
and it was translated by Christians. They were Syrians, and
so when they translated Galen's work, they did it into Arabic,
and they put their Christian slant on that translation. Now,
that work that had been translated into Arabic was eventually
translated into Latin, and it reflected that Christian slant that

(20:44):
the Syrian translators had put on it. And and the
problem was is that that looked great to the leaders
of the church, and and that you know that we're
talking about so of the European Church and the Western Church,
and so they looked at it and said, well, this
material is divinely inspired. And so it became in a

(21:06):
sense the rule of law that that you had to
follow in a lockstep fashion Galen's teachings. And so if
a fifteen hundred years it was pretty much verboting to
do research and and and so. Um, So medicine stagnated
and that became really and that was really problematic because
so much of what of what was practice was wronging.

(21:31):
This whole idea of the four humors, you have to
bleed people to balance these four substances of one of
them didn't exist. Um, So that was a real that
that was really troublesome and you and that continued in
some ways right up until the early twentieth century. They're
still bleeding people. So so that was that was a

(21:51):
bit problematic. Yeah, And like you put it in the book,
speaking of the humors that you know, we still talk
about people being melancholy, So we still have the linguistic
legacy of system or sanguine. Yes. Thank Now, skipping ahead

(22:11):
more into the present and looking ahead to the future,
you describe some amazing advances and medical science in the book.
You get into what you get into the history of
blood transfusion to where we are now. You you discuss
some hard transplants, how far are we away from what
we I guess sometimes roughly referred to as as lab
grown hearts. Um. Yeah, this is to me, this was

(22:34):
one of the most amazing things because I got to
go to Harvard and and meet with a researcher by
the name of Harold Ott. And he is he is
aware of the fact that that there's a real problem
with with with people on waiting lists for organs and
and and and thousands of people die every year, not
necessarily waiting for hearts, but waiting for livers, waiting for kidneys, um,

(22:56):
and and and so um. What he's trying to do
is take a very different approach. The reasons why the
people wind up dying on a waiting list is because
you have to have the right type tissue type, blood type.
You've got to be able to move this thing maybe
across the country, um, keep it refrigerated, and and so
that's often times a crapshoot whether that's going to work

(23:18):
out for somebody. So what he's done is and and
this is preliminary, He's taken cadaver hearts and put them
through in a sense of the turgent rints, and that
the turgent doesn't wash away the dirt, it washes away
the cells in the heart that your body would reject

(23:39):
were you to take up that heart and transplanted. So
we're talking about the muscle fibers and and other associated cells.
And so what's left is this ghost white framework of
the heart. So now you've got something that that looks
like a heart but really has no other cells besides

(24:00):
the connective tissue cells, which your body is not going
to reject. Okay, So now what he's done is, and
this science does exist, he will take a sample a
biopsy or a sample of skin cells from the person
who's going to receive the heart, the recipient and and
and so so we're not talking about something deep in
the body. This is This just comes right from your skin.

(24:20):
And these are quick. These cells are called fiber blasts.
The science now exists convert those fiber blasts into stem cells,
and stem cells, depending on how the body stimulates them,
can be converted into any type of cell. Now, so
what they are able to do now still is to
take these stem cells and stimulate them to become muscle cells.

(24:42):
And so his idea now is to take these muscle
cells and embed them, seed them, as it were, onto
this heart, to this framework, and grow a heart that
is a match for this recipient. And and and and it
won't reject the recipient won't reject that that heart, The

(25:04):
immune system won't won't find it to be foreign cells
or foreign tissue because it actually is derived from the
cells of that recipient. So when I asked them, how
long do you think this is going to take until
it becomes commonplace? He said ten years. That's his hope.
So I said, well, so, so how does that work?
He said, Well, somebody comes in with a heart problem,

(25:24):
they need a heart transplant. You take a sample from them,
you do what I just described about how you change
them into stem cells. You take a cadab or heart,
you embed it, and then you do this transplant and
the person is you know, is up and walking in
a day or two. Well, it's really exciting to imagine
getting to that point. And uh, and like I said
in the book, you know, there's this this wonderful evolutionary

(25:46):
journey you take us on. I love the journey through
our our attempts to scientifically and I guess culturally understand
what the heart is. Uh. Now I have to ask,
we're getting since we're getting into October here, You're previous
books have dealt with vampires and cannibals. Um, now we
do dealing with the heart and blood. And I'm to

(26:06):
understand you're working on a book about teeth. So I
have to ask, what what what is your favorite movie Monster?
Without a doubt, it is the original, So the nineteen
fifty one version of the thing, Yeah with um James
Arness that who's in gun Smoke in the nineteen sixties
and I guess early seventies playing this uh walking carrot

(26:30):
who lands crash lands in the Arctic, and how it's
recovered by this research group and what happens when when
it gets thought out by mistake. I just think it
has The movie has everything to me. Um, it is,
It's got a great mood, it has wonderful that has
a wonderful soundtrack. It's one of the first films ever
that has overlapping dialogue. So when you hear these these

(26:52):
soldiers and these scientists and conversation, they're not waiting for
someone else to stop talking. Before they before they talk.
So this old has to do with the director, Howard
Hawks and it's just to me, is is a perfect
film and stands up. Um even today, a lot of
people are in love with the John Carpenter two movie,
which is a gore fest good movie, you know. Um

(27:15):
but um, but I don't think that it that it Uh,
I don't think it's it's it's it's quite as as
much of a classic as as as the original. I
have to agree with you about the the the original
holding up so well. I happen to have just watched
it for the first time a week or two ago,
and um, yeah, the I totally agree on the dialogue.

(27:37):
It's it's it's snappy and and real and so many
of the secret I feel like there there were those
promo images of James R. Ness as the monster, and
especially for people who came up, uh you know, post Carpenter,
we kind of looked at that and we're like, I
don't I don't want to maybe don't want to see
a movie with this old fashioned looking monster. But the
way it shot in the film is so impressive, and

(27:57):
you have that that really frightening sequence with the fire.
I think it totally holds up. Well when that door
opens and it's standing on the other side of the
door and it's just like slams the doorframe. Um. The well,
I think it's very it's really funny. Um and and
it affected me so much that when I started to
write fiction, and I've written three novels, I've based the

(28:21):
characters in those novels on the characters in The Thing
and especially the original, but but certainly some of the
characters in the Uh. You know, when I was looking
for for a name of the character, I'd go looking
in in those movies, especially McCready. Who's Who's the hero in?
In these three technic no thrillers that that I wrote

(28:45):
with my co author Finch, I have to ask how
old were you when you first saw The Thing from
Another World? Young? Um? My parents, you know, back back
when I was a little kid, we went to the
drive in every week. Now that that movie is older
than I am, it's it's it's actually seventy years old
this year, and so I probably was five six years old,

(29:08):
and uh, you know that type of of of film.
And I've always been a huge film buff. And when
I'm writing my my novels, I'm thinking about these big
cinematic scenes and and and I think that when when
I write nonfiction, I'm able to go back. So I
opened up the you know, cannibalism with with the story

(29:30):
of a vent gain who was who was It was
really the cannibal murderer. That that the that the that
the Bates character and Psycho was based on. You know,
Alfred Hitchcock just took this real event and and got
rid of the cannibalism aspect and and kept the mother

(29:51):
obsession aspect of it. And so that to me is
that's another perfect film that there there are there's about
five of them, Psycho being one, and and and the
original Thing being another. In the original the Thing, it
also is more of a blood drinker, It is more
of a vampire. Do you think that had any any

(30:11):
impact on your eventual study of vampire bats? Uh? You know,
I wish I could say, because that sounds so cool,
that connection, but you know, I do always. But I've
been into into vampire movies as well. You know, I've
been into the original Dracula and and then the Hammer
versions that came out in the in the sixties and seventies.
So so I guess I'd always been intrigued by by

(30:33):
blood feeding. But when when I started the study bats,
that was my first semester as a PhD student at
Cornell Um. I've always been into strange animals and and
and I've always kept a lot of animals as pets.
When I was a kid, I had a monkey. That's
how different things we're back then. Every snake, every type

(30:54):
of lizard, whatever, whatever you could could find in a
pet shop or collect under a rock or drag out
of a log um. So so I'd always been into
sort of offbeat type creatures and and so when I
started to work on bats, it probably took me about
five minutes to decide that within these fourteen hundred species

(31:14):
that I wanted to work on, the three vampires. And
I just lucked out because in the early nineties of
what it was known in the literature about vampire bats
was known about the common vampire bat, and the other
two were open books. So that allowed me to go
in and do research on these because I was really
lucky because a lot of not we say a lot

(31:36):
a number of really important um influential bat biologists took
me aside and said, you know, Bill a vampire, about
as a vampire, about as a vampire. But you're not
gonna see differences. And I was fresh out of classes
thinking it doesn't that doesn't make sense, because if you
have two animals that do the same thing and they
live in the same place, then then then either one

(31:58):
of them is going to adapt different behavior, or it's
going to migrate, or it's going to go extinct. And
so when so this this this little biologist Arthur greenhallf
Museum and Natural History, which I've been lucky enough to
be there since the early nineteen nineties as well, took
me aside and said, Candy got something, so shut up
now and go do it um. And from there I

(32:19):
was able to look at all these differences that were
clearly apparent once we started looking at them, and just
to sort of put a shout out there. It's not
that people didn't know about it, because when I went
down to places like Trinidad, they knew from the start
that there were these huge differences. One of them fed
on birds, the other one is on the ground and
feeding on cows and pigs, um. And they knew about it.

(32:41):
They just weren't publishing. And so I've made it a
point to bring these guys on as co authors and
bring them up and make sure that they came to
conferences and and got to do that. I thought they
deserved bringing back to pump for a second. I also
loved the bit where you get into the the bats
that hibrinate uh in the in the snow. Yeah. Um,

(33:01):
not a whole lot is known about them, except that
there's a species of bat that lives in Japan that
that that evidently hibernates in in in snow. And and
so the researchers originally thought, well, this this, these guys
in polar bears are the only the only mammals that
do that, uh and so what since then, since this

(33:22):
work was started, they figured out that polar bears might
not really be card carrying hibernators because they wake up
off and during in the in the winter. Um. And
so it's not known if these bats are if these
bats wake up in the middle of the winter or not.
But they make this little with their body heat. They
carve this little cone in the snow, and then the

(33:42):
snow covers them and you don't find them until until
the spring, when it's either either somebody that digs them
up by mistake or or thaws out, and you know
that they're cold. They're laying there for a while and
then start to crank some some blood moving through them,
and then they fly off. But yeah, that was just
one of I don't know, dozens of really interesting stories

(34:06):
that I've learned about because the learning curve was steep,
which made it that much more interesting. You know. I
don't go into these things as sort of experts on
on the heart, for example, or cannibalism, thankfully. Of course,
the bats also remind me of the thing from another world,
you know, the organism is suspended in the ice, which

(34:27):
I guess drives home no matter how weird. An idea
is that we dream up about an alien creature, like
there's something in the natural world that is already as
weird or weirder. Right, oh, yeah, no doubt. And and
that's you know, I try to bring that out in
the book as well. And and then the fun thing
is to try to tie that into modern medicine. So

(34:47):
you have uh, you know, you know, you have an
aquarium fish, the zebra fish, which everybody's seeing this little stripes,
the horizontal stripes. Turns out that if you snippal its heart.
The heart not only grows back, but it's completely functioned.
Now if you were to do that, you know, we
don't really do that similar gladiatorial combat. You know a

(35:09):
lot of people are upset about that. But to be serious,
if if you have a part of your heart is
damaged because the blood flow has been cut off to it,
and and and it and in a sense that tissue
dies when it grows back. It's scar tissue. It's not contractile,
good function named muscle tissue. That's not the case with
the zebrafish. So how do we take that? What does

(35:30):
the zebrafish have going for it that enables it to
completely repair? It's hard after being traumatically uh injured? That
and and how do you translate that into um into
curing a sick heart that is undergoing a heart attack
or multiple heart attacks? And there was a list of

(35:51):
those that that I ran into. So that was kind
of fun as well. Well. Bill, thanks for taking time
out off your date to chat with us about the book. Well,
it was really good to be here, especially to talk
about the thing that's a that's a new one for me,
that one I haven't spoken to have been interviewed about
So it was a real pleasure to meet you and
talk with your Robert all right, thanks again to Bill

(36:12):
Shut for chatting with me. You can check him out
online at Bill Shut dot com. That's b I L
L S C H U T T dot com. Uh.
That website contains links to his social media accounts as well.
The website features information about his three nonfiction books That's
Dark Banquet, Cannibalism, and Now Pump, as well as his

(36:35):
three fiction books co written with J. R. Finch That's
Hell's Gate, The Himalayan Codex, and The Darwin Strain. I
have not read these but yet, but now I'm super
interested to check them out after after chatting with Bill.
In the meantime, as you would like to check out
other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind where you
can find them in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind

(36:55):
podcast feed. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we give you our
core science episodes. On Monday's we do listener Mail. On
Wednesday's we do an artifact short form episode. On Friday's
we do a little Weird how Cinema You know what
that is. That's our chance to kick back and discuss
a weird film, and yes, as luck would have it,

(37:15):
we very recently discussed the Thing from Another World on
the show, so hey, especially after this chat with Bill,
go back and listen to that episode if you haven't, again,
wonderful film. Oh and then on the on the weekends
we do a little rerun that's a vault episode. Thanks
as always to Seth Nicholas Johnson for producing the show
and recording us here and if you would like to

(37:37):
email us, as always, you can do so at contact
at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to
Blow your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For
more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.

(38:00):
I think it doesn't four star